Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #879: Magic 2010 with Aaron Forsythe

Episode Date: October 22, 2021

I sit down with Designer Aaron Forsythe, and we talk about the design of Magic 2010.

I'm not pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time to rather drive to work. Coronavirus edition. So, using my home time to talk with people of Magic's past and present about sets we made. So today I have Aaron Forsythe, and we're going to talk about the making of Magic 2010. Hey, Aaron. Hey there. Okay, so this is your baby. So, let's go to the very beginning. How did the idea to make Magic 2010 come about? Well, there's the kind of printed version of that story, but I guess I can tell a little bit more of the behind the scenes part of it. So Elaine Chase was the brand manager of Magic back in those days.

And let's see. So the 9th edition had come out a few years before. And this is back when core sets, the Nth edition core sets were all reprints. And when 9th edition came out, it came out in Russia for the first time. We released a core set or a Magic set, I think, in Russian for for the first time. We released a core set, or a magic set, I think, in Russian for the very first time.

And so that printing of 9th edition was black-bordered, whereas all of the rest of 9th edition in every other language was the normal white-bordered core set that we'd been doing for years. And the Russian version of the set sold incredibly well, you know, obviously in relation to how much we expect Russian product to sell. So when it came time to figure out what to do with 10th edition, Elaine was like, let's just make the whole set black border. It's 10th. It's a big milestone for the core set.

And so 10th edition was printed all black bordered the first core set since beta that had been done in all black borders. And so it was like, okay, and whatever we're doing for 11th edition, you know, we have to top that somehow. That's just always, uh, the hopes whenever you're putting together your product lineup is that each year will be a little better than the year before. up is that each year will be a little better than the year before and i was like this would be a tough a tough one to beat you know if we're just sticking with the same model uh we started off a little bit of blackboard it was all black border what what's left to make it cool we had already had foils in the corset for several editions now um so that got me myself and Jake Tice, who was another guy working on the brand team. We'd go out to lunch once a week talking about, should we just, is there room for new cards in the core set?

Like that seems to be the, the way to go to get this thing to stand out post edition. And that solved a lot of problems in my head. Like I, I've been on a a like magic should be more resonant kick for a long time um especially when trying to teach new people how to play do we have card concepts that they recognize that helps you learn the rules because what the cards do gets you know when you imagine a a knight or whatever uh or a pegasus does in quote real life when you see it written

out in game terms that helps you learn those game terms it makes the game feel much more accessible than if we're inundating you with a bunch of creative concepts that you also are not familiar with in addition to rules concepts you're not familiar with so i said okay this is gonna be great we can kind of remake alpha using today's design sense make some new use some of the old cards that work great um but make up new cards to fill in all the gaps um and that's basically where it came from and that's pretty much exactly what we executed on okay so i know you put together a pretty high-octane design team for this set. So for the audience, the design team was Aaron, who led it, Bill Rose, myself, Devin Lowe, Brady Domroth, and Brian Tinsman, which at the time was most of the heavy hitters from R&D. Right, in fact, a lot of those people weren't typically on design sense. It was just such a,

I remember talking with Bill who was, and still is the vice president of the whole department. Um, you know, this is a new thing. It's going to make a lot of people nervous. Um, are we sure we're doing it right? So that led him to be like, let's put my, you know, he wanted to be on the team. He wanted you on the team. Let's just get everybody that might object or have some concern on the team in the room. Brady was the creative director at that time, you know, in charge of all the art commissioning and names and flavor text. Brian was obviously one of our most senior designers. Devin was the head developer. Just like anyone who might take issue with doing this or let's get them all in the room, all on board, all working towards the same goal.

And, you know, it wasn't even particularly contentious. I think everybody saw the idea as a good one and worked hard to execute on it. But, yeah, I think that design team is pretty outsized for if you read through the card set, just how very vanilla and tame most of the designs in that set are. Well, one of the things that's interesting is this idea that simple cards are easier to design is just false.

