Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #922: Lesson Learned – Ikoria

Episode Date: April 9, 2022

This podcast is another in my "Lessons Learned" series where I explore what I learned during the making of sets for which I led or co-led design.

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, dealing with some technical issues on sound, so I'm recording some stuff at home that I did record in my car, it got messed up, and I'm re-recording it. But for you guys, it'll be like it's all fresh and new. Okay, so today I'm going to be doing a lessons learned podcast. Okay, so today I'm going to be doing a Lessons Learned podcast. These are a series of podcasts where I talk about a set that I either led or co-led and talk about many of the lessons that I learned from it. So today I'm talking Ikoria. Okay, so the first lesson of Ikoria goes back to the very making of Ikoria,

which was, so for those who don't know, originally, so we name our premiere sets with a code name. They go in alphabetical order based on sports right now. So that year was Archery Baseball Cricket. So the original plans was Archery and Baseball were supposed to be Throne of Eldraine. We were going to have two sets in Eldraine. And then Cricket was supposed to be a return to Theros. But we decided in the middle of exploratory for Baseball that we were going to not do two worlds in Eldraine. It was just deemed, I don't know, too risky. I'm not sure. But anyway,

so we audibled out of baseball being out of baseball being Eldraine 2. The original plan was the first one was going to be kind of in the courts in the daylight and the second one was going to be going into the woods and being a little more darker version

of stuff. But anyway, once that decision was made, Aaron came to me and said, what do we want to replace it with? And he said, why don't we look ahead and see some stuff that we're planning to work on? Because normally when we work on sets, we plot out a couple years.

Not in great depth, but a general sense of what the world is and what we think the loose idea of the mechanics are. But anyway, he said, well, why don't you look? Maybe we can pull forward something for baseball. So my recommendation to him was, well, why don't we pull ahead what was going to be for cricket, which was Theros. Ethan Fletcher was going to lead that.

And we knew what we wanted. So it's like, OK, let's pull that ahead. Ethan can work on that and give me a little breathing time to figure out what would go in the next slot, which would be cricket. So anyway, we looked forward on what was up and coming, and the one that really drew my attention was what we called Monster Island at the time. Which was a set sort of where monsters was the driving resonant theme. where Monsters was the driving resonant theme. So the first lesson is sort of learning to roll with the punches. Like, I, for example, I was the big push for us to do Eldran in the first place.

I really wanted, I thought fairy tales would look really cool as a set. I had every belief in believing that we could do two sets out of it. But I get it. There's some nervousness. And so one of the things that I've learned to do is, you know, I will always be somebody who sort of fights for something and talks about something. But, hey, when, you know, making magic is a group project. So when the group decides not to do something,

I got to figure out how to do what the group wants and not, you know, I will fight for my way up to a point but at some point I got to go, okay, this is not what we're doing and I got to figure out the best way to accomplish that. So the first lesson really of Ikoria Design was sort of

figuring out what Ikoria Design was. And I, of all the things when I look forward that I thought had the most promise, I really liked the idea of a monster theme set using the resonance of monsters. I thought it was a cool theme. So, you know, there's a little bit of sort of like

going with your gut and trying to follow what seemed like would be a cool thing. Now, the key to making any set, especially set that sort of, I mean, nowadays, I really want every set to have some resonant core. What I mean by that is when people play the game of magic, I want them to be excited and happy when they play. And that one of the things we've learned is one of the ways to really get people excited for a new world is there's something about that world that's familiar to them.

That, you know, making something in which everything is foreign and nothing makes sense is not as inviting as, hey, we're making a new world, but something about this world is tapping into something you already know. There's something, you know, and in this particular case, it was monsters, right?

It's like one of the things that we always tend to do whenever we sort of get a theme is we try to figure out, well, how is that theme used? We like to look sort of at pop culture and, you know, how are people, how do they in other means

and throughout the pop culture, how do they interact with this theme? So with monsters, we started to look and said, okay, where are all the tropes based with monsters? Where are the monster stories? What kind of monster stories? How do people interact with monsters? And what we found was I'll divide them into two major categories. What I would call the monster good category and the monster bad category. So the monster good category and the monster bad category. So the

monster good category is the idea that the main character bonds in some way with the monster. And when I say the monster, I mean it's something that other people view as a monster because it is large or it is something that seems scary in some ways. But usually in the good monster trope, our hero comes to realize that the monster isn't a monster in a sense at all, but somebody who has inherent good qualities to them. Like Iron Giant is a good example of, Iron Giant's about this giant robot from space.

