Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #919: Oath of the Gatewatch with Ethan Fleischer

Episode Date: April 1, 2022

I sit down with Designer Ethan Fleischer to talk about the design of Oath of the Gatewatch.

I'm not pulling out of the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another Drive to Work at Home edition. So I'm using my time at home to interview people about past sets that we've worked on together. So today I have Ethan Fleischer, and we're going to talk about Oath of the Gatewatch. Hey, Ethan. Hi. How you doing, Mark? Okay, so Oath of the Gatewatch, was this your second design? Yeah, it was my second design or it was actually my third design lead i led uh journey into next and then commander 2014 okay and then oath of the game watch okay so i i led the set before it which was um battle for zendikar so

this was this was a small set that went with the big set. The Battle of Vrzenekar was the big set. This was the companion small set. And there were two set blocks at that time. Yes. This was during the time where all the blocks were large, small. Okay, so let's start from the beginning. So, like, you're assigned Oath of the Gatewatch. So what...

In fact, this set changed a bit. So let's talk a little bit about what you were originally assigned to do. Right. So at first, it was very much focused on, like, what are these Eldrazi up to? Because there were three Eldrazi brood lineages. And Battle for Zendikar focused on Ulamog's brood lineage, which were hungry all the time. So you had those processors that were eating things. And Kozilek were weird all the time, and they were doing crazy radiation stuff and transforming things.

And then Emrakul's lineage was all about, like, mutating biological form. mutating biological form. So I really focused early on in design on figuring out what made Kozilek's brood lineage different from Ulamog's brood lineage. And what we came up with was an idea that another game designer, John Louts, came up with during the Great Designer Search 2, which was colorless mana costs.

You know, costs that could only be paid with a colorless mana. Couldn't use red mana. It's not generic. And we had to come up with a whole new symbol for that. So this set changed magic forever because now there's a colorless mana symbol. Okay, so real quickly, I'll just explain to the audience so they understand this. So when the game got created in alpha, this is from the very beginning, we used, there was a mana symbol we used that meant two completely different things.

So there's what we call a generic mana symbol. You would see that in like, you know, a lot of artifacts like in alpha, for example. Or, you know, most spells had some colored mana and some generic mana. So, the generic mana symbol means you can spend anything you want. It can be colored, it can be colorless, it doesn't care. Just give me mana of any kind. So, um, so

for example, Sol Ring, I'll give you my example. Sol Ring costs one, right, and it's mana cost. So, you needed to spend one of anything. But also on the card, if you tapped it, it showed you a little two that looked a lot like a generic mana symbol. I will point

out that Alpha did not do this. Alpha spelled out the words colorless mana. Okay, fair enough. Yes, eventually I think it was in Mirage Block the notation changed to those numbers with the gray circles. A fine point.

But so there was a point at which, for much of Magic, where we would use that symbol to show the generation of colorless mana. So like a soul ring would tap for two colorless mana. That wasn't colored mana. You couldn't pay colored costs. That was colorless mana. And we had used the same symbol to mean generic mana was colorless mana. And we had used the same symbol to mean generic mana and colorless mana.

And then, along comes Ethan Fleischer, and he says, what if mana costs had colorless mana? Or, based on John Locke's obviously. And the problem was, we couldn't have the same symbol, because then if a mana symbol said, you know,

one in a circle and a blue, is that a colorless mana? Is that a generic mana? Who knows? So yeah, we corrected the mistakes of the past and rationalized our symbols. Of course, it was

a big to-do and caused a lot of repercussions in a lot of ways. I know that the Magic Online team had to spend a tremendous amount of time implementing it. They had to rebuild the whole way mana was implemented. And, of course,

because this was backward compatible, as you said, Sol Ring, that's a card that makes colorless mana. So all of the cards that made colorless mana from Magic's past could work with these new Eldrazi with their colorless mana costs. And in a few cases, those interactions turned out to be too powerful, right? Like in Modern especially.

The Modern format was broken when Oath of the Game Watch came out and that we had to ban some cards to fix it. Other formats like Vintage and Legacy, like the cards were strong, but they didn't cause any serious problems. I mean, one of the cool things, real quickly, I just want to say that one of the cool things about this mechanic

is it did this neat thing where it kind of made something kind of like a six color, but completely backward compatible. And that was really neat in that it allowed us to do something that would be normally hard to do in a way that, hey, there's all these cards in Magic

that already do it. Right, the problem with just adding a six color to Magic is that there's no old cards that would work with that deck. But by sort of sneaking in a pseudo six color this way, we got to have a bunch of support for the mechanic,

sort of built into magic. Okay, so Colas was pretty early, right? Yeah, that was very early that I decided on that. And there were a lot of execution things that we had to decide. Like, we sort of had to come up with a whole special color pie for these colorless cards, because they weren't generic cards, which normally an artifact that costs generic mana just needs to be an inefficient card.

