Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #923: Zendikar Rising with Andrew Brown

Episode Date: April 16, 2022

In this podcast, I sit down with Andrew Brown to discuss the design of Zendikar Rising.

I'm not pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the Drive to Work at Home Edition. So I'm using my home time to talk to people. So today I have Andrew Brown and we're gonna talk about Zendikar Rising. Hey Andrew. How's it going, Mark? Okay, so I talk a lot about the very beginning of design, but today we're gonna talk about the end of design. So talk all about play design. So you are in charge of play design. Yeah, I'm the technical lead of play design. So basically what that means is I'll make all of the final decisions on numbers, designs, just to make sure that we're making the best

thing we can possibly make. Okay. So, um, just also to be clear, I had Melissa on not super long ago and she, we talked a lot about the casual and you're the more of the competitive end of play design, correct? Uh, yeah, it's competitive and it's also just limited balance as well. Um, so we, we also ensure that, you know, all the colors are relatively close together for limited as well, which is kind of another dimension to the work. Okay, so we're going to use, today we're going to use Zendikar Rising

as our example of what we're going to talk about. But I'm hoping to use today as an example for people to understand, like, all what play design does, because there's a lot, a lot, a lot that play design does. So I want to hit as much as we can of that today that we can hit in half an hour.

Okay, so Zendikar Rising, I did the initial vision design. I handed it off to Eric Lauer. Did Eric hand it off, or did Eric take it all the way through? It was kind of, Eric started working a lot more on another project. Okay.

And we were like, oh, well, I guess we should have somebody else be in charge. So I took over for about the last two, two and a half months of set design. Okay, so when you took the file over, where were things? Where was Zendikar rising at the point where you first started working on it, or you took it over, at least? Yeah, I mean, I drafted it and you know thought about a lot of the um packages of cards for a while but uh when eric handed over to me it was um roughly in about the shape you see it now maybe some numbers were different um maybe we had some rares that didn't show up but uh it was pretty close to the final product I would

say it was like 70 to 75 percent done and okay so I just want to run through the the main things in the set and I think these were all there when you took over so for example landfall got brought back it had the party mechanic there were the modal double-faced cars with the lands on the back. There was the equipment attached. All that was there, right? Right, yes. All of that was there. Okay. So a lot of what play design is doing is not determining what's in the set from a larger meta sense,

but more in the fine-tuned granular sense, correct? Right. sense correct right like um we knew that we wanted five mythic uh dfc lands that could come in untapped if you paid three life so a lot of what play design did there was actually come up with the designs of what the spell side does so for example amaria's call was the we came up with oh sure it's a white land, and on the other side, it's two angels that give your team indestructible. So we don't necessarily come up with a lot of the concepts. We just kind of fill in the blanks.

Right, and the other thing that people need to understand is when we talk about knobs, I think people really tend to think of numbers as knobs, like changing the mana cost, but there are actually a whole bunch of different knobs that we can change. Yeah. There's, yeah, one of the best things about magic design for me is that you can change the power level of a card by doing so many different things. Like, each color has so many different you know keywords there are changing etb effects to attack triggers to dyes triggers to upkeep triggers to end step triggers where like you can really move around so many effects to different timings that um it gets really interesting when you're trying to you know hit that really small landing strip of the right

power level yeah one of the the big challenges like, one of the things that I find interesting is magic, like, you have to cost things in whole numbers, right? And that, like, one of the, like, there's a huge difference between, you know, one and a blue and two and a blue. There's a big gap there, and I know one of the challenges for you guys is you're trying to really,

especially on competitive cards, you know, you're trying to really max out, like, hey, you're getting everything you're trying to really, especially on competitive cards, you're trying to really max out like, hey, you're getting everything you're paying for. It's trying to find ways to fill in the gap because the mana, there's only so much you can do with the mana. The increments are somewhat far apart in a fine-tuning way.

