Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #928: Streets of New Capenna Design

Episode Date: April 30, 2022

In this podcast, I talk about designing Streets of New Capenna.

I'm pulling my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay guys, today I'm telling the story of the design of Streets of New Capenna. Okay, so to understand this story we have to go back a ways. So one of the things that we do is we always plot ahead where we think we're going. is we always plot ahead where we think we're going, and the farther ahead we plot, the fuzzier it is, the more we don't quite know what it is. And there's a lot of sort of conjecturing where we think this will be what it is, and as we get closer, basically as we get closer,

we get a better idea of what something is. Normally, when we first come up with a concept of a world, we'll make what we call an art plate, which is just a picture that sort of captures the sense of the world, that shows something that, like, an art that would be in the set, but also sort of captures the tone, and, you know, does a good job of saying, you know, imagine this kind of world. And so, anyway, the Streets of New Accompany starts with an idea that I think the creative team had that was originally called Demon Mobster World. And the idea was that there

was like a war between demons and angels and it had a bit of a mobster vibe to it, but it was very vague. What that meant, how that played out, none of that was figured out yet. It was just kind of, here's a general idea of a gist of something we think might be interesting. And so I think Bill Rose was doing a presentation where he was just talking about the future and he had some slides and he was using the art plates because that's the only image we had from these worlds. And he showed Demon Mobster World. And Mark Gottlieb, in the meeting, got inspired and on his phone wrote a letter to Ken Troop. So Ken sort of oversees tabletop magic.

He wrote a letter and said, I know what this can be. And the interesting thing, I posted the letter in my column on this. The letter from Mark, like, really sort of saw everything. I think the idea we had had when we first pitched the idea was maybe this would be multicolored. You know, we weren't quite sure how it would work. And so what Mark said is, okay, here's my idea. Imagine it's a three-colored, an arc, you know, what Shards of Alara was, an ally, sorry, a color and two allies. Imagine it was an arc, three-color world, but faction-based, and each of the factions represented a different trope of crime.

And so Mark wrote this email and pitched this whole idea, and it really, like Mark says, it came to him like all at once. He just sort of had the idea as a whole idea. And basically, we liked it. I mean, everybody sort of like it. Mark pitched this idea and everybody was on board. So when it was time to sort of for me to put together the vision design team, I wanted Mark to lead it.

It was Mark's vision. Like it literally was Mark's vision. I wanted Mark to lead the team. And so what happened was I was on the lead the team. And so what happened was I was on the team with him. I don't remember the whole team, but usually when I'm not leading a team, I'm always on the team

just to sort of guide and help. The other thing is I'm always aware of all the sets around it and not everybody works in every set. So another big part of my job is just to make sure that the things we're doing are blending with the things around it

and stuff like that. Anyway, so Mark and I talked. One of the things was we decided this was a new world. You know, it was a brand new world. It wasn't, I mean, we had one point talked about do we want to go back to Alara? And maybe one day we will go back to Alara. maybe one day we will go back to Alara. I do want to stress that just because we do a

faction world based on the same color combinations doesn't mean it's remotely the same. Much like Strixhaven did enemy colors. Ravnica did enemy 2 color. But Strixhaven and Ravnica are very different. The same

was true here. Alara was all about imagine a world in which a color had its allies and no enemies if white had a world where its enemies were gone what kind of world would white craft

likewise for blue, for black, for red, for green so Alara really was playing around the space of things missing and what does that mean what does a world look like where the enemies are gone Shards of Alara really was playing around the space of things missing and what does that mean? What does the world look like where the enemies are gone? Shards of Alara, not Shards of Alara, Streets of New Capenna was always about this idea of using crime tropes as a means to generate. And in the email that Mark first wrote, he really talks about the different kind of things we can do. So one of the things, let me get into real quick, is resonance.

One of the things that's become more and more important, we realize over time, is how impactful it is when the sets we do mean something to the players, that there's something about it that the players can relate to. Maybe it's drawing from real world inspiration. Maybe it's from a real life event. Maybe it's from something you'll see in pop culture there's something about it that the audience goes oh

I see and recognize that and that has proven very powerful and what Mark sort of said is look crime is all, there's lots and lots of of pop culture stories about crime so much so that there's a lot of different kinds of stories that get told.

