Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #888: Crimson Vow Design

Episode Date: November 19, 2021

I walk through the larger design story of Innistrad: Crimson Vow.

I'm not pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the Drive to Work Coronavirus Edition. Okay, so today is all about the design of Crimson Dawn. So I'm going to talk about a lot about the vision design, a little bit about after it, but I'll probably focus more on the part I did. Okay, so the first, let's start at the very beginning. So, if you notice, the codename for Midnight Hunt

is golf, and the codename for Kamigawa Neon Dynasty is hockey. Wait a minute, for those that don't know, all our codenames of the Premier Sets, non-core Premier Sets,

go in alphabetical order based on sports right now. So anyway, what's going on? So the code name for Crimson Dawn is Clubs. So that should be the first clue that something weird was happening here. So I actually, so I was on Midnight Hunt. I did not lead it. Ethan Fleischer led it, but I was on the team. And the week after that ended, I started up the next teamnight Hunt I did not lead it, Ethan Fleischer led it but I was on the team and the week after that ended I started up the next

team which I did lead which was Kamigawa Nien Dynasty. I actually worked on that and so I'm in the middle of working on that, doing the vision design for that and there's a lot of discussion about what they

want to do. So originally when we made Adventures in the Forgotten Realm, the Dungeons & Dragons set, it was going to originally be a core set with a D&D flavoring. That it was just going to be a normal core set, but flavored to match D&D. And then over time, it kind of evolved into a much more traditional premiere set you know as far as complexity level and new mechanics that is a lot closer to a normal premiere set than it was a core set um and that combined with like jumpstart

started doing really well and proved to be a really interesting way to introduce new players and um arena had a tutorial that was working well. And anyway, for various different reasons, it was sort of decided that maybe instead of having a fourth set that's the core set, what if we had a fourth set that was a more traditional premiere set? And at the same time, there was a different conversation going on about do we want to have the sets come out a little bit earlier in the year? Because the fourth set is in standard less time.

And so there's some discussions about maybe we want to release a set at a different time than the summer. So all these forces sort of came together, and there's this idea of what if our fourth set, instead of being a summer core set, was a late fall, early winter, and once again, I'm using northern hemisphere seasons, set. The idea was, well, we could move the traditional fall set a month earlier, maybe, and then two months later, we could do another set. So they sort of came to us and said, what do you guys think? Like, we think this might be a good idea. And then they said,

and we're thinking, what if we did it right now? What if we did it in, and I'm like, well, we did it at Hunt. I'm working on Neon Dynasty. Like, we sort of passed that window. But we looked into it because, you know, whenever you have a good idea, you want to sort of investigate. And what we discovered was vision design tends to start, I mean, not always,

but often will start a little bit early. We're less tied to anything because we're at the beginning. And so sometimes we'll have to start a little earlier than normal. And it turned out there was a window where if I stopped working on Neon Dynasty and started working on Crimson Vow, we had enough time for a traditional vision design. We didn't have time for exploratory design, but we would have time for a full vision design.

And so we all sort of talked it over and said, okay, let's do this. I ended up, normally I sort of, I'll consult with various people about who wants to lead whatever vision set. And it was kind of decided that like, this didn't have exploratory. So it was going to be a little rougher

than the average design just because it was a little less lead-in. And it made sense for me to lead it, so I left this at. Okay, so... Oh, also, because we had no exploratory vision design and no exploratory world building, it was pretty clear that it couldn't be a brand new world. We just didn't have the resources to do that. That we were, I mean, the missing time we were missing kind of prevented us from inventing

something brand new. And so the logical thing was, well, Midnight Hunt was on Innistrad. Innistrad is a very popular set, probably number two or three overall, I believe, of worlds. So, I mean, it's a very popular world. It's using the genre of horror, which there's a lot of material.

