Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #905: Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty Commander

Episode Date: February 12, 2022

I sit down with Designer Corey Bowen to talk about the design of Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty Commander decks and Set Booster cards.

I'm not pulling out of the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the Drive to Work Coronavirus Edition. So, as you all know, I'm using my home time to talk to lots of people. And today, I have Corey Bowen talking about Kamigawa Neon Dynasty Commander. Hey, Corey. Hi, Mark. How's it going? Going good. So, okay, so I've spent a bunch of podcasts talking about the making of the main set, but this is the first podcast to talk about the commander decks.

So let's start from the very beginning. How do you guys even decide what decks we're going to make in a product? Yeah, so our commander team, like our draft teams, our setup, our main set teams are divided up into vision design and set design. And so for this set, Chris Mooney was doing the vision and I was doing the set design, leading a set design. And this was also the same kind of split we had for Midnight Hunt and Crimson Vow. The whole Midnight Hunt, Crimson Vow, and Neo, which is the set code, so that's how I refer to it. Those three sets had the same kind of structure for the commander team. So we were kind of in a rhythm for what we were doing.

we were doing um so it was mainly chris mooney's uh job to sit there and look at different uh deck themes and test them out against each other and figure out what we really wanted remember for this set we had a few different options that we were looking at coming out of uh the innistrad commanders which all of those four decks from crimson and midnight those were all uh creature type themes so it was a vampire a spirit say werewolf and a somewhat of a human stack so those were all uh going in from those themes and so i remember feeling pretty happy or confident that we were just going to do like a ninjas and samurai thing here. But for one reason or another, I think Chris said that samurai was harder to build at a pre-con level and ninjas there were also so few of that those also felt just like not super viable options for the pre-constructed decks. And then I remember us looking into something that kind of emphasized the two different kind of ideologies in this new futuristic Kamigawa, which was the tradition versus the modernization or like the artifacts versus the enchantments as the mechanical theme in this set and i think building off of that is where we got to one deck which was fairly artifact centric being the

vehicles deck and one deck that was uh i mean it has artifacts in it but it was more flavored or centered around enchantments or auras which which is the red-green modified deck. Modified being a new mechanic that cares if your creatures have a counter, are equipped, or enchanted. So, I mean, I think a lot of the idea is you want the commander deck to come from whatever the set is, right? And this set had a theme, right? And it had two very clear themes so when the dust settled that's what made sense yeah when the dust settled it made sense to take what was

not just special about kamigawa in general but was special about this kamigawa and uh you know what's special about this set and that was really the interplay through the artifacts and enchantments, which is you can very heavily see through just looking through the set, opening a booster pack, there's artifact creatures, there's enchantment creatures, you know? So that's kind of one of the things

we wanted to hone in on. So here's an interesting question. When you return somewhere, you have access, obviously, to cards from the previous visit. Does that make it easier to make Commander decks? Does it make it easier? It makes it easier, but not always. I'll say for Innistrad, obviously, like,

oh, there's been a few Innistrad sets, so certainly there should be some more creature type theme support for these specific creature types. Like, oh like oh you know we can make a pretty cohesive red black vampires or blue white spirits well yeah but you know there's some cards we can use but it turns out like a lot of those support cards uh didn't cater well towards making a deck so i mean we still did it because it was heavy flavorfully but the vampires deck had a lot of trouble finding a cohesive theme because vampires had just done so many things in the past um but in general it's a great starting place kamigawa was kind of trickier

because it was just another era of design um and i don't know some of the old kamigawa cards are just following different rules and it was a bit harder to pull those forward. So, is it determined ahead of time? Like, do you know going in how many new cards versus how many reprints there have to be? Yeah, sometimes it changes. In general, we're kind of aware of how many new cards are in each deck. we're kind of aware of how many new cards are in each deck um sometimes yeah like i said sometimes it changes but we kind of uh would like at least by starting set we're like okay this is probably the amount of new cards we're doing maybe there's a reason that the set lead is like i'm supposed to pull back or i'm supposed to go more usually it's not influenced by oh i think this is what'd be good for this set but it's more influenced by our commander product suite as a larger collection of products on the shelf it's like when those