And this little boy befriends it and realizes that inherently there's something good about the robot. It's not a bad robot. And Godzilla, there's definitely Godzilla's, where a kid bonds with Godzilla. I mean, there is different movies. And that in a good monster movie, it's about the hero bonding with the monster

and making people understand that the monster's not a monster at all and that it might be a monster in the surface, meaning it's usually a big giant creature that has the capability of doing things, and sometimes it does because the people don't listen to our hero, but

there's that kind of thing. And then the bad monster is like a monster's up to no good and then our hero has to stop the monster and it's more about fighting the monster. And so what we found was there was kind of bond with the monster and there was fight the monster. And so in building our

set, we made sure we wanted to do both bond with the monster and fight the monster. But, so here's my next lesson. Whenever you are exploring something, you need to understand what is novel about it. What is the new thing about it? So, for example,

the idea of attack with giant monster or fight giant monster, normal magic does that. You know, normal magic definitely has giant creatures. That's not an abnormal thing for magic. Maybe there are more in Ikoria than normal,

or maybe how we treated them is a little different, but just the idea of here's a giant creature, that is something that is normal magic. So whenever you're looking at how to make the currents that you're working on resonant, you want to figure what about that is unique. And so what we found was the idea that you have a monster that you're working with and it's evolving and it's growing and it's changing

that's a big thing about the bonding with monsters is that usually in stories when you start when you first start bonding with it often it's not even a monster yet it's not giant yet a lot of times oh it's just it's not even a monster yet. It's not giant yet. You know, a lot of times, oh, it's just, you know, it's an ape that you befriended before some mutation or something

makes it grow into a giant ape. You first befriended when it was a normal small ape. And that idea of the monster changing and evolving over time, that isn't something magic normally does. And so the lesson there really is trying to embrace what is the unique thing about it. And it's not that we didn't have giant monsters and attack with giant monsters. Obviously we did. But that wasn't the thing that was going to be unique. If I said, oh, we have a magic set where there's large giant creatures and you can attack with them, you're like, yeah, I play magic.

But if I say, oh, there's a set in which there's monsters that you can mutate and change them and adapt them, you go, oh, that sounds kind of cool. And so what that meant was when we really started working on it, whenever we have themes, and I talked about this in my ideation podcast, you really want to figure out what themes take priority. You could have multiple themes, but one of your themes has to be the most important theme. So when your themes fight, you know what takes priority,

what wins the fight. And so for Ikoria, really what we said is we wanted it to be about evolution and mutation. We wanted it to be about you getting to make monsters, but that you get to adapt and change the monsters. So the next lesson this sort of segues into is normally in a lot of games, the way that mutation works

is you have certain set states, like you have a monster, and then the first version of the monster turns into the second version of the monster, and maybe it turns into a third version or a fourth version. That it's sort of set in the game that this creature with this name becomes that creature with that name, and the names are usually connected in some way.

But in magic, so the idea there could be, I could have a legendary creature that turns into another legendary creature, which turns into a third legendary creature. But that is a little state from a magic standpoint. And we do things like monstrosity, we do things like double-faced cards. We definitely have different states. So we definitely have

oh, this becomes that. So that is something magic does. But part of the fun of Sword of the Mutation and something that Ikoria leaned into is we really wanted the idea of you, the player, have the option and the ability to sort of form and create your monster.

That you could, you know, it's a set where you could make monsters. And in a game that's modular like Magic, you really want people to have some ability and flexibility to lean into that. And another big thing whenever we're working is we always want to keep our eye open for things that we've heard before that seem they might be relevant. One of the things about making magic is it is not made in a vacuum. We work on many sets and we try many

things and ideas you get in one place might not be best for that place, but sometimes they'd be better later on. The example here is when I know when we first made Amonkhet and we decided to do the punch out cards. One of the things that Dave Humphries and his team looked into is what could be on these punch out cards? What kind of things can you do with punch-out cards? And one of the ideas that they toyed with was the idea of keyword counters. Oh, well, I put a plus one plus one counter on something, it gets bigger.