Okay, if we're going to do a second set right after an Innistrad set, let's just do a second Innistrad set. We'd actually been talking about how we wanted... We hadn't really done two worlds on the two sets consecutively on the same world for a while since Ravnica and War of the Spark so anyway it just kind of made logical sense

to make it Innistrad so when I started on my first day of doing vision design all we knew was it's the second set in Innistrad that's really all we knew so I gathered my team. So my vision design team was myself, Andrew Veen, Doug Beyer, Ari Nee, and Daniel Holt. Anyway, so the first thing I did with my team is I said, okay, well, let's look at Midnight Hunt. How are we going to give an identity to this set?

Like we have two sets in a row that are on the same place. A lot of times where you are can be a definitional thing. Like, if you're only, if it's the one set on that world, the world very much can define what it is. But once you have two sets on the same world, okay, how do we separate them? How do we give them their own identity? And so what we decided was, I looked at Midnight Hunt and I said, you know what? It has a pretty strong werewolf theme. The main mechanic in the set was Daybound Nightbound, which is a riff on the werewolf mechanic. We had pushed werewolves into a third color

and splashed them in a fourth and fifth color. The story we had planned was very werewolf-centric. Arlen, who's the werewolf planeswalker, was in the set. It really had very werewolf centric Arlen who's the werewolf planeswalker was in the set like it really had a werewolf theme to it so I said okay well what if we play up that is the werewolf set and we play up the

Crimson Vow as a different creature type so obviously on Innistrad the main creature types that we normally play around with are humans, spirits, vampires, werewolves, and zombies. Obviously werewolves had been sort of the thematic focus of Ben and Hunt. Okay, we needed to pick a different one for Crimson Vow. Okay, the first thing we eliminated was humans because every world has humans.

I mean, there's nothing, humans didn't feel as distinct to the world of Innistrad. I mean, just because humans are everywhere. So we decided, we decided we probably wanted another, you know, monster and not humans. We took humans out. Next, well, ghosts make a lot of sense. Spirits make a lot of sense. On Innistrad, we felt that both zombies and Um, we felt that both zombies and, um, vampires had a little more sort of pop culture cachet, if you will. Um, and so, uh, I made the call to get rid of spirits and said, okay, we're going to either do vampires or we're going to do zombies. We're gonna do one of these two.

Hold on a second. I'm gonna take a drink. I have a cold if you can't tell from listening to me. Okay. So what happened next was we had two meetings. from listening to me. Okay. So, what happened next was we had two meetings. The first meeting was vampire meeting.

I don't know what order we went into, but let's say it was vampire meeting. And I said, okay, let's talk about everything vampire.

What mechanics would we bring back if it was a vampire set? What themes could we do? What new mechanics could we do? We've explored if it was a vampire set, What themes could we do? What new mechanics could we do? We explored if it was a vampire set, what would a vampire set

let us do? And we talked about all the tropes of vampires and we just wrote everything that we could on the board. Like, okay, if it's a vampire set, what's all the coolness of vampires? Then the next meeting, we said, okay, what makes zombies cool? What are the cool things about zombies? What mechanics would come back

that are zombie mechanics? What are the cool things about zombies? What mechanics would come back that are zombie mechanics? What are cool zombie tropes? What could we do that would be fun for zombies? And so in each of these two meetings, we made a giant list. And the takeaway from those two meetings were we could make a really cool vampire set or we could make a really cool zombie set. So I then talked to Doug Beyer.

So Doug was on the vision design team, but also Doug ran the world building team. And I had said to him, could you go to your team and say, hey, vampires or zombies, which one would you guys prefer? And so they did something interesting to what we did. And they sort of, okay, what is the vampire set? What is the zombie set? And so he came back and said, oh, well, my team is really excited by this idea of a vampire wedding. And I was like, vampire wedding, okay.

I guess we're doing vampires. And, you know, we, I mean, basically, it's like we were split. Yeah, vision design was split. We had good ideas for both. Creative had split leaning toward vampires, or more than split. They design was split. We had good ideas for both. Creative had split leaning toward vampires, or more than split. They wanted to do vampires. So, okay, let's do vampires.