Yeah, definitely. Although, I will say, in unsets, I do love half mana a lot. Super fun. But yeah, it's definitely one of the largest struggles for our group in terms of coming up with the right costs for the right effects. Sometimes things just don't work out and we just have to kind of maybe move it higher up the curve than we want it to and then sometimes things actually do work out and we get that super sweet power level spot okay so let's

take the lands the rare lands as an example since you brought them up sure okay so you guys get the land so like what what happens how do you figure out what the right thing to do with the lands are how do you figure that out um so the first thing that we do generally is we look what set design has given us and we say huh is this the rate that we would want to try this out at in terms of you know playing it in um in a constructed format so we look at it we'd say okay looks about right maybe down a mana maybe up a mana and then we play test from there sometimes it would be like oh we look at the card we're like oh that rare is too similar to something that we already have we'll ask the set design team to redesign it to something else that doesn't overlap with a card we already like um from something maybe two sets ago

so there's a lot of different outcomes that happen, but normally what would happen is we see the lands and we're like, okay, we'll try this, maybe plus a power, and then we'll go through our normal process where we play it, iterate on it, maybe move some numbers around, and then end up on the final card. And, I mean, I know the lands were tricky because, for example, they don't have

a mana cost, and at some level, one thing that was neat about the MDFCs, the modal double-faced lands, where you had a land on one side is that there's a lot of, people underestimate the value of choice, right?

Choice is really powerful. And so, the key to the land for you guys was trying to figure out, like, well, we know what this, like, the land was always the same at some level, that it's going to be either, it was a tapped land for everything uncommon and below,

and then it was untapped but paid three life. Oh, was it always paid three life? Was it ever? Do you guys try two life or four life? It was always three life. We always always pay three life was it ever do you guys try two life or four life uh it was always three life um we always went for three life and we wanted the one thing that we wanted to make sure on the backsides is that they were bigger and splashier effects because the the lands below mythic were more like you know cheaper mana cost less impactful cards uh one of the one of the ways i like to think about balancing choice

um is let's take a card like cryptic command that's a card most people know um if you look at the modes of cryptic command if we were to cost some of them individually they would generally be about two mana so essentially cryptic command is a fourmana card because there are two two-mana modes stapled to it. So one of the heuristics we had for making some of the Strixhaven charms is we take the mana cost, let's say it's three mana, and then we would pick four things that we think are about costed at one and a half mana. So real quickly, for my audience, just because they don't always know the cards off the top of their head. Crypt of Command is one blue, blue, blue,

so four mana, three witches blue, choose to instant, choose two, counter target spell, return target permit to its owner's hand, tap all creatures your opponents control, draw a card. Yep. And none of those,

I mean, those are all, those effects are worth about how much? Yeah, about two mana each. Counterspell is generally two and a half mana. Draw a card is generally one and a half mana, so that's the difference there. But bounce and tap all your creatures, both are about two mana. So that's why, you know, I think the heuristics are good with Crypto Command in terms of all of them. Each of the mode costs

two. Yeah, and it's interesting how the other thing that I'm always fascinated with watching play design is how much you have to draft off what has happened before. Like how much the knowledge you guys have is, well, we did thing A or thing B before,

and this is kind of like that, and trying to use old things to figure out what new things are. Yeah, that's a huge part of our work. It's really important to have, like, a large library of cards in your head in terms of how they were played in their time. So yeah, it is, it's definitely a lot of memorization. But it's a lot of fun, too, because I get to remember the times I was at my local store, like drafting new Phyrexia, and then we make a card similar to that. And then it's like, oh, hey, I remember that card was about at that power level. And then I use my reference point there to kind of make a quick judgment on what I think the power level would be.

Okay, so I'm going to take a mechanic from the set, and then you're going to tell me what in the past you looked at to try to figure out how to make it work. Sure. Okay, so the party mechanic, for those that might not know it, it cared about,

there were four different creature types, warrior, wizard, cleric, and rogue. Rogue. Okay, so it wanted you to have one of each of those. It was representing sort of like an adventuring party that you would see in games like Dungeons & Dragons. Right, right, right. Okay, so we give you party.