That making a good clean simple card is actually pretty hard that's for sure especially if you know um look at some of our recent sets we've certainly been getting more and more wordy that simple cards are uh you know diamonds in the rough um a lot of these were not particularly inspired designs it was just kind of re-skins of existing stuff tons of vanilla and french vanilla creatures like i think there's like the number of blue creatures in the set that just have flying and no other words is a is crazy high because it was just like what's a sprite dude what's a drake dude what's a uh whatever an air elemental dude they all just fly um and we just didn't put any other text on them and i think that's great for an introductory product um but the set does not have a ton of

texture and as we went through the rest of the series, M11 and so on, we got a little more complex. So there's four, I just counted, there's four creatures that are vanilla, you know, vanilla flyers. There's a lot that have like ETB effect. I mean, there's a lot of flyers that don't have a, you know, a virtual vanilla. Like once they come into play, that's all they are is vanilla.

Yeah. So I wouldn't say those cards are hard to make or anything like that um but it was a good starting point like as far as like let's reset everything let's start from the beginning again um making a bunch of french vanilla cards with either revamped concepts or or cherry picking the best concepts that we'd ever done throughout all of Magic worked out pretty well. First, for the audience who might not know the terminology, a French vanilla creature has no rules

text, and a French vanilla creature only has creature abilities. Usually evergreen creature abilities, but any creature abilities, technically. Like Sarah Angel is French vanilla. It has flying and vigilance. Yeah. So let me

tell you one of my favorite memories from this design team, and I'm curious. So each of us made a list of what we thought the optimized version of the color, like we had to go through and like, okay, you could reprint cards. What is your perfect version of each

color through reprints, just reprints, and then we compared notes and what the perfect reprints were. Do you remember this exercise? Yeah, I do. I do. I don't remember anything I would have put on the list personally, but, yeah, we did a lot of that. Just, like, start from square one.

Give us your ideal version of things. And there was a lot of and then like what what concepts do we think people are familiar with now that they weren't familiar with in 1993 that we can make a very resonant card around and whatnot and then let's fix some stuff like um you know savannah lions was a card we had printed it rare for years but really that that card does just not make sense at Rare anymore, so we shifted it down to Uncommon and made it a Soldier, because there

were Soldier tribal cards in the set as well. So just polishing off some rough edges and just trying to make the most resonant, simple set possible. Yeah, I know there were a bunch of cards that were like, we had a cool concept previously, but the card we'd made for it just wasn't a clean version of it.

And we're like, okay, let's just do the cleaner version of Concept X. Yeah, and there's some really cool cards that came out of that. I think Acidic Slime might be one of my favorites. Gen of Wishes. As we talk about cards, I just want to say this So acidic slime is 3 green green It's a 2-2 ooze It's got death touch

And when it enters the battlefield Destroy target artifact, enchantment, or land And I think the idea there was That was top-down ooze, right? It's a slime How do we make a slime? A green slime from D&D or whatever. Some sort of corrosive

non-sentient ooze monster. Yeah, I mentioned the Djinn of Wishes was the other one. Okay, so Djinn of Wishes, 3 blue blue, 4 4. It's a djinn, flying. When it enters the battlefield, it has 3 wish counters on it and then two blue blue, remove a wish counter from djinn of wishes

reveal the top card of your library you may play that card without paying its mana cost if you don't exile it and that was just literally like we're trying to make a genie right, a genie with three wishes with three wishes, yes yeah

and the interesting thing was in this design meeting, which is a little different than some of the others, is we would come in and say, we really want the following thing. We want a gin of three wishes, and then we'd go out and we'd design our own version of that and then come back and sort of compare them. Yeah, and there were even some cards

that we had a little contest for. I think there's a Red Ifrit in the set, Capricious Ifrit, which said we need designs for a Red Ifrit. What would the best execution of the Red Ifrit concept be? The card ended up being a little too chaotic and potentially downside-y to really captivate people. But I remember we just had like a dozen different versions of this hanging on the wall in the office,

and people voted on the one they liked best, and this is the one that won. I think Greg Marks is the guy that came up with this particular design. So Capricious Afrit, real quick,'s four red red, six four Afrit. At the beginning of your upkeep, choose target non-land permanent you control, and up to two target non-land permanents you don't control, destroy one of them at random. Right.