But for these cards, you really did need a specific type of mana to cast these cards, you really did need a specific type of mana to cast these cards. So we ended up finding a bunch of sort of strange effects that we didn't normally put on cards, but were nevertheless, you know, useful, just a little on the weird side, right? Sort of the watchword for the Eldrazi in that block was, like, incomprehensible, alien, right? So putting weird mechanics on them was a way to express that. Yeah, and we definitely, like, in Oath of the Gatewatch, as well as in Battle for the End of Conqueror, we were trying to be kind of weird.

Like, it was the Eldrazi. There's a war with the Eldrazi. They're unfathomable alien creatures from who knows where, you know, and we were definitely leaning into that. Okay, so my question, here's my question for you, Ethan, is at some point you get approached by the Bran team. Are there mechanics that were added before this point in the story happens? Maybe, but it's not important for the purposes of the story.

Okay, okay. So you get approached by the brand team. What do they say to you? They said that the story is really important. The overall magic story is really important. This was during the Gatewatch storyline, magic story is really important. This was during the Gatewatch storyline and that a

critical story beat happens in Oath of the Gatewatch, which at the time just had a codename. I don't remember what it was now. Was it Sweat? What was the codename? The codename was...

Was it Sweat? Blood, Sweat, and, yeah, Tears. Okay. Tears and Fears. Okay. Yeah, so in Sweat, the superhero team, as we were calling it, is going to form. The Planeswalker superhero team. And that, of course, was Gideon, James, Chandra, and Nyssa, before Liliana joined.

Gideon, James, Chandra, and Nyssa, before Liliana joined. So they were all going to form the Justice League of Magic the Gathering, essentially. So it was important to really emphasize that. I really love the sort of fusion of flavor and gameplay that Magic sets can achieve when everything's pulling in. The mechanics and the creative are pulling in the same direction. And so I kind of jumped on this idea like, ooh, this seems like it has a lot of potential.

So there are a lot of mechanics and specific choices about how mechanics work that were inspired by this idea uh one of them is the the actual oath cards right these are cards that help your planeswalkers each of the four planeswalkers that uh that joins the gatewatch in the storyline has an oath card and they're all legendary enchantments. Let me read one to them. Pardon? Let me read one to the audience so they get a sense of what an example of an Oath card is.

Yeah, read them an Oath card. Okay, so Oath of Chandra costs one and a red. It's a legendary enchantment. When Oath of Chandra enters the battlefield, it deals three damage to target creature and opponent controls at the beginning of each end step if a Planeswalker enters the battlefield under your control this turn

Oath of Chandra deals 2 damage to each opponent right so each one is a legendary enchantment that has some generically useful enters the battlefield trigger and then some other ability that helps your Planeswalkers in some way, in a way that's appropriate to the color involved.

And this played into something that people were already doing, which was putting lots of planeswalkers together in a deck. That's a play style that's very appealing to some players. So I was like, all right, let's give people some tools for that. So that was one way. healing to some players so i was like all right let's give people some tools for that so that was one way uh another way was playing into the two-headed giant format so this is a format that's primarily played in limited and basically each uh it's a it's a four-player game with two players on each team so you have teammate, your opponent has a teammate

and you have a shared life total and a shared turn. And this is a pretty fun and popular format in Limited and it's a really good way for less experienced players to experience the game. Like, oh, I'm going to team up with my buddy who's players to experience the game right like oh i'm going to team up with my buddy who's really good at the game and i don't need to i don't need to know all the rules as well it's a it's a good way for people to get into it so i thought it'd be great if we could emphasize two-headed giant at the pre-release and support it with some mechanics and uh there were a couple

of mechanics in particular uh i said support and that's because support is one of those mechanics. It is. This is a mechanic that allows you to put plus one, plus one counters on things, and it encourages you to sort of spread those counters around, because you can, what does it do? Well, so support N, here, I can actually read actual support text for you. That sounds good. So, okay, the support text says

support N, N's a number, put a N plus one plus one counter on each of up to two other target creatures. Put A plus one plus one counter. Put A plus one plus one counter on each of up to two other target creatures for support two,

for example. Oh, I see. So you can only put one per creature, but you've got to put it on up to that many creatures. Right. So you could put some on your partner's creatures. You could put some on your teammates' creatures. Partner is a whole different thing. You could put some on your teammates' creatures.