And Mark said, I think there's enough space in the crime genre that we can sort of mine five sub-genres of it. Now, let me bring up another point. So one of the things that we talk about behind the scenes is top-down and bottom-up. So top-down talks about sort of building your structure based on the flavor, and bottom-up means building your structure based on the mechanics. Now this is an interesting one because it's a three-color faction set,

but it very much was inspired by the crime genre. So this is a bottom-up set, and the reason for that is, in order to make a three-color faction set work, it's very structured. In fact, when we started putting this together, one of the big questions was how we wanted to structure it. And what we decided was, I made Constance, I did the original design for Constance Tarkir and then Eric Lauer was the developer on it.

And Eric Lauer really did a very extensive work in figuring out how to make a three-color set function. Now, we had done three colors before in Shards of Alara, but for anyone who played Shards of Alara, there were a lot of things about that. I mean, it was the first, you know, whole block about three-color play.

But there was a lot, like, one of the things about any time we do something early, there's growing pains, there's a learning curve. And that, I mean, Shards of Alara was innovative for its day. It was the first time we'd ever done that. But there were a lot of mistakes made along the way because we just hadn't done it before. One of the biggest examples is we really didn't have the color support.

Like, it was one of the biggest problems in playing Shards of Lara block was it was very easy to get in trouble with your mana because we didn't do a good job of providing you with proper mana to support three-color play. And that block also eventually pushes you into five-color play. We really didn't support that. Anyway, Eric really sort of refined and figured out how to make a three-color set work. Another big part that Eric

sort of brought to the table was, hey, whenever we make a set, we have five primary draft strategies and five secondary draft strategies. And what Eric said is, look, the primary are going to be your three colors. That's what we're here for. But the secondary want to be two color. And in wedge world, which is what Shards of Tarkir was, you wanted the enemy colors. And in an Arc World, you want ally colors. The reason for that is every two different factions in an Arc set have ally colors. Because they're all in a row, if you will. So if white, blue, black is a, you know, a faction and blue, black, red is a faction,

well, blue, black is playable in both, you know, in this particular set, it's playable in both the Obscura and the Maestros. So the idea is that you want to use the secondary two-color strategy. Once again, conscious arc here was wedge, and this is arc, so you have to flop the two colors. But in this set, it's like, okay, we're going to secondarily build in the ally colors, and that way you can draft ally colors, and then later in the draft,

you either could stay in ally colors, or you could opt into one of two different factions, families as we call them. Okay, so the idea really early on was, look, Concert Turk here did a very good job of figuring this out. Let's use that as our base model. So from very early on, and this is not something we do all the time, we realized that we had a structure from a different world

that made sense here. Now, it had to be adapted. When I say we start, that doesn't mean it's exactly the same. Changes are made along the way. But it was our jumping off point. I always talk about, like, set skeletons. The set skeleton in the beginning of Streets of New Campana was with Concert Arc here as the model for the set skeleton.

And there are some things that change, but primarily, mostly, the set that Streets of New Capenna structurally represents is Concertarquier. Now, even though the structure was built mechanically, the actual design of the factions and their keyword and how they played was much more built on top-down. So it is structurally a bottoms-up set, but there are plenty of top-down elements of it. You know, a lot of the way we crafted the factions had a lot to do with our flavor. Okay, so let me go through the five factions and I'll talk about how each of them got put together. So I'm going to go in what we call a Wooburg order based on their center color. So each

faction, normally by the way, the one thing Contra Tarkir did that we don't normally do, normally when we make an arc set we center the color in the color that has the two allies in a wedge set we center in the color that has the two allies. In a wedge set, we center in the color that has the two enemies. There was weird things going on in Conjurer's Dark here where it went from a wedge set to an ally color set. And so we couldn't put it in the enemy color because that was the color that dropped off.

But normally that's how we do it. So for this set, for example, the brokers are green, white, blue. They're white in the center. They're white focused and they are sort of the white centered group. Their primary objectives are very core to white. Okay, so the idea of each of these was we wanted to find crime tropes that we could play around with. And I also want to say when Mark sort of first pitched it off the top of his head, he just pitched the trope that most came to mind.