decisions about those change and those kind of are you know maybe there's more decks maybe there's less decks maybe there's decks at this time or decks at that time that environment's changing i think more often influences how many new cards we'll put in uh products just because we want to make sure we're supplying like the right flow and rates of new stuff to the format but we also want to keep you know these decks interesting and exciting so we want more new cards to keep stuff exciting. Sometimes we're like, oh, maybe we can do less new cards because we just have enough here and we don't need to inject that much new content

into the format at this point in time. One thing I want to stress for the audience, I think the audience a lot of times thinks about R&D of old as there's one entity and we just do everything. And the reality is modern, you know, sort of modern R&D is, hey, there's a lot of specialties. For example, as you're talking about, there's people that focus. I mean, not that they do nothing else, but there's people that focus on Commander. And, hey, like, for example, I know with you, the majority of what you do is Commander.

And so there's a lot of focus on that and that there's a group of people who are like, let's think of Commander and let's think of a larger Commander format of what's the environment and what cards do we add that help and this and that. And that, you know, one of the things you're balancing is every Commander product is for Commander, but also it's tied to a Premier set, and it wants to sort of hit both things. It both wants to feel like a Commander set, but also feel like it makes sense with whatever's going with. And I know that

can be a challenge. Yeah, it definitely is a challenge trying to connect to the main set, do new stuff. I think it's really fun to have the main set as a starting point. Like we used to make these commander decks where we would just completely fabricate what we think we should do that year. I never really got to work or lead on one of those products, but I really enjoyed starting from a world,

being like, we know we like this world. We have people with world building resources on this world at this time so let's let's start at the starting point and see what we can come up with and i've enjoyed that a lot um starting from there and i enjoy the incentives of having you know uh more people who are playing magic kind of under the same banner of we like this thing at the same time i think that's you know really healthy for the community to kind of under the same banner of we like this thing at the same time i think that's you know really healthy for the community to kind of like yeah you know right now standard players are excited about kamigawa and commander players are excited about kamigawa and maybe modern players or

whatever are excited about kamigawa so it's it's fun to have everyone excited about the same world i think that's a really big bonus of building commander decks off of the sets like that. Yeah. Another big bonus I think that people might not realize is when you keep making something, it's really helpful to have different starting points. Like one of the things about making magic,

and I, I feel this very strongly is I want to start every set that I do from a different place than some other set has started. And having the commander have this like world and set to sort of rip off of this gives you a very like would you have made the two decks you made for this product if you were just making things in a vacuum and most likely you never would you know these are very specific to this time and place yeah totally i also think like if you are sitting there making your own starting points for products, you're going to like run out of your own creativity at some points. And it's really useful to adapt your creativity to a different starting point because that's that

starting point someone else thought of or a team thought of. And you take what they thought of and you combine it with what you think of and you make something no one would have ever thought of. take what they thought of and you combine it with what you think of and you make something no one would have ever thought of. So, one of the cool things that I enjoy, let's talk about some examples from this product, from these two decks, from Nand Dynasty. There's a couple

cool things you get to do. So one is you work with the creative team. Sometimes there's cool characters that we just, we couldn't fit. We couldn't fit in the main set but you guys have some extra shots to get characters um you want to talk about any of the characters any of the legendary characters in either the two decks were like hey we didn't have a chance to do this but here we actually had a

chance to do it yeah most of the characters we're using in commander in the decks at the very least most of those i think were stuff that i don't think there's any callbacks in the commander decks they're the characters are mostly things that we kind of thought of like as a concept that would fit in the world so for the vehicles deck we have like a hot shot pilot character like oh this is a young moon folk pilots you know legendary pilots seem like a cool thing to hit, and then here's their big mech as the secondary commander. So it was more reaching trope space

within the Kamigawa world. I know for... Do you know what's going to be revealed by the time this podcast comes out? I believe that they will know all the decks by the time this podcast comes out. Will they know the set booster cards? I believe they will know the set booster cards.

