Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #887: Crimson Vow with Chris Mooney

Episode Date: November 19, 2021

I sit down with Designer Chris Mooney, and we talk about the design of Innistrad: Crimson Vow, especially some of the top-down card designs for Vampires and weddings.

I'm not pulling in my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another Drive to Work Coronavirus Edition. And Mark has a cold. Anyway, I'm here today with Chris Mooney, and we are going to talk about Crimson Vow. Hey, Chris. Hello. Happy to be here. Okay, so I worked on the... I led the vision team,

and you were on set design, so we did not overlap, I don't think. Yes, that is correct. So I have a whole different podcast about the vision design, so we're going to talk a little bit more about set design since I have you as my guest. So what is your earliest memory of Crimson Vow? My earliest memory was probably... I sort of heard that we were doing the set because the schedule was a little bit in flux. So this set sort of got dropped in and I was like, oh, interesting. I'm a huge Innistrad fan.

The original Innistrad is one of my favorite sets of all time and I love the world and the flavor and the mechanics of most of the times that we've returned. So I was the world and the flavor and the mechanics of most of the times that we've returned. So I was excited, but I was also kind of, in the beginning, it wasn't yet clear what the theme was going to be. And I think my first memory was hearing somebody say vampire wedding. And I was like, what? What? That sounds crazy. At first, I was like what what that sounds crazy uh at first I was very skeptical of the idea which is funny because as the set design went on I became one of the biggest champions of the vampire wedding I was like it's it's such an

awesome theme we have to do all these vampire cards and all these wedding cards I was really really excited about it but I definitely remember at the beginning being like, how is that going to work? I have no idea. Like, what's going on? Can't two vampires in love get married? I don't think they're in love, though. But yeah, no, it was, I'm glad that I was able to be on the team and sort of get, become, really to fall in love with the theme of the set. And yeah, it was a great opportunity because, as I said, I love Innistrad. And, you know, the timing was a bit off for me to be on Midnight Hunt.

But then this Crimson Vow team opened up. And so I had an opportunity to contribute to this world that I love so much. Okay, so I'm going to start by talking weddings because I know this is something you were very interested in. So I want to talk about top-down design. So like, okay, we know it's a wedding. What does that mean? How do you approach making the set feel like a wedding? Right. So when it comes to wedding, it was very interesting because there's a lot of trope space in weddings. Not only just in the lives of people, lots of people get married themselves or have lots of family and friends who get married.

So people are sort of all familiar with various wedding tropes, but also from media, tons and tons of movies and TV shows. Just weddings are a huge part of of you know especially american pop culture um so there's a lot of stuff to really like dig into on things that would probably be recognizable uh and the opportunity here with crimson vow was that uh we probably we hadn't done much of it before and we probably aren't going to do much of it again

you know who knows when the next time wedding will be the theme of a magic set right uh so it was really an opportunity to try and just grab everything we thought was going to be fun and resonant uh and and just try to hit as many things as possible um but on top of that there's also sort of a kind of a more subtle general theme of things pairing up um so just having a general theme across the set of thing a plus thing b you know usually like two creatures coming together to be stronger uh when they're working alongside one another that was sort of a minor theme that we could weave throughout everything even when uh it wasn't explicitly wedding themed okay so i want to talk about some specific like specific wedding cards so what let's pick some of your favorites i know you made a bunch of the wedding cards so

pick pick one let's talk about how you made it um yeah let's start with, well, uh, just the first one off the top of my head is, uh, the Bride's Gown and Groom's Finery. Okay, so I just want to tell the audience what this is before we describe them. So Bride's Gown is one and a white, artifact equipment, equipped creature gets plus two plus oh, it gets an additional plus zero plus two, and as first strike, as long as an equipment named Groom's Finery is attached to a creature you control, equip two. And then Groom's Finery is one and a black,

so it mirrors, obviously. Artifact equipment, equip creature gets plus two, plus zero, it gets an additional plus zero, plus two, and as death touch, as long as an equipment named Bride's Gown is attached to a creature you control, equipped to. So, okay, that's what it is. Go ahead. How did these two come about? Right, so this was sort of from that first category I talked about of just wedding tropes.