And one of the things that happens as we sort of make a set is, hey, we have to evaluate and figure out, you know, there is always trope space that plays in places that are not things we want. There are stereotypes. There are things that reinforce things that plays in places that are not things we want. There are stereotypes. There are things that reinforce things that we don't like. And so in anything that we build, we're always very conscious of saying,

where, you know, how does this impact? Like, this doesn't exist in a vacuum. So we really want to think about how it impacts the people that are playing the game. doesn't exist in a vacuum. So we really want to think about how it impacts the people that are playing the game. So the brokers started, I think, originally when he got his first pitch was the idea of sort of corrupt cops. That's a whole Trump space. We ended up shifting a little bit, just the nature of the world and where things were at. We decided to do a corrupt law firm instead of corrupt cops. I think the big inspiration from this was

Warfarm and Heart, which is the, there's a show called Angel, which is a spin-off of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And there's this evil law firm. There are other references to pull from,

but that was one of our inspirations. But anyway, the idea is, look, white is all about structure and order. Well, if white's going to commit crimes, it's going to do that through structure and order. So, white, you know, it makes sense that in this world, white abuses the law. That it abuses, the way it does its crime is through abuse of structure.

It's through its mastery of structure is how it commits its crime. Now, this faction, the family, its mechanic was shield counters. I believe that was the very first mechanic we tried for them. I think Mark Gottlieb actually tried shield counters before. I think he tried them in Adventures in the Forgotten Realm,

the D&D set. But for different reasons, they didn't make sense there. But Mark had kept it in his mind. I think the idea, we've made a bunch of mechanics that sort of protect creatures. We made totem armor, which was like equipment that when, instead of the creature dying, the totem armor dies. So we played around in space. And even like regeneration regeneration regeneration used to

put sort of a regeneration shield if you will original regeneration way back in the beginning of the game when it died you could pay mana to regenerate it then but when 6th edition rules came out you kind of had to proactively do it rather than reactively do it

and so it ended up making the system now I don't think I didn't make shield Now, I don't think... I didn't make Shield Counter, so I don't know whether or not Regeneration... I think Gottlieb was thinking sort of in space of... The thing I think inspired him, is my guess, is we made a mechanic called Persist, and a different one

called Undying. And the way those mechanics worked is, when the creature would die, it came back, and it then would get a minus one, minus one counter with persist or a plus one, plus one counter with undying. And then the next time it died, it would just die. And I think, Mark, the idea of, oh, it dies, you save it once from dying. I think Mark was inspired. But what if we didn't have to have plus one, plus one or minus one, minus one counters?

What if you proactively put the counter on it? And then it would allow you to do stuff like you get more than one counter, so you can protect you multiple times. Anyway, I think the idea that white, you know, the white crime family was more about sort of protecting you from people harming you, that there's a protective element to it, I think Mark liked. So anyway, Mark picked shields. And in the very first meeting of our vision design, Mark made a document that he handed

out. And in it, he made pitches for each of the five mechanics. Not that they were necessarily what we were going to do, but it was ideas that Mark had had. Actually, that might have been the beginning. In fact, I said vision. That might have been the beginning of exploratory that he handed that out. Because Mark had really come full formed with this idea.

Anyway, shield counters stuck around. There was some question about, you know, does that plus one, plus one counters? It will be confusing when you see a creature with a counter where you know what it is. And eventually we decided that the way they play is a little bit different, and so we ended up leaving them. One of the ongoing debates in general is how many counters should there be?

We like having one dominant counter so you can look at the board, especially in limited, and just know what's going on. But here's us playing around a little bit. The other big thing is we wanted to make sure that it was useful without being too oppressive. Like a lot of times it takes a lot to kill a creature, so the idea that I have to kill it twice,

we wanted to make sure that there was some balance there. But we played with it, and like I said, I'll be honest, I was a little skeptical with them early on. I was worried they might be a little bit too oppressive in how they played, but they ended up playing pretty well and it was a lot of fun. We did toy around with having more shield counters. I think there were some cards early on that were like shield three. In the end, I think there's like one or two that are shield two

and most of them are just a single shield counter. Okay, next up, the Obscura. White, blue, black. So this is the blue centered. So they is the blue-centered. So they're all about information. They're all about... The idea is they're crimes, but the thing they value most is information, and they're sort of information brokers. That the thing they value most, and the thing they'll steal,

