Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #937: CLB Vision Design with Glenn Jones

Episode Date: June 3, 2022

I sit down with designer Glenn Jones top talk about the vision design of Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur's Gate.

I'm not pulling out of the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work at home edition. So today I have Glenn Jones and we're going to talk about the vision design of Commander Legends Battle for Baldur's Gate. So hello, Glenn. Hello, glad to be here. Okay, so let's go back to the very, very beginning. When you were assigned to the task, what were you told? What was the initial sort of pitch to you of what you were assigned the task what were you told what what were you what was the initial sort of pitch to you of what you were getting into yeah it's actually pretty interesting um so it is my first booster set and my first vision design lead uh both of which were kind of

to set me up to lead another future project in some senses but to get that boots on the ground experience um we knew that we were doing commander legends 2 for sure uh we were looking at it being dnd themed initially and we locked that in pretty quick um but it wasn't we didn't start off with it being 100 so we started thinking about the mechanics a little bit before that uh and then we kind of had to figure out how do you make a sequel to adventures in the forgotten realms because like the whole idea of that was that it was like an anthology kind of set almost it was like you know little bits and pieces from everywhere so were we just going to do like little bits and pieces from everywhere too uh like that's not what we wanted to do right so we started looking for things that we could tie into that felt both appropriate for Dungeons & Dragons

and appropriate for us as a company and a brand to be delivering our players. And Baldur's Gate kind of quickly came up as an option. We looked into some of the lore and stories around Baldur's Gate. We have the video games, which are beloved by manny uh and a new one uh balder's gate 3 and eventually like early envision design we kind of settled on let's do balder's gate and let's try and focus the story a little bit around the dead three which are these like high profile uh gods and i think that that kind of shifted in set design to be less emphatic but that was where we started on early.

It was like, okay, let's try to have a little bit more narrative in Adventures in the Forgotten Realms. We're in one place. We're talking about the people and things surrounding some, like, reasonably significant events, but, you know, there are these gods we can kind of pick and choose from their story throughout history. And early on, if I remember correctly, there were more gods in the file early on, right?

Yeah. Yeah, we looked at a lot of different things. One of the elements that we really liked was the idea of using the time of troubles, if I recall. I believe that's what it's called, which was a time when gods became mortals, because that would let us put actually a lot of the gods into the file as legendary creatures that weren't gods. And we thought that would just be a really interesting hook and a way to tell some of those stories more cleanly

okay so i mean the interesting thing about this set was in some ways it was a sequel to two different sets but at the same time yep yeah very very novel and the other thing was a timeline the time time line wise it's hard to say um the dnd set hadn't come out yet like when you guys had started right no not during vision design um we'd heard some of what the players were hoping to see in it at that point um because it was announced and we got it was like after znr had come out so like one of the things was, you know, a lot of people were like, oh man, Party, what a great D&D mechanic, can't wait for Party to come back in Adventures of the Forgotten Realms, and we were sitting over on CLB going, oh, maybe we should do something about that, I don't know. So let's talk, we can talk about that a little bit, like I know you guys looked at doing Party. Yeah, we tried a few different things,

we pretty quickly established that we didn't want to just do party it felt weird to only care about four classes dnd's love of many classes is part of its charm um so we looked at you know like could we do a super party like some version of the mechanic that just checks any class um we looked at like doing dnd specific class we even actually talked to uh the rules manager about hey like is it on the table to like batch magics creature types into like jobs and not jobs and then we can like kind of like you did a little bit with historic indominaria like is that a viable batching because we could use that in lots of sets theoretically uh if we wanted to care about jobs

and we eventually decided not to pursue that here but i think that's you know still on the still on the docket maybe to do one day um but it wound up just being a really complex element you know people kind of loved it or hated it or nothing did yeah it wasn't quite where we wanted to to end up i don't think we didn't we didn't hand off with vision design a really strong version of that mechanic uh i know the handoff included basically like these are the things that we tried we know that the audience would really love a super awesome mechanic based around jobs and jobs as classes but we don't know if it exists and we might not be able to deliver it okay so other than party what other existing magic mechanics did you look at like what else do you say oh people want this in a dnd set so does this make sense oh yeah we had i wish i had my