So it destroys all sorts of stuff one third of the time. It's your own thing. Or maybe itself. Yeah. And then there was, you know know plenty of just like renaming this was just a big kick that I was on where like I did not think Master Decoy was the right name for

that white tapper so it got renamed Blinding Mage I didn't like Threaten as the name of like a red the red temporary steel card so that got renamed to Active Treason and a lot of these have stuck around um mind control was the more fantasy name for the card persuasion which was the five mana you know um control magic aura just little detailed stuff i'm just like this

isn't perfect the way we have it can we can we make a perfect version i think this is also where divination showed up for the first time. It used to be called Council of the Soratami. I was just like, that's not going to cut it for this exercise. Yeah, that was a card from from

Arcadian Masks, right? Oh, no, no, I'm sorry, from Champions of Kamigawa. And you didn't even know whether it was a creature or a spell, like, you know, because console can be, I mean, there's different spellings of the word console.

I guess the most notable new card to come out of that set was Baneslayer Angel. That was one of the Eric Lauer, who was the developer on the set. I think mostly made up on his own. Knowing that we wanted to kind of reinstate Sarah Angel as an uncommon

because it had been pushed up to rare at some point in the core set cycle, but just was never good enough. Certainly not a constructed card for a long time. So we figured we'd put that back where it belonged at an uncommon. Then what would a mythic angel look like if their angel wasn't

uncommon? And Eric came up with the... So, I have a little story. First let me say what Bane's Flare Angel is and then I have a little story about Bane's Flare Angel. So Bane's Flare Angel is three white white for a 5-5 angel, flying, first strike, lifelink, protection from demons and from dragons.

So the original version of it was Flying First Strike Vigilance, Protection from Demons and from Dragons. And I really had a big problem. I didn't want to completely off-place Ser Angel. Obviously, it's obviously better than Ser Angel, you know, but

I felt like, could we just not make it 100% in every way better? So I convinced Eric to change Vigilance to Lifelink, just to make it, like, at least Sarah Angel didn't tap. There's a slight reason it's not completely overshadowed by that card. You will not be replacing Sarah Angel with Baneslayer Angel in your stasis deck. Yes, yeah. So I did get him to make that one change.

But yeah, that card went over really, really well. People were super blown away by it. It showed up in Constructed a decent amount, and it was just kind of a home run on all fronts. Yeah, one of the cool things about Constructed is when we put protection from dragons and demons on it, it was what we call trinket tax. It was more flavor than it was meant to be super functional,

but it ended up really mattering in the environment it first got played in, which is kind of funny. Yeah, because Alara had some Constructed dragons, which they had to come up. And obviously the most notable reprint to be included in the set was Lightning Bolt. So how did that come to be? So Lightning Bolt, real quickly,

for those that don't know Lightning Bolt, is R, do three damage to any target from Alpha. Yeah. If you don't know Lightning Bolt, I'm surprised you're listening to this podcast, to be honest with you. How did it come about well it was i definitely wanted to include you know famous old cards people are excited about that may have that had gotten kind of a bad rap in the meantime but you know may it may end up being fair enough to include at least for

one cycle through a core set even if we weren't going to make them standard legal all the time so we have like birds of paradise hypnotic specter uh and lightning bolt and it just it's such a beautiful, clean, powerful card. Simple as all get out, but, you know, people have loved playing it since the first days magic ever existed. And it's very resonant. Like, Lightning Bolt's a spell in D&D. It's a super easy to grasp concept.