Well, what if I just put a flying counter on something? And the idea of that was pretty cool, and the only issue with permanently granting abilities is memory, and so counters really solve that. Well, you know, it's not hard to have a counter that says flying on it. What does that mean? What does it do?

Well, it grants this ability. It's an evergreen ability. Now, normally granting that without the counter, we got to remember and how to know that this thing can fly. But the counter makes it real easy. So what happened is they came up with the idea in Amonkhet, but there's lots going on. They didn't need it. And so later on, we had a hackathon where we were looking at different things we could do. It got brought up there, and the hackathon was right before we started

Ikoria design. So when we got to Ikoria, it's like, oh, there are ideas floating in my head that we had talked about that had come up from other places. And the idea of the counters was definitely something early on that really influenced about thinking about how we would do mutate. Ironically, and once again, another good lesson here is that sometimes you get to some place and the thing that gets you there is not the thing you end up needing. Ironically, we used mutate counters, keyword counters, as the early form of mutate. used mutate counters, keyword counters, as the early form of mutate. Early on, for example, whenever I mutated on top of something,

I absorbed any abilities that existed on a keyword counter. So we keyworded most of the evergreen abilities. So the idea originally was if my monster mutates something and the creature I'm mutating from has flying, then I get a flying counter, then I absorbed all those abilities. And it was the earliest version of us trying to understand how do I take different abilities and put them together. Speaking of just looking back in the past,

I had tried, in Unstable, I do this card called a card called Grusilda Monster Masher and it was based on something that I had tried numerous times I think the first time was a card called Meld

not the printed card but the earlier version of Meld where I've been trying to smash creatures together forever because it's a lot of fun

and Grusilda's me just doing that in you know in Unset where I can just do whatever and just assume the rules work out okay. But it was something where I had always

kind of wanted to do that. And so when I got to Ikoria and I was talking about how to mutate things, one of the ideas that really came across early was can we have different creatures mutate into other creatures? So one of the things you do whenever you're looking at an idea is you look at how you handled the idea before.

So for example, we had once before looked at doing evolutions during Lorwyn, and we'd come up with the champion mechanic. And the champion mechanic is a mechanic where you can take any creature on the battlefield that has a certain creature type, and then you exile that creature, and it sort of becomes the new creature, is sort of the flavor. And we had looked at doing straight mutations. You know, this creature becomes specifically that creature. And it was a little bit too... It didn't fit the modularness of how magic works.

It was a little too... I mean, like I said, we do have monstrosity. We do have double-faced gods. We do do some of this one thing directly becomes that thing. But when we were trying to do something bigger and mechanic, we wanted more flexibility. So with champion, we tied it to a creature type.

Any elf would become this elf champion. Any goblin would become this goblin champion. So when we were sort of looking at now, I was trying to take the next step. What if anything could become this goblin champion. So when we were sort of looking at now, I was trying to take the next step. What if anything could become this thing? What if any creature could become that creature? And that's when we started looking at the keyword counters and trying to understand how to mesh them together.

Interestingly, Dave and his team, Dave Humphreys was, I handed off the, I did the vision design, I handed it off to Dave Humphreys, who did the set design. They really took what we had done, like I think the version we handed off, you could mutate if the creature you're mutating matched either in creature type or in keyword, of the evergreen keywords of the creature you're mutating, and then those things carried forward.

creature you're mutating, and then those things carried forward. And then what Dave found was that it was a little bit easier on some level to not worry about the counters and just say, hey, we're going to make a stack. The top creature determines

everything other than the rules text, and the rules text will be sort of the rules text abilities of all the creatures. So everything in the stack, if you will, although stack has another meaning in magic, but everything in the pile of creatures, all of them are part of this creature. So when I mutate

on top of something, I take all of your abilities. And a lot of that came from the idea where we did with the keyword counters, but Dave sort of... And this is not... Normally, by the way, when I apply InVision, normally it's set design that's making it narrower, not broader.

