Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #885: Amonkhet with Ethan Fleischer

Episode Date: November 12, 2021

In this podcast, I sit down with R&D member Ethan Fleischer to talk about the design of Amonkhet.

I'm not pulling in my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the Drive to Work Coronavirus Edition. Okay, I'm having lots of fun talking with people about Magic's past. So today I have Ethan Fleischer. We're going to talk all about Amonkhet. Hey, Ethan. Hi, how's it going, Mark? It's going good. Amonkhet. So this was a set where you and I co-led the set. So I sort of led the first half of design, back when it was design development, and you did the second half, so.

That's right. And we were both on it for the whole time, just we sort of hindered the reins halfway through. Switched who was responsible for making decisions and maintaining the file and writing documents and stuff. Okay, so what is your memory of Amonkhet?

When you think back to Amonkhet, what first jumps to mind? Oh, I just remember this. It's a lot of visual memories, right? I feel like ancient Egypt, which Amonkhet was based on, is a very sort of visually splendiferous setting, because a lot of what we know about it is from ancient artifacts and ancient buildings. And so a lot of the illustrations that we made popped to mind for Amonkhet, the windblown sand and the pyramids and the costumes.

Well, I remember very early on, Jeremy Jarvis was the creative director at the time. And he was like no dusty egypt it's got to be bright sunny egypt and like there's a lot of tropes just because so much of egypt is through archaeology and stuff that right yeah because there's kind of there's there are two egypts right there's egypt as it was it you know in ancient times and then there is the Egypt of like 1920s British archaeologists discovering Egyptian artifacts. And Jeremy was very

much interested in the first thing, and not at all interested in the second thing. And so we really focused in on Egypt as a living, vibrant culture, rather than a collection of dusty artifacts. Yeah, I remember one of the things we did early on. So this was part of what we called the Bolas saga,

which was a three-year Bolas story that ended up with War of the Spark. And so one of the things I know that came really, really early on was the idea that this was like one of Bolas' like home, I'm not homeworld, he's from Dominaria, but like he was up to something. This is a world in which it reflected his influence.

Right. We didn't think that there was quite enough meat on the bone of just ancient Egypt to base two entire sets around that. And so we wanted, what's the other angle here that will make this uniquely magic, the gathering? And we thought, Nicol Bolas' influence here, what if there was an entire society that he had dominated here?

And what would that look like? Yeah, I know pretty early on, we, one of the things that, I think this came out of exploratory, is the idea of that there was a dissonance and that the people of the world weren't unhappy, but that the gate watch show up, obviously, in the story. And to them, everything seems horribly wrong, but the people who live there, they're absolutely fine with it. And that it's this weird society that it runs the way it runs

and they're very happy with it, even though from an outside perspective, it seems weird. Right. It was supposed to be a dystopia where everybody was sort of artificially happy with the status quo in a way that was creepy. And to me, that was one of the most satisfying things about Amonkhet was that idea of creative dissonance, where horrible things would be happening but they would be named something very nice which you often see in totalitarian states right democracy square in the middle of an oppressive dictatorship things like that yeah and so one of the big things mechanically was what we wanted was we want the mechanics to feel as mean as possible

and the creator to feel nice right so that that it had this play dissonance like the set didn't play like it was a nice place but all the names and the art was saying it was a nice place right and so i was very excited when i found a reprint for amonkhet when we were working on it uh and it was a card from i believe it's from onslaught called unburden and it's a discard spell it makes you discard two cards uh makes the player discard two cards and had cycling and like cycling we put cycling in the set and like the idea that unburden that sounds good right i want to unburden uh but i'm gonna unburden you of your mind right like the the picture has a minotaur being, you know,

having brain surgery put on him or something, and he's kind of looking a little dumb. So the way we thought about the set when we were designing it was we did kind of divide it in two. We said there's the Egypt part of the set that's all the top-down, you know, ancient Egypt, and then there's kind of the bowl-less part of the set of the sort of, youdown ancient Egypt, and then there's kind of the Bolas part of the set of the sort of, you know, the meanness

of sort of like, you know, feeling like a world that Bolas had influenced. Right. In fact, we made a Venn diagram with like a Bolas circle and an Egypt circle and like all the items that were sort of, you know, one or the other or things that felt like they overlapped.