And it's one of those cards people have just been asking for a while. You know, why can't you reprint Lightning Bolt? Why can't you reprint Lightning Bolt? Why can't you reprint Lightning Bolt? I do think it is, on average, too good for standard almost always. But Eric, again, who is the lead developer, was like, I will protect this. I get why you want to do it. It's certainly going to draw a lot of attention to the product and get people to pay attention to this score set compared to others and you know maybe even re-engage some lapsed players who might want to come back now and play again once lightning

bolt uh shows up in the set and i think it did all that and we actually kept it around for m11 as well um and then when we created the modern format, it benefited from those sets being legal, and Lightning Bolt is the most played card in modern. So it certainly is iconic and powerful and awesome, and I was happy to be able to include it, to have it be part of today's Magic, as opposed to something that might just be relegated to um the older formats or whatever it it's it being displayed as it is in modern is pretty awesome uh it's just one of the all-time bangers of magic spells okay so letting bolt made it what cards didn't make it what cards got considered and didn't end up making it to the set? I'm pretty sure Fireball is on that list. I like it for similar reasons.

It has a long history in the game. Oh, no, it is in the set. It is in the set. Yeah, you do. That one probably shouldn't have made it. It is not an easy spell to resolve. I'm trying to think of what... We talked about Counterspell. We did.

And Counterspell actually came up in many different M-set discussions for years. It has that similar simplicity plus power plus famousness appeal that could do a lot of work to get people to engage. It's probably not as healthy as Lightning Bolt was. What else?

Swords to Plowshares was talked about. It was on a list. It didn't take long to eliminate that one from the running. Do you remember any in particular? I'm trying to think.

I remember, I mean, we, was this the core set we tried Rancor, or was that a different core set? We actually did print Rancor in a later core set. In a later core set, okay. Well, or something like that. I know we talked about it for a while, and I'm not sure whether this one's that's what we talked about,

and then we eventually did do it. Yep. Yeah, we did do Vanker. It might have been talked about here. I mean, there's certainly a fun, powerful card. I don't know. Yeah. I remember a weird card we talked about.

It wasn't really a power level thing but we had some very serious talks about Prodigal Sorcerer of it isn't really a blue thing anymore but it was a fun card and we decided that it just added too much complexity

We actually printed the red version from Player Chaos and it said Prodigal Pyromancer is in but an uncommon right that uncommon right now all those those effects do tend to gum up games and limited where it's just like you have if you have got two of them for instance uh if they were common that would happen a lot and then your opponent just draws cards that they can't cast just keeps drawing two toughness creatures or one toughness creatures and doesn't even get to cast their spells.

So those creatures that can sit, permanents that can sit there and invalidate large numbers of draw steps are generally frowned upon. It is interesting, like how Prodigal Sorcerer being blue, which gave blue an angle that it didn't otherwise have with any other cards but in red it's kind of forgettable you know it just

vanishes into the sea of ways to kill things in red yeah yeah it's interesting that uh one of the things that i one of the balances on doing sets in general, not just Magic 2010, but is this balance of nostalgia and then sort of simplicity and resonance, right? That some of the times, you know, you want to bring back things because people just have fond memories of them. And sometimes there's things that are just so clean and simple.

And then that cross section of the little Venn diagram, like what are the nostalgic things, but they're very clean and simple and I know we examined a lot of them for this set, a lot of them are in this set Yeah, another big addition this set made to Magic is the cycle of

dual lands M10 lands or buddy lands like Dragon Skull Summit I guess is a good example if you want to read that one aloud sure uh dragon skull summit enters battlefield tapped unless you control a swamp or mountain tap add black or red to your mana pool and that's as printed now we just say tap you add red or black right um we wanted we wanted dual lands we knew those were things players like they're kind of an important thing to learn early on in your magic journey that you can build more ambitious mana bases if you get the right lands.

from Ice Age, which do damage to you every time you tap them for one of the two colors, or the, we call the shock lands from the first Ravnica, which you can put into play untapped if you pay two life. Those life payments, we just figured, you know, we'd seen it over and over again, that newer players

bounce off those really hard. They don't have any interest in lands that hurt you because you have free access to infinite basic lands that don't hurt you. you have free access to infinite basic lands that don't hurt you why would i want to do this to myself if they they overvalue their own life totals especially at higher life totals so instead of trying to like play into that tension we wanted to come up with what's what's a good cycle of constructed level dual lands that doesn't involve life loss or damage or anything like that.