This is an interesting case where Dave found it was like, in order to capture the essence of what we wanted, that there was a way to do it that was a little messier, but captured the flavor better and did something more grandiose, which I applaud.

Like I said, normally in set design, it's restricting what we're doing. But in this particular case, and that's one of the fun things about the way we work, of working on something and then handing it off to somebody else, is you get to sort of set the idea of what you want,

but you let somebody else sort of figure how to execute upon that. And sometimes you figure it out in your process, and they just do what you figure it out, and sometimes they take it to the next level. And there's a lot of great examples where, you know, they should come up with a really neat idea, but set design figures out the right execution

of it. And mutate's a good example of that. I'm very proud of where mutate ended up. Like I said, in some ways, it is one of the more out there mechanics that we've done. It definitely pushes boundaries in a weird way, but it's fun. And like I said, it inherently does a neat thing. One of my big, another lesson is the audience is willing to put a lot of work in if what you're asking them to do fundamentally at its core is fun. And so I think one of the things I realized

about Mutate, looking back, is yeah, it's messy, yeah, there's a lot of rules that go into it, but the core essence of what it is, of smashing two creatures together, is super fun. And so I think... And there's a lot of players

that really gravitated toward it. It's one of the mechanics that I get asked about all the time. Could you do more mutate stuff that people really enjoy it? And that there's something very at the core of it. There's, one of the things that we look at is sort of how, what's the core of the fun in it? And smashing creatures together is just very core fun. There's a lot of fun there. I'm not saying it's for everybody, but for the people that really enjoy it,

it really shined. Okay, another mechanic I want to talk a little bit about is Companion. Which leads to probably my biggest lesson of this set. Companion also came out of the hackathon. I think it was originally inspired by

thinking about Commander, and how in Commander you have a creature you can play at any moment because you're Commander, and how there's a certain reliability, the fact that you have access to that creature, that you know you have access to it. So it allows you to sort of craft your deck in a way that would be harder to do if you didn't have that.

And so I think Companions came from that, the idea of, okay, here is a creature that you have access to. Okay, what hoop do you have to jump through? And the hoop idea was your deck construction unto itself. And there was a lot of challenges of making Companion. Obviously, you know, as mistakes go, I mean, it's not often we make a mechanic and we have to, after the mechanic is printed, change how the mechanic works. In fact,

while we've done that occasionally for some, like, rule-fixing things, this is the only time for power level we've ever done that. So, obviously it was a big mistake. And it ties into probably what I think from vision design is the largest mistake we made in Icoria, which was one of the responsibilities that you have in working on vision, because you're the first people really to work on it along with the creative team,

is there's a lot of people downriver of you. There's a lot of people that are going to be working on it. And it is your job to make sure that you are helping the people that have to people downriver of you. There's a lot of people that are going to be working on it. And it is your job to make sure that you are helping the people that have to work on it after you. And so I think the biggest mistake of Ikoria was both Mutate and Companion are very out there ideas. That whenever we make an idea,

one of the things we have to think about is how hard is this to execute? And a big factor of that is, A, has a little bit to do with complexity, but more so than that is have we messed in the space before? Do we have chops in working in the space? Do we understand the space?

That the more you play in space that's new, the harder it is for people down the road to develop it. That when play design has to work on something, for example, if we make what I'll call a kicker mechanic, if we make a mechanic where you're paying extra mana and the spell gets an extra ability. Look, we've done that

infinite times. There's lots and lots of spells that, you know, lots of mechanics that are sort of kicker-ish mechanics. We understand that. We've done it many times. That's not going to cause people problems. It's not going to be hard for us to balance or develop. But whenever we do something like, we've just never done that before. It's in going to be hard for us to balance or develop. But whenever we do something, like, we've just never done that before.

It's in a space that is a new space. We have to be careful. We have to be careful when we're doing that. And the real big lesson about Chorea is if you push too much in that space, the people down the road of you don't have enough time. I mean, essentially, the reason I think Companion broke was Muteit and Companion were just too much. Our eyes were bigger than our stomach, to use a metaphor, that it was too much.