massive excel sheet uh but we had a laundry list uh one of the things i do whenever i'm starting up magic sets is i just go through every keyword again um because there's you know maybe some fruit or some tweak or like some memory even I'll have a play with the mechanic that will send me in a direction. So I did that for D&D as well. Monstrous was one of the things that we looked at because it just has such great flavor for D&D. It's just a great word to put on cards, especially if we were also going to do heroic, which we consider as maybe a thing,

like heroic and monstrous, just like Enderos, kind of another way we could sequelize the third sequel. But makes sense to pit those things against one another. Considered something akin to training, which was, I think, in the pipeline at the same time. A variety of different kicker based mechanics. Flashback was one or a flashback like mechanic flashback we like specifically is the idea of like maybe we could do like your commander's memories is like the flavor of flashback like a much tighter flavorful uh execution on the mechanic than we might have seen before because we've done like some flashback cards are like

that but what if like all of them were like that? And we looked at split cards as another way to do the D&D thing that Jules did with Adventures in the Forgotten Realms. It was so good of Option A or Option B. And MDFCs could also have been a way to execute on that as well, the Option A or B storyline type stuff. Okay, so there is a mechanic that you did end up putting in. So let's talk about how adventures got in the file. Yes, adventures were a passion of mine pretty early on. I think it's a great word, obviously, for the setting. And we had done adventures as a pretty tight flavor in Eldraine, where it was pretty much always telling a self contained story. Eldraine where it was pretty much always telling a self-contained

story. The beast one is my favorite. You make the little one one human and then you make the big beast. That's the story of Beauty and the Beast. And the creatures were the ones going on the adventure in that story. That's the beast's adventure. So we had

the flavorful idea of like, well, all those adventures turn into creatures. There's nothing to stop us from turning into non-creatures um so what if the adventures are your champion your commander going into the dungeons filled with dragons uh and finding loot there so that was where the very first adventure started we're like how many non-creature adventures can we make are there enough that we think like it's a charming part of the set to push hard on and there were we found them pretty fun to play with the limited gameplay part of them

I was most excited about is I love getting people to put big creatures into the limited decks the mechanics that historically have been really good at doing that mostly let you throw the creature away cycling and land cycling being like the two biggest ones and this mechanic the

adventure mechanic would let us put them in the deck and you would play them later um like eventually they would come into play and that was awesome for commander because nobody is you know wishing that they didn't have a creature on turn seven and commander that comes up all the time uh so yeah it seemed like an excellent solve to add on like the monsters and things you would encounter in the caverns as well. So that was kind of the flavor of adventure for the set. It's your commander going on an adventure in what they encounter. And I was very bullish on it from pretty much go.

And I'm really glad it stuck around because it was one of my favorite parts of the set. So InVision, I know in the finished product there are either creatures or there are artifacts. But what did you experiment with in Vision? We tried everything we did look at sorceries we did not do instance because a face-up instance is just not a super fun mechanic to play against

especially in multiplayer but we did try sorceries being the idea of your commander unlocks some big event. Like, you know, maybe you cause an avalanche or collapse a cavern or whatever or end the world accidentally. We thought just like we all had these like funny DD moments from campaigns that we were like, how many of these can we turn into cards? And we tried to enchantments and auras and things like that, too, as similar like, you know,

And we tried enchantments and auras and things like that too, as similar, like, you know, other ways your commander can feel like they have successfully plundered a dungeon and been rewarded by the DM. Because that was really the element of the experience I liked, was the adventure feeling like you were kind of DMing for your own commander as a player. So you tried sorceries, you tried enchantments, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's fun. We go back and look at some of the early design stuff. You guys experiment, like, as Vision often does. You just try lots of different things and then set design figures out what makes the most

sense for what we want to build in the file. Okay, let's talk about another problem you guys had to figure out, which was you were doing Commander Legends 2, so something Commander Legends sets need, I'll let you go into this, but just the, when you draft, one of the problems about a Commander draft is you need to be able to shift colors. Like in a normal draft, if I start drafting red, and then I see, oh, green's open,

