Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #931: Streets of New Capenna Commander with Chris Mooney

Episode Date: May 13, 2022

I sit down with Chris Mooney, lead set designer of the Streets of New Capenna Commander decks, to talk about their 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. Okay, having lots of people I talk to, so today I have Chris Mooney to talk all about the making of Commander, or Streets of New Capenna Commander Decks. Hey Chris. Hello. Okay, so you were in charge of the design for the... There's four... No, there's five Commander decks. Yes. One for each family.

Okay, so let's start from the very beginning. Okay, I mean, obviously, we knew from the very, very beginning you were doing the five factions. That was a given from the get-go. But what were the challenges in figuring out what they did? Right, so when we start making... a given from the get-go. But what were the challenges in figuring out what they did? Right. So when we start making Commander decks, typically we're starting maybe halfway-ish through set design of the main set.

So what that means is that the major themes of the set have been determined, most of the mechanics have been nailed down. And a large part of the flavor and the world building has also been done. So coming in, we have a lot to work with. But also we sort of, you know, we also have a lot of things that we need to accomplish in order to make sure that we're sort of lining up with the expectations people have for the main set. So for each of these five families, we had the general idea of what they were all about flavor-wise, what they were about mechanically, and we knew mostly what each of the

mechanics was doing. And so a large part of our early explorations was basically taking those and coming up with what would be fun ideas to build commander decks around. So when you build commander decks, do you start with the commander or you start with your theme? Where do you start? It depends from set to set because sometimes sets have themes we know we want to do. And so we'll sort of say hey we already know what the theme is um and other sets will be oh we don't really know what direction we want to go in let's just make some cool commanders and see what kind of decks come up with um in this particular one we sort of knew what the ideas were for each family so the first deck that we built was based around the family's uh mechanic and uh we sort of designed

commanders specifically to go with those themes um for you know for each of these families we had a you know uh the maestros had casualty so we said what if your commander gave everything casualty and the riveteers had blitz so we said what if the riveteers card gave everything casualty, and the Riveteers had Blitz. So we said, what if the Riveteers card gave everything Blitz? But some of the other mechanics weren't as obvious. So for the Brokers, they have shield counters, and we didn't really think it was very fun to just give all your creatures shield counters. That wasn't a very interesting commander. So we started down the

path of, hey, what are different kinds of counters that you could interact with? So here, I'm going to read Perry. Where's Perry? Yes, Perry the Pulverizer. Perry the Pulverizer. I'm trying to find Perry. Do you have Perry? Do you know Perry? Yes, I've got all the cards up. I'm happy to read them. So read Perry to me,

please. All right. so Perry the Pulverizer is 1GW for a 3-3 legendary creature, Rhino Soldier. When Perry enters the battlefield, put a shield counter on target creature, and as a reminder, shield counters prevent

an instance of damage or destruction on a creature, so they're a one-time sort of extra life. And whenever Perry attacks, target creature you control gets trample and plus X plus X, where X is the number of different kinds of counters on permanents you control. Okay, so obviously you make Perry,

and it's, okay, he cares about different counters. So, like, where does that lead you? Like, what is that? What's the next step when you do something like that? Right. So the first thing we did is we were like, shield counter. Only working with shield counters was a little boring and it was a little frustrating to play. So what if instead of shield counters, we cared about any kind of counter?

And we thought, you know, oh, that could be fun. You know, you'll have some keyword counters in there for Micoria. Of course, plus one, plus one counters, you know, oh, that could be fun. You know, you'll have some keyword counters in there for Micoria. Of course, plus one, plus one counters, you know, from almost every set. So that seemed to have a lot of possibilities. So the next step was basically saying, okay, if it's a deck that cares about different kinds of counters, let's go through all of Magic's history and try to find, you know, what are the cards that give all sorts of different counters. And we found many, many very funny, sometimes very not-so-useful cards that had lots of different kinds of counters on them.

And from among all of those, we sort of narrowed down to the ones that we thought both used different counters but also were actually effective, fun to play, useful cards in Commander. Do you have any idea how many different counters exist in the deck? In the deck? That's a good question. I think it's something like 15, maybe? Certainly we have almost every keyword counter that exists is in there, and plus a bunch of sort of individual fun ones, like there's a card with brick counters and a card with hoof print counters.