We've never quite done that before. So what do you look at to figure out how to make party work? Um, so the first thing I think about is it is requiring, it's a pretty difficult deck building, um, quest to send a person on in terms of fitting in four different types that you're going to have at different times. Um, there really isn't a good one-for-one analog, but one of the things that I used to think about is modern affinity, because that deck is generally comprised of three different things,

which is like your cheap things, your mana producers, and then your haymakers like Arcbound Ravager. So in a sense i think that was the closest parallel to me in terms of thinking about the deck building is like juggling a bunch of different pieces together in my head in order to create something cohesive um so that's the first thing that i would think of uh but uh yeah I mean developing party was definitely difficult because um you know having one or two creatures in play reliably is already hard enough and you know once you get up to four it's like well geez I don't know um so it was really fun

in terms of coming up I think my favorite thing about making party cards was coming up with the top end of the rewards. We get to write really crazy stuff for having each of the types. So, I guess that would be my answer. Yeah, so one of the things that

is interesting, because I worked very much in the early end, you work on the later end, and we do interconnect. One of the things, for example, is there's always a play designer, usually Dan on my design teams. And the whole reason to have that person there is to look ahead to all the work you guys do and like catch problems before we get there.

Like, you know, and we have check-ins, for example, during vision where we will come and your team will look at stuff and you'll look at all the mechanics, usually you'll play with it. And then we have a meeting where you guys go through and say, yeah, we think we can do this, this we're not sure of. And so I think people sometimes think like there's no interaction between the parts, but there's actually a lot of interaction between the parts. Yeah, there's definitely a lot of check-ins, and we have to have a lot of communication to make sure everybody's on the same page.

And yeah, I think over the years, our cross-team communication has improved constantly. And yeah, it's definitely fun to draft a lot of the early sets, because some of the cards I look at, and i'm like i wouldn't do that um so it's a nice break from uh my normal uh do i make this two or three and then i see this five and i'm like oh that should be uh two so uh it's a lot of fun for sure. Okay, so party, the other thing I found interesting about your answer about party is it's not that you look at something

that works exactly the same. Like your answer wasn't, let's go look at tribal. It was, how does this work in a meta sense? What else works like that so that you can get a general sense of it? And I'm always intrigued, like part of my job is to throw new things into the game.

And then your team is like, okay, how do we make sure that this is fun and fair and that, you know, this is balanced? So in Zendikar Rising, what was the biggest challenge for you guys you think in Zendikar Rising? I do think party was our biggest challenge um like i was saying just like when everybody gets to build their deck with any card they want you know keeping

a lot of creatures around is really difficult um so coming up with uh the creatures and the rewards for party was i think probably the toughest part um one of the things we did to kind of mitigate the difficulty of you know putting a bunch of different creature types in your deck is we would give a lot of the creatures spell effects so that you would be more happy to put them in your deck so that they wouldn't have to take up a spell slot and then another thing we did was i think we printed one rare that had every single party type. So it was kind of, we called it the party glue, the glue of the party.

I think there were three of them, but only one was meant for constructed, right? Right, right, yeah. I think the green rare, the elf, I'm forgetting. Yeah, yeah, Tajuru Paragon, yeah. That was the one elf that we uh that we wanted to position for constructed um funnily enough too that card gets uh cards of its type and it's also an elf so we were also thinking about that card for kaldheim elves as well so it was kind of serving

uh party and elves at the same time. So that's an interesting question. How much, when you're working on a particular set, do you have to think about the sets around it? How much does that influence what you're doing? Oh, it influences us a lot. Like, you know, a lot of the

set teams sometimes get a little siloed, and all of the set leads are different people, and they all like like different cards and sometimes they kind of come with they come up with the same idea of like oh i want to make a hasty four mana green creature right but realistically um for us like we would only want one of those every, you know, three or four sets. So if there's like, if there's two super strong green hasty creatures, two sets in a row, we would say, okay, you know, you should probably move that one to maybe your next set or give it to another set lead because it would be too close together.