Okay, so why don't I, just as a structural thing, why don't we start with the Egypt part first and talk about sort of capturing Egypt. So what part of Egypt would you like to start with? I feel like mummies is a great place to start, right? Sure. That's a monster that is uniquely Egyptian-themed. Now, the idea of mummies that roam around and fight people, obviously, belongs much more to that 1920s British explorer trope space,

you know, the universal monster movies and such. But we went that far. Yes, we're going to have mummies walking around. And so we made a whole keyword mechanic around that, which was embalm, that would allow you to make a token copy of a creature from your graveyard. So you could pay some mana,

exile the creature from your graveyard to make a token that's a copy of it, except it's a white zombie, in addition to its other colors, other types. And the reason that we wanted to do that instead of unearthed was because we got to show the before and after. Like here, before this person is alive, afterwards, now they have been wrapped in bandages and they're a mummy now.

So it was a fun way. We made bespoke tokens for each of the embalmed cards, which at the time felt like a big ask. I was like, oh man, can we get like 12 new token arts or whatever? Is that even possible? And Jeremy loved the idea. He was the art director for the set, and he was very excited about the idea and was happy to devote the extra resources at a time

when we didn't have as many resources as we do now. I just want to point this out. It's important for the audience to understand when we have to make a magic set, like there are real-world restrictions, you know. You have so many pieces of art and like even for tokens normally you only have so much token art so what we were asking for was more than we were allotted so that required us to go get permission and say hey here's a cool idea can we get this extra

resource and we were told yes but that that's not always the case you know um sometimes it's just a matter of budgetary constraint uh and sometimes it's just a matter of budgetary constraint. And sometimes it's just a matter of like bandwidth. Like, are there enough people to write the art descriptions and enough artists with time available who can illustrate the cards? There's not a, not an infinite supply of anything in the world. So fortunately it was,

they were able to do that. And I was, I was very happy with how the embalm cards turned out. Yeah. The tokens were really cool, too. And the other thing we did, the creative team did, was they concepted all of them so each one had a different shape to it. So there was no repeats. Like, everyone was a cool...

Once you wrap someone in bandages, they look a lot like someone else in bandages. So they definitely found ways to mix it up. Like, this one's a cat, and this one is an angel with big wings, right? Things like that. So real quickly, since we're talking about zombies and you mentioned cats, so zombies was our one main tribal thing in the set.

Normally in sets that aren't tribal-focused, we tend to have, like, one tribal thing. Players like tribals. And zombies, one of the cool things about zombies was the story made sense for white zombies because in the story the zombies are the the zombies in the city are servants you know they they're the sanctified dead they elaborate religious rituals had been performed upon them and they were holy in some sense right right and then also there were there were black zombies that were outside the city

that were kind of wild, more vicious kind of zombies. Yeah, they were evil monsters that hungered for human flesh. But one of the cool things, and this is one of the things we always think about, is we had white and black zombies with some zombie tribal, and then Innistrad was in standard with us, and they had blue and black zombies with some zombie tribal and then indestride was in standard with us and they had blue and black zombies so you know it's sort of like we could add to zombies but here's a new thing it's white zombies we hadn't done white zombies before um and it's not easy like certain concepts are hard to find like zombies as a white concept is weird like we found

one and it worked but you know there's not a lot of worlds where white zombies make a lot of sense. Yeah, and we didn't set out to say, is there some way to do white zombies? We're like, what should mummies be? Well, why not white zombies? Makes sense here. Oh, and I was going to say, the one other thing we did do, tribally, because you mentioned it, is we did have a little cat theme we ran through the set, which was another Egyptian thing. Right, because the ancient Egyptians worshipped cats. So it might have been the first cat tribal reward