So, oh, and then, right, feather counters. So we definitely went pretty deep. One that is a card that people play with often but don't think about very much is a wall of roots which uses minus zero minus one counters so that was a uh you know a card that you probably played with uh before if you played a lot of magic but probably you haven't cared about that specific kind of counter in your deck yeah one of the things that's a lot of fun i know when making commander decks is can we care about something that magic has done it's it's not you're not making up something new but that you're caring about it in a way that we've never cared about so

right it makes you track down old cards and care about a minus zero minus one counter that means something right and it's fun because not only will people in the audience be able to go find some of those other cards we didn't include and put and add them to the deck if they would like but also as we go forward in magic we will add lots of new kinds of counters and each of those kinds is going to be able to increase the you know the potential that perry has yes i can confirm we are making new counters i know that for a fact um okay so and hello gives casualty henze gives Blitz. We talked about Parry. So let's talk a little bit about Kami's Obscura Oculus.

Let me read this card real quick. One white, blue, black. It's a legendary creature. Suffolet Rogue. 2-4. Whenever you attack, target attacking creature can't be blocked this turn. It connives. Then choose another attacking creature with lesser power.

That creature gains double strike till end of turn, and then connive means to have a creature connive, draw a card, then discard a card. If you discarded a non-land card, put a plus one plus one counter on that creature. Yes, so Kameez is a good example of kind of some of the challenges

that we face when working with this card. So when we first made Kameez, the first idea we had was, what if she just lets you connive a whole bunch? That had a couple of difficulties. One was that conniving a lot over and over can be challenging. You have to draw a card, then discard a card, draw a card, and then discard a card. And so it can be, it's a lot of decisions to make. It takes a long time. So we found that that was frustrating. And we came up with the idea of what if instead of conniving a bunch of times

in a row, it was connive X. So the idea of, cool, instead of drawing one and discarding one, I'll draw X and discard X. And that makes it a lot faster, a lot easier to perform a bunch of, cool, instead of drawing one and discarding one, I'll draw X and discard X. And that makes it a lot faster, a lot easier to perform a multi-Kanaev. However, then we faced the next challenge, which is that in the main set, the main set team also wanted to have Raffine, who is the Sphinx demon, the leader of the Obscura. They wanted Raffine to also connive X. And we were like, at the end of the day, the main set should have this cool, awesome, mega connive design.

And the commander set will figure out something else cool to do. So that was sort of the first challenge, was we solved the connive problem, but then the main set came in and took connive X. So the next thing we looked at was, okay, well what are sort of deck themes that work well with, you know, conniving? And so we tried out a lot of different things. We tried some drawing and discarding.

We tried some plus one, plus one counter matters. Ultimately, none of those decks we felt were really coming together very well. They weren't, it was difficult to make commanders for those in the colors that we had. It was difficult to sort of design new cards that we thought were really inspiring. So we sort of started looking for other options. And the one that we liked the most was Saboteurs. Saboteur, for people who don't know, is sort of slaying for creatures that

have an effect when you deal combat damage to another player um this was something that felt really flavor wise appropriate for the obscura you know they're sneaky they're spies and they kind of you know um that the flavor of that of sneaking through your enemy's defenses and hitting them um really made a lot of sense so So we then started down the path of building this deck around these Saboteur effects. And that was working out really well.

Ultimately, where Kameez ended up was we essentially liked the idea of being able to make a creature unblockable so that she can help get through your creatures with Saboteur effects. But then, this double strike ability also gives you the option of taking one of your maybe smaller flying saboteurs and giving them double strikes that can actually have

their saboteur ability go off twice in a turn. So she ends up in a very tricky space, a little bit not as obvious as some of the other commanders, but when we make commanders we like to have some of them be A little bit, not as obvious as some of the other commanders, but when we make commanders, we like to have some of them be a little bit more obscure, pun intended, and a little bit more, you have to figure out what the puzzle is,

but there's lots of interesting things that you can do with it. Okay. Let's go on to Kit Kanto, Mayhem Diva. She is of the Cabaretty. So the card is one red, green, white. So four mana total, one of the three colors. 3-3 legendary creature, cat, bard, druid.

