Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #897: Rise of Eldrazi with Brian Tinsman

Episode Date: January 15, 2022

In this podcast, I sit down with Designer Brian Tinsman to talk about the design of Rise of the Eldrazi.

I'm not pulling out of the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another Drive to Work Coronavirus Edition. So, I've been doing lots of fun interviews, and today I continue that trend with Brian Tinsman, and we're going to talk about Rise of V.L. Drazi. Welcome, Brian. Hi, Mark.'s go back. So it's interesting. Most of the time when I do interviews, I'm the one that was on the design team, and I'm talking to people who develop it a lot of the time. But in this particular product, you led the design team, and I wasn't on the design team at all. I was on the development team. So a little backwards from most of my interviews. So okay, so let's go to the very beginning. Where did the idea to do this set come from? This was kind of a follow-up in Zendikar block. And, you know, Zendikar had kind of like this kind of three-act storyline where initially it was a lush world full of energy and in World Wake things were starting to get crazy and some turbulence and destruction

was beginning to be unleashed and then in the third act it was Rise of the Eldrazi and it turns out that the whole plane is getting overrun by these giant interdimensional kaiju-like sized creatures. I'm sure most people listening to this are familiar with Eldrazi at this point, but it was all still an idea at this stage.

So real quickly, just a little background for the audience. Originally, we were only going to be in Zendikar for two sets, and the third set wasn't going to be in Zendikar at all, was the original plan. And the creative team said, whoa, whoa, whoa, we don't have time to build another world. What if we create an event that is so dramatic that it makes sense that there are brand new mechanics and everything? And I think the creative team is the one that came up with the concept of the Eldrazi. But I know you are a huge Cthulhu fan, right? So you were super, super excited by this. Yeah, right. I really wanted to be part of it because I love the idea of these

mysterious beings and forces that are just above the level of our dimension and inscrutable in their thinking. No humans will ever be able to comprehend what goes on in their world. And I know Brady had Mark Tadine and a few of the other artists out there to do like a story world Bible

and put the style guide together. I think it was one of the first times they had ever done that and they had like a whole bunch of crazy experimental art that they came and showed off and uh got the entire team excited about okay so what what was your driving like what was your vision of the design what what did you? What sort of led everything that came after it? So we did want to turn the mechanics on there in a new and fresh direction. And we had this really strong concept. And I got to say, I'm really pleased with how it turned out.

It's a standout, I i think in terms of delivering on the promise right we wanted to have a set that in fact i think it probably does count as the first battle cruiser magic experience uh at least that was like deliberately created that way and do you want to define what battle cruiser means when you say battle cruiser what did you mean by what do you mean by that yeah uh so is there it's a reference to starcraft and the the pro players um are super focused on uh and using the best, most efficient units in the game. But casual players, a lot of times, they just want to go build the biggest,

most powerful units in the game and then throw them all together at the center and see them crash into each other. Ken Nagel, I think, kind of told the story of how him and his friends, they get so much enjoyment out of doing that, and we kind of realized that there had never been a set deliberately created to make 8-8s and 10-10s come out and be the right play, be good to play, and both in limited and in constructed.

Like, you just really never had a set that was focused around that. And the experience of Rise of the Eldritch, I think it delivered on that. So that's what I really remember about that. Okay, so let's jump in and talk about some of the mechanics. let's jump in to talk about some of the mechanics. So why don't we start with Annihilator since that is the most closely tied to the Eldrazi. So where did Annihilator come from? So we were talking about how these Eldrazi are going to be

different and distinct and it was Aaron Forsythe just like kind of casually mentioned it in a meeting. And he, and he even said, we should, we should call this annihilator or something like that. That's just like super aggressive and scary. And I kind of heard that and looked around the room and said, damn, I want that. Yeah, yeah. And we put that up on the whiteboard along with quite a few other ideas.