I can add green and then just add forest to my deck. But in Commander, it doesn't quite let you do that. So talk about solving, I don't know what to call this problem, but the drafting problem. Yeah, I've got a bunch of fun little stories for this one. So the first thing was we didn't want to rock the boat on what Commander Legends had done, both because we were planning to be a sequel to the set, and also because Jules took a really long time to figure out how Commander Legends should work. And in general, I trust Jules. He a fantastic designer and I was there like that took it took

so much work and a lot of vetting to get to the set composition and number of cards and packs and everything that Jules did so I wanted to really reap the benefits of his effort by not rocking the boat too much on the the bare the structural execution of the set uh so we started off pretty pretty early on knowing we wanted to have a similar set size and some kind of color changing mechanic that let us put cards and packs to let people pick commanders but not necessarily get really aggressively locked into their colors uh right off the bat I started from the premise of let's assume that partner is the last resort because we know it will work and also because it's just a pretty dangerous thing

to continue to inject in the format at the pace we're considering doing it. Commander Legends added, I think, 70 partners, 72, something like that, to the format. That's just a lot. We didn't want to do that again unless we absolutely

had to so my i tasked the vision team with like you're allowed to submit basically any mechanic that solves this problem except for partner and then set design is going to decide if they should just give up and do partner so we we considered vision design a zero partner tolerance uh area and we tried a lot of different stuff based on that based on those assumptions fascinatingly um shortly after i had finished vision design we were also i guess not that shortly maybe but we were doing like casual play designer interviews for that team which now exists and we hired them but during the interviews uh i actually used this problem as one of my interview questions for the designers which is you you have to design commander legends too and

you can't use partner. What do you do? And one of the candidates who will remain nameless essentially pitched Backgrounds, which was pretty cool. It was already done by them, but it was just cool that they figured it out. Okay, so give me some idea.

What did you guys try? What were the non-Partner things you tried? So, a lot of them still operated off the same basic premise of using two cards we just found that that was mostly the most fruitful space uh some of the things we did consider though were like an outside of the game object that offered you like uh one of five different uh color aligned abilities and commanders that would let you pick them uh or cards that you know similarly came with like multiple abilities and commanders that would let you pick them or cards that similarly came with multiple abilities

and you would just pick one of those things. The challenge there was very much how many of them can we do? If it's only five, then the gameplay is kind of homogenous, not super not very dynamic. If two black legendary creatures

have the same white ability, it's like, meh, that's just not incredibly thrilling. So we figured we needed to do at least two of each color, at which point it's kind of confusing because now I have to draft while holding all 10 of these abilities in my head. That's pretty hard too. So I think that set design wisely

did not go down that route, but it was one of the more interesting outside- outside of the box solutions that we had. Um, some other ones that we explored, and I'm sure I'll mix up which are named which, cause it's been so long. put a feat ability on a creature in the set, just any 2-mana 2-2 with an ability, that ability could be considered a feat ability, like it would have a little special frame treatment. And you could put it in your deck and it would be a fine 2-mana 2-2 with its own ability. But you could start it in the command zone attached to your commander, kind of like a mutate card,

and your commander would have that ability and that color identity. And it would have learned the feat that it needed to do. And so that mechanic is pretty interesting. It's obviously kind of similar to where background ended. There are a bunch of meaningful differences in it. It can appear on a larger variety of card types. It's restricted to a tighter set of abilities.