When Kanto enters the battlefield, create a 1-1 green and white citizen creature token. At the beginning of combat on each player's turn, you may tap two untapped creatures you control. When you do, target creature that player controls gets plus two, plus two, and gains trample to end of turn. Go to that creature. Yes, so

when it came to the Cabaretty deck, the Cabaretty are all about going wide and making lots of tokens. In the history of Magic, we've done a lot of Naya-colored commanders that like to go wide. So we basically said basically said hey if we're making

another go wide deck let's see if we can think of uh sort of a twist on it something new to bring to the space um and since the cabaretty are all about sort of partying um you know inviting everyone over for a good time we like the idea of a commander that was a little bit more about politics a little bit more about forcing other people to attack for you, and maybe then making them get mad at one another. So that's sort of where Kit's design came from, this idea of you want to have a lot of tokens, but rather than just making a big army and attacking, you can make a big army and then have other people attack each other. Yeah, also we should point out that Goad has, I guess we've called it like evergreen for commander decks. It's just been an ability we're using a lot.

Yes, we're definitely going to see more Goad moving forward. Goad is something that we enjoy just for helping to push games forward, cause action to happen. push games forward, cause action to happen. And this product in particular has a lot of goad because of the sort of political theming of the decks. So I want to quickly just talk about the two other commanders. We sort of briefly talked about them, but I do want to bring them up to talk about these two decks. So first off is Anhalo the Painter.

He is from the Maestros. Legendary creature, vampire assassin, 1-3, death touch. The first instant or sorcery spell you cast each turn has casualty 2. Yes. So Anhalo is one of the ones that has changed probably the least since we first thought of it. Casualty is a very fun ability to grant to your spells. And we really like the idea of you're a spells deck, but Casualty really requires you to have Sacrifice Spotter in order to work.

So it was a very different kind of spells deck where you sort of had to think about, okay, what are the creatures I'm putting in my spells deck in order to fuel all of this copying? We, yeah, so this was a fun deck to build, and we found there were a lot of interesting things to do with it. And this was, yeah, again, an example where we had an idea right off the bat, it worked really well, it pretty much worked through all of design, and so we were really happy with how it turned out. Okay, so the final one is the Riveteers. Henzy Toolbox Tori. Black, red, green.

So three mana total. 3-3. Legendary creature. Devil rogue. Each creature spell you cast with mana value four or greater has blitz. The blitz cost is equal to its mana cost. And blitz means you may choose to cast that spell for its blitzing out, you know, giving blitz to a lot of your creatures. We liked having a restriction on the mana value, because when it came to creatures that were small,

it was pretty much just, hey, play every single creature that has a strong ETB for really cheap. And that wasn't as interesting, that wasn't as fun. We liked saying, no, fill your deck with big stuff, and then when you Blitz them out, actually attack people with your giant creatures. So Hensi's second ability was designed so that it would work both with his first ability, but also with Blitz cards from the main set.

So whatever cool Blitz cards you happen to open in Streets of New Capenna, you could put in this deck and they would also get discounted. Okay, so now that we've talked about each of the five decks, I want to talk about some larger things that are going on here. So first up, there are a lot of old mechanics showing up. So let's talk about that a little bit. That's right. So early on in our design team, I kind of enjoyed the idea of going through old magic keywords and finding some that

I thought would fit really well with this world. So for example, the mechanic addendum is a mechanic that we've made previously for a faction um but it seems like it would be a perfect fit for the brokers who are a you know lawyer faction they literally are all about contracts um so uh we decided that we wanted to make an addendum card because that seems like a fun throwback that thematically fit um and kind of inspired by that we went through and found tons and tons and tons of these old keywords and decided to bring a bunch of them back just for, you know, single cards here and there in order to add a little bit of, you know, texture and some fun throwbacks,

uh, for longtime fans. And so I want to talk a little bit like that wasn't, that isn't something we used to do, right? That isn't something that was sort of a normal thing. that isn't something we used to do, right? That isn't something that was sort of a normal thing. And hint, it's becoming a thing, but I just want to talk a little behind the scenes.

Like, how did you go from, we didn't do this to we're now doing this? Well, right. Prior to this, it's something that we have very occasionally did it. Maybe one card per commander product or something brought an old keyword back um but for me i was like hey i find these designs you know very charming um we they've got we've got a lot of interesting things that we can do um some of the mechanics fit super well was what the decks

want to do and whenever we play test people are always like oh that's neat i love that this mechanic is back or that mechanic is back so internally we were like hey this seems like it's pretty cool we all like this um and when we talked about it as a as a design group the commander designers were like yeah previously we sort of um there was a sentiment of oh we don't want to do it too much but we all sort of checked in and we were like all of us really like this idea um so we kind of it just sort of took one person saying hey i like this i think it's cool i want to do it for everyone else to be like yeah that is really cool let's all start doing that so um right i'm super looking forward to seeing more of these old mechanics return i've gotten tons of great feedback from the audience of you know mechanics that are are so you know

niche or you know um you know are very not known by many people someone someone out there will be like this is my favorite mechanic i'm so happy to see it come back um and for a lot of these mechanics they might not be mechanics that we will return to very soon or maybe ever they might only have a couple of more designs that you can make with them. And so Commander products are a great place to sort of bring those back and celebrate the kind of deep well of old magic mechanics that we have. Yeah, I mean, one of the things that I think Modern Horizons has really taught us is there are magic mechanics that, like, look, there's just not enough meat on the bone really to revisit it in any big way, but there might be like a really cool individual design with it. And I know that modern horizons really was able to do that very successfully.