And everything else was kind of crossed off the list pretty quickly. And the great thing about Annihilator is traditionally the big creature mechanic is trample, and an eye letter plays kind of differently, and it sort of gives you a few chances while your permanents in your lands are being eaten by these creatures. It gives you some chances to try and hunt for that pacifism or some removal or some some way out and like occasionally you're gonna find it and you're gonna be left with only a few resources left on the board in this desperate situation and so those are super memorable moments when they when they happen and that same kind of thing doesn't really happen so much with Trample. So Annihilator turned out to be really good for creating

those dramatic moments. And it was very big. I mean, one of the things I know you wanted to do was part of the Battlecruiser idea was these weren't just little tiny things. These were just huge, gigantic, large-scale things were going on and big things were happening.

And I think Annihilator definitely falls into that. Like, just, it feels like this creature attacks, and just things fall in its wake as it attacks. Yeah. One of my principles in game design is to leave people with emotional experience and memory, a moment that just sticks out in their minds. And so if you can create an exciting moment or a piece of drama that's never happened before, you've done a good job as a designer.

And so like a lot of these mechanics are trying to set up like a big epic turn or a last minute save or something that is like when you are driving home from the game that night, you're talking to someone and going like, oh, man, I can't believe that happened. That's where a lot of these mechanics are headed. OK, so another big player. This one required... Nowadays, we do a lot of frame changes. That is not something we did

a lot in the time, although the Eldrazi themselves required a frame change. We'll get to that in a second, but the Eldrazi looked different. We had to make a new frame, but we also did level up, so I want to talk a little bit about level up. Where did level up come from?

Yeah, Level Up came from this idea that we want to make big creatures smash into each other and make it correct to have 8-8s and 10-10s fighting. And we were sort of like, okay, we got the Eldrazi, but how can we pump up the the other creatures in this set and and give them an epic experience especially when we're providing all these tools to kind of slow down the early game make make it safe to ramp your mana for a bit and then on turn 7, 8, 9 you've got access to a ton of mana all right what can you do with it what can you pour into it and so level up was like kind of mechanically a way to pour in

all this mana if you're not playing Eldrazi and uh we had a theme of auras and uh and making your little humanoids be able to fight the big guys as well. I realize I did not explain... Real quickly, as I introduce concepts, I should explain them to the audience who might not know them. Annihilate is a mechanic that when you attack, it has a number.

Your opponent has to sacrifice that many creatures, whatever the number is, that many permanents. And then Level up was a mechanic where you could pay mana and the creature had three different sort of text boxes and power toughnesses, and you could sort of

upgrade the creature by spending mana. Right, right. Jumping back, jumping, yeah, go ahead. Real quickly, just because the magic historian in me has to bring something up. So there's a card that inspired this mechanic,

which you designed back in Eventide, which was called Figure of Destiny. Oh, yes. And that was a card, so it was a hybrid set, so it was a hybrid red-white mana. So for one hybrid mana, all this is red-white, you made a 1-1, and then you spent one more hybrid set, so it was a hybrid red-white mana. So for one hybrid mana, all this is red-white,

you made a 1-1, and then you spent one more hybrid mana, it became a 2-2, and then you spent three more hybrid mana, it became a 4-4, and then you spent six more mana, and it became an 8-8 flying first strike, and so, like, it kept it was the early version of what this mechanic would be, although it didn't have all

the frame changes and stuff. Yeah, that's exactly right. And that card was using creature type to detect whether it was ready to go to the next stage or not, which was kind of like a fun, different use of creature type. And then

the level up mechanic was just using a frame change of the level 1, level 2, level 3, and how many counters had been, or not. It was using three different text boxes to add abilities onto it, I should say. Right, the way it worked is, you would have the level of ability,

which told you how much mana you had to spend, and then it would give you, at this level, here's your stats, at this level, here's your stats, and so different ones would change a different amount. So how much mana you had to spend would change and stuff. Yeah. I was very interested in exploring what we could do to the card frame