And we want to make sure that there's enough variety at rare. Yeah. Something else I just realized, you and I are somewhat unique in r&d in that we actually see every premiere set like i i am on every single team at the beginning of the product and you're you you oversee every team at the end of the product and so correct for most people in r&d there's gaps like they don't work on every set so they work on you know maybe they worked on neon dynasty but they didn't touch Streets of New Compatna. But you and I actually have to look at every single set, at least all the premiere sets.

Yeah, yeah. I guess that is definitely exclusive to only us because you're there for every exploratory team, every vision team. And I'm on the set team for every three months before we lock it down. So, yeah, I guess that's true. That's really interesting. I never thought about it that way. So you share my pain of having to remember every set. I don't even call cards by their name anymore.

I just call them by the effect that I remember. Yeah, it is. The thing that's interesting is magic once upon a time, like back when we had blocks, I mean, we had sets, but it was easier to think of the block as one cohesive thing. And now like, you know, it's just it's it is amazing how many things we have to keep track of. I always. Yeah, especially one of the one of the days I dread every three months. It happens twice every three months. But all of the card names change in the file.

So as we're playing them, you're just like, oh, I play this card. And then I look at it and I'm like, oh, that's a different name. So when we talk about it with everybody in the room as a team, it's just like, okay, do we know the new card name? Okay, let's call it that. Somebody calls it by the old name. It gets kind of confusing sometimes. Yeah, one of my problems is sometimes I'll play stuff near the end of completion, like I'll be in a playtest or something, and I will play a card as I remember it being, not what it is. Oh yeah, that happens to everybody, don't worry. Okay, so I'm going to talk a little bit more about MDSEs, because it was something that I was very excited by,

because it's a very cool concept. But one of the things I knew when it first got presented is there's a lot of challenges to it. And so I want to talk a little bit about something brand new. So MDS, I mean, we had double-faced cards, obviously, before it, but transforming double-faced cards are really a different animal than modal double-faced cards.

They really, I mean, from a play design standpoint, they're very different things in how they function. For sure. So when we introduced it, we were saying to you guys, okay, here's a brand new thing. You really haven't done this before. So how did you approach MDFCs? So I guess I'll start with the Pathway Lands.

Okay. So it's pretty... Let's explain to the audience. The Pathway Lands are the ones in which they're dual lands. They're, you know, green on one side red on the other side and so you can choose which to play it but once you choose it that's what it is yeah it's um it's very rare that we test a totally new dual land cycle just because they're very difficult to come up with um but my favorite thing about the Pathways is just, like, I think they're just perfect.

Like, out of the gates. Like, I love the choice. I love the exact power level they're at. And I think totally it was an awesome home run. And we didn't change a single thing about them. So, it's interesting. Early on, when I first pitched them to Aaron, it was one of the very first things we ever came up with.

We were making MDFCs in the very beginning. We're like, oh, the lands, oh, dual lands. It was one of the first things we came up with. And then there was a big conversation of, could they come and play untapped? That was a giant conversation. Because we try not to make better than basic lands. It was sort of like, is this just strictly better than a forest,

since you can make it a forest or you can make it, you know? And we talked a lot about like, well, what if they don't have the basic land type? Like there's a lot of discussions. And it's funny, like by the time it got to you, like we'd hash all those discussions out. But I just remember a lot of them like, you know, does it have to come like a tap?