You could put some on your own creatures. You could put some on your teammates' creatures. You could put some on your own creatures. And then, actually, as I originally designed it, support was also going to be able to put loyalty counters on planeswalkers. But at the last minute, we got rid of that ability because there was just a little too much weirdness going on in the set. And when you say last minute, it was post-slideshow. It was very above the latest we could pull something from the set and and when you say last minute like it was post slideshow like it was yeah very above the

latest we could pull something from the set yeah um so we have a slideshow uh at basically while the set is being typeset it's partially typeset and uh we look at all the cards and if there's any last minute changes that need to be made that's when they get made uh so you know we looked at the set it was just like wow there's just a little too much going on here so uh we got rid of the planeswalker rider and i was a little bit disappointed but uh seeing how support was used again in the battle bond set um made me feel like we've made the right choice like oh here's a here's a mechanic we can use again. Maybe we wouldn't have used it again

if it had been a little weirder. The other mechanic that supported two-headed giant play was the surge mechanic. I'll read this one real quick. So it has a surge cost, which is usually cheaper than the normal cost.

You may cast this spell for its surge cost if you or a teammate has cast another spell this turn. This encourages sort of storm style gameplay in, I guess, in regular two-player magic or in a two-headed giant game right because uh casting more spells makes this one cheaper uh storm is a little different and that casting more spells makes more copies of the storm card but uh the sort of style of deck that you build is uh is pretty similar with lots of spells that don't cost very much mana. So this was, I thought, a really fun mechanic. And I got to put the word teammate on the card, which was like, very loudly says, Hey, two-headed giant, this is a format you can play, and it's a lot of fun. I believe only one card had had the word teammate on it before this, and it was from Future Sight.

It was like Imperial Mask or something? One black border card, thank you very much. Oh, well, excuse me, you're right. There was a cycle of cards. And Glue had a cycle of cards that referenced teammates specifically on them, but I did forget about that. I have a little blind spot

when it comes to silver border cards, I guess. What's the opposite of a blind spot? I have that. So the when it comes to silver border cards, I guess. What's the opposite of a blind spot? I have that. So anyway, by the way, I do like Surge. I think Surge should come back. I like Surge. But okay, so there was another mechanic that also implied teamwork.

Right. The cohort mechanic. The cohort. Instead of players teaming up with cohort, it was your creatures that were teaming up. So the way cohort works is it only went on allies, and it said tap and tap an untapped

ally. So you had to tap this creature and another ally, and then discard an... And then you generate an effect. You didn't always discard a card. That's just the one I was reading. So you would tap this and another creature to generate an effect. Right.

Yeah, this one was not terribly popular, I think. No. It was pretty hard to get two creatures on the battlefield, two allies on the battlefield, and get to your next turn without one of them getting destroyed. So it's an uphill battle for a mechanic like that to work and construct it. It was okay and limited, but I don't think it really excited very many people. Yeah. One of the things I always look at is I'll do reviews of stuff, talk about how the mechanics did.

And I always talk about whether they're, which of the four quadrants they were in, as far as, you know, were they at the top 25%, the next 25. And I believe cohorts in the bottom 25. It's one of the mechanics of people like,

ah, you can not do that again. That'd be okay with us. Yeah. Yeah. It was a thing, but yeah. Yeah. I think the greatest mechanic. Well,, but yeah. Yeah, I think, yeah.

Not the greatest mechanic. Well, we try things. It's true, it's true. And we wanted, I wanted, like, the goal there was just, like, what's something else we could do with our allies? Because we had had the rally mechanic in Battle for Zendikar, and I thought it might be fun to try something that encouraged a different style of gameplay with your allies.

Yeah, by the way, I think it's important that we always try things. Like, sometimes when things don't work out, like, oh, you shouldn't have done that. I'm like, well, I think part of magic is exploring and trying things. And there are plenty of things that we thought maybe wouldn't work out that were huge successes. So you never really know. You do want to experiment and try things. And I never begrudge us trying things because a lot of cool things came about because, yeah, let's try this.

It ends up being popular. Yeah, and I certainly don't mind putting a mechanic in a set that's only particularly useful and limited. I think that's fine. So I think those are the three new mechanics, both Devoid and Landfall, which were from Battle for Zetikar, were in Oath of the Gatewatch. Right. There were a lot of Devoid cards.

