Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #891: Tempest with Richard Garfield

Episode Date: December 4, 2021

I sit down with Richard Garfield to talk about the design of Tempest.

I'm not pulling on the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another Drive to Work Coronavirus Edition. So, being home, I've had a lot of chance to talk to people. And today I have an awesome interview with Richard Garfield. We're going to talk about Tempest. Hey, Richard. Hello, Mark. Okay, so I'm going to tell the very beginning of this story, and then I'm curious to get your side of this story which is how you and I ended up on Tempest okay so you had designed Alpha

you did Arabian Nights and then you went off and were starting to do other things you were designing you know Vampire the Eternal Struggle and a bunch of other games Netrunner and such so when I was hired I was hired in 95 by Mike Davis as a developer. And I wanted to be a designer, but I was told at the time, like, they didn't need designers. They had you.

They needed developers. And so I got hired as a developer. But my secret passion was I really wanted to be a designer. And so I was trying to figure out how I could let, how I could design magic, what I could do. And so you and I were talking and you had said that you were interested in doing magic design again. You hadn't done magic design in a while. And so I took that and ran with it. And I went to Joel or whoever, whoever I had convinced of this and said, Richard, would you let me make a magic set if Richard did it with me? And they said, sure. And so my big break was that you were on the team.

That's that's why they let me do it. So what is your memory? How did you remember getting involved in Tempest? What I remember of Tempest was its focus on developing characters. So not that, you know, not the context in our other design in particular. And I remember, of course, that was very tied with you and that I was working with you and that we were, to some degree, partners in the design but uh um yeah that's that's what i remember and i did not actually remember that this was the first uh set

that i worked on uh since arabian nights i probably you know gave feedback on i'm sure i gave feedback on a lot of them but uh but uh i i did not remember this was the one that i i came back to and that was my memory as far as being on the design team obviously yeah it's probably true um i know that that after uh after doing magic uh arabian nights the reason i went off was because i wanted to focus on uh what else you could do with trading card games rather than, you know, Magic. And additionally, I wanted Magic was such a big job. It had to deal with so many different types of players and people that I knew that we wanted to have lots of people who were good at making it. So I wanted the designers and developers who followed me to have the freedom to do that. So the other big thing that you introduced,

let me explain to the audience, is so Michael Ryan and I went to the Magic brand team and pitched this idea of doing a story. Like Magic had like, there are elements of story. The Brothers War was, you know, mentioned, like Antiquities sort of hinted at it happening long ago.

But there wasn't sort of an ongoing narrative that you saw on the cards, necessarily. And so we pitched what we called the Weatherlight Saga at the time. Or what ended up being called. I don't know if we pitched it as that. But so Weatherlight kind of, we quickly did Weatherlight to introduce, to get the story started. But Tempest was kind of the big starting of the story. So what you're talking about is for the first time, we were representing a story on cards in a way that we really hadn't done before.

Yeah, that's right. Certainly the development, Magic had wrestled with the best way to do story and character and such with the cards. With the original magic, it was all just elements that didn't have any real context outside of their hooks into old myth and legend. Arabian Nights was the same, but it was more focused on a particular mythos. Arabian Nights was the same but it was more focused on a particular mythos and then of course Antiquities as you mentioned had a take at that as well but it wasn't a current story it was still elements of a story but they were ones that were original and since the designers felt that you couldn't get them in any order, that having them be sort of archaeological remains were an appropriate way to do it. But this, yeah, this was the first time that people, you know, that we were serious about actually making, you know,

making what is more traditionally a story which you follow. Okay, so one of my earliest memories of Tempest is for the very first week of Tempest. Do you remember where our first week of design was for Tempest? I'm going to guess Tahoe? No. No? It's not my family. It was your family. Okay, yeah, yeah, Portland. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I remember a trip there. I did not remember that was Tempest. Yeah. So we went down to Portland where your parents lived. And the first week of Tempest Design was in your parents' house down in Portland. Cool. Yeah. That was a fun time. What is your memories of that week?