And it's also, rules-wise, way harder to implement. Let me try to explain to the audience a little bit how I think it works, or you can correct me if I'm wrong, but, so the idea was I'd have a creature and it had an ability, it had mana required to defeat ability, but it was a lot like Monstrous or something, where I could spend that mana,

the only difference was that if you did it, the legendary creature, your commander, for the rest of the game got the ability. It wasn't, it was sort of forever you got it, and so if the creature died and came back, it still the legendary creature, your commander, for the rest of the game got the ability. It was sort of forever you got it. And so if the creature died and came back, it still had that ability, right? If the commander did, yes. It was considered like your commander basically absorbed

this monstrous ability into the command zone. Whereas with creatures, it was very much just... Until it died, right. And then the idea was you could have a second creature that had a feat put that in your command zone and that could be an extra feat for your commander. Yeah. We tried a couple of different explorations.

We basically looked at single feat and double feat. I think by the end of it we were pretty sure that if we were going to do this we would only want to do single feat. But double feat was just think by the end of it, we were pretty sure that if we were going to do this, we would only want to do single feet. But double feet was just a really cool line of text and I could have visualized doing one or two mythics that were

monocolored characters that could become three colors through the addition of these feats. It seemed like it was potentially interesting in higher rarities, but it wasn't something we wanted to have going on in the base limited experience. Okay, so you guys tried feats. Anything else of interest that you guys tried?

We tried some variations on feet. Feat really kind of captures, I think, the best of what we had found. But we tried a lot of things that were sub-pieces of feet. We looked at DFC executions. at DFC executions. Like all of the legends are some kind of strange DFC that lets you maybe choose a

color on the back side of it to adjust your color identity and gives you some spell that the commander can then use. We consider DFC creatures similar to the ability where you put in your creature and it's just a regular creature or you could use it as the DFC, the back face of it and put that in the command zone and it would be kind

of like an emblem that adds to your color identity you know um like a lot of world might be like a creature and then on the back of it it would have you know like your commander whenever it attacks add g it doesn't empty or something like that some some ability that kind of mimics what the creature was doing as as a learned skill. Okay, so I think you guys turned over an early version of background, right? Yeah. Yeah, we turned over an early version of background. I know we had talked about doing it as enchantments. Part of the concern was how strong can we make them versus how easy they can be to remove

if there are things that go onto the battlefield um there was tension around that um but i know after certainly like i play tested a little bit during set design and after a couple play tests jules and i both suggested to cory that and he was already on that train as well that enchantments seemed like they were probably the best way to go um So it was a good meeting of the minds. I think that was actually like the week that they changed over basically was when all three of us were just like, yeah, enchantments seemed a lot better than what we were trying right now. Okay, so let's talk about a different element of the set, initiative.

So where did that mechanic start from? What need were you trying to meet? Where did that mechanic start from? What need were you trying to meet? How did you get there? Yeah, so Monarch played really great in Commander Legends. Just a really fun mechanic. I think it just is a fun mechanic. We didn't want to do Monarch again for a few reasons.

One of them is it's just not very D&D. You pretty rarely become a king in a D&D campaign. So we didn't want to do that. And there aren't any, like, you know, particularly any meaningful kings of Baldur's Gate, especially. So we wanted to try and find a new flavor for something that accomplished the same play goals as Monarch. And we tried a lot of different executions and some very weird and hard-to-intuit ones as well.

And even where we landed, I do think is a little bit complicated, but we started off with the core idea of the torch. You know, that you're carrying it, you're leading the, the company down into the dungeons. And that was Corey during vision design before he took over the set of set design.

That was really his, his baby. I essentially delegated that out to corey as like you know explore the torch go nuts with it uh chris mooney also did a ton of that work um that it was really it was really both both of theirs um and they they came up with a lot of the naming and structure and we we considered so many different versions of it including just you know monarch as like this this dungeon unique to the set which is kind of closest to where it wound up but like we had it as like you know a map in the

middle of the table where players are like advancing their pawns and you could like maybe do something once you got into the same room as another player um and there were cards in the set that maybe cared about being farther along than other players so it had like a race element to it as well um there was a lot of fun stuff going on but it was it was definitely heavy and difficult to to balance and to execute in the rules but it was just really fun space i know chris mooney had also explored in a previous team the idea of like a variable version of the monarch where there were like crowns that did some different things maybe and we we looked at doing that as well as maybe one of the ways that we can incorporate class. We're like, you know, all right,