And I like to see this as sort of a extension of that of, Hey, here's a resource. Why can't we make cool things? You know, what's don't, don't stop us from making cool things. Yeah, and I think that, right, we'll definitely see more of this moving forward. And also, a nice thing about this as well is that for the people who are fans of these old mechanics, they get a few new cards to play with.

But for a lot of new Magic players, seeing these mechanics for the first time can help sort of send them on a quest of like oh this mechanic seems fun i wonder what other cards exist and they can sort of learn about some sets that they maybe weren't around for okay so the next thing i want to talk about is kind of what are the advantages and the challenges of designing commanders within the same worlds as the main set? Yes. So the advantages are that, you know, we have a lot of material to work with. You know, as you often say, right, restrictions breed creativity. Having a fully blank slate is sometimes very daunting.

You can just kind of make whatever but starting out with this very strong like you know this is what the world is this is what the factions are um gives us a lot of stuff to kind of you know we can use as a springboard as inspiration um on top of that these characters in particular um were sort of characters that had been developed by uh the creative team and we saw most of these characters actually show up in the New Capenna web fiction. So that was also a huge benefit in that there's actually able to be some backstory on these characters and people were able to become familiar with them and sort of be like, oh, I read the story about Perry. Now I'm excited to see perry's card um the challenges are definitely that sometimes you

will have a specific theme or a mechanic that is tricky to make work in um in a commander deck that then sort of sets you down a different path so camise uh and kit are sort of both good examples we talked about earlier where the obscura it was, it was like, all right, Knave, you know, is pretty useful, but it was difficult for us to build a full deck around it. We kind of had to go in a different direction. And Kit was something where it's pretty easy to build around going wide, but we've done it a lot before, so we needed to find new, unique space. So we needed to find new, unique space. Another good example from a different commander product that I worked on was for Neo Kamigawa. When we first started making the commander decks for that product, we were like, all right, we're making two commander decks for Neo Kamigawa. What if we did ninjas and samurai?

You know, they're very popular, very famous famous uh you know these creature types that people love um but the the issue is that when we started to investigate it it was hey a lot of really cool ninjas and samurai are actually in the main set they're in neokamigawa and so it wasn't really there wasn't nearly as much space there for us to explore because we were already making a lot in the main set. So that's why we decided to go in different directions and choose two themes that were kind of underrepresented in the main set. So that's another challenge, that sometimes the main set is going to make cards that are very similar to the ones that you might make for your commander deck, and you have to choose a different direction to go in. Okay, so I want to help the audience understand a little bit about the nuts and bolts of making these. So you get a design team. How do you actually make the decks?

What's the structure to making them behind the scenes? So generally speaking, the first thing that we will do is come up with themes of the decks, and that includes colors. Of course, for Streets of Nukapapena we already knew what the colors were because the families were sort of the whole identity of the set um but for other sets we'll also have to choose what colors the decks are going to be um the typically the thing that we do first is we will put together a deck comprised um and almost entirely of old cards um typically we'll make a couple new cards. Usually, we'll make a, you know, a new, we'll almost always make a new commander to playtest that deck. The purpose of

that is for us to see, hey, is this a strategy that actually works at all? Because at the end of the day, even though we make a lot of new cards for these commander decks, the majority of the decks are still going to be old cards. So if there aren't enough reprints that we can use to make the theme work, then it's just not going to be able to be a functioning deck. But assuming that it works decently well, then we start going, okay, we know that this theme is pretty good. Let's start making some brand new cards and putting those in and start testing them. And from that point forward, we just sort of constantly are playing the decks over and over and over again, making changes to both the new cards and to which reprints we're including until we sort of get all of them into a spot that we like. So how many people are usually on a commander design team?

