Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #939: CLB Set Design with Corey Bowen

Episode Date: June 10, 2022

I sit down with Designer Corey Bowen to talk about the set design of Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur's Gate.

I'm not pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another Drive to Work at Home Edition. Okay, so today I have Corey Bowen, and we're going to talk about the set design of Commander Legends Battle for Baldur's Gate. Hey, Corey. Hey, Mark. How's it going? Okay, so I know you were on the Vision Design team, but you also led the set design team. So we're going to talk about Set Design today. So we're going to, basically our story is going to start when Vision Design hands over the set to you. And so I want to talk about different pieces of it.

And you talk about how it got from where it started in the beginning of Set Design to how it got to the printed version. So let's start by talking backgrounds. So when Vision Design handed over the file, backgrounds existed, but where were they when they got handed over? Backgrounds were really tricky when they were handed over. I remember a lot of where they were through Vision. I'm trying to remember where they were when they were handed over. remember where they were when they were handed over um i believe we were messing with this space where uh you had a legendary creature and they were it was called like story background or story backstory for a long time um where your legend would have story and their backgrounds were

called backstories so we um yeah for some flexibility reasons but uh for story backstory for a while the story legends included backstories within them so if i had this card that um was a story so it could have a backstory it also had a little separate ability that was a backstory if you were using it as a backstory in the command zone there's also this this whole thing where if you were using it as a backstory in the command zone there's also this this whole thing where if you had a backstory in the command zone the way it worked is like once per game you could pay its cost to add its ability text to your commander forever so it was more like this this one-time cost that you use to upgrade your commander very different than what it is now but it's like monstrosity maybe a good example right like once game, you could pay this mana and add this ability.

Yeah, monstrosity is very close. But if your commander died or went back to the command zone, it would retain this upgrade. But we messed around with that. I think that's where we were leaving off mostly from vision. We had a lot of iterations of that kind of stuff um yeah and we messed around with different stuff like that you know at some point we were calling them feats instead of backstories um we were just uh swapping different iterations trying to get that to work

trying to get the text space to work one of the issues was oh i have this story legend and it also has an ability but was the backstory. And so it had two interesting abilities, and that was really confusing. Or it just crowded the text box, and so we didn't have a lot of space to communicate everything. Eventually, through set design, maybe like a quarter or a third of the way in, we had what I call a return to normal cardboard, where we just try to outfit the mechanic more to where it is now where it's enchantments in the command zone and they're separate cards and they work like a mechanic that you expect them to work like so we were

tested from from vision and from early uh set design we were testing a lot of super novel weirdo space. I think at one point I was thinking about like, I don't know if I can say this on this podcast. Let's just say that we returned to normal cardboard and it made a lot more sense. It still had the high resonance feel. And we just kept iterating from there.

So, yeah. and we just kept iterating from there. So, yeah. Yeah, and one of the things that's interesting to talk about, just touch on for a second, is why a set like Commander Legends needs something like background. Can we talk about that for a little bit? Oh, yeah. What purpose does it serve?

Yeah. So, you know, draft in general as a format has this very cool thing where if I'm drafting red cards and green cards and I realize that my green cards aren't as good as the blue cards coming to me, I might want to pivot over to blue-red and start picking more blue cards. And that kind of flexibility, that ability to pivot, is really crucial to the fun and structure of draft. So in commander draft, you have this really great thing where, oh, I can only build decks to my commander's color identity. So if I added a red-green legend, I know I'm building red-green. And if I notice my green is not coming along and i have good blue cards i could start picking those blue cards but my flexibility is really limited until i get a blue red legendary creature um which is a lot harder than it thinks and so in commander legends one their solution was

partner and in that set there was a bunch of mono color legends legends that had partners. So if I had a red legend and a green legend, I would feel like, hey, I can pick red-green cards. I can feel like I can reliably pick a red and a green legend because there's plentiful monocolor legends that link up. And if I wanted to switch to blue, I would feel fairly confident in being able to find a blue partner that would be able to connect to my red partner or whatever. And so that flexibility of having those two commanders to assemble your color

