Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #929: Streets of New Capenna with Jules Robins

Episode Date: May 7, 2022

I sit down with Jules Robins, lead set designer of Streets of New Capenna, to talk about the design of the set.

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. Okay, I'm here with Jules Robbins to talk all about the design of Streets of New Capenna. Hey, Jules. Hey, thanks for having me. Okay, so you led the set design. So Mark Gottlieb led the vision and, and, uh, he, he led a little later than most vision designers lead. He, he sort of led the beginning, I guess, part of set design, um, how he normally would divide it. Uh, but then it got handed over to you.

So we're going to talk all about, uh, from you getting the product to it coming out. So, um, for starters, I think most of the mechanics, well, the five keyword mechanics, the guild, not guild, but the family mechanics, mostly were what, I mean, you guys tweaked them some, but they were, what Gottlieb handed over was the five mechanics that ended up in the set. Yeah, they were pretty close.

Four of them were almost exactly the same uh the cabaret mechanic alliance was actually the backup handed over from that we they started there and then uh gone to a version that gave your cards bonuses if two or more creatures had entered the battlefield this turn. And we ended up moving back because that was too insular. It didn't play easily in decks of the

neighboring families. Yeah, it's funny. So that mechanic called Alliance in the printer mechanic, but we called it Creature Fall all during design. I've been trying to get a mechanic in for a while, so I think Gottlieb's issue was he felt

it was just too easy. Like, you play creatures all the time, and the argument I kept having with him is like, Landfall! You play land all the time! Like, that's, you know, we could, you know, one of the things is, we can change the effect based on how easy it is, but, you know,

I mean, I guess you can play multiple creatures a turn a little bit easier than you can play multiple lands a turn, but traditionally speaking, other than late game or token making, I guess, most of the time you're making one creature a turn, no more than one creature a turn. It certainly has a lot more skewing potential than Dway Landfall does for the decks that are really committed to doing it I think we tried to have this in Guilds of Ravnica It was a Celestia mechanic in Guilds of Ravnica

It's funny because ever since Landfall happened I've just been on this crusade of like let's do all the falls So it's funny because ever since Landfall happened, I've just been on this crusade of like, let's do all the falls. And little by little, they're getting in. Artifact Fall and I guess technically Planeswalker Fall. That one might never see the light of day.

Okay, so there were a few other changes. I just want to walk through the mechanics and talk about the changes. So Alliance obviously got turned over as being when the second creature gets played, although we had had the original version. So it wasn't that you weren't aware it existed or you could do it. It was more like you were trying out something to see if you could make it work. I think Gottwig was even like, here's the one in the file.

We think it's less of a sure thing, but try it out. Can move back to Alliance if need be. And there was a lot of fun gameplay to the second feature thing. We ended up keeping it on a cycle of, or cycle of uncommon, one in each of the cabaretting colors.

Yeah, so we would call it a faction cycle, where it one in each of the cabaretting colors. Yes. We would call it faction cycle, where each member of the color in the faction gets one. So there are many kinds of cycles. People always think of cycles as only being five. But there actually are cycles in all sorts of combinations. Okay, so let's go. I'm going to go in sort of a Wooburg order here. Okay, so shield counters. Did anything change on shield counters?

Like, obviously, shield counters got handed over, but what did you do with shield counters? Yeah, we tried a lot of subtle tweaks and variations to this mechanic. I actually don't remember exactly what state it was in when Scott Lee handed it over to me, but very similar. Just on, like, does any amount of damage remove them? We kind of need the damage prevention part so you don't get into weird spots with, like,

your creature takes some damage, and then you take an equipment off it, and now it has lethal damage to proc the shield counter. There was a lot of little finagley rules weirdness around there, but it mostly stayed the same the whole time. The one thing I know, and I'm not sure where this happened, I know you guys experimented with more shield counters, and you sorta, like, I know there was like shield 3 in the file at some point so right yeah we did end up with one card that

comes with multiple shield counters uh sanctuary warden but that's that's right right but yeah uh mostly found was like the mechanic just played too much the same as indestructible with high shield counter numbers. Like, it's got this really interesting dynamic where your opponent can try to make, like, bad trades, spending their small burn spell or, like, throwing away attackers against your creatures to maybe be able to interact with stuff. And that play just evaporated once we got up to high numbers of shield counters. Yeah, it's interesting that some mechanics, and shield's a really good example of this,

how the volume matters. Like, you just turn it up too high. Like, it isn't fun because it doesn't get to do the thing that it's trying to do. And you're right. Shield counters are about, hey, the opponent has an answer to it. There's things you can do. It's not undealable. But if you put too many on there,

then it basically, it's just like, well, just don't deal with me. Right. Okay. Next is Knive. Did anything change on Knive? Not after Gottlieb was the lead, but I joined the set design team for a little while while Mark Gottlieb was still leading it before taking it over.