that we've ever printed in Magic. I think it was. If it wasn't the only one, it was certainly one of very few when we made that Cat Lord. And it was the most powerful. If one existed, it was nowhere as powerful as that one we made that Cat Lord. And it was the most powerful. If one existed, it was nowhere as powerful as that one. We made it to go, okay, cat lovers,

we can go build a cat deck. The players loved it, and since then, we've had a cat-themed commander deck, we've had cat-themed jumpstart boosters, cats have taken off in a big way, and I'm glad that that we were able to embrace people's love of cats because lots of people like cats not just ancient egyptians

but people alive today who like to buy magic cards but one of the things amonkhet added to the world of magic is a focus on cats which was i mean cats existed before that obviously but more of a tribal focus okay what, what else did we do? What other Egyptian things did we do? Well, a lot of things that people associate with Egypt are artifacts, you know, costumes and tools and, you know, canopic jars, the pyramids, the sphinx statue. So there were quite a lot of artifacts in

amonkhet actually even though it wasn't an artifact themed set um so one uh one type of artifact that we made a few of were these sort of work in progress uh artifacts where they would start out partially built and you would have to add brick counters to them various ways to complete them. And this was kind of inspired by the Civilization video games where you would build great monuments and they would give you some special power if you managed to complete them

before the other players complete their version of it. So we had a few cards like that. And we also had the monuments. Each color was kind of headed up by a god. There was a pantheon of five gods, one for each color. And then there were various other cards associated with each of the gods, including this big monument that was like the temple to that god. And each one was a legendary artifact that did something cool when you cast a creature spell of the appropriate color.

Yeah, actually, each color had a little bit of a theme that ran through it. They had the god, and then there was a bunch of different components that all sort of tied together. they had the god and then they had there was a bunch of different components that all sort of tied together. Right, there was like the god and the trial and the cartouche and the monument and if you put all four of those things together in a

deck, they would kind of have a strategic direction to them. Yeah, so this was the second set that had gods. I mean, we had had gods in Theros, obviously. And I know one of the challenges, speaking of Egyptian things, one of the challenges was, okay, how do you not do

ancient Egypt, you've got to do gods. And, you know, how do we capture gods in a way? Because we didn't have devotion. Like, how do we capture gods in a way that felt like gods, but also felt like Egypt? Yeah, we didn't want to do devotion again, and we didn't want to do devotion again,

and we didn't want to do enchantment creatures again. We wanted to make these gods feel pretty different from the ones in Theros. And ultimately we decided devotion wasn't appropriate. These gods were here whether people worshipped them or not. And we had to find a different mechanic to represent their immortality rather than just indestructibility. We wanted to, we didn't want to kind of paint ourselves into a corner because we knew eventually we were going to go to Kaldheim and do Norse mythology. And so

we wanted to make sure that there were like some elements in common between the amonkhet gods and the theros gods but we didn't want so many elements in common that players would think it was weird when we did something a little farther afield when we went to kaldheim so uh it was important to mix it up a little bit uh so each each god had more of a thing that it cared about rather than each caring about devotion okay also you mentioned the cartouches, want to talk about the cartouches? right the cartouches were

special auras they even had a special subtype because these represented the sort of medals that would be awarded when uh when somebody completed one of the five trials that they had to uh had to go through in order to uh go into the the happy afterlife that was supposedly awaiting them um so each of the trials i believe would

them um so each of the trials i believe would one of the cartouches is that right yeah whenever a cartouche entered the battlefield uh you would each of the trials had a an ability that triggered when it entered the battlefield and then uh whenever you played a cartouche you could return the trial from the battlefield to your hand so you could play it again and get that into the battlefield trigger again. A big part, just so people understand the story, was there were five trials.