identity rather than be sent on a quest or a very specific color identity, like a card with a very specific color identity, is really, really good. And so in Commander Legends 2, Battle for Baldur's Gate, we have this dynamic where partners are a little troubling to balance for constructed. The more partners there are in existence, the harder it is to balance them or playtest them with every other partner. In theory, perhaps, is that fine? Is that fun? Is that fair? So we wanted to try to do a spinoff partner because we thought the structure of the two-part command zone worked really, really well for flexibility in your color identity. And we came up with this idea of, I mean,

choose a background really came from the idea of customizing your commander with a color identity this is my legendary creature but like in dnd i have some influence on their on their character qualities and in this case it's backstory it's background i'm playing this card but i'm deciding that you know flavorfully i'm a criminal or flavorfully i'm like a crafter flavorfully i'm a chef or whatever um and so that's a lot of fun in D&D there that came in with this flexibility drafting

mechanic. Okay, so let's talk about another mechanic, initiative. Do you remember where initiative got handed off? Yeah, so we tried several different initiatives. Before you tell the story, let me real quick for the audience.

Initiative is this ability where you get a card kind of like the monarch. You take the initiative. And then when you take the initiative, it allows you to venture into a specific dungeon called the Undercity. Or if you're already in a dungeon, further go through that dungeon you're in. Okay, so that's what it is. Let's talk about how we how you got there yeah vision handed off i believe that very basic ground level idea of what if we had and at that time i think we were calling it the torch but what if we had the torch this is the monarch but you

get to venture into a dungeon um and that was like pretty pop line you know that's what it is um obviously it's there's a lot more going on with it but that's what it is that's what bitch is like hey this could be cool and i was like this is cool i like this idea a lot i like how it marries the commander limited like you know monarchs on mechanic i like how it marries that kind of gameplay with uh the dungeons from afr in a satisfying way. And then throughout set design, I think most of that mechanic, we knew that it was Monarch Venture Dungeon thing, but we didn't know what the timing was.

Was it going to do end step as well? Was it going to work with old Venture cards? Monarch triggers just on your end step, but this card triggers so it's on your upkeep if you kept it, or it's whenever you take it. So if triggers just on your end step but this card triggers so it's on your upkeep if you kept it or it's whenever you take it so if i hit someone with it i trigger it immediately or if i already have it and i play a card that takes the initiative i still get to venture which is unlike the monarch in the monarch you have this thing where you uh want to play a monarch deck uh you put a bunch of cards that become the monarch.

And then you're like, I, you know, the monarch creates a sub game where like I enjoy hitting people. So evasive creatures are good for me. And in my monarch deck, that kind of little mini game I create in the world, I end up not playing as much. Because if someone takes the monarch from me, I don't need to hit them. I just am going to play one of my many become the monarch cards because i put all of the cards that become the monarch together and i'm incentivized to hold those cards in my hand until i lose the monarch so i forever have the monarch without really interacting with anyone so with the venture or the initiative cards a lot of the idea and then something born from set design was that uh if i want to play a dungeon heavy deck with a

lot of initiative cards i want to make these cards so that if i already have the initiative i don't want to hold these in my hand i want to be proactive i want to play them because i have an incentive to now now if i play them i still get to venture you know i don't need to wait to hold it back i still can wait in case someone i think someone's going to take it from me but i have this proactive play already so that's a huge difference between monarch and initiative that i really enjoyed and obviously dungeons are dungeons are a lot dungeons are a lot to design it's a lot of different little things a lot of different iterations um so the dungeon really changed a lot late set design i I think more early to mid set design, we were figuring out the intricacies of the initiative itself.

And once we were like, okay, we're pretty solid. This is what it is. Let's just really start iterating on this dungeon again to really figure out its final resting place. So that dungeon, I really loved the first mode being get a land. And I really loved goad being somewhere.