There were only actually two Landfall cards, just sort of the bare minimum to carry the mechanic forward. I just didn't find that there was a lot of design space left for Le Anfal cards that hadn't already been used in battle for Zetikar. So I just made a couple of cards that did something different. Yeah, and Devoid, for those who don't remember Devoid, Devoid is just, they're colorless cards with a colored mana cost. We use them to represent the Eldrazi, because the Eldrazi have a very weird feel to them. So we represented the Eldrazi

with either true Cullis cards or Devoid cards, which allowed us to then care about Cullisness. Devoid also, Devoid was never really supposed to be a keyword. It was just supposed to be a reminder that this would tell you that but we had a keyword for like rules reasons and then the audience were like it doesn't do anything why is this a keyword so yeah i think it should have been a super i think i think i think your

original idea was like oh it'll have a little color indicator blip yeah uh on the type line but then the graphic designers had to figure out what a colorless color indicator should look like. And I'm afraid that's a hard challenge. In retrospect, I wish we had made it a supertype. Because a supertype would have done the work we needed. But people don't, supertypes don't always have rules baggage. Where mechanics traditionally always have rules baggage, where mechanics traditionally always have rules baggage. So I think it would have accomplished our task in a way that wouldn't have sort of set people off like DeVoy did, is my belief.

Yeah, no, I think that would have been a better solution there. I agree. So, okay, so let's talk a little bit about telling the story. Because what had happened was magic kind of goes in and out of how much the story's in the cards. Right. You know, early Magic, not much story was in the cards. And then Michael and I pitched the Weatherlight Saga and it was all over the cards.

And then we pulled back. We sort of go in and out of how much story's in the cards. And this was us sort of crushing, like, it was crushing a little bit. Like, okay, we're starting a new story. Let's get it in the cards a little more. So what was that like, trying to get sort of telling the story in the cards? It was a very satisfying exercise.

And, like, this story continued all the way to War of the Spark, which was sort of the ultimate expression of that concept. We're like, this is a set that's all about an important plot point and is almost nothing about a setting, right? So the Game Watch was kind of a compromise. It was like, here's this setting. It's Zendikar. There's Eldrazi here.

But also these story events are here and we want to emphasize that with mechanics I like taking different approaches to making different sets and so making a set that's very

culturally inspired like Kaldheim is great for one reason, making a set that is very mechanically inspired like Tarkir is another approach and then making a set that is you know inspired by by story genres like Innistrad is another satisfying approach and And so to me, making a set that is very inspired by a story, our own magic story, is just a fourth equally valid approach. And taking different, you know, using different sources of inspiration for design

just ensures that our sets are fresh and different from each other. And so I really enjoy being able to approach sets from different directions that way. Oh, I realized something we didn't talk about. We got near this, but we didn't talk specifically about it. So Oath of the Gatewatch, besides introducing a new symbol, also introduced a new type of basic land. Right. So do you want to talk a little bit about the making of Waste?

Right. Okay, so Waste's origin... From my standpoint, Waste's were related to the set Invasion, actually. There was this mechanic in invasion that was called Domain. Domain went on cards that had scaling effects

based on the number of basic land types among lands you controlled. So that could go anywhere from 0 to 5, normally. So that could go anywhere from 0 to 5, normally. But the original designer for the sort of first draft version of Invasion, named Barry Reich, I believe, designed a card called Barry's Land. Which was a 6th basic land that tapped for colorless mana. Is that correct? That isn't correct. I mean, you're close to correct. Is that correct? Ice Age, one team made Mirage, and Barry, the team, but Barry was his own team, made a thing called Spectral Chaos was the code name. And then when we went to make Invasion, Bill decided to look through Spectral Chaos, because it had a multicolored theme, to see if we could pull anything out of it to use in the

set. So there was stuff, like, we were trying to see, like, Invasion was the set to say, is there anything good here that we can use? And our favorite thing was Domain, which we called Barry's Mechanic in design, and that one of the things was Barry's Land, right, which was a six basic land type.

But interestingly, Waste is not Barry's Land. No, it is not. So, the next part of the story is where I come in, which was when I was working on Commander 2014. Before I decided to make five monocolored decks there, I was exploring lots of different options.

And one of the options that I was considering was a colorless deck. The problem with making a colorless, pre-constructed Commander deck is that because Commander is a singleton format, you would have to have only one of each land. And you would start to get into some really weird lands that had a lot of text that didn't really mean anything from a gameplay standpoint.