And a vampire wedding sounded really cool, so we were on board. Okay. So, the first mechanic we did was the vampire mechanic. Obviously, it had a whole day of brainstorming. And the one idea that really stood out

that I was very excited by was the idea of blood tokens. So in original Innistrad, in Shadows of Innistrad, there was like a mystery theme. And we were trying to sort of capture the idea of investigation because Jace is kind of like a detective

and he's investigating. He had a cool trench coat. Anyway, so we ended up coming up with this mechanic called Investigate. Originally, it was like, well, what if Investigate lets you draw cards? And we're like, well, we can't do that much of it

if it's too easy to draw cards. So we ended up coming up with the idea of Clues. And what Clues was is, oh, it's an artifact that you have to then still put mana into it to get the card. So it wasn't that it gave you a card, it sort of let you at a discount price,

basically, buy a card for two mana. Anyway, we made Clues, and prior to Clues, by the way, Magic had made a lot of creature tokens, but we really hadn't made many artifact tokens. In fact, the only ones I think that existed were like copies, like we made artifact copies, tokens that were copies of artifacts. But I don't think we had made, I don't know if we did,

but there was only one or two. There weren't really much of artifact tokens. And what Clue said to us is, hey, just like there are cool creature tokens, you could do a cool artifact token that's not a creature, and it could have some utility. So, for example, Clue drew you a card. So anyway, flash forward, I don't know, a year or two later,

we're doing ixalan and we say okay let's let's take that same basic premise and can we use an artifact token and we made treasure and treasure was like okay instead of giving you the resource of cards it gives you the resource of um a mana then flash forward a little more we're in throne of eldraine and it just becomes clear that food is just thematically a big deal uh in fairy tales and so they ended up making food tokens which plays the resource of life um and anyway we really we really realized the value of the artifact tokens that it, that it was both flavorful and it was mechanically very interesting.

And then not only could you use them as what they were normally used for, but you could use them as a resource. So for example, in Throne of Eldraine, we had things that could eat the food. You know, the wolf can eat the food and get bigger. So like the food had sort of a duality to it, that it could get you life if you needed it,

but it also could be this other resource. So, recognizing all that, we were enamored with the idea of what if blood was an artifact token in the vein of a clue or treasure or food. And I think the reason we got there was when I sort of said, what do you associate with vampires? Really high on the list was blood.

They suck your blood. That's what vampires do. That's what vampires are after, you know. And the idea of a blood token seemed really cool. Now, we didn't know what it did. Basically, what we said is, is we're gonna have a blood token it's gonna do something and then vampires will you know will eat the blood right the vampire you can give blood your vampires to make them stronger and like okay that seemed like a good

recipe um but that meant okay well what what are blood counters doing um now we had learned from clues that you have to be careful how much value you give. One of the problems we had run with Clues was getting a card is a pretty big deal. So you have to do a lot to give up the Clue token because what you're giving up in exchange is a card, which is a pretty big deal. So we wanted to make sure that it was something

that was a little bit smaller of an effect. We could charge you less for it, but a smaller of an effect, um, for a couple reasons. One, we wanted to be able to feed them to vampires. And two, if it's a smaller effect, we could give you more blood. Like, if it's a big effect, all you'd ever get is a single blood. But if it's a smaller effect, we could increment a little more and be able to give you, um, we could give you more, you more nuance and have more knobs it would allow us to sort of

have a little bit more finesse in the design okay so the first thing we tried was plus one plus one counters we're like okay maybe blood makes you stronger and if you feed that to a creature,

you could use it to make a creature bigger, or you could feed it to your vampires. The problem we ran into, there were a couple problems. One was that it was making the vampires play like werewolves. The werewolves are all about sort of growing bigger with time. And so it was making the vampires and the werewolves play a little too similarly. Also, we wanted to feed it to the vampires, but making a vampire permanently plus one plus one is pretty good. And so you just were not inclined to feed the

bloods of vampires. It was kind of too big of an effect. And then there was it ended up being like it added a complication to combat. If you could do it at instant speed. So it required us to do it at sorcery speed. Anyway, there was a whole bunch of different issues that just sort of said,

ah, plus one, plus one counter's not working. Okay, so he said, let's go smaller. How about scry one? And the idea there is there's a lot of blood magic, blood omens, where you use blood to scry the future, if you get into the horror genre. Okay, what if you do scry? What if you use blood and you're seeing the future? So we had the reverse problem in that scry one wasn't quite big enough. That you were sort of never using to scry one. You were always kind of saving for your vampires.