But that one dungeon, it really had a lot of iteration later in the set design. So was it always, as far as set design, it always was its own dungeon, right? It wasn't, it was never like venturing to the dungeon was what happened.

It was always venturing to the Undercity or whatever, you know, you guys called it. Yeah, I mean, the exact specifics of venturing to the Undercity was tricky. I think there may have been, maybe when we first were thinking of it, we were thinking about multiple dungeons. I think myself personally,

I was very headstrong on one dungeon very early on. I felt like if there was multiple dungeons, I didn't want like when one card enters the game, this means everyone has to know all of the dungeons and have to be able to make a choice of which dungeon they're going into. That really frustrated me. I didn't want player a to play to take the initiative and suddenly now player b has to really think about which of the three or five or whatever dungeons they need to enter that felt um like really really taxing choice to me um and i like this other dynamic where if there's only one dungeon and you know you're entering it you don't have to make any choices when you enter it there's only one entrance room you know you're entering it, you don't have to make any choices when you enter it. There's only one entrance room.

And then if you have one big dungeon game aid piece, you can put it in the middle of the table and just track everyone's progress on it. Everyone doesn't need their own separate reminder. You can just track everyone's progress on one single dungeon reminder piece. And it feels like you're all in the same dungeon, even though you're kind of in separate instances of it but i thought that was really lovely as well so what is like a lot of the fine tuning was making the dungeon you think like what was the biggest part of set design with with the mechanic with this mechanic specifically this mechanic was a beast all the way through i mean again in the beginning was figuring out the cards that take the initiative and what the timing was

in the middle it was you know discussing with mtgo and other stakeholders on like how was this mechanic going to work how was this dungeon going to work um How is this going to work with previous Venture cards? And then later on, it's, you know, what are the specifics of the dungeon? Every step of the way, we were iterating on what the specifics of the dungeon were, but really, most of that stride was late. But, I don't know, this mechanic was being chiseled on and worked on basically every single week. Okay, so let's go to another mechanic. Adventure.

So, do you remember the state adventure got handed over yeah i mean adventure seems pretty was pretty cut and clean adventure i handed over saying hey we think adventure is cool and awesome and fits with pretty good themes also we can do adventure on like artifacts and enchantments and stuff and i was like yes that is cool it is sweet there are things we can make that marry with adventure um so adventure was just kind of had a lot of high confidence all the way through and then um at some point i started making limited cards that would like marry dragons and adventures because often we had our dragons have adventures. And so those combining some cards that made you want to play adventures and dragons

or adventures or dragons was really cool as well. But in general, adventure was just, Vision handed it off saying, you should use adventure. And I said, okay, I will use adventure. There's a little bit of trepidation in using adventure and adventure, but I believe we got over it.

So when it was handed over, so the finished product there are adventure on creatures and there's adventures on spells that spells on um artifacts yeah um but you you mentioned enchantments i know there was more stuff that was explored as far as other kinds of things um oh for starters just so the audience understands, the flavor you guys approached, like in Eldraine, where Adventures first showed up, you met the creature that went on the adventure, right? The creature that you could cast

was the creature that went on the adventure. But you guys did something a little bit different, which is you, the player, are going on the adventure, and the permanent represents things you will encounter or find on your adventure.

Yeah, that is a lot of the idea, is that you will go on this adventure, and you will encounter this monster, or this magic item, or whatever. I don't think this is 100% consistent. There's a lot of dragons in this set where it just makes more sense that that dragon's attack is the adventure, but even then you could read it as i've been attacked by this that's my adventure this is what is attacking me um but yeah i mean that's the general idea and there were there were i believe enchantments with adventure in the vision handoff i just wanted to streamline it more towards the magic items because i thought they were more resonance.