the thing that they is... They understand the power of knowledge, because blue's all about knowledge. So if blue's going to commit crime, and it's all about knowledge, it's going to do it through knowledge and using knowledge. So the mechanic for, I think when early on, we liked the idea that something that had to do with looting or something that had to do with card flow because the Obscura is all about information, while it being some sort of

what we call a smoothing mechanic. What that means is a smoothing mechanic helps you get the cards you need to draw when you need to draw them. So it's not that it's drawing you extra cards, it's improving the quality of your draw. Now, you can improve the quality of your draw

through card drawing. So sometimes we'll do deck smoothing by card advantage, but card utility can also get you deck smoothing, where it's not that I'm drawing more cards, but I'm more selective in what I draw. So anyway, I think the inspiration for this mechanic, there's a mechanic called Explore that was an original... where was it? Oh, sorry, sorry, it was an original... Where was it? Oh, sorry, sorry.

It was in Ixalan. It was in Ixalan. So Explore says when you... This creature... Creatures Explore. When they enter the battlefield, you look at the top card of your library. If it's a land, it goes in your hand. If not, you discard it

and you get a plus one, plus one counter. So that's a little more green-centric. This is blue-centric because it's very land-oriented. So the idea we came up with is, okay, what if it had looting? So you drew a card and discarded a card, but then we cared about what you discarded. And so it kind of did the opposite of what we did with Explore, which is if you discard a land, you don't get the bonus.

But if you discard a non-land, you get a plus one, plus one counter. The idea being that when you're looting, usually throwing away land is I don't need it anymore. I have enough land, so there's not a lot of value. Or throwing away a spell is something I could use later. So it's a bigger ask to throw away a non-land. So that's why we played around with that. Okay, next.

Blue, black, red. The Maestros. So this is the black-centered family. Well, black is all about doing what it takes. About ruthlessness. So they're very centered on murder. This is the Assassin's League. Assassin's Guild.

And they're the ones that will kill for a price or maybe just to accomplish some other task. They're the ones kind of they're the criminals that whatever it takes, you know, whatever they need to do, they'll get their hands dirty. They don't care. And they're more than

happy to use death as a means to get what they want. We tried a bunch of different mechanics for them. The one we ended up with, we originally called Splatter, but it was called Casualty in the set. And the idea was, what if there were spells that if you sacrificed a creature, you got to copy the spell? There's a mechanic called Exploit.

I think it's where we went to first. So Exploit, where was Exploit? Exploit was the blue-black mechanic in, I think, Dragons of Tarkir. It originally was in, might have been in, was it in the middle set? Anyway, it was for sure in Dragons of Tarkir.

The idea is that when this enters the battlefield, it's a creature. When it enters the battlefield, you can sack a creature, and if you do, it generates an effect. So we sort of made a concentrated version of the effect, which is, when you play the spell, so it goes on spells, not creatures. When you play a spell, if you sacrifice a creature, you get a copy of the spell. And I think originally, the mechanic just lets you sacrifice any creature, but what they found in set design was it rewarded a little too much playing tokens.

And so they put a number on it. So it was Casualty 1, 2, or 3, I believe. And what that means is you have to have that power or higher in order to sacrifice it. So a Casualty 3 spell meant, hey, I'm a big spell, I'm splashy, but you need to have a larger creature to sacrifice. spell meant, hey, I'm a big spell, I'm splashy, but you need to have a larger creature to sacrifice. If we didn't do that, it meant that all of the spells had to be in the exact same band of power, and by changing the number, it allowed there to be different bands of power. So now you can have a very powerful effect, but oh, it's casually three, not casually one or casually two.

And the other thing that we really liked with the maestros is the idea that they're willing to use whatever resource they have to use the mechanic is about sacrifice but a lot of the building of it also inherently they'll do the things they need to do to win and it definitely has a little more of a vicious feel to it the next family is the red-centered family.

That is the Riveteers. So that is black, red, green. So these guys, I think when we started, Gottlieb's first pitch was the idea of the people sort of of the street, of the average Joe.

And I think early on, we were looking at maybe something inspired more like gangs and stuff, and then realized was leading to some stuff we didn't like. And so we ended up making the Riveteers are the people that build the city. They're the people that construct it. And so they're the craftsmen and the workmen. And they're definitely the ones that are sort of you know, they have sort of a, they have sort of a...