The whole idea behind this world, the city, was that you went through these five trials and that along the way, you often died, and that if you made it all the way through, then you would if you made it all the way through then you would be like gloriously killed and get a great reward in the hereafter.

Secretly behind the scenes, Bolas is building a zombie army. So, well. In fact, this was just a giant, this entire city was a machine designed to sort people out into not very good warriors and good warriors. And the good warriors would be turned

into members of his eternal army that he used to invade Ravnica later in the story. But there, so each color had a god associated with it and there was a trial and there was, I don't know if you remember each color had a word associated

I can't remember all this because it's so long ago but there was like a there was um right there was the trial of solidarity for white the trial of knowledge for blue the trial of ambition for black the trial of zeal for red and the trial of strength for green though they weren't gone through in that order no i it was, you started with white, then I think you did green, then blue, then black, then red, is that right? I know you ended in red. I remember red was last. Yeah, red was last, and I think white was first.

But yeah, each one of them, they're just different kind of tasks, like, and the red one was a fight that you fought at the end, and then, if you were the last one standing, then, uh, bowls killed you, or one of the gods killed you. Hazoret the red god killed you, yeah. The sort of final Egyptian element that we put in, aside from visual design stuff, which was considerable,

but from a game design standpoint. And top-down. There was lots of one-of top-downs. We had deserts. So, there was a card from Arabian Nights called Desert that had the subtype Desert, and that was the only card with

the subtype Desert for most of Magic's history, but we decided to make several new deserts in Amonkhet and in Hour of Devastation, the second set of the block, and some cards that cared about deserts. Okay, you said that was the last Egyptian thing. What do you consider

Aftermath? Oh. Aftermath. Is that Egyptian or is that more bolus? I'm not sure. Yeah, Aftermath I think is more of a... It doesn't feel especially flavorful as far as...

Okay, maybe that's more on the Bola side. Okay, we talked Egypt. So let's get to the Bola side. Okay, so why don't we start by talking about minus one, minus one counters. Right. So, we try... I am losing my connection. Well, I will start.

So, one of the things we knew early on is we wanted it to be... I'm sure you're not. We wanted it to have a very harsh feel to it. And one of the ways we had known from when we had been on, in Shadowmoor was that minus one, minus one kind of just felt very mean. You know, it definitely has a very sort of odd feel to it. And so that was one of the ways that we thought we could, we could add this, this mean quality, if you will.

And there was a lot of controversy at the time. I've talked about this on my podcast, not podcast, on my articles a little bit. And that minus one, minus one counters are kind of hard to use. Normally when you use plus one, plus one counters, you're building things up, you're making things stronger you're sort of, things are growing in strength but when you use minus one minus one counters it helps the game to advance ultimately the goal

of a magic game is for one of the players to be reduced to zero life points and the problem you run into in a minus one minus one world is that it sort of makes things go away rather than get bigger. Like it doesn't make the game end. It slows the game down. Right.

But we were very, I mean, I was very, I really wanted to use minus one minus one counters. I thought like if we're going to capture the sense of this being a harsh world, that minus one minus one did a really good job of feeling harsh. Yeah, I agree. It made it feel like a dangerous place with a hostile environment. Okay, so what else? Let's talk the bullish side of things. Oh, let's talk about Exert. Right. Exert was something that felt a little more unique to the specifics of this setting.

Like there were all of these essentially warrior athletes who were trying to outdo each other in these various trials. And Exert kind of uh them striving for excellence so exert was a an ability that allowed you to uh tap a creature and make it so they didn't untap during its uh controllers next on tap step so it was kind of double tapping it where it took two untapped steps for it to un-tap. And that would give you some special ability. They were different from card to card.