So I went with creatures and artifacts. Yeah, it's sort of fun, the magical artifacts. The idea that you find treasure in your adventures, I think, is really cute. Okay, next, let's talk about Myriad. So I believe there was no Myriad in the set, correct, when it was handed off? Yeah, there was no Myriad in the set, correct? When it was handed off? Yeah, there was no Myriad in the set. The set was handed off with Melee, actually.

Melee is a mechanic where a creature's Melee gets plus one, plus one for each opponent you're attacking. And there was 1-1 tokens with Melee in the Vision handoff. So the idea was, hey, we think we can do a red-white deck that can still scale aggro and multiplayer pretty decently with melee. And I liked the melee tokens. But after thinking about it, I thought that Myriad was, I don't know, I thought it was cooler.

I thought it was cooler. I thought it had more opportunities for synergy with a big set like this with so many potential commanders. One of the things I was always thinking about was getting mechanics that had a lot of potential to hook into different synergies. And melee has so much going on in that aspect.

Sorry, Myriad. Let me explain what Myriad is just for those who might not know what Myriad is. So this is the rule text, reminder text from Myriad. Let me explain what Myriad is, just for those who might not know what Myriad is. So this is the rules text, reminder text from Myriad. Whenever this creature attacks, for each opponent other than defending player, you may create a token that's a copy of this creature that's tapped and attacking that player or a planeswalker they control. Exile the tokens at end of combat.

Right, so imagine you have a 1-1 with Myriad. Right, so imagine you have a 1-1 with Myriad. Essentially, the text means when I attack, I'm attacking everyone with different copies of myself. But it had a lot of synergy with tokens, and then synergies with sacrificing, and then synergies with attacking, and then synergies with going wide. We're leaving the battlefield, so there's a lot of fun stuff to do um yeah and then creatively we like the idea for a myriad cards to represent like traveling parties um you know sometimes playing a dnd rpg or just dnds in general and you have your party full of different you know classes and whatever but sometimes you run along and yeah here's a group of cultists or here's a group of like guards and so you know parties and traveling groups are

very common in dnd so we thought it was cool to represent the myriad uh cards as groups of uh things and bolts and such and such also something i want to point out uh you've done a lot of design on various commander products and commander decks and stuff um but this is the first time you led a set design of a booster product correct yeah no i've done um i think up to that point i i've done like 20 or so um commander pre-con releases or pre-con decks but i've done a lot of commander pre-con leading and this was my first booster set which is uh maybe the viewers don't really get it, but it's a huge difference, a huge different workload. You know, there's like 360 cards to make in an environment to consider them in.

So it was a much, much bigger project. Okay, so let's move on to talk another element of the set, dice rolling. So was dice rolling always there when Vision another element of the set, dice rolling. So was dice rolling always there when Vision handed it off? Was there dice rolling in it? Yeah, dice rolling was tricky. There was always a little bit of dice rolling in this set. We knew it was D&D.

One of our tenants in AFR was that if, hey, if you're rolling a D20 in Magic, it's going to feel like D&D. And so that carried over a little bit um one of the tricky parts about like the development for battle for balder's gate um was mostly completely before afr was released so we knew that dice rolling in black border was kind of a you know we were confident that people would like it we were confident that people like people who like variants would enjoy it but uh we were still hesitant on how much they would like it and so uh we kept the dice rolling kind of at a minimal for a long time

until afr released and we tried to update a few cards because we thought it went over pretty well i think if we i think if we had been making the set later and we already had confidence in dice rolling we would see a lot more of it in the set but instead we just see it more in the background of the set because we want to evoke that dnd feeling but we were a little bit trepidatious about the reception of d20s without seeing the players play with it. Yeah, you bring up something the audience might not be aware of, which was we had a lot of confidence in Adventures in Forgotten Realm, the first D&D Magic set,

but this product got started before the audience had seen the first one. So you guys were working somewhat in the dark, but during set design, the set came out, right? So you didn't finish set design set design the set came out right so like you you didn't finish set design before the original set came out yeah we had a few months i think after the set came out it was definitely towards the end of the process that we saw afr come out um but i think we had a bit of time to react um which which was good you know obviously i wish i had been able to know more about AFR sooner.