to help take the gameplay in different directions. And I spent a long time kind of shopping around different layouts different versions of of level up to see if people would like intuitively play it correctly just by looking at it and understanding it and I think we ended up sort of on the edge of where that's a good idea or not and it's good I mean it's good that we found the edge, right? I don't think it was quite the right way to do it, but we were pushing it down. So here's a little fact check for the

audience from behind the scenes. Originally, I think your first version of it went up and not down. So your original ability was the bottom number, and then you would level up. You literally would go up as you got it. And that confused people. They kept thinking the bottom You literally would go up as you got it. And that confused people. They kept thinking the bottom right one was

the power when you cast it. Yeah. I'm sorry, the reverse. They thought the highest up was the one when you cast it. But I know from your testing, you learned that going up confused people, so you went down rather than up. Right.

Now, the other frame change, I just wanted to bring this up. The Eldrazi required a frame change because you introduced colorless cards. Like, Magic had artifacts, obviously, so you could use generic mana to cast an artifact. But

for the first time, Ryza Eldrazi says, I'm not a color, but I'm not an artifact. So do you remember where that came from? Yeah, it was sort of an attempt to make them different. Like they don't play by the normal rules that humans understand. And they can be everything and nothing all at once. And we also gave them a transparent frame to kind of make them different and you get to see like little tidbits of the art it was like kind of an early exploration of

of full art uh with semi-transparent frames yeah it was uh i mean we later would do that planeswalkers kind of do that now um but it definitely yeah it was this this back in the day, just so people aren't aware nowadays we make new frames all the time that's not a thing that Magic is afraid to do, but back in the time back when Rise of the Rising came out we just didn't do a lot of frames and this definitely introduced a bunch of frames

and some bold frames especially like the level up frame, that's a different looking frame, so I spent a good amount of time arguing to try and do some frames especially like the level up frame that's a different looking frame so uh that's one yeah i i spent a good amount of time arguing to try and do some new and different stuff with the card frames and uh i'm glad that i did because it it gave it a different different fresh experience and and you know while we're talking about colorless aldrazi maybe it's a good time to talk about the the three titans um okay cool Kozilek and Ulamog and I'm super happy that we did those you know we we sort of wanted that we we knew we wanted to have some big legendary uh monsters to represent the Eldrazi, but we ended up amping them up really high in terms of their

abilities and how big they were and how powerful they were. Ulamog and Kozilek have Annihilator 4. Emrakul has Annihilator 6 and takes you an extra turn when you play him or her. And it takes you an extra turn when you play him or her. It was just ridiculous. It was ridiculous at the time. And it was very memorable. If people remember the set for anything, they remember it, I think, for those three Eldrazi Titans.

And they're still played. They're still sought after today. And seeing those stomp around in all the formats made people really pay attention to this set. Yeah, it's... One of the things the set really does is when you first open it up, it's just... It is so loudly something you're not

used to. I mean, we do that from time to time, but it was one of the early sets that really, like... I think we had a common 7-7. Is that right? And, like, that's just not something that you ever see, right? Like, normally in Magic, you cut off how big something can be at common.

I think maybe, like, blue gets some giant serpent or something and green would have something. But the idea of just a generic 7-7 that anybody can play, that is not something you saw. Right, right. And we made it actually, in Limited, we made it correct to play 8-mana 8-8s. And it was hard for people to switch their thinking over

because everybody kind of assumed that that has to be bad because it always had been bad in the past. Yeah, it's funny. Here's a quick story. Here's my one development story. My one development story is... I'm trying to think which the creature was. So there was a common creature...