I'm an artificer now and like somebody takes it and they're like, all right, well I'm an artificer now, I guess. So we did consider some stuff in that vein, but Torch just had like a really clean idea behind it. And that was what we pursued most aggressively. So is there anything else that you remember that like was something you guys played around with envision that didn't end up in the final product but it's something you guys spent time on oh it's been so long uh

trying to think if there was anything particularly cool i mean honestly like the the story the time of troubles based storyline is one of the cooler things, I thought. But it was just, it is difficult to execute on a story in a space as wide as a Commander Legends set. So it would probably be my pick.

A lot of the individual designs made it. Some of the limited structure stayed the same yeah nothing nothing really stands out um really i tried to give cory what i thought was like you know the blueprints of here's just a lot of stuff that can go in a lot of different directions that's very flexible for you to figure it out uh and from there he you know continued to tweak and add and i think like die rolling and myriad and things like that. But yeah, I came at it from the standpoint of

very much wanting to give him a really great set of tools and I think that's what we did. So you bring up an interesting point as someone who does vision design a lot. This is your first vision design set. So what were you most surprised?

What kind of surprised you running your first vision set? Like what, what might that people think about when they, you think, Oh, I want to do this. Um, for me, I actually spent a lot of both my, this vision design process and my later set design process, uh, just building tools that I have come to find really valuable. Um, that was something, you know,

like I didn't really know how to build a booster set of magic. And also Commander Legends is like not a baseline booster set experience. So even if I was some kind of virtuoso, I would have had to relearn a bunch of stuff. So yeah, like coming up with basically removing the burden on my brain to like know and hold and remember all of this stuff, like building Excel documents and databases and things that could just tell me what was going on in the set um i took a lot of joy in executing on those tools and seeing other people use them has been really great um so that

was probably the most fruitful element of the vision design experience for me it was my first time writing a vision design handoff uh as well of course, and writing a document like that, you know, that I'm going to hand off and have somebody just carry off into the wilderness with them was a unique experience. I had a lot of great help on that from several mentors. Ethan Fleischer is, I think, one of the best vision design document writers that we've got, and I read several of his in preparation for working on mine and he gave me some great tips. Gavin, I think also is quite thorough and he helped me as well. So just for the audience, I'm not,

I'm not sure when this is going to come out versus my article, but I did take Glenn's document much like I take a lot of my own documents and did an annotated version in my article. So at some point, I don't know whether or not before or after we, this, you got here, this, uh,

you'll get a chance to see Glenn's article, uh, in all its glory. So, um, I hope I got a gold star. No, I thought it was really good.

I mean, like I said, it's the diet, the tricky thing about vision design that, that the audience sometimes don't quite realize is it's not, you are trying to set up the people downstream of you to, for success. You know, a lot of vision design is I'm making a toolbox of tools so that the person that's going to build the thing has the, the, you know, the

freedom, the blueprint, so that they're able to build it. And that it's not about sort of the completion of it as much as it is the vision and setting up, you know, so they have some guideline of where to go and what to do. And that, you know, a good vision design doesn't answer every question, but it gives tools so that the set design team can answer the questions. Yeah. And riffing on that, I mean, like a vision design that includes a lot of failures is also really fruitful. Like, Corey not having to spend as much time trying to make party work because we had already spent so much time failing at it is, I think, really fruitful.

I wouldn't have wanted to lose a lot of set design time to that. And yeah, like just making something developable, I think, is the word we use a lot of the time. Like, you know, it can be changed. It is not just this one thing where if it doesn't work, you have to rip it out of the set, and you don't have anything there to replace it. Yeah, we spend a lot of time, this is a process that's changed over the last couple of years,

of play design gives a lot more notes a lot earlier on of, you know, right, is this design, is this developable? Is this something that, you know, has the right knobs and things so that it can be balanced? Because you can build something that sort of can't get used on the road. That's something you have to be very careful about. Yeah, and I think that was an unrealized advantage I had coming into vision design was that I'd done a lot of set design for Commander products. And I'd worked on some game balance teams for other projects.