Just curious. I'll share a story while you think. One of my memories of that week was, for some reason, so the design team was me and you, Mike Elliott and Charlie Coutinho. And we decided for some reason that we weren't going to shave all week. And so we were trying to see in seven days who could make the best beard. And it was not a fair fight. Charlie was there. So it just wasn't particularly fair. Like in seven days, Charlie went to like full beard, it seemed like. Yeah, no, I don't really have any memories

other than just generally working on design with you guys. And yeah, that it was a pleasant change of environment. I don't remember why we went there. I think, here's my guess of what happened, is we had gone to Tahoe for a couple of things and the idea of just getting away was kind of like, we thought it might be fun to get away. And I think you offered up your parents.

I was like, oh, we can go down to Portland. And, you know, my parents don't mind. And so we went down there. Oh, OK. I think I think that's how it happened. Yeah. Yeah. So that certainly especially makes sense if we had already done the Tahoe.

Yes. Design stuff. Yeah. OK. Yeah. I mean, Tahoe design stuff. Yeah, okay. I mean, Tahoe was before and after. There was Tahoe trips after the trip down to your parents, but there was stuff before. So I think we just, I don't know.

My guess is you were inspired, like, hey, we're into my dad's, why don't we go to your dad's? Right, that makes sense. Okay, so the way it worked was Mike Elliott and I were in a similar boat at the time. Both of us were hired as developers, really wanted to be designers, and each of us had done lots and lots of design on our own, sort of just designing Magic Cards in our spare time and such. And so that week, what I had said to everybody is,

bring any ideas you have, and then we'll just go through them. Whatever you want, sort of carte blanche. And Charlie brought a little bit, and you brought, you know, not a, you brought some. And then Mike and I brought some insane amount of cards, like, you know, 50 pages of cards each or something. And then we just went, I remember we went through it. We sat in the downstairs at your parents' place, and we went through card by card. What do we like? What do we not like?

So something that strikes me as strange is you said that you guys weren't the designers because they had me. But if I wasn't doing magic design, who was doing the design? Well, early on, there were outside groups, right? Mirage was done by an outside group. Ice Age and Alliances was done by an outside group. Tempest was the first time we had done in-house.

It was the first large set that hey, inside the building we were going to make it, not exterior to the building. I see. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think when they hired us, they were like, oh, we have all these outside people doing stuff. And they eventually realized maybe we should have the like, oh, we have all these outside people doing stuff. And they eventually realized maybe we should have the inside people doing it rather than all the outside people doing it. Yeah.

So I think that's what happened. And I positioned myself. That's all. I was very eager to do it. And then Mike was also very eager. So that's one of the reasons Mike was on the team is Mike and I have been chatting a lot about wanting to do design. Sure. Sure. Okay.

So let's, I'm going to walk through some elements of Tempest and I'm curious to get your memory. So the first one is something that was your baby. So I'm curious to get your memories of this was buyback. So what, what are your earliest memories of the making of buyback? Buyback. So,

so this was something where that was the, where, where you pay mana to get it out of the discard pile uh no no you pay mana you pay mana to not put it into the discard pile yeah okay yeah yeah um well i i was um i like to see i remember liking uh cards that had more life to it than just being used and going to the discard pile or living outside for a little while then being destroyed. And I've always wanted to incorporate more sorcery type effects into a structure other than fire and forget. But creatures are so inherently interesting

because they do something, they hang around, they interact with one another. But you have to sort of work to make sorceries exciting. And I think I was probably also thinking the cosmic encounter, as well known as a big inspiration to me here, has these flare cards. And the flare cards in Cosmic, when you played them, you get to keep them. And that was much more interesting than playing them and having them discarded, because when you played them and kept them,

the opponent was surprised by it perhaps, but it changed the entire context of the fight going forward. Uh, as opposed to you play it and it goes away, they might say, Oh, that hurt. I hope that doesn't happen again. But, but here that you, you would know it was happening again. So buyback might be, you know, might've been, I might've been thinking of it as a way to get a permanent change to the hands landscape. Yeah, another interesting thing about buyback is I think it was the first mechanic, what we now call kicker mechanics, it was the first mechanic where you could pay extra mana