They're red, so they follow their emotions, and they, you know, they're passionate. And they're the ones that really sort of, you know, they have this sort of, this code they live by, and, you know, they're willing to use their fists when it comes to it, and... While the maestros are clearly assassins

the riveters are more like, you know, they're willing to get protection or they're willing to sort of use their muscle to influence people and so they're a little bit more about aggression as an influence rather than straight up murder like the maestros

we had tried a bunch of different mechanics for them. Oh, I was going to say Morbid, but I think Morbid was the mechanic we first tried for the Maestros. I know we tried a couple different things for the Riveteers. One of the early mechanics we tried was Dash, which is... Dash is also from Dragons of Tarkir,

and they're creatures that have a different cost, and if you play them for that cost, they have haste, and then end of turn they return to your hand. But the play pattern didn't quite play nicely. One of the things about doing a faction set is you really want, you need the factions to play nicely

with the factions next to them, and Dash wasn't quite working, but we figured out we could tweak it a little bit. And so the idea was instead of it going back to your hand, at end of turn, you sacrifice it and you get to draw a card. So the idea is if I use this ability, I get to attack with it right away, but I'm only going to use it for that turn. But then I draw a card to make up for the, I don't have card disadvantage. And we codenamed this when we first made it. Instead of Dash, we called it Bash. It's called Blitz in the final product.

But it did a nice job of sort of, you know, in the heat of the moment, you can sort of do things. And we felt it captured the impulsiveness of the red family. Finally, we have the green family, which is the Cabaretty, which is red, green, white. So green-centric.

They're very much about tradition. So one of the things to remember about green is a lot of times we think about green being very nature-oriented, which it normally is. But when we get into a civilization, one of the aspects that green does is the idea of caring about the old ways, caring about the past and the way it's always been. Now, a lot of times that is the natural way for green. But when we're playing

in the city, we decided that green could play up, look, this is a city that has old, old traditions, and there's a lot of very old aspects to the city, and green represents that old way. The trope space we started when, we started a little more like in godfather space, but then, again, like I said, there were a lot of things in the crime tropes that were sort of, ended up being not quite what we wanted, a little bit inappropriate, and so we shifted a little bit. And so these definitely are the people that are all about tradition tradition and about the way things are and they have like an ancient code they live by.

You know, it has a lot of the aesthetic of some of the way the Godfather functions, but separated from some other aspects. And in this city, they're in charge of kind of a nightlife and entertainment. One of the ideas we had early on that goes really way back to the initial idea that the creative team had is having this kind of 20s, Roaring 20s aesthetic, a little bit of art deco. And that carried through. And so a lot of that, the idea of the Roaring 20s, there's a lot of wanting to be the center of entertainment really played into that aesthetic. And so we gave the cabaret that feel.

So one of the things that... So the cabaret, from very early on, I had pitched what we had... I'm using the wrong word there. What we... colloquially? What we casually called Creature Fall. In fact, I... So we had done Landfall in Zendikar,

and we really realized just how powerful it was. Like, hey, I'm going to play Land. Let me reward you for doing that. And then when we were trying to find the best enchantment mechanic in Theros, in Journey into Nyx, we ended up with Constellation, which basically is enchantment fall.

And the funny thing is we had done enchantment fall earlier. It was a Selesnya mechanic originally in Return to Ravnica, but it didn't fit in around it. You'll see a theme here. So I tried to use Creature Fall... Oh, no, it wasn't the Selesnya mechanic, sorry. It was the Azorius mechanic in Return to Ravnica. But in Guilds of Ravnica,

I tried to use Creature Fall as the Selesnya mechanic, because Selesnya's all about the power of numbers and stuff. And so caring about creatures made a lot of sense. It ended up being, ironically, too synergistic. The problem that sometimes happens is red and green and green and white just by nature are very synergistic. And it was a little bit too synergistic. And so Creature Fall ended up getting killed, not because it didn't work, but it worked a little too well. So anyway, I pitched Creature Fall as the cabaretting mechanic.