I mean, how is this? I'm not going to release it until they know everything. How's that? Yeah, that's great. So talk freely. One of the things that, you know, for the set booster cards, there's five Myojin, which are like really big, like eight mana, nine mana, seven mana legendary creatures from the original kamigawa block that would like come in with an indestructible counter and then remove it for some crazy effect and we i thought that was i thought those were really cool i thought they were commander sized because they're obviously like these huge splashy creature spells and they're legendary which is also a very commander

hot word so for set boosters i thought uh it was fun to try to make five more myogen in that way because we hadn't um done so in the main set the main set hadn't used this space so i thought that was certainly a fun callback to do i know the main set did a really really good job um figuring out what was worth it to call back in Kamigawa and what were to pay their homages and such and such. So the Commander set was mostly trying to figure out what else we could do. Yeah, another thing that you get to do in Commander, which is kind of fun, is the main set, like, it has mechanics, it has evergreen mechanics, it has mechanics specifically for that set. But you guys

have access to other to older mechanics. So if there's a really cool, hey, this mechanic on one card would be very flavorful in this world, you guys get to do that. And that's not something that, you know, it's something that only you can do that is harder for us to do in the Premiere set.

Yeah, we have a few of those. I know in the Blue White Vehicle set, there's maybe three new cards with improvise improvise being the mechanic from the ether revolt where you can tap artifacts for mana to pay for that spell with improvise much like convoke but with artifacts um yeah we we kind of you know commander teams really enjoy bringing back this other older mechanics sometimes they're for flavor reasons sometimes they're just, you know, fun nostalgia to call back on.

But really, it's just very delightful. It's delightful for us. I think it's very delightful for the players, so we love doing it. Yeah, it's funny. One of the things we always do early in Vision is we say, hey, what mechanics can we bring back? Like, we're in this world. And a lot of times

there's things that are like, that would be cool on a card or two, but like, it just, you know, in order to bring it back in the main set, you have to really support it on enough cards to justify it. But Commander's like, you can make one card. If there's just one cool card, make the one cool card, and it's hard for us to do in the main set. So,

there's some freedoms there for the Commander decks to do some cool stuff that we just can't do in the Premier set. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, totally. Like, that's, you know, Commander, a lot of Commander, because it's Singleton and stuff, a lot of it's about, like, drawing that one cool card. And so just making more cards that are just cool on their own or don't need a whole environment to support them, but maybe someone looks at it and wants to put it in their deck. You know, that's kind of good, fruitful space for this audience.

So was there anything that you got to do in either of the two decks? Like, what was kind of a fun thing that the main set didn't get to do, but for whatever reason, either couldn't do it or didn't have space, or, like, what do you think are some fun, and it could be new be new space but like what what's some fun things you felt the decks got to do that you know allowed us to sort of expand what kamigawa was or you know new new kamigawa expand what new kamigawa was uh i thought there was some interesting stuff um i know in the the red green deck the modified deck there's a mono green legend that i think it doesn't say modified on it but it uses like some interesting space in the modified stuff to tell a story that feels uh my opinion cohesive to kamigawa it's like it's called kosei penitent

warlord plus one gg so three mana zero five and it says as long as Kosei is enchanted, equipped, and has a counter on it, they have, whenever Kosei deals combat damage, you draw that many cards and deal that much damage to each other opponent. So Modified cares about enchantments or Aura's equipment and counters. And so this card doesn't say Modified modify but it cares if you were modified by all three buckets then it kind of goes into super mode and the flavor of the card is this is like some old like fighter or battler or samurai who used to be really really strong and then he decided oh you know i'm gonna i'm just gonna stop doing this and try to just be a pacifist for a while so this card is him post post being this vicious warlord person and now they are just meditating but if they get all