and then the card got extra efficiency in some way. Yeah. Yeah, I think we were all talking about also uh ways to make it like a one of the arc of magic is you begin out starved for mana and at the end you know you got more than you know what to do with uh and so you uh design your deck in some way around that um and and cards which had uh extra utility later by being very expensive but didn't lose their utility early was was sort of interesting yeah no i think that buyback really paved the way for a lot of things that followed um oh so here's an interesting real quick story for the audience

just behind the scenes stuff i'm curious will you remember this there's a mechanic that we tried to make work that we just could not make work at the time. So the idea was there were cards that had draw triggers that when you literally drew them from your library, they would have an effect. Like, you know, it was a lightning bolt, but it did one damage to you when you drew it, you know. Yeah. Do you remember this? Absolutely. Yeah. Although it might be running together into the many times we tried these, whatever.

Probably the first example of that was in your unglued sets, like the mail bomb or something. Oh, yeah, that was in Unhinged, right, right. Yeah, draw triggers were something we returned to a bunch of times. And so, yeah, yeah. I think, to my memory, I mean, maybe someone did it before Tempest, but that was the first time I remember us

messing around in this space. Yeah. And we, I remember, like, one of the things we thought about is, well, what if we just changed the backs? Because this is before, like, sleeves were a thing. What if the backs were just different? And so when you saw it on top of your library, you

and your opponent, everybody would know, oh, that's one of these cards. So you've got to reveal it when you draw it so you see what happens. But that... And so, originally we were going to try to do that. That didn't work out. And then you came up with buyback. Like, buyback was it kind of... We took all those out of the set and

we put buyback in. Buyback was kind of the filler that went in there. I was replacing that. Oh, I did not remember that. So, another thing that you introduced in Tempest, that was in Tempest Design for a while, was cycling. It was the first time we had ever done cycling. You actually, we put it into uh tempest and then we couldn't we put too much into tempest bill had to take stuff out but we uh we overstuffed it and so cycling was actually original you remember this putting cycling i do yeah yeah yeah uh yeah cycling cycling was uh

exactly the the same area where we're where we were thinking about uh um how to handle um the the wide variety of different uh mana you have during the game and so cycling is another way to go about it where where uh with with uh um buyback it's useful at the beginning because you can play it for cheap and it's useful at the end because you can buy it back and with cycling it's uh useful at the beginning because it's cheap or it's contextual, and it's useful late because you can always cycle it away. So it's probably a good move not doing both at the same time because they are sort of covering some of the same design space. Yeah, I mean, it's exactly why it got pushed off.

It was, right, putting buyback and cycling in the same set didn't make sense. And I think we had made more use of buyback in the set. The cycling was there in a lower level, so it's easier to pull out. Although we use it the next year. In fact, both the main mechanics from Urza Saga, which was the next year, were both things

that were in Tempest Design. Yeah, I mean, that sounds like something, I seem to remember that happening a lot, where we would over-design sets, and then a lot where we would uh you know we would over design sets and then a lot of stuff got pulled and got you know pushed off but but maybe i'm mainly thinking of uh this design experience it did happen but tempest one of the things that tempest did for it's kind of funny story is we so overstuffed the design that i think like for

seven years every set had at least one card that originally had shown up in Tempest Design. Right. But both Echo and Cycling were originally in Tempest Design, and then Mike Elliott used them a year later when he did Urza Saga. Right. Okay, so let me talk about other mechanics. These weren't created by you, but I'm curious about your early memory of them.

One of them is Shadow, which Mike Elliott had made, I think in a i i or did you make shadow okay i don't know i think this was a uh that we that we both did okay okay that's great i remember i remember uh um that one a lot you know we of course had different names for it but i do remember uh uh coming up with that independently and we both we both uh because it's a pretty simple idea uh yeah yeah i remember that well let's hear your i know mike's stories let's hear your story how how did you get there um well uh um i was thinking about uh you the interaction between the creatures is really uh is very interesting often and and you have all these different things that modify the way they can interact.