We wanted a mix of things. The other problem we found was one of the things we wanted this token to do is smooth the draws in some way. We wanted to help the larger system, and scry wasn't quite doing that. Now, while we were trying scry, we also did try Surveil.

So, Surveil is like Scry, but instead of the card, if you don't take the card, or sorry, if you don't leave the card on top of the library, Scry goes to the bottom of the library. Surveil goes to the graveyard. We kind of liked, the thing we liked about Surveil is there's graveyard themes. It's an Innistrad set. You have a lot of graveyard themes.

And so, that was kind of cool. But, once again, Surveil, like Scry graveyard themes. It's an Innistrad set. You have a lot of graveyard themes. And so that was kind of cool. But once again, Surveil, like Scry, just wasn't big enough. We did, by the way, at one point, I actually did, a lot of what I'm talking about, I talk in my article, but I'm going hopefully in more detail here. We did at one point try the opponent losing life.

It didn't do any smoothing and it made you stockpile the blood so that your opponent sort of had to assume they were at a certain life total. And so it was just causing weird tensions in a way that wasn't fun. Anyway, at some point,

we say, okay, one of the cool things, like, what is the resource we want? And we liked the idea of cards getting into the graveyard. We liked the idea that, you know, cards mattered in the graveyard because it's Innistrad. And so was there a way for this mechanic

to get cards to the graveyard? And so that's what we said. Okay, we know that clues are card drawing, but what if we did either looting or rummaging? Looting is draw a card, discard a card. Rummaging is discard a card, draw a card. Looting is normally done in blue. Rummaging is normally done in red.

And in the end, I think we decided to go with rummaging partly because vampires are black-red. And so they weren't blue, they were more red. And it had a little more of a wilder feel to it. Oh, so one of the questions, I'll just answer this because this comes up on my blog a lot. Once we decided that, well, let me finish Blood, and then I'll talk about why there's no madness in the set.

I'll talk about that in a second. Anyway, so we decided that we would do blood, be rummage. So you would pay mana, discard a card, then draw a card. We ended up making it cost one, because if it cost two, it just felt like a worse clue. Like, it felt like a clue where, you know, like, clue just lets you draw a card. Here you have to discard to draw a card.

So one is like, okay, well, it's better value for mana than a clue, because you get it for one, but it's more card utility than card advantage, obviously. And then we tried it and it played really well. And it stuck. And I know they fiddled with stuff in set design, but it never really... It just, it was the right thing to do. I do know one of the problems we always struggled with was

one of the nice things about clues and about treasure and food is how strongly the effect just nails what it is like food it gains you life you eat you get you know and one of the things we realized about blood is we could find things that leaned in a direction but it's just not like blood has this clear obvious thing that blood does and so there wasn't a clean mechanic that just felt like blood. And so we ended up going with something that like, look, it doesn't feel not like blood. You know, if you want to think like it energizes you or your blood omening or whatever you want to think like,

we felt like it could make sense. And the flavor of things giving you blood was super flavorful. And the flavor of you using blood on vampires was super flavorful. Like, okay, there's so much good flavor here that, you know, will absorb the fact that blood's ability is more opaque than exactly what blood would do, but I don't even know exactly what blood would do.