But I think we made a great D&D product. And I think dice rolling also adds a lot of complexity. And we approached dice rolling in a very different way here. Because in AFR, you're drafting dice cards. And then you're going to go play three or four rounds. And if you miss on a die roll, then the next time you play it maybe you'll succeed but in this this game you're like clb you're drafting a huge deck full of like mostly singleton cards obviously it's not all singleton because it's draft but uh you you when you draw your die rolling card it's it's so much

harder because you have such a bigger deck to draw that card. And you're usually just rolling the die once. And so if you fail, maybe you'll never roll that die again. And so there's a lot of little differences in the die rolling here. I know that some of our die rolling cards, when they scale up,

they don't scale up on effectiveness. They scale up on how many opponents they affect. So if you're trying to kill that creature or trying to affect this opponent, you can. so if you're trying to kill that creature or trying to affect this opponent you can and if you roll well it just will happen to hit everyone else which is kind of our way of giving the die rolling cards a meaningful floor and still an exciting ceiling um and then some of our other die rolling cards maybe maybe it's like an attack trigger or something um i can't remember any specifics right now, but some of the philosophy was,

okay, if one card gets to roll their dice multiple times, then maybe that'll help that variance of if I fail, then that's the only die roll I ever get. So I don't know. All in all, it was a little tricky to react to to make sure that it was satisfying, but I like die rolling. I really like the dragons that roll

a d20 and scale off that many. There's a mythic, a blue mythic, where you get to roll a d20 and then whatever that result is you draw that many cards. There's no table. If I roll a 19, I'm drawing 19 cards. So here, let me get the... which dragon is this?

It's the... Blue dragon is this? It's the... Blue dragon. What's the name of the blue dragon? Oh, sorry. It's Ancient Silver Dragon. Ancient Silver Dragon. Okay. So Ancient Silver Dragon, 6 blue blue, Elder Dragon, 8-8, flying. Whenever Ancient Silver Dragon deals combat damage to a player,

roll a d20, draw cards equal to the result. You have no maximum hand size for the rest of the game. So this is a full cycle, right, of dragons when they attack you, roll a d20 draw cards equal to the result you have no maximum hand size for the rest of the game so this is a full cycle right of dragons when they attack you roll a d20 yeah there's there's a dragonese color there um and really just got in a room with one of my designers and we were just thinking about hey if we just roll a d20 and scale off of that number what's the craziest stuff we can do yeah and this is sort of fun that the uh all of the afr stuff and the off of that number what's the craziest stuff we can do yeah and this is sort of fun that the uh all of the afr stuff and the rest of the cards outside the dragons have like

the roll chart right you're rolling a d20 it tells you what happens but these are just it's a scalable thing from 1 to 20 and you could you could roll 20 and draw 20 cards or whatever yeah it takes some inspiration from an afr the commander decks had cards that would roll um different die like a d6 or d12 or d10 um which by the way shorthand for a 10 set of die a 12 set of die or 16 set of die and then you would scale off of that number in some way so the commander decks had explored the space a little bit um but not that much with the d20 and i didn't want to do different die types i thought it was you know there's so much going on in the set already i didn't want people to have to like get different dies or dice so uh i liked taking that concept from afr commander and uh scaling

it up to the d20 and trying it out at some splashy effect okay Okay, let's go on to the next component. So one of the interesting things about Baldur's Gate is it has nine gates. And I think, were the gates in the Vision Design Handoff or did you guys add gates later? No, it wasn't a Vision Design Handoff. There was actually probably a larger presence of gate matters in the vision handoff than what