You've got flying, which of course is sort of the main one. Flyers can only block flyers. But then you had all the island walkers and swamp walkers, which sort of weren't as big a part and kind of fell out completely. And they weren't quite as interesting because they allowed you to bypass the creature combat as opposed to flying, which sort of made it different. And so there was a point when I realized that, you know, I was thinking about it, and I realized that there's no reason why you couldn't have all sorts of different versions of flying.

And they could act exactly the same as flying if you wanted, or they could be a little bit different. But the idea that you have a creature with, you know, I thought of it as different tubes. You could attack down tube A or tube B or tube C. And if you had a card that could attack down a particular tube, you could only block it with a card that could block that particular tube. So 2B or not 2B? Is that the question?

Yes, that sends me back to our design sessions. And I remember there's a lot of conflict about how powerful you could make these guys because the one big difference between that and flying, a conflict about how powerful you could make these guys. Because the one big difference between that and flying, flying could block everybody, so it could block it, but it could only be blocked by people who could block that particular tube. Shadow was like flying, except it couldn't block regular guys um and

uh and and so it was sort of locked in that sort of separate area and the way certainly the way i pictured it was that it could be uh equal and opposite you know that there you wouldn't have to make them particularly stronger or weaker because they're no stronger or weaker than regular creatures. But we decided to go with making them all really pretty small, though. Yeah, I think we made the toughness low was the big thing, that they weren't hard to destroy if you needed to destroy them. But yeah, they were on the smaller side. But even when we got bigger in power, we always left the toughness pretty small. We made them fragile.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is, yeah, it's fine. Because they had this, you know, they were going to be part of the set and not necessarily continued forever. So even though they were not inherently any more powerful or weaker than regular creatures, you sort of had to treat them as exceptional anyway. But you could certainly imagine magic from the beginning having been designed with shadow creatures and they were as tough and, you know, just exactly the same as regular creatures

and you would decide how to distribute your army. Yeah, I think if they were a core part of the game, you could treat them differently. But because, right, if they were a core part of the game, you could treat them differently, but because, right, if you play a shadow creature ten years later, who has, you know, other people might not have shadow, so it just becomes this unblockable creature. Right. And, uh,

yeah. And, yeah, so, and the disadvantage, you can't block the other, well, the defender in Magic has such big advantages, you don't need as many creatures to block a similar number of creatures. And so that's why, that's one reason why having one Shadow guy is a big advantage, because you still can block everything pretty much with your other guys. Okay, let's talk about another mechanic. You at least inspired this mechanic, although I don't know the hand you had in this mechanic.

Slivers. What is your memory? So slivers are all creatures that grant the same ability to other slivers. What is your memory of slivers? Yeah, I certainly don't remember

having any particular part of slivers. I was a little, I think I was a little skeptical of having cards that were so, my preference in general is for cards that don't combo obviously. is for cards that don't combo obviously. It's not that I want super subtle combos, but I want to feel like there's some cleverness in putting it together that you're a little surprised by it. And Slivers felt to me a little bit on the nose, where it's pretty obvious what you do. But they got a big response in part i'm sure because of that and also

because you know so many clever things were done with them that that uh even though they're obviously combo with one another there's all sorts of different ways to go about that so that was you know that was a good solution to the on the nose problem okay so here's my trivia question for you, Richard. There's a card that you made that inspired it. What card did you make that inspired Slivers? Sorry, sorry. You froze there for a minute. Oh, sorry. So my question is, there's a card you made, a design that you made,

that was the card that inspired Slivers. What is the card that you made that inspired Slivers? Oh, Plague Rats? Oh, Plague Rats? Yes, Plague Rats, exactly. So Mike Elliott was, he really liked Plague Rats, and he was trying to sort of make a whole, how do you make a whole, you know, creature type of Plague Rats was the idea.

And that's where Slivers came from, was trying to, like to take the fun of plague rats, but just, what if it wasn't just making things bigger? What if it granted flying? What if it granted other abilities? And so, although you didn't directly do Slivers, you inspired Slivers.