And at one point, all the Knive cards were just an ETB trigger. Everything had, when this enters the battlefield, it Knives. And then I think Cameron Williams had pitched, wouldn't it be cool if we could do this on other timeframes? So we started experimenting with, like, when this creature deals combat damage to your opponent, it connives. And then made, like, Illuminator Virtuoso, that when you target it with a spell, it connives. that when you target it with a spell, it connives,

and that eventually got us to the one real far-off twist on the mechanic, on Raphine, who connives X instead of the default keyword action. Basically, we tried Raphine conn Iving a bunch of individual times and it was just madness and mental overload. Let me tell them what K'nai is, for people that don't memorize all the cards. Raphine is Raphine, Scheming Seer, white, blue, black, so three mana, one of each of the colors,

1, 4, Legendary Creature, Sphinx, Demon, Flying Ward 1, Whenever you attack, target attacking creature K'nai's X, where X is the number of attacking creatures. Right. So we had to come up with this variant so you would draw the cards at once

and then discard cards and get counters because trying to resolve five different Kenai triggers at the same time got into this really weird guessing game about what you were going to draw later. Okay, so

K'naiv didn't change too much other than you used it more than just as an ETB. Okay, Casualty. Casualty I know changed, so let's talk about Casualty. Yeah. So, at the outset, Casualty was you can sacrifice a creature to copy this spell and that wasn't what play design calls naughty enough which is uh it was too hard to

fine-tune the power level on the cards to make things get at the right spot for game balance. Either your one mana card with Casualty was asking just as much of you to get an additional copy as a six mana card with Casualty, and it left a lot of cards without sensible mana costs where they would be reasonable to cast without sacrificing a creature and not game-breaking if you did sacrifice a creature. So we started messing around with parameters we could put on it. We looked at sacrificing N different creatures for your casualty number, and we looked at sacrificing a creature with at least X power or at least N toughness

and we also looked at sacrificing creatures with total combined power up to N and we ended up landing on the version that was asking you for a single creature with at least N power as sort of the overlap balance point between keeping the mechanic as simple as it could be and giving us the room we needed to adjust all the casualty cards. So I believe other than the one card we're going to talk about in a second, it's casually one, two, or three, correct? Yeah. Having a four-powered creature is a really big ask,

and we didn't need a huge amount more knobbiness on the mechanic, just a smidge. So one, two, and three got us everything we needed. Yeah, it's interesting that we had the same problem when we were making vehicles originally, and that original vehicles, just you had to tap a creature, and then we tried a version where you had to tap

X creatures, and what we found in the end was caring about power allowed us to do more of the nuance we wanted, more so, because when you care about, it's just a creature, you don't care about the quantities of the creature, it says play token creatures or tiny creatures you know it just sort of warps the kind of gameplay you have because it so rewards you for having the small thing um and when you care about power it

starts making more creatures relevant in a way that i think just more organic and fun it really taps into magic's core game systems better. We already have to balance stuff around how much total power you can get onto the battlefield, because that's how you take your opponent's life total down. Yeah, it's funny. One of the trends I find in Magic design is

there's something we don't care too much about, and then we start using it, and like, ooh, this is very useful, and we start using it more and more. And I think caring about power has been something that just has gone up over time as we realize more and more how useful it is. Okay, now we're going to talk about the weirdy of the

Casualty cards. So I'm going to read the card first and then you're going to tell me how this happened because when we turned over the file, it was all instants and sorceries. So, okay. So Ob Nixilis, the adversary, one black red, legendary planeswalker Nixilis, the adversary. One black red. Legendary planeswalker, Nixilis. Starting loyalty of three.