So I asked the rules manager at the time, Matt Tabak, oh, what about Barry's land? Can we make that? He said, it's hard to make Barry's land with a new basic land type because it causes a bunch of cards to behave in unexpected ways. But it's very easy to make a basic land that taps for colorless mana and has no basic land type. Gatewatch, I remember this, I was like, okay, this is a great opportunity to make this new basic land that taps for colorless mana

and has no basic land type. I think I even named it, I named it Wastes. And we put it in the set, and then the last part of the saga is Jeremy Jarvis, who was the art director at the time,

really wanted the lands to look the same as the rest of the basic lands, where it didn't have any rules text, just had the big symbol, the mana symbol of the color that it generates, or in this case, the colorless mana that it generates. And I was like, oh, that won't work. The whole way that uh

that regular basic lands work is that the basic land type defines what kind of mana it produces these ones have to have rules text and uh eventually the editors decided that we could just print those those uh wastes that looked the way jeremy jarvis wanted them to and basically issued Day Zero errata that put the rules text back in the Oracle text for the cards. So officially, they all have the rules text, tap, add, see. But as printed, they look the same as normal basic lands do. That's pretty cool. Oh, so, interesting little story

here that, just to tell, since we're telling stories people might not know, when you guys made the Cullis mana symbol, there was a big conversation about whether cards in Battle for Zendikar that had it should have

the symbol. And I think it was Aaron. I was fighting very hard for that to be true. And I believe Aaron in the end said we want it to be a cool new thing for the new set, so let's... We don't want to show it off on the new set.

And I remember arguing with him. I'm like, well, what if we just use it and, like, people go, ooh, look at this, and then the next time we make use of it, wouldn't that be cool? But he said no. So I lost that fight. Yeah. No, I mean, I definitely can see arguments both ways. Certainly it was very exciting when people saw Cozilek for the first time.

We're like, what the hell is this? Oh, my God, this is crazy. So, yeah, certainly the excitement was there it did make playing with the two sets together and limited a little confusing yeah i have to say that like of all the cards in oath the gate watch wastes is my favorite one i just like, look what we did. It is a thing of simplicity when you look at the actual printed guard. It's like, there's no words

on it, but it does things. Yep. So I can see my desk from here so we don't have too much time left before I get to work. Any last thoughts on Oath of the Gatewatch? Any final things you wanted to mention that you haven't had a chance to?

I mean, it's definitely a crazy set. And I don't know if I would have done it the same way if I knew then what I know now. But it was pretty exciting to work on. It certainly made a lot of waves. Yeah, it definitely got people's attention. it was pretty exciting to work on it certainly made a lot of waves yeah no it was it was it definitely got people's attention and it's funny how just a new symbol makes people sit up and go

what? yeah I think in retrospect I wish I had fought a little harder to get those colorless mana symbols that whole mechanic into the whole block on Battle for Zetikar and Oath of the Gatewatch. I think that that would have

been... I think that's a cool enough mechanic to support a whole block, actually. Yeah, I agree. I agree. We had talked about it after the fact, like, if we had to do it all over again, that we would introduce it, like, up front, but, like, as part of everything. But the timing

of the way things worked out, that Battle for Zetacarp was way, way, way too far along to be able to sort of put that in. It just wasn't possible. Yep. But I agree with you. In retrospect, it would have been great if the whole block, you know, that was just the Eldrazi thing and the whole block had it.

Yep. And now, on my blog, I get people asking me all the time for, when are Wastes coming back? When can we see more Wastes? Can we get more Wastes, please? Where's Snow Wastes? We made the symbol kind of generic so that it's not creatively tied to the Eldrazi. Oh, yeah.

So we can bring it back whenever we decide it's the right time. When we come up with a cool reason to do it, we will do it again. Yeah, I mean, it's in our back pocket. The one thing I make sure the audience understands is there's a lot of infrastructure needed to make Cullis costs a thing. You can't just throw one in a set and have it work out. It really requires some dedication. So it's not that we can't do it again. I'm sure we will do it again. But it is not something

you can just throw in a set. The set really has to have certain qualities that allow it to happen. Right. It's a mechanic. I like to say a mechanic like that requires structural support. Yes. Yes, it does. So anyway, Ethan, it was fun. It was fun talking with you

about Oath of the Gatewatch. But I see my desk, so we all know what that means. This is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. Thanks for being with us, Ethan. Thanks for having me. And for all you, I will see you all next

time. Bye-bye.