So, real quickly, once we decided we're doing rummaging, a lot of people said, oh, well, vampires in Shadows of Innistrad had madness. And madness goes really well with rummaging. So did you ever think of bringing madness in? We didn't, but here's why. We only wanted to do one mechanic per sort of tribe, if you will, per creature type that matters.

per sort of tribe, if you will, per creature type that matters. And we didn't... So blood tokens were going to be what we were doing with the vampires. So we just didn't have space for a second mechanic. But we did know that if you're building a deck, you get to build your deck with Shadows over Innistrad. So we knew that blood on the vampires

would play nicely with madness on vampires. So while we weren't doing it in this limited environment, we knew constructed magic would have that synergy. So we were aware of the synergy. Okay, so that was the vampires. Next up, the zombies. So one of the cool things we'd come up with while we were brainstorming

was we wanted to find ways to let you make a host of zombies and then overrun them with a horde of zombies. That's super flavorful. The problem was that when you make zombie tokens, which is the easiest way to make creatures, it tends to gum up the board. And so we came up with a solution of what ended up being called Decade. So the idea was, it was a token, it couldn't block, and when it dealt damage, it went away. So it was kind of a

one-shot token creature. And we played with it, and it played really interestingly, and we just sort of fell in love with it. I was a huge fan, I'm still a huge fan of Decade. So anyway, we put it in the set and then in set design,

I think Eric was working on Midnight Hunt and anyway, he realized that if they swapped some stuff around, it would help both sets. And so Decade got taken from Midnight Hunt. What that means in set design is set design had to figure out what to do for the zombies. So it turns out that to separate the two sets, Midnight Hunt, when we first made Innistrad, we realized that there were two different kinds

of zombies. One was kind of the necromancy zombie, it's sort of something raised from the dead through magic. And the second was kind of a science zombie, sort of Frankenstein, like somebody made it out of pieces. And we realized that we needed to have two colors, that we'd make black the sort of necromantic zombies, and we'd make blue the sort of Frankenstein, you know, science zombies.

So when we made the first set, we leaned, at Midnight Hunt, we leaned a little more on the necromantic zombies. And so the second set, we leaned a little more on the scabs or the science zombies. That's also why, by the way, Gisa and Gerolf, Gisa is a necromancer. She's in the first set. Gerolf is a, what do they call people that make scabs, but a scab maker.

He's in the second set. Anyway, so they wanted to find a mechanic that would play nicely with graveyard interactions. And they looked at new mechanics, but in the end, there was an old mechanic, Exploit, the mechanic for Silumgar in Dragons of Tarkir, the blue-black faction. And so that just seemed like a clean, easy fit. It played nice with other stuff from the set.

It played nicely with blood. And so that became the zombie mechanic. Interestingly, the mechanic for the spirits actually was designed not in Midnight Hunt. I'm sorry, not in Crimson Demow, but in Midnight Hunt. We liked the flavor of Haunt from Guildpact, but there were a lot of mechanical

muckiness about it. So we were trying to use double-faced card technology to kind of mimic Haunt. And the idea was, it's a spirit on the front and when it dies, it turns into an aura that does the same thing the spirit did that attaches to a creature.

So you could have a flying spirit that dies and give something flying. And the double-faced cards did a nice, clean way of doing that. Because it's the creature but when it dies, it becomes the aura that, you know, but when it dies, it becomes the aura that, you know, and you can make,

now it's just an aura. So having two cards, you know, two faces, really made it flavorful and easy to do. Anyway, that mechanic gets taken to Midnight Hunt. They decide that they want to have a cost

on it. Once they decide they want to have a cost on it, they realize that there's a different version where you can do creature that's not a spirit and when it dies, now you can make a spirit out of it. And once they realize that, they're like, oh, well, we probably want to do the creature creature first and do the creature aura second. So that got passed off to us

in Crimson Vow. So even though we made it in Midnight Hunt, so we made Decade in Crimson Vow and So even though we made it in Midnight Hunt, so we made Decade in Crimson Vow and that ended up in Midnight Hunt. We made the Decade version that shows up in, or a similar version in Midnight Hunt, it showed up in Crimson Vow. Next, the werewolves.