Oh, Ulamog's Crusher. So Ulamog's Crusher is a generic 8-mana 8-8. And it has Annihilator 2. And what happened was, people weren't attacking with it. It's a very powerful card, but people just were not attacking with it. But no matter what we could do, we just weren't getting people to attack with it. It was an 8-8 Annihilator 2, and just nobody would attack with it. So we finally put on it,

it must attack each turn, so the player wouldn't have any choice but to attack with it, and then once they did that, they learned, oh, this is really good, I should be attacking with these things. So that was... Oh, okay. So there's about the mechanics I want to hit before...

So let's talk rebound. Where did Rebound come from? So for the audience, real quick, Rebound says, if you cast this spell from your hand, exile it as it resolves. At the beginning of your next upkeep, you may cast this card from exile without paying its mana cost. So it basically

sort of did it twice. Yeah, you play the spell and then you get a free copy of it on your next turn. And I think this came from this idea that we wanted to make an experience where the early game you could kind of turtle up and be safe. And then once you got to the turn seven or eight or whatever, it's time for the game to start ending and big epic battles to happen.

We wanted to make a huge epic turn and so once you get your big fighters, your big creatures out on the board and you can start having these free effects kick in to make that

turn bigger better more powerful when you're gonna go to just attack your your opponent another thing i assume is a lot of your other mechanics were very permanent based um like annihilated by by definition only goes in creatures and level up i think only went on creatures so like we needed us you needed a spell mechanic, so this also served the role of going on instants and sorceries. Mm-hmm. Yep. Okay, the last named mechanic was Totem Armor. So let me...

Here, let me read a Totem Armor card for everybody. So, Totem Armor. If enchanted creature would be destroyed, instead remove all damage from it and destroy this aura. So it was an aura mechanic. It went on auras. Right. And there's kind of an age-old problem of creature enchantments that you get card disadvantage when the creature that it's on is killed,

you just got automatically two for one. And over the time we were trying to solve that with things like equipment and you and I were both on the Mirrodin design team with it, where we discussed this issue quite a bit when we created equipment there. And this is, we knew that again, this issue quite a bit when we created equipment there. And this is, we knew that, again,

that we wanted to have the kind of like the humanoids, the non Eldrazi be able to have a good fight with the eight eights that are, that we're forcing you to attack with. And so totem armor is both a way to fight against that card disadvantage. And so Totem Armor is both a way to fight against that card disadvantage. It's a way to pump your little guys up so that they're able to fight against the big guys. And it also creates those moments where you have a second chance, right? Your guy should have gotten killed. Instead, the Totem Armor falls off. He's saved, and now

it's possible that in that battle, everyone was killed, except the guy who was just saved by your boar, Umbra. And now he's going to go in and do the last couple of points of damage all on his own, and what an epic moment. Yeah, I mean, a lot of Rise of

the Drasi really was, like I said, your vision was, we want to get to these giant, you know, epic battles, and what can we do to get there? I know one of the challenges on the development side of things, so that's the team I was on, is making it so you got to the point where you could do that. There was a lot of things we had to do. I mean, you had done a lot in design, and we had to sort of do more to reinforce that stuff. But, like, there was a lot of, how do you slow the game down so it doesn't end before you can play your 7-7 or 8-8? Yeah. It's funny because it's sort of similar. Like, Commander wasn't super popular at the time, not as popular as it is today, but in Commander you see a lot of people kind of

spend early turns ramping and it doesn't reward like fast aggressive attacking most of the time, and then you start playing huge game ending spells towards the end of the game and that's the experience we're trying to create here and without knowing it. And then create here and without knowing it. And then the Eldrazi themselves became quite good in Commander. And we also should touch on the fact that the three titans reshuffle themselves whenever they go in the graveyard. And not only reshuffle themselves, they reshuffle your entire graveyard back into your library, including themselves, which made them perfect against mill strategies. So do you remember why we did that? I mean, originally it was because it was perceived they would be too strong a reanimator, but we had done that mechanic before where anti-reanimator mechanic was for the card to reshuffle itself.