It took us quite a few iterations to land on this one. But I'm really happy with it. We obviously finished the cycle later and have reprinted them a couple times. And they show up in tons of different formats. Commander, Modern, now and again.

Pioneer for sure. I love them. You know, Commander, Modern, now and again. Pioneer, for sure. I love them. So, speaking of lands, here's a story I remember from this set. Is, we decided that what we were going to try to do for the basic lands is find our four favorite pieces of art. Like, what were the best plane art we've ever done? And I remember we had, like, there's a lot of discussion in the pit about like, what's the best planes? What's the best island? And I mean, obviously the art director had the final

call on this, but there was a lot of discussion about like, what is the all-time best planes in magic? Stuff like that. And I know we spent a lot of time on picking which of the basic lands the set was going to have. I think it has a couple new ones and a couple reprints. I'm trying to remember if that's how we did it.

It's got a John Avon one and a Rob Alexander one. I think we might have commissioned a couple like too new, too old, something like that. Oh, it's possible, maybe. Definitely a lot of care put into the land art. But I think beyond Lightning Bolt and Dual Lands and

resonant new card designs, the Thing Magic 2010 most impacted Magic with was the rules changes that went along with it. So let's talk about that. So what prompted the rules changes? So I think 6th edition was the last major rules update that Magic had gone through, and that's when, gosh, you'll have to remind me of what 6th edition rules did. You kind of unified the stack. 6th edition added damage to the stack. Right, it added the stack.

It added the stack and added the stack. It added some interrupts and whatnot down to just the stack, including combat damage going on the stack. It was a good rules change. Like, 6th edition did a lot to streamline magic um and that one was that one those rule sets were created with the idea that magic was going to be a digital game at some point uh you know pre-magic online and if we wanted to if we wanted it to be codable there needed to be a lot more cohesion to the rule set sixth edition

did that but between sixth and tenth there's just like a lot more cohesion to the rule set sixth edition did that but between sixth and tenth there's just like a backlog of little nitpicky things um stuff that popped up in our consumer research about where people got stuck and what didn't feel right um some of the terminology we'd used and you know some of the rules that were just extraneous and felt like we didn't we didn't need them anymore. And so as part of the whole, like, rip the band-aid off and feel like we're starting over with Alpha, we said, well, here's our chance to fix the rules up again. So I have a list in front of me of all the changes that happened with Magic 2010.

This was very contentious internally as well. I don't want people to think that we all held hands and felt really good about this. There was definitely some nervousness, uncertainty, and whatnot, but I'm glad we ended up where we did. So probably the one that got the most... people talked the most about was Mana Burn went away. So how mana pulls worked and Mana Burn going away was a big change. We labeled a bunch of things differently. For example, the term Battlefield started in Magic 2010. Exile started in Magic 2010. Certain keywords like Death Touch and Lifelink sort of got the premiere in Magic 2010. Certain keywords like Death Touch and Lifelink

sort of got the premiere in Magic 2010. Yeah, I mean, the exile, I think it just feels so natural now. It's like it's always been there. Battlefield, I still think isn't quite as natural a term

or as necessary, but ETB has finally fully replaced CIP. It comes into play as it used to be called. So I'm happy that the vernacular has fully adopted those terms in the decade plus since this set came out. So actually I said mana, I said mana burn was the most talked about. It was not. Combat damage leaving said Mana Burn was the most talked about. It was not.

Combat damage leaving the stack was probably the most talked about. So in 6th edition rules, when the stack got introduced, damage was kind of treated like spells were. And why did we change that? What caused us to change that? There was just a lot of cases where either people would put damage on a stack and then do something.

And oftentimes with newer or less experienced players or players that hadn't played as part of larger tournament communities, they just would not believe, they just could not fathom that what you just told them was true right i block your 2-1 with my 2-1 and then i'm going to put damage on the stack and then bounce my 2-1 back to my hand or sack it to some other effect like a something like a goblin bombardment or whatever and kill another one of your creatures uh you know or like the mod the mod fanatic is kind of the poster child it's a r for a one one that has sacrificed this to deal one damage to to any target and you would you block a two two with a one one mod fanatic put the one damage on the stack and then sacrifice it to do the second damage and kill the 2-2.