their weapons on they're super powered again and i thought i made a legend that i know that the in the world guide there was a lot of mechs with like uh origami imagery or some artifact creatures that looked like they were folded paper and cranes and stuff which is very you know very japanese reticence and maybe reticence long word reminiscence and we wanted to make a legendary creature that you know was like oh maybe this is an origami artist or something so we made katsumasa the animator which is for two uu it's a three three flying legendary moonfolk artificer. You can pay 3 mana to turn a non-creature artifact into an artifact creature,

but it's a 1-1 flying in tone of turn. And then at your upkeep, you can put 3 counters on, or sorry, a counter and up to 3 different non-creature artifacts you control. So this is kind of a commander that likes to animate artifacts that like to be animated

because you can just put counters on stuff but the this really started from us thinking about you know the origami imagery from the world guide and how we could show a legend that you know is an origami crafter or uh emphasizes that you know aspect of this new imagery from what the world-building people were working with. So do you have other favorites of stuff you designed, or was given to you, not necessarily that you designed personally? Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I like a lot of the set booster cards this time around, to be honest. So do you guys, just real quickly, does the people who make the commander decks also do the set design cards, or is that a different team? Oh, yeah, sorry. Yeah, we totally do that. Usually the commander teams are directly responsible for also making the set booster cards. So we'll be doing the decks, we'll be making new cards, and we'll be thinking to ourselves, um so we'll be doing the decks we're making new cards and we'll be thinking to ourselves you know we are spending a lot of time and energy thinking about what feels like this set and what feels like commander like what would make a good commander pre-con but sometimes you know we're like oh this would be such a sweet commander to have in this world um but it's not in the

main set and we can't really put in their decks because maybe it doesn't make sense in the two decks we like, or maybe it doesn't even make sense to make a deck out of to begin with. An example here is there's a five-color shrine commander. And so there's a bunch of shrines, and now this is a commander for the five-color shrine deck. And we thought that was a really, you know, love that space as an example of a set booster card of like, here's a legend that we can, that, you know,

we were spending so much energy thinking of cool commander stuff. This is someone, something thought of, and it was too cool, you know, to not, or to let go. So what does it do? Can you read what it does? So it's a ghost Shintai of Light's Origin. It costs four mana, three and a green. It's a 3-4 Legendary Enchantment Creature Shrine. It has an activated ability where you can spend a Wooburg, one mana of each color,

and tap it to return an enchantment card from your graveyard to your battlefield. And then when Ghost Shintai or another non-token shrine you control enters the battlefield you get to make a one one colorless shrine enchantment creature token so this is great for shrines because you want to have a lot of shrines and this is a good way to like double your shrines when you play a shrine you get a little one one shrine it's a little fragile it can die but for the time being it's making your other shrines stronger, which is great. I'm very excited about that card. One of the reasons that we started making the set design cards is

we found there were cards that didn't quite make sense in the main set and didn't fit in the commander decks, but we knew would be popular, especially for commander. And so that's a perfect example of, hey, it's a really cool card. It doesn't do anything in draft. It doesn't fit in either of our Commander decks. But hey, we want that card to exist. Another example is, for example, I think

your two decks were white, blue, and red, green, correct? Right. Right. So if we have a cool black card that you guys want to make, well, there's nowhere none of the decks can have a black card. So that's where, like, the set design usually can pick up the slack a little bit. It's very common when you make two decks that there's a color that falls through the cracks because often the decks are two color.

And then I know we make set designs to, like, sometimes pick up the slack when that happens. Yeah, that's often how I'll do it. I have this kind of structure that i like to follow you know other leads might think differently but when i'm doing separate cards i like having like the two mythics or like one of the mythics is a legendary and then the other mythic is a wild card exciting thing and then there will be six rares and five of them will be part of a cycle, and that last one will be a color that's underserved from the deck. So, you know, in these set booster cards, there's the Myogen cycle at rare, and then there's a black card, and then there's two mythics. In this case, they're both

legends, because we had two cool legend ideas. So one of them was the Shrine Lord. What was the other one? The other one, very delightful. So the other one is Yoshimaru Ever Faithful. It's a white 1-mana, 1-1 legendary creature dog. We're trying to make a callback to Isamaru. So it's a 1-mana, 1-1. Whenever another legendary permanent enters a battlefield under your control, you put a 1-1 counter on Yoshimaru. And it has partner