Not, could it have a basic land or not? And I think we finally settled on the basic land means something. And then that was enough to let us get away with coming completely undapped yeah yeah um and yeah for the for the other uh mdfc lands uh i really enjoyed um developing a lot of those because it definitely allowed us to add more um i would say niche or narrow effects that you wouldn't put in your deck because it's on the back of a land so like the cost of playing something more narrow isn't as high because you can't just put it um onto the battlefield as a land so for play design it really opened us up to put more unique effects onto cards

instead of just, you know, kind of like the normal, just generic playable stuff we have to do. So it was really cool to kind of like think about, you know, what wouldn't players play in their everyday decks and staple that onto the lands. So that was a fun experience. Yeah, I talked earlier of how the increment of mana causes problems at times. And you're hitting a very interesting things that cost less than a mana, like things

that aren't worth a mana, and it's funny, there's a lot of innovations, like I just, I wrote a whole article about charms, and like charms came about in the first place, because they're like, what do we do with all these effects that are not worth a mana? Well, what if three of them are on a card? Is that worth it? You know, so it's fun. I always get a big kick out of seeing like what we mana. Like, well, what if three of them are on a card? Is that worth it? You know?

So it's fun. I always, I get a big kick out of seeing, like, what we can do with, okay, I have the freedom now to not worry about being a full mana. What effects can I make? I enjoy that a lot in the Zendikar, you know, the way that lands were made. Yeah, yeah. It's definitely, it's really cool when you get more of that freedom in terms of, you know, choosing effects that you know you normally wouldn't put in your deck or aren't aren't worth that mana cost so um it was definitely a fun

puzzle to try and solve okay now we're the common so the common lands come and play tapped and they have some simple effect for less than one man on the other side um and then the rare lands we talked about where they come and play, or the mythic lands, they come and play, you pay three life, and they have more powerful effects on the other side. Which were harder to make, the commons or the mythics? Definitely the mythics. It's a lot harder to gauge.

Well, like, we have to assume, we started with the assumption that people would play as many of these as possible um because the opportunity cost is lower um so with that in mind we had to essentially come up with effects that look very splashy but uh don't actually have a ton of impact. So, for example, the Amarius Call land that I talked about, which taps for white on one side, and you can pay three life to have it come and untap, and the other side is four triple white,

create four quadruple white, sorry, make two 4-4 angels. Your creature, your non-angels, get indestructible until end of turn um so we had to come up with things that looked mythic but didn't actually have a ton of impact in terms of the game so that last line of text which is like your non-angels get indestructible is that ad to like give it that extra boost while not actually having the punch yeah and that's a very interesting thing of how you want things to have a certain feel that extra boost while not actually having the punch. Yeah.

And that's a very interesting thing of how you want things to have a certain feel, but yet be a certain power. And there always is a big, there's a big differential between how powerful things actually are and how they're perceived to be. And I know that's something you guys play around with a lot. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. That's the perception versus reality argument is uh

it's something that we have to deal with every day um and you know baseline is it's difficult like um we always want our cards to feel rare like you know but sometimes they might feel more uncommon. Like, I think a good example is, let's just say, a 4-mana 7-7, right? Like, that's kind of rare, I guess. It's rare on size, but it doesn't have that, you know, pizzazz to it, other than it's just big. But let's say I had a 4-mana 6-6 with, like, can't be countered, damage can't be prevented, when it goes to your graveyard, put it on the bottom of your library, right?

Like, all of those lines read cool, but don't have that much of an effect on the game. So the 4-mana 6-6 with all that looks more appealing, but the 7-7 is actually way stronger. The four mana six six with all that looks more appealing, but the seven seven is actually way stronger. So there's a lot of juggling between like what actually looks cool and what actually is powerful. So, OK, so we talked. I want to talk a little bit about landfall. So that's an example of oftentimes, especially when we do returns, we bring back mechanics. So what are the challenges of reusing a mechanic, a mechanic that you've already used before? Yeah, I think one of the main dangers we try to stay away from is just basically copy-pasting what it did previously.