So I was really like learning, Vision was like almost, you know, like my third discipline in this case. So I was able to lean on the back of that experience and kind of know, have a bit more intuition about the things that might work or might not work, or what might even be the best way to go about and try it. I think that saved me some time and also helped make sure I wasn't handing off too many duds to Corey. Yeah, one of the things that's very interesting, and you'll see in the document when we post your document, is you listed all the things that you didn't use,

and there was a lot of, like, we tried this, we tried this, we tried this. And like you said, that's very, very valuable for set design to say, we did try this but here's why it didn't work yeah and another reason i did do that was also like it was going to be cory's uh set design project and he was on the vision design team so i know he's going to know a lot of this but also you never know what will happen right like maybe cory has to move to another project and then somebody else has to come in and lead the set or you know something other strange

thing can happen. You need that information documented. We can't just rely on everybody keeping it in their heads because it'll just disappear if you do that eventually. So that's a big part of why I wanted to make sure the document was really thorough was so that both Corey would have the reference if Corey needed to move, somebody else could continue working on the set, or if somebody else just got brought in and Corey wanted something to bring bring them up to speed he had a strong document that you know two months

into set design he can give somebody and like yeah this is stuff you don't need to bother suggesting we've already tried this yeah another thing that uh is the reason having documentation is really important is future sets this happens all the time where someone says oh yeah we try something like that way back when. And then we can go dig it up. And, you know, like Fertel is a really good example where, you know, Fertel was kind of built on a mechanic called layaway that we had made ages ago based on this. The Star Wars trading card game. You know, it was just a thing that we had tried and didn't quite work.

And then we were playing in similar space. We just sort of pulled it out. And, you know, it's not that mechanic, but a lot of the lessons of that mechanic shaped, you know, what Fortel became. Yeah. So anyway, I can see my desk here, so we're almost done. So any final thoughts on leaving your first set?

Well, it was, yeah, it was a daunting experience, but also just really fun and enjoyable. I honestly can say when I got hired at Wizards, I did not ever imagine I would be leading a Magic the Gathering booster set, so it's pretty cool, and I hope everybody enjoys it. I'm really looking forward

to playing it. It honestly is both far enough in my rear view, and also I've worked on so many things in between that like i feel like it'll almost be a fresh experience for me in some weird ways and i'm pretty excited to to have that as well and see it in the wild yeah for those that i mean i've had glenn on my podcast before so maybe you know this if you're listening to my podcast but glenn actually joined uh magic as an editor that that was Glenn's first sort of job for Magic, right? Yep.

And so if you want to hear, Glenn came on my podcast to talk about editing Unstable. So if you want to hear Glenn talk about editing, you can go back and listen to it. We have a podcast. But it's been fun. It's neat watching people sort of shift roles in R&D, and that happens all the time.

So that's been cool to watch so I've enjoyed it quite a bit and so your next big project which we can't talk about any of the details because it's far in the future but you got a lead

Lord of the Rings which is an exciting thing the artist will get a play in a year or two yeah I am the lead designer for the set based on the Lord of the Rings, which is an exciting thing. The audience will get a play in a year or two. Yeah, I am the lead designer for the set based on the Lord of the Rings intellectual property. But yeah, anyway, you and I actually didn't overlap because I was on the vision design team,

but I don't think you didn't join until set design, right? Yeah, yeah. And we kind of did like a quick vision reboot since it was, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Anyway.

We can talk about that later. At some point in the future, I'll have you back when we can talk about Lord of the Rings, which is a really cool set. But anyway, that's for the future. So I want to thank you for joining us today. It was a lot of fun talking all about Baldur's Gate. And for the audience, go play it. And anyway, thank you. Thanks, Glenn, for joining me.

Yeah. Thanks for having me. But, guys, 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. I want to thank Glenn once again, and I'll see you all next week. Bye-bye.