Generally speaking, the number of people on a commander design team is about the same as the number of decks that are being made so for example for streets of nukapena um are we had five people on our design team for the most for most of the length of the team um and but smaller ones like if we're only making two decks for a set, we'll typically only have, you know, two people. So usually each deck has someone sort of the main person for it, not that other people don't get involved. Right. Everyone is involved with all the decks, especially the design lead is always involved with all of the decks. But typically it's a good sort of division of labor for each design team member to take one of the decks, focus on that one. And then oftentimes, halfway through or so, you'll actually switch up the decks and everyone will take a different one so that just that you're getting different eyes on the different decks and

different people have different styles of building decks. So they might recognize some weaknesses that are present that someone else maybe wouldn't have seen. So what would you say is the biggest hurdle that making Commander decks tends to run into? I think the biggest hurdle is, and this is just generally true of designing for Commander, is that Commander is an internal format. It has a legacy card pool.

It never rotates. So that means that when we make new cards, we have to be very conscious about the effect that they're going to have long term um so we spend a lot of time trying to think about when we're adding new cards to the format what new things are these cards allowing people to do what old things are they supporting um and you know balancing that is a very tough uh tight rope to walk thankfully you know in in the recent uh you know maybe past couple months we have uh we now have the casual play design team which is a team that's focused specifically on testing cards for um formats such as commander uh so moving forward i think we're going to see even even more uh you know attention

being given to that area of design um but of course this team didn't exist when i was working on streets of new capenna so a lot of it just fell onto me and the other designers to test the decks and try to balance the cards to the best of our ability yeah one of the things i always talk about is how design is iterative and you know the more we make commander decks the better we get at making commander decks because the more experience and you know lessons and stuff along the way yeah i think that uh we have seen over the past two years or so that the quality of the commander decks um at least based on the feedback that the fans have been giving us that, that people have been really liking them. And I think a large part of that

is because we make more now, which allows us to get more and more practice and become more and more skilled at the kinds of facing the challenges that come up with these products. Okay, so we're not too far from being done here. So I have two last questions for you. Number one is,

if you could pick one trick for one of the decks, something that people might not think of, that is a fun little thing you guys stumbled upon while playtesting, what's a fun little, not obvious thing that people could do with one of the five decks? Hmm, that's very interesting. It's, that is a tricky question. I think what I will use as my example is uh a play that i saw happen the other night when we were playing we were playing with the decks uh oscar rubbish reclaimer is a

card that allows you to uh cast cards when you discard them um he works very well with Knive. And we had a great moment where somebody attacked with Kameez, Knived, and then discarded a Cypher card, and then cast the Cypher card and Cyphered it onto their creature that was attacking, and then hit someone, and immediately got to recast the Cypher card and get a ton of value out of that attack. So that was a super cool play that I got to see, and I think that there are a lot more tricky plays that can be done with Oscar and being able to cast cards off of discarding them at times that you might not normally be able to. Real quickly, just for the audience that might not know off the top of their head, Oscar, Rubbish Reclaimer, 3 blue black,

Legendary Creature, Human Wizard, 3-3. The spell costs one less to cast for each different mana value among cards in your graveyard. Whenever you discard a non-land card, you may cast it from your graveyard. Okay, my final question for you is, is there anything about the decks that we haven't touched upon that you would love to let the audience know about? Anything that I didn't hit upon yet? I think the one sort of large topic

that I would just want to call out, and you know, I've talked about it a lot online, and in other interviews, is that there are a lot of white cards in this product that are really starting to push into the new space that we've just we've kind of opened up for white card draw um it's something that players have been asking for for a long time and as the white color pie counselor this was sort of an opportunity for me to bring some of those new design space uh to the forefront and give people um you know some some options options using those tools that we've added into white. There are quite a few in this set. We are definitely trying to sort of start high and give people a lot of options.

I wouldn't expect that we would see this many white card draw cards in products moving forward, but this sort of marks the beginning of kind of a new era of us trying to give White more card draw options in Commander. Yeah, and we spent, the team, the console callers spent a long time sort of carving out, and I will point out to anybody, as I talked about earlier, there's a lot of iteration that goes on. So, like, we're testing the boundaries of what we think is the right thing. We will see the players play with it.

You know, we will come back, and there's a lot of give and take. So like once we see what the world does with it, that will influence future things as well. Because it's one thing to make them, it's another to sort of see them live and breathe in the actual environment. Yep. I'm super looking forward to seeing what everybody does with these cards. Well, anyway, 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. But I want to thank you, Chris, for being with us. Thanks for having me. And to everybody else, I will see you next time. Bye-bye.