We did talk about having a new werewolf mechanic, but we're like, look, the werewolves just aren't going to play well together if they don't work the same. And so we ended up keeping Daybound Nightbound. We did have some fun in making a lot of cool individual werewolf designs. So while the

werewolves don't get a new mechanic, we did spend extra energy into trying to make some really cool individual werewolf designs. So those are there. Then we get to the humans. So in Kanz of Ravnica, we had made a Boros mechanic called Mentor, that when you attack with a smaller creature,

you can put a plus one, plus one counter on it. Eric Lauer kept Mentor in, but always sort of felt like it was a little bit off. And the way he thought it should work is the creature puts the counter on itself if it hits with a larger creature. So kind of like Mentor, except it goes on the mentoree rather than mentor.

And we ended up calling it, I think, Training. But anyway, I think Eric has suggested that for the humans. We liked it, and so that went in for the humans. The final mechanic in the set, as far as named mechanics, I mean, obviously transforms in the set because it's Innistrad. But the final mechanic was Cleave. So Cleave, oh, Training was the name. Did I say Training?

Training was the name of Human Mechanic. I might have... Anyway, it's Training. Okay, so the way Cleve came about was... And I have to be careful in this story because it involves stuff I haven't... It's not public yet. So we were working on exploratory design

for Streets of New Cabana, and Ari Nee came up with a mechanic that may or may not have been influenced by something in the Great Designer Search. It got pointed out that, was it Ryan? Somebody in the Great Designer Search had done something Cleave-ish.

Maybe that inspired Ari. I'm not 100% sure. But Ari came up with Cleave in Streets of New Cabana in exploratory. Then in Vision, when weoratory. Then in Vision, when we were working on stuff in Vision, what often happens in Vision is you pull out stuff that you'd made

in Exploratory, and Ari pitched it to be used in Streets of New Compendia. It didn't really fit there for reasons I could get into when we make Streets of New Compendia, or Streets of New Compendia gets released. I guess we made it. But anyway, so then Mark Gott New Capenna gets released. I guess we've made it. But anyway, so then Mark Gottlieb is in a meeting.

Mark Gottlieb was running Streets of New Capenna vision design, but he was on the set design team for Crimson Vow. And they were looking for a spell mechanic because Daybound, Nightbound, and Exploit, and to a certain extent, Blood Tokens and Training and Disturb all went on creatures. I mean, I guess Blood Counters was the one exception.

But other than that, four of the five mechanics only went on creatures. And so they needed something for their spells. And so while they were looking, Markatly said, well, here's a cool mechanic that we looked at for Streets of New Capenna. We didn't really need a Streets of New Capenna. Maybe you could use it here.

And the idea behind it was it's a mechanic where, it's a kicker-like mechanic, where if you spend extra mana, you get a removed text. You cleave the text. You remove text from the rules text, and the card has a different function because you remove some of the text. You cleave the text. You remove text from the rules text, and the card has a different function because you remove some of the

text. It was very clever and definitely sort of, you know, a little quirkier of a mechanic, and it ended up just sort of fitting really well in that space. I think that's all the...

But anyway, I think that's all the... But anyway, I think that's all the mechanics. So, oh, the other big thing that happened I should mention is we knew very early on that it was going to be a vampire wedding. So not only were we doing a lot of top-down vampire tropes

and, you know, we spent a lot of time saying, what have we done? What haven't we done? What's still there? What's the cool stuff? And figuring out all the sort of vampire tropes that existed. We also realized that we had wedding tropes.

And then not only are there like real live, this is what happens in weddings, but also because weddings are such a big part of the human experience, it shows up all the time in movies, in TV shows, in pop culture. And so there's a lot of sort of entertainment tropes about it too. And so that's another big thing is we really spent a lot of time

working on trying to get top-down vampires, top-down wedding. The set design ended up playing up a theme of cards that work well together. So the idea that these two creatures are better together. So there's that theme that got woven in. But anyway, there was a lot of

cool stuff woven into the set. And hopefully this talk gave you some insight in what we did. I also have a podcast with Chris Mooney talking about the set design and discussing a lot of individual cards that Chris had made. And if you want

to hear more about that, that's another podcast for you to listen to. Anyway, guys, but I'm at 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. Hope you guys enjoyed hearing all about Crimson Vow.

And I'll see you next time. Bye-bye.