But I don't think we had done reshuffle your entire graveyard back. Do you remember why? Why entire graveyard? Do you have any memory of why that choice was made? I think Matt Place on the development team was pushing for that, and I assume he had some devious anti-Mill agenda. But we played with it, and we thought it was great, and it was different than what had been done before. So I was a fan of it. Yeah, it's funny. For many years, instead of making reanimation more expensive, we just put all this extra text on the big creatures

to make them not reanimatable. And then finally we're like, why don't we just make the reanimated spells not quite as good and then we can stop doing that on the big creatures. So... Okay, so what else... Go ahead. Yeah, but it ended up being kind of great.

I think it's quite fun to throw an Eldrazi Titan into almost any deck that can use it in a commander type of game, just as a surprise for the mill players. Yeah, as someone who loves milling, I definitely love the Eldrazi a little bit. Like, oh, curse you, Eldrazi. Right, right. And in case any of the rules committee out there are listening, I'm still a little salty that

Emrakul is banned. We sort of had the idea that, like, if you play a 15-mana spell, you ought to be able to win the game. Come on. And I've never been on the receiving end of a degenerate Ember Cool, uh, commander deck, but just, I, do I ever get to appeal that decision? Uh,

at some point we should, uh, we, we should try to appeal. Okay. So, um, my, my question for you now is, we went through all the mechanics. Is there any sort of particular cards or themes, anything else that really you have fond memories of? Well, I got to touch on those Eldrazi Titans.

You know, looking at Emrakul, I remember reading some message board where people were like, try to think of the biggest, dumbest card you possibly could. The new card in Rise of Eldrazi is even bigger and dumber than that. And I was sort of like, oh, yes, we did our job. Yeah, I remember in development, we had a big talk about whether they were supposed to be enter the battlefield effects or cast effects. And we ended up doing, I think we were just trying to make them a little bit stronger.

So we did cast effects rather than enter the battlefield effects. Yeah, I mean, I think there's a good balancing decision because you've got to, you know, you can't abuse it by bouncing them and as they entered the battlefield effects they would have been a little more degenerate like I said if you get Eldrazi Titan on the board you kind of deserve to start winning anyway. I also think one of the

things is flickering and stuff could cause like it could get kind of degenerate with flickering so that's another reason we did it yeah exactly I remember Eldrazi Conscription flickering and stuff could cause like, it could get kind of degenerate with flickering. So that's another reason we did it. Yeah, exactly. I remember Eldrazi Conscription. That's a,

that's a fun aura. It's an eight mana aura that gives a creature plus 10 plus 10 and Annihilator too. And Trample. And that, oh yeah. Trample and Annihilator too. Yeah. That,

that was, I don't know if it still is like kind of like the best aura to use in terms of like play auras for free type of effects and you know there's there's aura fans it was the first colorless enchantment by the way

we had obviously had we had colorless creatures and artifacts because they were artifacts but we hadn't had a colorless enchantment and so this was the first set'd had colorless creatures and artifacts because they were artifacts, but we hadn't had a colorless enchantment, and so this was the first set to have colorless enchantments. Yeah. Oh, we have not mentioned Eldrazi Spawn, Mana Bots.

Okay, let's talk about Eldrazi Spawn. So Eldrazi Spawn... Let me find a card that has them. They were little creatures. It was a 0-1 Eldrazi spawn, and they had the ability, sacrifice this creature, add one generic mana to your mana pool. Or one color mana to your mana pool. Yeah, so that's

a way to ramp mana without giving you permanent mana ramp. And now that treasures have existed, they seem sort of archaic, but there was no such thing as treasures back then. And so we said, let's make them little creatures. And that was nice, too, because in case somebody was playing like an aggressive attack deck and you needed a while to ramp up your mana,

you could use them as chump blockers and kind of they made you feel safe. Like you had at least a couple more turns to get out your big stuff. And we had cards that would make two or three of them at a time too. And it could really take you like from turns, you know, six mana to nine mana in one turn put out something giant and then keep going. Yeah, it's fun. I thought it played great. They did.