which is a little bit while partner is a very volatile mechanic obviously we made a bunch in commander legends but ever since it's kind of creation in uh whichever commander set it came out because i get commander sets used a lot but when when Partner came out, it made a huge impact on the Commander formats. It's really shaken up everything. So here we wanted to make a card that was kind of a callback to Isamaru as just like a fun one-mana legendary dog, but make an exciting partner as well, because just having a dog with partners seemed like a

really really cute idea and so that's what we ended up going for with yoshimaru and i think it turned out pretty well yeah it's it's funny a lot of times what happens you just get a really cool idea and you're like i want to bring this to life this is a cool idea and um you know we know there's an audience like there's one of the things you learn over time is there's certain audiences for all sorts of different things, and you want to have a variety of stuff. And, like, for example, there's dog lovers out there. So from time to time, we like making dogs because we know there are people that just have a lot of fun when we make dogs.

And we've been trying to make more, like, one of the things you look at are dogs. We've been trying to make a variety of dogs. So, like, no matter what kind of dog you like, at some point we'll make the dog you love. So we keep making different dogs. So like, no matter what kind of dog you like, at some point, we'll make the dog you love. So we keep making different dogs. Right.

The great thing about making dogs is that there's quite a big audience for dogs. There is. People love them. Yes.

Dogs and cats are both strangely very popular. So go figure. I wonder why. So I can see my desk here. So we're not too far away from me getting to work.

But any other thoughts about what was unique about this Commander product that is different from other Commander products? How did this one stand out in a way that's uniquely its own? Yeah, I mean, honestly, the whole Kamigawa world this time around is, in my opinion, so unique, such rich mechanical space. I thought that these decks did a really good job finding uh some appealing uh mechanical space and themes for each of the decks these are certainly not the decks that i was going to think of if i were

doing on my own so props to chris mooney and daniel holt for really brainstorming and coming up with these two themes that I think ended up working out really well. I also think these are, again, some of my favorite set booster cards this time around. I really like the Myogen going on. I really like the Shrine stuff. I love the Dog.

I think there's a lot of really, really neat new cards in this set as well that aren't commanders that can just go in your 99 and have a really good time. So check them out. Any final examples of individual cards that you just sort of love? I'll call out Drumbellower. This was just some random card that we thought of. Drumbellower is a three-mana white creature.

It costs two and a dub. It a spirit for two one it has flying and you untap all your creatures during each other players on tap steps so it's a seaborne muse in white that flies it's a mana cheaper or a few mana cheaper or something and it um it only untaps your creatures, though. But it seemed like a really cool space for whites and a really nice callback to a card. And it's not as frustrating as maybe untapping all your permanents. So it's fun. You can repeat your activated abilities. It just seems something that made sense in this set. And it turned out that it synergized good enough with crewing vehicles and having a bunch of tapped creatures all the time that we liked putting it here so interesting one of the things about this set is we decided to make

our vehicles mechs something that would make a lot of sense in this particular environment um was having was having vehicles be mechs did that add any sort of interesting twist to how you did vehicles uh not so much a twist i felt like it was like where the excitement was coming from. Like the driver for making the vehicles deck was like, yeah, we're going to get vehicles back and it's going to be full of max. Like we can make some new Mac creatures. So we have like a white new vehicle, a blue new vehicle. We have our secondary commander is an eight,

eight vehicle Mac and it's like a vehicle we have our secondary commander is an 8-8 vehicle mech and it's like a vehicle that can be your commander um do you want me to read that one sure sure that sounds cool it's shurikai uh genesis engine or mana to a white and a blue it's a legendary artifact vehicle 8-8 you can pay a mana and tap it to draw two cards and discard a card and make a 1-1 pilot token that can crew vehicles as though its power were two greater. It has crew weights, so it's crew weight for an 8-8. And then it can be your commander. And I think a lot of people, there's that kind of space of just a giant mech that's cool.