So did you get my response? Because you were frozen there. I didn't hear what you said, but I'm guessing plague rats. Yes, but I'm guessing plague rats. Yes, yes, yes, plague rats. That is correct. Okay. So,

we talked about the main mechanics. We were talking about an on-the-nose combo mechanic. Yes. So my question is, open up a little bit. Do you have any particular memories of Tempest? Like when you think of Tempest, what do you tend to think of? What are your strongest memories from Tempest?

I tend to think of, well, I thought of Shadow for some reason really stuck in my head. But beyond that, I really thought about the characters, Gerard, the goblin, and so forth, and the way they were being handled, and sort of the challenges with making a story fit with player autonomy and the mix and match sort of nature of magic. with player autonomy and the mix and match sort of nature of magic. So what were the challenges? What did we have to do that we never had to do before? What was the added challenge? Well, I mean, you have to sort of think about what it means to be defeated in the game. And you have to think about how characters evolve over time.

They're not always the same. They're much richer than a card can make them out to be. So you really want to make multiple Girards, for example, to sort of capture an arc rather than just one instance of a character. instance of a character um and uh um and it's easy to take sort of a uh it's easy to take a character and say okay this is what a goblin looks like and not think about it any longer but when you're following a goblin through a story uh there's going to be more than you can fit on a card and so choosing what to put there is a is a is a challenge. The mix and match nature of magic is something which, you know, you also sort of have to think about. You've got to make it like the fact that the characters that were introduced

in The Weatherlight were sort of together on this ship, and you had members of all sorts of different colors, was pretty important because when we've tried to do trading card games where there's more, like with, say, Lord of the Rings, where there's more of a dark side and a light side, and it looks weird when you start mixing them. You sort of want any story told within the magic universe to have not necessarily infinite flexibility, because that would mean you have no story, really. But at the same time, you want to have enough flexibility that whatever deck people put them in doesn't look too weird.

Yeah, one of the big challenges, and this was a big creative challenge, is one of the visions that Mike and I had was we really wanted you to see the story in the cards. And the idea is, if you took all the cards and put them in the right order, you literally could see the story that we were telling. And in fact, the duelists at the time, we actually had an article where we told the story, but we showed all the cards in order. Like, we showed you the story in order on the cards, basically. And I remember one of the big arguments, so how does Pulp Fiction tie into magic? Uh, I remember I was arguing at the time, the reason that like one of the, one of the

problems with the trading card game is you don't know the order you're going to see things in, right? That, you know, you might get the middle of the story before you get the beginning of the story. Uh, and I was arguing that like Pulp Fiction demonstrated how you don't have to tell stories in order. That one of the fun things sometimes, you know, and there's some classic examples. Annie Hall does this as well.

But you don't always have to tell a story in order for the audience to appreciate the story. And so I was using stuff like Annie Hall and Pulp Fiction to say, look, look, there's classic storytelling in which it's not in order. Hey, the audience can sort of piece things together. And part of the fun of it might be, oh, I've seen this piece, but now I get to see that piece, and that... The big argument at the time was, hey, let's lean into trading card games, and maybe the story being out of order

isn't such a horrible thing, that there is some fun storytelling that still can be told, and that if you tell very archetypal stories, meaning, you know, the stories themselves aren't complex. That they're following very simple, you know, modes of how stories are told. That it would be easier for the audience to understand because you're not, like, reinventing storytelling. You're using basic storytelling. But the means in which you're telling it is what makes it novel, not the story.

The story itself is a very, like, Michael and I, there's a famous book by Joseph Campbell called The Faces of Myth, I think. I may be missing the name of the book. But he talks about how there's eight stories. There's eight stories in mankind. And we took the myth of the epic hero, which is the same story Star Wars is based on. And literally, he maps out the pieces you have to do to tell that story. And George Lucas did the exact same thing with Star Wars. So you could, and so we took the exact same story as Star Wars and made our story, which is not at all Star Wars, which shows how you can mix up stories.

But we did a lot of like, you know, like the fact that the main bad guy was the brother of the good guy is, you know, not, not an accident or anything. was the brother of the good guy is, you know, not, not an accident or anything. So I don't, I don't want to give away Star Wars things, but the, the main, the main good guy, main bad guy might've been related. Spoiler. Yeah. Yeah. No, I, I remember that being, being a topic of conversation. I know that, that I was pretty happy with the way they went about it with antiquities, the idea you couldn't tell it in order.