And those happened... I guess that happened when they attacked, right? When they attacked, you could do something, and then if you did, they wouldn't un-tap. Yeah, I thought it was a pretty cool mechanic i thought it was uh it's a neat resource like it's one of the things we're always looking for

is what else what are the costs could you pay and this was kind of like oh well maybe the cost you pay is untapping that's a different kind of cost yeah and it was it was a mechanic that encouraged aggressive play. And a lot of the rest of the set, you know, cycling and aftermath of kind of reward slower play where you want the game to drag out and we wanted a mechanic that, something for aggressive decks. As it turned out, the fervor cards were a little stronger in the real world than they were in our playtests, just due to the large number of players being able to optimize how the set was drafted. And it turned out that the Fervor cards were a little too strong and kind of pushed out some of those slower strategies once the draft format matured. Okay, so you mentioned Aftermath. What do you remember the origin of Aftermath?

I remember we were excited about cards that had two different card types on them because there was the Delirium mechanic and Shadows over Innistrad. Right. This is just intolerable. Sorry about that.

No, no, no. We're having little audio issues here, but... Right, and so we wanted to have split cards that could have two types on them. That was how we originally came to Aftermath. It was like, we want instant on one side and sorcery on the other. And eventually we came to Aftermath. It was like, we want instant on one side

and sorcery on the other. And eventually we came to the idea of like, what if we kind of fused split cards and flashback where you could get one effect the first time you cast a spell from your hand and a different effect when you cast it from the graveyard. Yeah, and we tried a lot of visual ways to represent that. The one we finally ended up with was, they were oriented differently, so like in your graveyard you could sort of

orient them so you could see them. Right, yeah, the idea was that you could kind of arrange them in such a way that you could easily see the aftermath cards sticking out and see what they were. I'm not sure that it was entirely a satisfactory implementation overall, but the cards

are pretty fun to play with. Yeah, the mechanically the cards are a lot of fun. The frame layout, probably there's other executions we could have done. We tried a lot of time. Yeah, we did try a lot of things, and ultimately they ended up looking a little weird.

We did end up with some interesting art pieces, though, because one of the card halves had a super wide screen, very wide aspect ratio to the art, which allowed us to get some unusual illustrations in there. Okay, so the one other mechanic that I don't think we've talked about yet is cycling, we mentioned in passing. Do you remember why cycling? Why did cycling end up in this set? Cycling was something that Eric Lauer, who was in charge of the

late design, what we call set design now, we called it development at the time, he was very keen for us to put cycling into the set. He thought that there were a lot of opportunities to make constructed cards by using the cycling mechanic. And ultimately, it felt like it interacted pretty well with what the rest of the set was doing so I was happy to accommodate him.

The one thing about cycling is there's really no set that you can't make cycling work in? Cycling is a flavor neutral mechanic it doesn't really imply anything about the story. So it was definitely more there for standard constructed reasons than it was for sort of internally self-consistent limited reasons. But it's, yes, it's something that is very easy to make work in a set because it's a, it's a very solid mechanic. Okay. So this set was pretty full. I do want to mention one other fact. So between minus one, minus one counters and exerting and brick counters and all sorts of things.

So Dave Humphries, who led the development of the set, decided to make punch-out cards, which is the first time Magic has done punch-out cards. Yeah, so they were like a card-shaped object with perforations in it. And so you could punch out various little counters and things. So there were minus one, minus one counters you could punch out. There were brick counters.

There was a little rectangle that said exerted. So you could use these as play aids while you were playing with the cards. And the players liked them, I think. No, I actually think that's, I mean, we've gone back and used them again because they're useful. And so as someone looking for future designs the punch out card really has has interesting potentials for for future possibilities so yes and anything that you can put into a booster pack is exciting to us because that's how we sell magic cards and like wow here's a different thing we can put into booster packs that is exciting that fires the

imagination of uh people like us. And also it's pretty flexible. Like there's a lot of things you can do. We had a hackathon one time. We were looking at future things and my team, one of the things we were looking at was like other components. And so we did a brainstorm on punch out cards. And there's a lot of things you can do with punch out cards just because