Like, what are some common things that you see at a wedding? And, you know, very classically, there's sort of a, you know, a tuxedo and a wedding dress pair. And it seemed really fun as the idea of, right, you know, we don't often get to make equipment out of, you know, nice outfits as opposed to big weapons or something. So it seemed kind of fun here to play into the, oh, you're dressed up nice for the wedding. And also to have these two sort of pair with one another. One is white, one is black. Just like you would sort of expect in your mind when you're picturing these famous outfits. It was kind of, I first sort of threw it out there as sort of a joke of like,

wouldn't it be funny if there was a white dress and a black tux and they kind of went together? But when we put it in the set, it turned out it actually was really fun to try and get these two and get them in play at the same time. You could suit up two different creatures and have them be both buffed. The final cards actually have, you know, you can put them on the same creature even and have one person wearing both outfits, which, you know, is maybe not perfect flavor, but it is very fun to imagine someone donning both their, you know, wedding tuxedo and their wedding dress at the same time and getting ultimate power. But that was just the kind of thing of we really dug into a lot of the tropes and kind of what people would expect from them.

But also we had to make sure that they actually were fun. You know, this is something that you talk about all the time, which is you can make cards that are very flavorful top down. But at the end of the day, if they're not fun to play with, then it's not really, you know, that's not great design. It's not really doing that much for us. play with, then it's not really, you know, that's not great design. It's not really doing that much for us. So we were really happy when these kind of, this silly idea of this matching set of outfits actually turned out to be a fun sort of side quest to do in draft. And so they were able to stay in the set all the way. Yeah, one of the interesting side notes, this is true for a lot of sets, is we only get so much equipment. Like, equipment's something we've learned over the years. Like,

a little bit of equipment goes a long way and so often in sets we're always like there's a lot of objects that you want to give things to and so it's like okay you know but now a wedding it made sense to prioritize you know the gown and the tuxedo so okay what is what's the next what's your next pick for a wedding item

another good one is next pick for a wedding item? Another good one is what did the final name turn into? It is a double-faced card. Wedding announcement? Wedding announcement. There we go. Okay, so let me read this and then you can explain it.

So wedding announcement is two and a white enchantment. At the beginning of your end step, put an invitation counter on Wedding Announcement. If you attack with two or more creatures this turn, draw a card. Otherwise create a one one white human creature token. Then if Wedding Announcement has three or more invitation counters on it, transform it.

The backside is Wedding Festivities. Enchantment. Creatures you control get plus one plus one. Right. So this was, this design actually came out of a lot of different sort of trains of thought. So the first one was, right, dipping into those wedding tropes, trying to think of something that is like very memorable to kind of anyone who's been involved in a wedding, is

the sort of big planning uh you know build up uh you know some people have small weddings but if you have a larger wedding then there's a lot of planning that has to go into it figuring out you know who to invite and how to get all of the flowers and the catering and the music and everything um so i was really enamored with this idea of some kind of card that represented this big build-up to the main event. Additionally, we were doing double-faced cards in the set. We knew that from the get-go. And we were looking for some interesting different double-faced card uh designs that were in the previous set midnight hunt we had gone really deep on day night uh and so day night was really the focus

of a lot of double-faced cards in midnight hunt and so we were looking for some non-day night just standalone interesting designs to use the double-faced card space and thirdly this was also a little bit of um our new space for white card drawing so we've been investigating trying to add a little bit more uh ways of drawing cards into white and this card was uh is an example of white being able to sort of draw one card per turn over time by doing some uh by kind of jumping through a white aligned hoop uh so this design sort of combined took all those different ideas together and created this effect where on the front side you're sort of building up over time if you've got a lot of creatures already then you can draw some cards otherwise you can make some

creature tokens. But then on the back, you finally get the payoff, the big wedding party, where everyone that you've invited to your wedding previous to this gets a bonus. So it was a really nice tying of a story, a little wedding story, plus some of these mechanics that we had been interested in trying out. So I do want to point out before we move on, while you were not in charge of white during the time this card got made, you've since taken the mantle of white in the Council of Colors. That is right. I hope that I can continue a lot of the good work that, uh, Ari, my predecessor

was doing before me. Uh, this is an example of wedding announcement isn't really a card draw card in the sense that it's trying to get you a lot of cards. Uh, but it is using card draw just as a way of adding a little bit of power and uh you know sustainability to this effect uh and i think that we'll see a lot more of that as well uh as we move forward is more card more white cards that are replacing themselves or just allowing you to remain at card parity um which is something that they have struggled with historically and one of the things that i think both midnight hunt and and Crimson Vow definitely,

you start to see some of our influences on white. There's more coming, but you definitely can see that we've been working on white and trying to add some stuff to white, so white is getting fleshed out a little bit. Right. Can't spoil anything that's upcoming in the future, but this is definitely the start of a trend

that continues to grow moving forward. Okay, do you want to talk more wedding or do you want to move over to vampires um i think one last card that i want to call out on the wedding side is the wedding hearse okay the wait hold on a second i will read the wedding hearse sorry it's called honeymoon hear Hearse. Oh, Honeymoon Hearse. That's the real card name. Okay, Honeymoon Hearse is two and a red. It's an artifact. It's a vehicle. It's an artifact vehicle.