But there's a lot of people that will find a lot of delight from having this non-creature permanent be their commander so i'm really excited about that one so how do you decide when something gets can be your commander because i mean there's a lot of i we get pressure that all the time could this be can this be your commander like what's the dividing line for you when you decide that to make that true right for me it's um it's like safeguarding the frequency uh i don't want to like overuse that line and have everything be your commander but it's also in general like the rule of cool um if it just yeah we should make something like this a commander that seems really cool it seems really awesome this feels like a commander then we'll do it um which i thought was really the

case in this sense is just making a giant vehicle that was related to the base commander making that your commander i thought was really cool idea so this is this idea where we're making we're making two commanders that could lead a vehicle deck makes sense that one of those commanders is a pilot because if i'm leading a vehicle deck oh it's cool that my commander's the pilot we already have the paula a red white vehicle commander that exists from kaladesh so the other thought is like what are we going to make the second vehicle commander like just an artificer another pilot well wouldn't people who really like vehicles like a vehicle as their commander sometimes and there was just a lot of different

pressures that was like okay we should use the Can Be Your Commander line here. Seems really cool. I think it's worth the rule of cool, so we've done it. I like the rule of cool. That's good. Yeah, a lot of times it's just a matter of like, would people like the end product? You're like, sometimes you decide to do things because you're like, you have to see the

end product and the audience and like, right, will you really excite the players that that's intended for? But anyway, so we are wrapping up here, but any final, we talked about that real quickly since we talked about the vehicle

deck. Any final thoughts on the red-green deck? I mean, I like the red-green deck a good bit. I think it's a great, you you know deck to so aura's equipment counters all very popular but usually siloed in their their own decks i know afr commander had an aura as an equipment deck but this is a chance to not only like oh you can build your equipment or aura deck in red green which is not something you've done before but it's also a chance to try to bring those three strategies together in a really interesting way it looks

like it's a deck that kind of rehashes old strategies but combining those three aspects makes for a really unique gameplay experience that i think is really cool also a very very big fan of the secondary commander i think it's really awesome, so please check it out. Tell us, what is the Secondary Commander? Yeah, sure. It's a Kaima, the Fractured Calm. It's a two, a red and a green. It's a legendary creature spirit. It's a 3-3.

So the beginning of your end step, you goad each creature your opponent's control that's enchanted by an aura you control, and then you put a 1-1 counter on Kaima, the Fractured Calm, for each creature goaded this way. So the idea is that every enchantment you have kind of acts as a vow in some sense, a vow being these auras that kept things from attacking you. Or an impetus from the Ikoria Commander impetuses were similar auras that just goaded the creature.

impetus from the akoria commander impetuses were similar auras that just goaded the creature um so you could you know oh i have you know order uh or or dual nylia or something and i can enchant my opponent's creature with any aura i want and suddenly that creature is goaded i thought it was really interesting to make a creature that made all of your auras into vows in some sense because it's fun political play it's pretty aggressive and i've been looking for a spot to make a card like this for a while so i'm very happy to have landed it here um in a deck that has a bunch of auras and i like that you know if you're playing the phase commander and playing the modified game you really want to change your own stuff the auras but if you're playing the secondary commander uh on the same pre-con every aura you draw is a chance to go to an opponent's creatures

and it's just a completely different gameplay for uh the secondary commander which i really really like yeah one of the things that's uh just behind the scenes is you come up you know when you design magic cards you come up with cool ideas all the time, but not every cool idea makes sense in the set that you're making. And so it's very common to hold on to cool ideas and just wait for the right place for them to show up. And sometimes that can be a while. So I always get very excited when I finally find a home for something that I've been wanting to do forever.

So that's always fun. But anyway, I can see my desk. So it looks like I finally made it to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. So I wanted to thank you, Corey, for being with us. Thanks for joining us. Yeah, thank you so much,

Mark. I really enjoyed being here. And to all of you, I will see you next time. Bye-bye.