So one of the things we tried to really avoid with Landfall and Zendikar Rising was that it was all about aggression. Because when people think back to the old Zendikar, they think of Landfall and Zendikar Rising was that it was all about aggression. Because when people think back to the old Zendikar, they think of Landfall, they think of plus two, plus two, they think of, you know, winning the game super fast. So what we tried to do is, you know, have some of that in green and red. But with our other Landfall cards, we tried to vary up the effects more. So it still felt like something that you were used to but it had a different spin on it yeah another challenge of bringing back mechanics is often

we messed up with something before we made a card that we probably shouldn't have made but when people think of the mechanic they think of probably the most powerful card that had that mechanic and we can't often bring that back we We can't repeat that necessarily. And how do you, how do you deal with that? Um, that's an interesting question because I think what, one of the things we've been trying to do, um, is kind of skirt the line and like give you a taste of what that old card was like, but not actually, um, you know, be as overbearing as that previously was.

So again, that's kind of the perception reality thing. We want you to feel like you're doing the bad thing again, but in reality, it's not actually that bad. So a taste without being quite, yeah, that's funny. That's interesting. Yeah. Okay, so I can see my desk here, so I'm not too far from work.

Okay. So my last question for you is, of all the stuff you did in Zendikar Rising, what are you, from a play design standpoint, the most proud of? Oh, this is an easy one. at the end, nearing the end of every set, there's a thing called the contingency art wave, where we get to ask for a new art piece a lot later than we would. Basically, we have to rush one out the door. So in play design, we were like, oh, we really want a creature

that can exile another creature until it leaves the battlefield. So fiend hunter or banisher priest. And we wanted it to also lose abilities um which is you know kind of difficult so the idea that we came up with was based on the token available that we had in the set which was from one of the inscriptions that made an xx so basically what we did is we merged the XX token into the white creature that could exile something, and then

we got the card Skyclave Apparition, which happened to be a multi-format all-star, and we made it kind of like at the last second. And I thought that was really sweet. So Skyclave Apparition is a one white white

two two core spirit when it enters the battlefield exile target non-land non-token permanent you don't control with mana value four or less when it leaves the battlefield it's that exiled cards owner creates an xx where x is the mana value of the exiled card so it was basically the last card we made the last card out the door the last art we made and it turned out to be super popular so uh that would be my answer for most proud moment of zendikar rising yeah one of the things that's also really interesting um is at the end of the process so much is sort of it's already already in cement like already hardened and that it's like right you had to use, and that it's, like, you had to use

token art that already existed. You had to, and a lot of the interesting things to me is the problem-solving where, like, on my end, when I have to solve a problem, hey, carte blanche, no one's done anything yet. I can make sweeping changes, but when you guys make a change, it's like, well, here's the limitations

we have to do, and some of my favorite stories are back in the day when I did more development. These days I do a lot more just vision. But I remember us having to fix a card, but it was locked in the collector number. So we had to name it and we had to redesign it, but here's the art and the name had to be in this little window.

And something that's always fun when you can pull that off. Yeah, it's definitely the most satisfying when you find that perfect solve and it's, uh, it's because it's from all these Frankenstein parts that you had access to. So yeah, totally agree. So anyway, uh, I want to thank you for joining us. It's been a lot of fun. And like I said, the, um, I hope the audience, one of the things I really want to sort of,

one of the reasons I'm excited to have you on today is um i if you listen to my podcast you hear me talk all the time about sort of the idea making the you know the formation of things and none of that would matter none of that like without the team downstream that makes it a reality that turns it that play test is it that balances it You know, I don't think I feel sometimes the audience doesn't realize how much work that is and how much of what they enjoy comes from all that work. And so I just wanted to thank

you in that you make my sets look good, so I'm very happy. Well, hey, thank you. I mean, I definitely couldn't come up with some of the stuff that you come up with, so I think it's a good marriage of our talents. So anyway, with that, thank you very much. And guys, I can see my desk.

So we all know what that means. It means it's the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. So thank you for joining us, Andrew. Thanks a lot for being here. No problem. And for all you, I will see you next time. Bye-bye.