And the team down of us, look, did the best they could to sort of execute on it, but we were asking too much of them. And so one of the things moving forward is we really have to gauge sort of how complex things are and we only get one complex thing, something that is sort of an unknown, we get one unknown new mechanic that really is going to cause problems because no one's worked with it before. Now, we make lots

of sets, so we have lots of opportunity to make these, but we really should limit them to one per set and the sake of Ikoria was we put two in one set. And the mistake of Ikoria was we put two in one set. And the thing that, I mean, looking back, one of the things that is important for me when I'm trying to understand the mistakes I made is were there signs of that mistake?

And the one that says yes is the handoff document that I made where we hand off to set design. You can look it up. I posted it on my column. I purposely designed Companion such that it could be taken out of the set. Like, if you look at it, I said, oh, look, if this is too much trouble here, I didn't attach anything. A lot of times when you're making a set, you intertwine things. So it's really hard to take Mechanic A out without Mechanic B. They're really enmeshed. And Companion, I didn't do that. I really kept it separate. That's because in my head,

I understood it was a problem child, and I sort of like... But the point is, rather than make it so it could be removed, I should have just removed it. And that was a big sign that I kind of recognize it might be a problem, and rather than take the steps I needed to take

at the level that I was working on, I passed those problems down the road. I sort of signed up the people after me to too big of a challenge. And I own up to that. I think that is my biggest mistake on Ikoria, you know, mine and my team, is we weren't respectful enough of down the river of us.

And I think that those two mechanics were a little bit too big. The other lesson of Companion in particular was understanding restrictions. It turns out that if I have a restriction I have to follow, it really

feels bad if my opponent can't kind of monitor it. And that really had a big impact on how Companion worked. That if I do something, there's no way whether you know whether I'm following or not. It made you nervous. It's like, well, how do I know if they're following these rules? But if I said, oh, well, I can't do something,

well, you can watch me. And as long as they don't do that, well, you know, like, if I ever sort of break the rule, you have a rule you can watch and monitor. Oh, nothing in my deck can cost over a certain amount, or it has to be odd, or it has to be even, or whatever the restriction. I can look and go, is, nothing in my deck can cost over a certain amount or has to be odd or has to be even or whatever the restriction. I can look and go, is he following that? Is that the guideline he's following?

And it turned out that that really defined the design space. And so Companion had a much more limited design space than we realized. That was another big lesson of making it. The other thing that, looking back on it, is we added this wedge component. I wish... I think that one of the things that

I wish we had in retrospect is it was kind of there, but not there. It was not the focus. I mean, it wasn't really a wedge set. It wasn't about wedge. There were wedge components and limited of something that you could sort of opt into. But I think the messaging was not quite as clean. I wish we had figured out a way to integrate that a little bit more. I think that was a little bit confusing. that the three-coloredness of it had a little more identity of what it was doing there and why it was there. I mean, we did build it so that you could have it.

I mean, the way that it ended up playing out is that you could play certain color combinations and then opt into the wedge as sort of a secondary sort of draft strategy. But anyway, I wish it was a little better defined. I think when we make sets where it's all about that, it's very easily defined. Hey, we're a three-color set.

Draft this three colors. I think in Ikoria, where it's all about that, it's very easily defined. Hey, we're a three-color set. Draft this three colors. I think in Ikoria, it was there as a component, and you could open up cards that were three-color. But I think it was sending messages that were a little bit unclear. I wish we had been a little bit clearer on that. As far as something that I did enjoy... I mean, not that I did enjoy the three-color, but I think we could have handled that a little bit better. Another little fast for the set that I was very intrigued by was

we played around this idea of human-tribal and non-human-tribal. So, like, you could only mutate things other than human. And in the world of Ikoria, the people were all human. We played around with how to, like, not mutate non-humanoid things, and it turned out the only clean way to do it was to use the non-human as a tribal thing and then just make all the humans, you know, the humanoid creatures of the world were human. So we weren't having the humans become mutated, because that really fought the flavor of what we were trying to do.