Five, five. Trample. Tap two untapped creatures you control. Honeymoon Hearse becomes an artifact creature until end of turn. So, this is probably my personal favorite of the the wedding cards that i submitted which was like the you know car that you drive off into the sunset after the wedding uh the so the newlyweds car was something that i uh thought was just very cute i thought it was a simple idea of needing two creatures to crew it uh and we submitted it it played fun and so it really lasted the whole way um the the hearse idea both is just funny from the sense of it's a hearse because it's innistrad uh but also that's inspired

by my love of the hearse that is outside of uh the haunted mansion at disneyland i love that hearse and i thought it would be be fun to have a hearse here. I will say that I think the art on this card absolutely, and the flavor text too, absolutely took the gag to an extra level. I think it's so funny that the skull and crossbones are on the back of the cart rather than the tin cans and stuff. That I think is super funny. So I'm really glad that other people found this idea charming and that everyone sort of leaned in to making it a very delightful design. Real quick question, just because I get asked this on this particular card. Normally, we crew

vehicles. Every once in a while, if there's a strong reason we want something different, we will leave crew off. In this particular card, the flavor of having exactly two creatures was so important that we left it off. I think we did talk crew two at one point, but like, you don't need two things to crew two. So it didn't quite get across. It felt really wrong for a two-two to crew the honeymoon car on their own. That being said, this is definitely something that, you know, in design we talked about, is there some variant of the crew keyword that we wanted to make, like crew two creatures or something. But ultimately we thought it was actually much cleaner and easier to understand

to just write it out such that you wouldn't have any confusion over how this interacted with other abilities. And future vehicles will most likely crew. That's the normal way that vehicles will work. Occasionally we might not crew if there's some other way to do it, but that's the exception, not the rule. Yep. Okay, so now that we've talked weddings, let's talk vampires.

Yes, the other half of the vow. The marriage that creates the theme of vow. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about how how do we how do we make this more vampirey well so the the the clear most the the loudest way that we did that was definitely with the blood tokens um you know that's sort of the new marquee mechanic of the set it It's strongly related to the vampires, and it shows up all over the place,

both mechanically and in the art. Yeah, it's funny. One of the things, if you look at the art, the art director had the challenge of, we want a lot of blood reference, but there's only so much blood you can actually show. And so I love the petal motif as like a means to represent blood without necessarily being blood all the time.

I thought that was pretty cool. Right, it really is a huge testament to the art teams in figuring out how to make a set where blood is one of the most important elements of the gameplay into something that we can sort of, you know, the art isn't just all messy, gore, really gross stuff so it big kudos to them yeah the the thing that they did that i

love is how elegant everything i'm saying i mean it definitely has it's a vampire and there's some creepiness to it but the the amount of elegance to it and how i know i really liked all that right the the wedding setting definitely helps to add to the, like, fanciness, the romance of it all. And that's something that, you know, is kind of unique to vampires when it comes to monsters, at least Innistrad monsters. The other Innistrad monsters don't have as much high society class and, you know, romance and sex appeal to them as the vampires can. Okay, so let's pick some vampire cards. So what would be a vampire card that you were excited for? A lot of the vampires that I helped make

were some of the legendary vampires. Okay. So Edgar Markov is a good example. Okay, let's talk let me let me read edgar uh so edgar is edgar charmed groom two white blacks of four mana total a legendary creature vampire noble he's a four four other vampires you control get plus one plus one when edgar charmed groom dies return to the battlefield transformed under its owner's control and the back face is edgar mark's coffin, legendary artifact.

At the beginning of your upkeep, create a 1-1 white and black vampire creature token with lifelink and put a bloodline counter on Edgar Markov's coffin. Then if there are three or more bloodline counters on it, remove those counters and transform it. Lots of double-faced cards for you to read today, Mark. Yes. But yeah, so Edgar, you you know obviously one of the most

important characters in the set maybe second behind uh the bride herself olivia uh edgar is a character that we haven't really seen in a long time he uh has been referenced of course uh and we sort of know that he is the progenitor of uh soren markov's vampire bloodline family um but uh we've only ever gotten one card of him and it wasn't even from an indiscard set it was from a commander product so delivering on edgar was definitely something that we knew we had to do and we had to try and figure out how can we really make it feel like this old lord of the vampires uh but without sort of stepping on the previous card that has become a very very popular and very powerful commander one of the ways that we did that was definitely by leaning into two colors so