Casualty X. The copy isn't legendary and is starting loyalty X. As you cast the spell, you may sacrifice a creature with power X. When you do, copy the spell. The copy becomes a token. Plus one loyalty. Each opponent loses two life unless they discard a card. If you control a demon or devil, you gain two life. Minus two loyalty,

create a 1-1 red devil creature token with when this creature dies, it deals one damage to any target. And minus seven loyalty, target player draws seven cards and loses seven life. Okay, how did this card come to be? Yeah, so a lot of this was

we've been looking for ways to make planeswalkers more unique as we've printed more and more of them, but there's somewhat limited planeswalker design space. really appealing to use is to try to figure out how to integrate set mechanics into planeswalker designs. And, you know, in the story, Obnixilus has this sort of, like, shadowy persona of the adversary that all of the families are worried about, and he kills Lord Xander in a bid to take over Capenna, who runs the maestros of the casualty mechanic.

So the mechanic seemed like it had all this stuff going for it to be a great fit for our Omnixilus planeswalker. And then we tried to figure out how to make that work, given with the, you know, somewhat new technology as of, I believe, Zendikar Rising, of being able to copy permanent spells. So is, so did the, I assume the rules had to change, you know, I mean, when we handed over originally, it just did instants and sorceries, and when you make mechanics that only work in instants and sorceries, uh when you make mechanics that only work in instance

sorceries usually they're a little bit different than things that also work on permanence that there's like there's rules you don't have to worry about because instance sources aren't permanence um so do you any idea i mean it's a just question not a you question but do you know what had to happen to make this work on a planeswalker yeah i mean you can certainly see a little bit of it in the text after the casualty x where the copy isn't legendary and has starting loyalty x on you know we needed to adjust some of the characteristics that the rules would by default give to the yeah permanent just copying it um but yeah i think most of the rules weirdness involves a lot of you know behind the scenes stuff that doesn't affect a lot of the cards we ended up printing they're more like

we got to think ahead to if one day some card can grant casualty to anything now that will be to a much wider subset than just the instance and sorceries and we'll be to a much wider subset than just the Instants and Sorceries, and we'll need to worry about, you know, having other copy effects affecting the thing that comes out, and all the weird stuff you can do to permanence that's harder to do to spells on the staff. Okay, so this, the designer in me, when I saw this card, because I, one of the things that's interesting, it's like, I'll work on sets, but then I go off to work on other sets and, you know, set design happens.

So I saw this later in the process. So my first, when I saw this card, so I'm going to ask you, is, well, if you could do a mix list, that means the rules work with permanents. Why didn't you do other permanents? Yeah, there are a few reasons. Yeah, there are a few reasons. The biggest one is probably just to track if you get a bunch of different kinds but at least your booster pack can have your citizen token and your angel token and your devil token and you can find ones to keep it straight with the coffee tokens unless you put a lot of

effort in and come prepared it's really really, really difficult to keep track of. And we didn't want people showing up to their drafts and making copies of three different creatures and not knowing what to do with them. The other part is, I guess there are two more. One is we really wanted to give the families unique feels and, you know, blue is often the most spell heavy color, but both shield counters and connive need creatures to work. So we really wanted to emphasize the Mace Grace mechanic on instants and sorceries and size the maestros mechanic on instants and sorceries and make sure the set has that pattern the last part is the type of permanent that we're most likely to make a lot of especially for the limited facing part of a magic set are creatures and casualty making more creatures sort of just feeds itself and it becomes insular. You get a bunch of extra

stinky creature tokens off your copied casualty creatures and then you can just sap those to future casualty cards. Okay. Okay, let's move on to the final of the family mechanics. Blitz!

So, um... So, Blitz! So, um... So, Blitz... Actually, I realized that. We were talking about these mechanics and not saying at all what they do. Blitz is if you cast a spell for its Blitz cost, it gains haste, and when this creature dies, draw a card.