We tried it. It played well. But Mark thought maybe it was a little bit too easy. So we tried a diversion where it triggered off the second creature entering the battlefield. But that proved to be a little bit too hard to do. And it was really punishing late game. And really what it ended up doing was it pushed too much toward tokens. Because the easiest way late in the game to make two creatures is to make multiple tokens. And so it ended up sort of warping a little bit.

So we ended up going back to the original version of it. And I'm happy. Like I said, I like Blink Fall. I'm sure one day we'll do Artifact Fall. I'm not sure Planeswalker Fall. I guess you need to we'll do Artifact Fall. I'm not sure. Planeswalker Fall. I guess you need to set like a War of the Spark to make that work. But anyway, we liked a lot that we could make that work. Okay, really quickly, let me run through the ally color combinations.

Okay, so the Brokers and the Obscura. So green, white, blue, and white, blue, black. The Brokers use shield counters. The Obscura had Kn white, blue, and white, blue, black. The brokers used shield counters. The obscura had connive, which created plus one, plus one counters. So for the synergy for that ally combination, we cared about counters. Then the obscura and the maestros,

so blue, black, the overlaps, white, blue, black, and blue, black, red, connive and casualty. I think the idea there... What did we do to overlap that? Oh, I think... Oh, graveyard, graveyard, right. Because connive discards cards to the graveyard,

and casualty sacrifices creatures to the graveyard. So we ended up with a theme that cared about having different mana values in your graveyard. I think most of them are five, but I think there's some that might vary there. But the idea is, I care about the quality of my graveyard because both mechanics are putting things into my graveyard. I think most of them are five, but I think there's some that might vary there. But the idea is, I care about the quality of my graveyard, because both mechanics are putting things into my graveyard.

The black-red overlap, so the maesters and the riveteers, blue-black-red and black-red-green, had a sacrifice theme, because casualties sacrifice creatures to copy things, blitz the creatures sacrifice themselves at the end of turn when you blitz them, and so it had a theme. And and Black-Red, it's a common

reoccurrence for Black-Red sacrifice themes, but it worked very nicely with its mechanics so Black-Red plays in the sacrifice. Red-Green so the Riveteers and the Cabaretti, Black-Red-Green and Red-Green-White there was a little bit of overlap in caring about creatures Blitz lets you play creatures a little cheaper than normal. Alliance gives you creatures that didn't quite play out like we liked. So what red green ended up doing was had a little theme of treasure. And then the idea was it's a red green base, but it lets you splash other colors in it. So red-green kind of is the one color combination

that lets you play all five colors in some circumstances. It's letting you splash the other colors. But that ended up being our red-green archetype. And finally, for green-white, which is the overlap of the cabaret and the brokers, I think that's where we played around with citizens. Citizens were a green and white token. And so we like having some tribal. We like the idea this was a city set. So what really emphasizes a city. Citizens

emphasize a city. And so we made that the theme. The idea essentially is that the brokers were good at generating tokens and the cabaret were good at being rewarded for having creatures enter the battlefield. And also, I guess the cabaret also are good at making tokens. Everybody's good at making tokens

and there's lots of rewards for having tokens. The one final thing, I'm at work so let me quickly finish this up. The one final thing, I'm at work, so let me quickly finish this up. The one other mechanic, or two other mechanics ended up on the set. One was, we decided to make the

ally, the arc versions of the Triomes, the tap lands, and that required us having cycling. We decided to make cycling deciduous, meaning we just decided that any set can now have cycling, so only those five cards have cycling in the set. The final thing, and this is a real quick version

because I'm finishing up here. Hideaway started not at all as Hideaway. We had a completely different mechanic. It was a cycle of rares that were crimes that was playing in a space that we keep trying to do that one day we'll figure out how to do, where you had to do certain crimes. You had certain things you had to commit, and if you did those game actions, then you got a reward. We played around with them. I know they went to Play Design. They didn't quite

end up working out, and so they shifted over to Hideaway. I know Hideaway, we tweaked a little bit how Hideaway worked, so it worked here, but Hideaway had a lot of nice flavor matching sort of crimes. And so that's how Hideaway ended up in the set. Anyway, guys, I'm now at work. I hope you enjoyed hearing about Streets of New Campana. It really came together great. And I think Gottlieb's vision really came to be an awesome set.

So I hope you guys enjoyed the story. But I'm at work, 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. I'll see you guys next time. Bye-bye.