They were cool. And like I said, they're sort of the precursor to Treasures. Maybe Treasure wouldn't have existed if not for the Eldrazi spawn. Yeah, that's right. I remember they caught on. They were quite popular in

R&D in the pit when the set started getting playtested. Any other fond memories of the set? Not in this world was a uh counter spell against uh anybody that tried to mess with your eldrazi so that was that was you know a memorable um colorless instant

yeah it was it was actually a tribal card type, which wasn't something that we had done much. Well, yeah, we had done... Lorwyn introduced the tribal card type, and then we really didn't use it that much, but we decided to use it for the Eldrazi so that we mechanically could tie the spells and other things to the creatures. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Oh, and of course, all is dust. That's another tribal... While we're on the topic of tribal sorceries and instants, that's a tribal sorcery, Eldrazi colorless, seven mana,

each player sacrifices all colored permanents he or she controls. That was a huge statement that these Eldrazi are serious, they're going to eat everything that is the normal world.

Yeah, so this, just for a little history buff for people, a little history knowledge, this set went on to be really among the enfranchised drafting crowd, one of the all-time favorites. When you ask people who are old-time drafters, what is your favorite set to draft? This is one of the ones that comes up a lot. It is different. Like, one of the things about this set was, I know beginners were a little overwhelmed because you didn't know what to do. But once you understood what was going on, it was a really elaborate, it was a very interesting set to draft once you understood what was going on.

Yeah, I feel like I was very lucky to get to work on this set because we had more freedom than we had had with most sets on average. I feel like there's sort of like a reactive thing that happened at least back then when you know if you really push the boundaries in one set and it was perceived as being you know popular or unpopular the next year's worth of sets or the next two years worth of sets would be don't push the boundaries, don't do anything crazy and weird. And then a couple of years after that, oh, we've played it safe now. We can do something crazy and weird. And so this happened to be on one of the up cycles when we had more freedom to, let's try

some new card frames, let's try some new strategies that people may not be familiar with. So it worked out great. It's funny, when I sort of think of your legacy as a magic designer, you were kind of known for,

you like to push boundaries, you like to be very bold, and to me, Rise of Eldrazi is kind of like your signature set. Like nothing is more a Brian Tinsman set than Rise of the Eldrazi because it is bold. You don't miss what's going on. It doesn't goof around. Oh, thanks. I'll gladly take that. I think it's great.

So anyway, I can see my desk here. So any final thoughts on Rise Eldrazi before I get to work? Yeah, I hope that Eldrazi, you know, they're an epic villain and I hope they come back. I hope they're popular. I hope people who listen to this, you know, mention them in social media so they they come back. I hope they're popular. I hope people who listen to this, you know, mention them in social media. So they'll come back again another time. They've been back once.

But I hope their time comes again. So they're popular. They're amazing. They're fun to play with. Yes, they're definitely one of Magic's big villains so right now Emrakul's hiding

off in the moon on Innistrad but one day maybe one day put him somewhere on the list I hope

but anyway I want to thank you Brian so it's always fun to share stories of sets going by and it's not often I can think back

to my developing days. That's fun to sort of talk about. I love talking about this stuff too. You have an ability to remember things that were said in meetings 15 years ago. I'm sort of like, oh yeah, I guess I do remember that. Somehow that's all still

stuck in your head. One of the funny things is because I constantly talk about magic all the time. So I keep telling the stories again and again. And then I'll interview people who are like, I haven't thought about it in, you know, 10, 15, 20 years. And they're like, let me think back, you know. And so, but it's fun. I enjoy reminiscing.

So thank you for joining me today. All right. Great talking to you, Mark. Thanks, everybody. So guys, I'm at my desk, so we all know what that means. That means instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. So, thank you, everybody,

and thank you, Brian, for joining us. Thanks, Mark. Thanks, everybody. And I'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.