Sacrifice the beginning of the next end step. So this was... In the design, we called this Bash because it was our Dash tweak. So, did this change much at all? Yeah, it got a very slight rules tweak on, I think, originally the sacrifice me at the end step was spliced text onto the creature as opposed to, so like, if you made it lose all abilities,

it wouldn't get sacrificed. Okay. But it doesn't change a lot very frequently. So this mostly just stuck from the original file. Okay, so now we're going to tell a story that I told a little bit. I did a podcast talking about design, but

I think I told like the one minute version of the story so we can delve a little deeper. So there's one other mechanic. I mean, there's cycling. Cycling's not deciduous. There's a cycle of cycling land, obviously. But as far as another mechanic that's not a deciduous mechanic,

we did have, there's a sixth mechanic. How did that mechanic get in the file? So we're talking about hideaway. Real quickly, let me read the text to Hideaway. Hideaway says, When this enchantment, or whatever, enters the battlefield, look at the top five cards of your library,

exile one face down, then put the rest on the bottom in a random order. Okay, so how did Hideaway get here? So Hideaway was definitely not where we started. We knew we wanted some rare cycle that really captured the essence of like you being in the midst of committing crimes rather than just like watching it happen with your creatures in the battlefield. And we tried a bunch of different executions on this with really complicated cards,

trying to get you to go through various steps of setting up your heist to commit crimes. And I still hope one day we'll be able to figure out how to get a mechanic in this vein to work. But we've tried related things a few times, and it's always just really hard to line up all of the elements of... Let me give a quick history of us trying to do this. So I think original Zendikar is where I first tried this. And the idea is, hey, here's a bunch of things to do.

Do these things. Go on this quest, if you will. Do these, usually there were three things, but do these things, and then you end up with something. And I think, like, back then it was like, you're trying to get, like, if you get a cleric and a dead body and a spell, you can animate this creature from the dead, you know?

Like, you had to go acquire these things. And then in front of Eldraine, we tried another version of this where there were quests that you were going on, that you were like a knight going on a quest. I know we've tried them a few other places, but it's been a reoccurring thing we keep trying is, hey, do this

series of tasks, and if you do that there's a payoff, and you get the payoff. This time it was crime themed because we were in you know a crime themed world okay uh so we we actually had those all the way into going into play design but we try as we might still just we're not able to quite get them worked out in a way that was going to end up satisfying so we took a step back and asked ourselves like what are we really trying to capture here what's the like core of the thing and it was like well you're preparing for some big moment where you get to claim the rewards of your criminal activity,

pull off the heist, or get the payout from the boxing match or whatever. And so we started trying to figure out the simplest execution on that space and kept getting to like, wow, this is just too close to hideaway. And then we asked, wait, why don't we just do hideaway? So you did. I know we had to tweak it a little bit. What was the tweak to hideaway? Hideaway changed a little bit so we could put in this set and we just changed the hideaway work yeah so there were a few things the original hideaway cards right appeared on a cycle of lands in lorwyn and they all ran into an issue of not having enough room for their cast when they wanted to enter the battlefield tapped and have a mana ability and have an activated ability that you could use to get the card back and have hideaway themselves. And at the time, they found a slightly hacky but solved that let us print the cards,

which was to stick enters the battlefield tapped into the hideaway reminder text. Which, you know, saves a line break, made the cards just a little shorter so we could print them. And they were the only cards like that for a while. We made a reference in Modern Horizons, but it was never really intended to be part of the mechanic and thankfully our editing technology has improved since then. We've made our templates a little better

and those parts now can fit with enters the battlefield separated out. So we didn't really want these enchantments that never care about being tapped or untapped to enter tapped. And so we started there. But the other piece was the lands are very low opportunity cost. You just put it into your deck and, you know, maybe you'll hit something good, maybe you won't, but you didn't really have to put any work to having the card in your deck only in-game if you're trying to pursue the quest.

But once you're spending mana to cast a spell, we didn't want you to miss so often on getting any relevant card. So we really wanted to look at five cards instead of four to make sure you would find something worth going on the quest for. And that led us to split out the number instead of everything looking at four cards like the original ones in lore when this cycle uses hideaway five. Yes. Did you... How'd you end up with

5? I mean, the whole cycle is 5. Yeah. It's sort of threading a needle between making sure you don't have a complete lack of options for anything cool to be worth questing for and not making it too easy to

like play this card and something that'll win the game pretty much on its own like an emrakul the aeons torn and just consistently see enough of your deck to make sure you can find the game winning card and not need any other strategy so you can still spike those sorts of extremely powerful plays sometimes but at least for people playing really competitively we don't want it to be too likely they'll build their deck to do just that and play out the same way every time. Okay, so we've talked through all the mechanics in the set. What do you think was set design, I mean, beside the mechanics, what were the big

influences you think set design had on the set as a whole? Well, there's one sneaky one, which was while Hideaway was added later, there was another mechanic in the set that we removed. Oh, right, right. Let's talk Smuggle.