traditionally on innistrad vampires have been black and red. And we've gotten white vampires a little bit on various planes. But because this was a vampire set, we really decided that we wanted to have vampires be more prominent than usual. So we decided we want to do some more white vampires on Innistrad. And since Edgar Markov's previous card was black, red, and white, we felt like this is a good place where we could do a black-white Edgar Markov. Additionally, though, we also didn't want to, you know, this Edgar design

is playing into kind of his role as being the leader of vampires. You know, he's a vampire lord, so he's buffing all of his vampire subjects. But we also wanted to make sure that uh for a design like this it wasn't simply uh leaning into the lore but that also we wanted to make sure that we were still being able to hit on some of these classic vampire tropes that even someone who wasn't super familiar with indestride could understand and that's where the

idea of him dying and flipping into the coffin and then sleeping and then returning, raising from the dead, that felt like something that, you know, ties into his role in the story. You know, no spoilers, but we'll probably learn a little bit more about Edgar Markov's role in this whole thing as we release more story elements. But also, it's just a classic vampire thing of a vampire going into the coffin and coming out of the coffin. So we really enjoyed how we were able to both be true to the character, but also deliver on a classic trope that lots of people could resonate with, or it would resonate with lots of people. Yeah, one of the things, just real quickly, because it's a very common question I'm getting online, is why isn't he white, red, black? And one of the things, I mean, you can go to my blog for the larger in-depth

conversations I've had, but one of the decisions we made very early on was keeping Innistrad to two colors. That the themes of Innistrad are very strongly two color, and that we decided not to make three-color cards in either Midnight Hunt or Crimson Vow. And so really, it was off the table. We weren't making three-color cards. And so it was really a question of what color

should he be. Olivia being red-black made a lot of sense, just because all her previous cards have been red-black. And we had wanted to do three vampires, one in each color combination. And Odric Roy made sense as red-white. So also for that, there's a bunch of reasons why it made a lot of sense.

And the other thing, as you pointed out, he has such a definitive white-black-red card that in some ways, trying to make a different one, you're just fighting against something that's very hard to fight against. Let's just make a different one so people can do something different with him.

Right. That's a big, I mean, that's definitely a big element in, we wanted this Edgar card to stand on his own and be interesting, maybe create some interesting new different kinds of decks, rather than just competing directly against the previous card. So that's always a challenge. Okay. Do you want to talk Olivia?

Yeah, let's talk about Olivia. Okay. So let me read Olivia. Okay, so Olivia is... Olivia Crimson Bride, 4 black, red, 3, 4. She's a legendary creature, Vampire Noble. Flying Haste. When Olivia Crimson Bride attacks, return target creature card from your graveyard to the battlefield, tapped and attacking.

It gains. When you don't control a legendary vampire, exile this creature. Right. So, again, I don't want to spoil too much of the story, but this, Olivia, is definitely based on some of the story events that are happening around maybe why this whole wedding is taking place in the first place. happening around maybe why this whole wedding is taking place in the first place uh this i sort of this is a good example of sort of how our general set design play design process works so i submitted a card that was very similar to this uh at the beginning of set design i was like we need an olivia let's put an olivia in the file that know, is kind of tied into what her role in the story is. My original design, though,

was essentially just reanimating one creature. And that was kind of... I have it in front of me. Do you want me to read it? Oh, yeah. I'm writing an article that's going through a lot of these cards. So if you want to see it, like, Edgar and Olivia, all the different versions of them, I have articles coming out that will do that. So the original version was

three black, red, legendary creature, vampire, three, three, flying. When card name enters the battlefield, return target creature card from a graveyard to the battlefield under your control until card name leaves the battlefield. If that creature is a vampire, it gains haste.

Right. So it was sort of like right uh she brings one person back from the graveyard and that person's kind of you know married to her so they they only get to really stick around as long as olivia is around um and you know that was a fine design to start with but uh we can see sort of where the cart ended up it It has a lot more potential, a lot more upside. And a lot of that just comes from at the beginning of set design, what we're really looking for is a core idea.