But it ended up doing this neat dynamic in the set where we had a little bit of human tribal and a bunch of non-human tribal in the mutate that sort of made you care about different elements of the set in a neat way. Like, one of the big things that I'm trying to get better at

is how do we get you to care about a set in new and interesting ways without having to introducing brand new concepts? And one of the ways to do that is to take the existing things that are already there and care about them in a way that we haven't cared about before. And so like human, non-human,

like the human creature type had been there for quite a while since Mirrodin, and non-human just meant not that. So, I mean, these ideas were there already. They're completely backward compatible. But I really think that an important part of, and you'll see a lot as the future sets follow this a lot, is the idea of how do you reshape things already there

that give it a new identity a new feel a new flavor but it's not it's not introducing a brand a brand new thing that's never been before because when i introduce a brand new thing hey the game is is usually not ready for that thing we have to figure out how to integrate it but when i take things that are already there and reshape how we think about them. Batching in Dominaria was a really good, I think batching was kind of the foray into this, but I do like

how Icora continued playing in this space. But it's something really interesting to me that I've spent a lot of time of sort of instead of inventing new things, how do you take the existing things and mix and match them in a way that gives a new identity

but doesn't eliminate all the previous cards for magic from caring about that thing? And that's something that I spent a lot of time thinking about. The final thing, before I realize I'm almost at work here, is the last mechanic I haven't talked about is cycling.

So, we didn't reach this realization work here, is the last mechanic I haven't talked about is cycling. So we didn't reach this realization until a little later, but it's interesting to note that I think the more we use cycling, the more we started to realize what we ultimately ended up realizing in

Streets of New Capenna was the idea of that we could take some things, like, the idea that more things can be deciduous than they have been. That cycling does such a good job of supplementing things. Like, the reason we added to the set

was that it allowed us to have more large creatures in it. We could have more monsters in the set. Because if you put cycling on a monster, if you're not able at that moment to play the monster, it lets you do something. And so the idea of double use so that

you can have... I mean, Channel does this in the End Dynasty. There's a lot of utility there and that I think the idea of letting us have that utility, of letting us have that duality, so that you can have things you care about, but there's a secondary reason for them

just made cycling so valuable here and makes it valuable in a lot of sets. And so I'm kind of happy that cycling's become something, it's become a tool that we have access to and that we can use where we need it. And I do think, like, kind of my final lesson here before I finish for the day is one of the things I'm constantly trying to figure out,

and I say me, my team, all of the designers, is what are the valuable tools? What are the things that we can do that will allow us to make brand new things, but we don't need to reinvent the wheel? One of the ongoing giant lessons of making magic is, like early on we thought like once we make a mechanic, we throw it away and never use it again. Or once we make a world, that's it. That's the one time we saw the world.

And now we're like, you know what? We can reuse mechanics. We can reuse worlds. Everything we make as the point of any one set are material that we can use for future sets and that we can come back and re-explore and re-examine and that a lot of what making magic is is finding ways to sort of like one of the things I talk about like in music is like hey there's the same notes the music you're making today are the same musical notes they made way back when. But hey, part of making new music is finding ways to use those same notes and do something different. And that's a big thing of looking at all the tools available to us from a magic design standpoint and figuring out how do we use those tools different? How do we shape and make something? How do we use those notes that you've heard a hundred times but make something and shape something that's brand new?

that you've heard a hundred times, but make something and shape something that's brand new. And Ikoria did a lot of cool things in that space where, you know, Mutate was taking lessons we had learned from Double Face cards, from Monstrosity, from Champion, and finding a new and different way to explore some of that. And anyway, I'm very proud of Ikoria.

I think it did a lot of neat things. It was a very innovative product. If any way, maybe a little too innovative. Uh, but it was, you know, I'm very proud of the stuff we did. And then we learned a lot from it. And I think, um, the sign of any good set is not only that it makes it a good set, but that it shapes the sets after it and helps make those better sets, which I do think Ikoria did.

But anyway, I now can 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 make magic. Hope you guys enjoyed listening to me talk about my lessons. Anyway, I will see you all next time.

Bye-bye.