it's like you can put whatever you want and punch it out. So I'm glad we introduced it. I think that was a cool thing the set introduced. Yeah. Okay, so looking back, there's cartouches and brick counters and split cards and aftermath and cycling and embalm and exert and deserts and zombies and lots of stuff going on um do you think in

retrospect there is too much going on uh i think there is or or at least i think that there is more going on than is necessary um the set the set felt a little too complex to me um and also like i wasn't especially happy with where we ended up with the aftermath uh frame design so um and i i don't mean that as a knock against the designer who designed the frame i don't have a better idea i'm not like if only we'd done it this way i think there may not just may not have been a great solution to Aftermath, and I probably, if I could go back in time, I probably would not have made the Aftermath cards in the final version of the set.

Yeah, I mean, this set was... The very experienced drafters actually really liked this set, just because the complexity gives you so much sort of things you can do with it when you're drafting. Yeah, it's just because of some of the sort of speed issues. Some of the things like large creatures with cycling and stuff were kind of forced out of playability in draft often just because there were some decks that just kind of were so fast

that they made it hard for slow decks to compete. Yeah, I know when Hour of Devastation came out, it helped it a little bit. It helped slow it down a little bit because there were some more answers and stuff. My impression was that the full block draft with our devastation was very well regarded. And that kind of course corrected the speed problems to where the speed was at the right level again. But since then, I feel like we've kind of learned that we need to build in safety valves so that like if the if the format is faster or slower than

than our internal testing suggests then there are enough things to do that's that's something that that we have to focus on in the when we're refining the design of sets for limited so I'm I can see my desk here, so I'm almost to work. So my final question to you, Ethan, is looking back, what is your big takeaway? Sort of like with some time looking, because this is one of your earlier sets, not your first set, but one of the earlier sets you worked on.

What is your takeaway looking back on Amonkhet? My big takeaway actually has little to do with like the mechanics of the set or or the complexity of the set and it's more about uh remembering that every magic set is somebody's first magic set and amonkhet block situated as it was right in the middle of this large story, didn't feel like it stood on its own well enough. It felt like it required too much context of knowing what had been happening in the story before this. And too much of its appeal kind of rested on that knowledge. And so I think that it wasn't quite as accessible to people who were coming into Magic for the first time as I would have wanted it to be.

No, it is hard, right? Any one set is somebody's first set and you have to sort of keep that in mind. Yep. The thing I did love is we had wanted to do egyptian top down for you know egyptian set forever like we had talked about doing egyptian sets like back in the like late late 90s like for a long long time uh and it was fun to finally do it and like there's a lot of just really cool evocative things that i that i

was so happy we got to do yeah absolutely i think. I think we really nailed a lot of the Egyptian themes. I was very happy with the creative dissonance of the creepy story we were trying to tell there. I felt like it definitely felt like it succeeded on an artistic level in a way that really satisfied me. And the other thing I enjoyed was not only, obviously, we did a lot of Egyptian influences, but also we created a world that had its own sense to it. Like, while clearly we were influenced

by Egypt, no doubt, that the world of Amonkhet had a very distinctive, like, Amonkhet feel that wasn't just, it wasn't just like, oh, this is exactly like ancient Egypt. It was sort of, we made our own world and I liked all the gods and the trials.

The world had a very sort of living element to it that the gameplay did a really good job of demonstrating. Absolutely. Well, I've got to go now, Mark. I've got another meeting. Okay. Well, I'm at my desk. So I guess we've got to call this a wrap. So thanks, Ethan. Thanks for being with well, I'm at my desk, so I guess we've got to call this a wrap. So thanks, Ethan.

Thanks for being with us. I'm happy to be here. And so I'm at my desk. We all know what that means. It means that instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. So I've made it to work. So I'll see you next time, guys. Bye-bye.