So the core idea was Olivia, bring someone back from the dead. But that core idea, you know, wasn't nearly at the correct rate and power level that we were looking for. So over time, we really tested different ways of making her stronger and stronger until she got to the final version that we have today, which is a lot more powerful, a lot more exciting, and sort of goes to show, but you can see that the design is still very close to the original, where it's bringing something back from the dead, and that thing kind of is reliant on having olivia there or at least another vampire around so this

is sort of an example of right like this is kind of how cards can transform drastically from the original idea to the final the core of the design is still there but we were able to take it to a whole nother level of excitement uh just by playing it and testing it and really pushing it a lot. So I just want, one of my favorite things about this, just to tell you a little design thing. So the final version of it cares that you have a legendary vampire. So this is a neat thing, we do

this all the time, where the card's self-referential. So the point is, if all you has Olivia, it works. It just means if Olivia goes away, they go away. But it encourages you to do some legendary vampire tribal, right? It says, hey, if you have more legendary vampires in your deck and Olivia dies, but one of these other

ones are in the deck and alive, they can keep these things alive. And so it does a nice balance of it. Both can work by itself, but it kind of encourages you to build a certain kind of deck. And so... It's very cool that, you know, if she brings back a legendary vampire,

well, then you control a legendary vampire and that person can survive on their own. So she definitely encourages you, in addition to working well with other cards, she also encourages you to sort of play out the way that the story has really played out. And I think that that's always really nice when cards align that way.

Okay. Any other vampire you want to talk about? I think one I definitely want to hit on is Runeau Stromkirk. Okay. Hold on a second. Let me read Runeau. Okay.

So Runeau Stromkirk is one blue-black legendary creature, vampire cleric. He's a 1-4, flying. When Runeau Stromkirk is one blue-black legendary creature, Vampire Cleric. He's a 1-4. Flying. When Runostromkirk enters the battlefield, put up to one target creature card from your graveyard on top of your library. At the beginning of your upkeep, look at the top card of your library. You may reveal that card. If a creature card with mana value 6 or greater is revealed this way, transform Runostromkirk.

And then it becomes Crothus, Lord of the Deep. A legendary creature, Kraken Whore, 3-5, flying. When Krothus, Lord of the Deep attacks, create a tapped and attacking token that's a copy of another attacking creature. If that creature is a Kraken, Leviathan, Octopus, or Serpent, create two of those tokens instead.

Okay, where did this card come from? Right, so, Runo is probably one of my my i'm very happy that we were able to get this i'm super proud that that we we finally did it so runo strongkirk has been a character that's existed in the magic story for you know all the way back to the original innistrad uh he's one of the progenitors of one of the vampire bloodlines that exists on Innistrad. However, because of the way that Innistrad is structured,

where we've got five tribes that each have two colors, we typically don't get to do too many legendary creatures of the same tribe in one set. Just because, hey, if we've got a legendary vampire in black red well the other color combinations are sort of being used by other creature types we don't really have room to get to to some beyond that uh but because this was a vampire set i was like here is our opportunity we can do all of the leaders of the different vampire bloodlines because of course you know all of them would show up for this wedding uh so finally we're able to hit runo in a way that we normally wouldn't be able to runo stromkirk has this backstory of the stromkirk vampires live by the

sea and they worship an ancient sea god which until now we had never really seen it wasn't really clear if it really existed or not but uh we finally were able to actually make a Runo card, and we were able to put the giant sea monster god on the back of his card. And I think that that is really, it's a great card if you don't know the story. It's just a cool vampire with a cool sea monster. But for any fans of the original Innistrad block

who remember that backstory about Runo, this will be a long time coming, really like exciting card to finally see in print. And also for all the Kraken, Leviathan, Octopus, and Serpent fans. Yes, yes. See monsters rejoice.

Okay, so I'm almost at my desk here, so we need to wrap up, but final thoughts? What's your big takeaway from working on crimson vow i absolutely loved working on crimson vow it was one of the it was one of the sets i worked the most on in terms of set design uh until an upcoming set that you and i mark spent a lot of time on together uh the uh and so i was just really happy to see it finally come out really happy to see all of these cards hit and i think that uh overall the set really did a great

job of weaving in these themes of vampire wedding both in these loud splashy cards but also in the just general gameplay of the commons and uncommons you're going to see a lot of cards that are uh rewarding you for having pairs of creatures or for teaming up or are better when they work well with one another. And I think that it's really nice when we're able to have all of the different pieces of a set kind of come together and add towards that one overarching theme. Yeah, I'm really happy with how it came out. Like I said, I was there in the beginning when we said, okay, how about

a vampire wedding? We were either going to do zombies or vampires, and so vampire wedding tipped us into vampires. That's right. Next time it'll be zombie wedding. Zombie bar mitzvah. Oh, yeah. There you go. There you go. Anyway,

I'm now at 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. But I want to thank you, Chris, for being with us. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. And to everybody else, I will see you next time. Bye-bye.