Okay, let's talk about Smuggle. So my memory is the original Smuggle was you paid some amount of mana. It was two at one point. It was three at one point. I don't know what we handed off. And you would exile the card and get a treasure. And then you could cast the card from exile. That was how Smuggle worked.

Right. and then you could cast the card from exile. That was how Smuggle worked. Great. So I think this was in the set originally to try to fill this gap on... We wanted three-color common cards, but with as high a density of three-color cards as you get with commons,

it's very easy to wind up just with your mana not working out and a card stranded in your hand. Right. So Tarkir was kind of the spiritual, you know, the set we were following the lead on. And that set had morph in it. And so the common three-color cards had Morph, so if I didn't have all my colors, I had a functionality

for the card. And that was kind of the inspiration is, okay, what is our version of Morph? It wasn't going to be Morph, but what was our version? That's where it came from. Right. And so we ran into a few problems with Smuggle.

The biggest one was just there was no mana cost that it really worked at. At three mana, it was really painful to take the time off to Smuggle your cards for a treasure, and usually not worth doing. and you're more likely to be color screwed the fewer lands that you've drawn. So often we would have people sitting on like, well, I've got two lands, and in my three-color deck, I can't even cast my two drops because they're the color I'm missing, and the three-mana smuggle wouldn't even help you accomplish that. But two-mana smuggle was just bananas. Fill your deck with a bunch of them, and consistently always be able to, like, skip your three-drop slot

and play a four-drop on turn three if you wanted to. And the cards would color-fix themselves pretty easily because you would, you know, essentially only be taxed one mana if you spent two mana to smuggle it and got an untapped treasure. So they were sort of two-brid cards as well as three-color gold cards. And I also believe there was a problem that people were splashing, like, it made it a little bit too easy to splash five colors. Right, that was the second issue.

Treasure fixes everything. Right, that was the second issue, was treasure fixes everything. So just by virtue of including these cards in your deck, you would naturally have a bunch of resources for anything you wanted to splash. Okay, so what did Smuggle become? Yeah, so we ended up with a pretty lengthy bit of text, but to get really the functionality we wanted on the cycle of Gold Commons. They'll let you pay two mana and exile them from your hand to make target land able to tap for any of the three colors of their family.

And then you, as long as they're exiled, and then you can still cast them later from exile. So one of the interesting questions is, we chose not to name this. Why didn't we name it? Yeah, I think mostly it was like we discussed where the naming made sense and there's sort of a promise when you see a named mechanic on commons that you're going to see more of this but it was complex enough and associated specifically to the colors of the cards we thought we only wanted to do it on the cycle of commons as opposed to like on the rares with cycling or hideaway most likely you've seen a bunch of other cards in the set before you see those if you're just opening a few packs and not familiar with everything that's going on. So they're less likely to set expectations wrong.

Yeah, also they were wordy, and probably adding a word might have caused problems with layout, too. Okay, any final—I can see my desk here, so I don't have too much longer. Any final thoughts on the making of Streets of New Compendia? I guess the other really big piece that guided us a lot here was the flavor of the setting. We were trying to jam in as many Golden Age and mob tropes as we could, and the initial team got a ton of great ones into the file. But yeah, a lot of the process was just trying to figure out how could we tweak this card a little bit to fit a trope

or how can we turn this top-down trope into some sort of card that'll fill a role in the set. We ended up with what we most wanted. That was a bad joke. It's an aura. Yeah, one of the things that I really appreciate this and something that, you know, all the teams did such a great job is the set's just really dripping with the top-down flavor

that we wanted, and there's so many, you know, like, the audience kept saying to me, I hope there's this, I hope there's that, and a lot of the time there was, so, you know, we, and some of the times where they wanted something, like, we did try, but, you know, not everything always works out, so, but we got sleep through the fishes,

so, you know, that's good. Exactly. Well, anyway, I want to thank you for joining me today, Jules. It's fun talking about the new set. So I hope the audience gets a chance to go play it and enjoy all the hard work that everyone put in. So thank you very much for being here. Yeah, thanks for having me.

I'm really looking forward to seeing what everyone thinks as they get a chance to play with the set. To everybody else, I'm at 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 thanks again, Jules. Thank you. And I'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.