So that is exactly like archaeology, where you can't exactly tell what order you're going to get things in. But when you reframed it as sort of modern, you know, just the storytelling where you don't necessarily get things in order, I think that makes a lot of sense and made a lot of sense. And so it sort of opened that up a lot more. So anyway, I can see my desk from here, so I'm almost to work. Any last thoughts on Tempest?

I know there's a lot. Just for the audience to understand, this was a long, long time ago. And we're digging back deep. And I talk about magic all the time so I'm constantly kind of reminding myself of things. Richard might not have talked about Tempest for what, 20 years? I mean it's been a while It's been a while, yeah yeah yeah

certainly one of the reasons I was interested in joining this episode because it's fun to have my memory prodded no, no, I don't really remember beyond that I'm sure that there were dozens of other things you could bring up, though, that would prod me. For me, yeah, the development around that time was sort of all ran together in a lot of different ways.

Well, so let's wrap up. One of my favorite memories of that is it was the first time that you and I had worked as closely as we had. I mean, we had worked together before, obviously, but it was the first, like, big project where we worked very closely together. And I consider you a mentor, so it was a really big deal for me to get a chance to work with you on making a magic set. I mean, since then, you've made some more magic sets, but it was a giant deal for me, and it was a real turning point. I mean, really, I went from being a developer in everyone's minds to being a designer, uh it was a giant deal for me and it was a real turning point i mean really what i went from being a developer in everyone's minds to being a designer so uh it was uh i have very fond memories of tempest and especially with your involvement on tempest so that's a pretty yeah

pretty exciting set uh as you uh mentioned all those mechanics that we were tossing around uh and and obviously uh yeah anything which uh um is the uh which is the first official design of both you and Mike Elliott's got to be cram-packed with ideas because you guys are a fount of design. Yeah, no, it was, I'm not kidding when I talked about, like, when I say seven years,

every single set had a card that was originally in Demis' design. You might sound like I'm exaggerating, and I'm not exaggerating. And it probably trickled past that. Just, I think for seven years, it was every single set for like seven years that we,

we had made this. It's crazy how many cards we had. We had a lot of cards, but it's, it's, it's a lot of fun designing when, when you get into it. Yeah.

There's just, and when you, and when you come up with one idea, you can just, Oh, there's just so many when you come up with one idea, you can just... Oh, there's just so many things you can do with it. It's the light designing for something like Magic where it's very flexible and you have an audience that really understands it.

Yeah, and Tempest, like I said, it was considered sort of... At the time, it was like we're trying something new. We're designing it in office and not outside, you know, not outside the Wizards, but within Wizards. And it ended up being a really big hit. The audience really, really liked it. And so, like I said, it was a lot of firsts, as we talked about today. Like, you know, Buyback was kind of the first kicker mechanic.

There's a lot of firsts that started there. So it was definitely a very instrumental set. And when I look back at sets that kind of shaped what came after them, Tempest was a big one that really did a lot of

reshaping sort of how we thought of things and stuff like that. But I want to thank you for being with us, Richard. It was, it's always fun having you on. It's always fun talking about

just past things you and I did together, so maybe in the future, you and I did together. So, um, maybe in the future we, we, we, you and I have a few more sets we worked on together. So maybe I'll,

I'll get you back at some point and we'll talk about like, uh, making Odyssey or Innistrad or anyway, but, uh, or Ravnica, a lot, a lot of cool stuff.

Yeah. There's a lot of design, a lot of design to talk through. I always liked talking games. It was always great to talk to you, Mark. So anyway, guys,

I'm now at my desk. So we all know what that means. Uh, instead of talking magic,'s always great to talk to you, Mark. So anyway, guys, I'm now at my desk. So we all know what that means. Instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. So I want to thank you, Richard, for being with us. Thanks so much. A pleasure. And to all you, I will see you next time. Bye-bye.