It made all those cards a lot more powerful, all those effects a lot more powerful, but it was not intuitive. It just wasn't. And, you know, a lot of players liked it, and they felt really smart whenever they could pull off these tricks, but, like, over and over and over again, every time we teach somebody new

or have somebody new show up at the company that wasn't wanted to learn magic they just could not believe that this stuff and found it very daunting and frustrating um and just kind of came to the realization that it wasn't necessary for that to work that way that we can have the damage be dealt um just in one quick motion if the creature is there it does damage if's not, it doesn't do damage. Yeah, and the other, that was the main reason. The secondary reason, which I think was also important, is we actually thought it was better gameplay that you had to make a decision.

Like, do you want to use your Mug Fanatic to kill the 2-1? The tension, people like it's less skill testing now, but it's not, it's more skill testing. Right, if I block your Dark Confidant with my Sakuraura tribe elder which is a one one that i can sacrifice to get a land out of my library i used to be able to just kill your dark confidant and get the land but now it's like which do i want to do more do i need the land or do i need to kill your creature and you can you know lose a game by making the wrong decision

there um and i think a lot of the higher level players saw that just like this isn't easier it's easier to explain and simpler from a rules perspective but the gameplay decisions are actually harder uh another big change that uh is we changed how blocking multiple blockers worked um you would do that was kind of a necessary thing to go with the combat damage not on the stack we still wanted the defending player to have some um ability to react to what the um the attacker was doing so if we didn't institute the kind of order, the blockers part of combat, it would be you block a 4-4 with three 2-2s. And then if you have a giant growth, I'll just kill the other two. No matter what your giant growth, I'll just kill the other two. No matter what your giant growth,

I'll just kill the other two. If the, if you didn't kind of put a step in there to indicate what, at what the attacker's intent was. And that was not intuitive either. It was just like, well, I'm going to kill these.

Well, no, if you said you're going to kill this one, that's the one I want a giant growth. No, well then I'll just kill the other two. And it just was very frustrating. And it made this kind of damage prevention effects and things like that

really bad in, in multi-blocking scenarios. So we had to add this. If there are multiple blockers, the attacker has to order them kind of in a row of how he plans to damage them down the line. That took some getting used to, um, people kind of held that up.

It's like, see, the system doesn't work. They have to add in this dumb step. But hopefully by now it's second nature and just it makes sense why we had to do it. And it makes all the cards work the way they're intended. So I can see my desk from here, so I'm not too far from work. Any final thoughts about Magic 2010? I thought it was just a great way to open up the door for us as a group

to embrace more resonant designs, and that stuff went on to influence, I think, how we did Zendikar, Innistrad, and all those other really awesome sets that came after it. It gave the Core Set family of products a lot more legs for the coming years. Not endless. Obviously, we've stopped doing them for now, and we've just found there's better ways, like with Arena, to teach people to play than to create a specific product just for newer people to play then to create a specific product just for uh you know

newer people to engage with um but yeah i mean all that stuff added together it makes the set stand out a lot as one of the kind of turning points for magic that's um legacy still lives on today in various forms and then um for as simple as as the cards are themselves to set that i'm so very proud of today so i did a podcast with matt place you guys can all go listen to uh just a few weeks ago where matt and i listed what we thought the 10 most influential magic sets of all time were uh and magic 2010 made my top 10. So I feel like sort of the push of resonance, there was a lot of sort of things that

said this is important that really sort of shaped the things that came after it. So, um, anyway, just a little side note that I do think that Magic 2010 was not just was it a good set in a vacuum, but it really sort of highlighted some things and stressed R&D

as a whole, things that were important that really much influenced all the sets that came after it. Great to hear that. Anyway, I can now see my desk, so we all know what that means. This is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me

to be making magic. So Aaron, thanks for being with us today. You got it. And all you, I will see you next time. Bye-bye.