ended up being true um there was a handful of green cards that cared more about gates um than what is true today um but i liked gates it was a suggestion in the vision it obviously was in the handoff um i thought that i've always liked gates as like a really background sub theme that you don't have to care about that much. And then we got to make nine gates and it worked decently well. Like there was the five common gates are close to the thriving lands and jumpstart. There are lands that enter the battlefield taps. You choose a color. They tap for a native color like there's one for blue or one for white and the chosen color so if i play the blue the blue common gate mentors tapped and i can choose whatever second color it might tap for and it can tap for blue or that other color

um and those i think were really really good fixing for um for commander legend sets because you want your fixing lands to not be constrained by color identity too much or else if i draft the red green land and i end up blue red then hey i can't play that land but if i draft the red lands and i pivoted from red green to blue red i could still play it which was really useful um and so those five gates and then we made uh four other gates where one of them's a rare that is really splashy it's balder's gates go figure and the other three were i think it's too common and an uncommon and they all had different gate rewards on the gates themselves so if i'm drafting gates you know it's probably i'm drafting this land that is taking me there. So any deck could start drafting gates if they felt so inclined.

You didn't need to be heavy multicolor like you usually do for these land-based decks. You could just draft these colorless color identity lands or these monocolor lands to start doing your gate stuff. And then we added a few colorless gate rewards on artifact creatures. We actually ended up reprinting Gate Colossus. Do you want to read Gate Colossus? Sure, I can read Gate Colossus. Gate Colossus is... What color is Gate Colossus?

It is colorless. It's a reprint. Oh, it's a colorless. Gate Colossus. Eight mana for an 8-8. It's an artifact creature construct. This spell costs one less to cast for each gate you control. Gate Colossus can't be blocked by creatures with power two or less.

Whenever a gate enters the battlefield under your control, you may put Gate Colossus from your graveyard on top of your library. Yeah, for a long time this was some other giant artifact creature that was trying to do something like Gate Colossus until we opened our eyes and learned time this was some other giant artifact creature that was trying to do something like gate colossus until we opened our eyes and learned how to love reprinting great gate colossus um which made a lot

more sense the card is really sweet and um yeah i don't know i think there's like a shield guardian from dnd concepted on that card or something similar to that but uh i think gates very similar to adventure they were there and then they stuck and then we ended up making one legendary creature that that would fit gates as well that i thought was fun uh who was legendary creature oh yeah actually yeah it's nine fingers keen you can just look up nine fingers okay nine fingers keen i Fingers Keen, I got it. One black, green, blue. So four mana total. One black, one green, one blue of that. Four four. Legendary creature, human rogue.

Menace. Ward. Pay nine life. Whenever Nine Fingers Keen deals combat damage to a player, look at the top nine cards in your library. You may put a gate card from among them onto the battlefield. Then if you control nine or more gates, put the rest into your hand. Otherwise, put the rest on the bottom of your library in a random order.

Yeah, so typically, you know, gate fans out in the world, people who like gates, are very used to five-color gate decks. There are ten Ravnikan gates. You need to be in all five colors to play them. I think there's maybe 11 Ravnikan gates, but you need to be in all five colors to play them um i think there's maybe 11 ravnikan gates but you need to be on all five colors to play them uh this is a three color gate legend which is really interesting but with the nine gates and balder's gate in which if i was i could play seven of them and then with i could play seven of these gates and then i could play the three gates from ravnica um that would fit soul tie so to be demir pogari and simic

and then so that would be 10 gates i could play my deck and then maybe there's another gate that i'm freaking that 11th gate from ravnica something. But maybe I could play like 11 or 12 gates already. So in Constructed, I certainly can reach nine gates in three color, which typically people would be like, you can't reach nine gates in three color, but you can here. And then, yeah, and then in Draft, because you can do multiples of gates, you can technically reach nine gates as well.

Yeah, that's pretty cool. So I can see my desk here, so I'm almost to work. Any final thoughts on the making of Battle for Baldur's Gate? Final thoughts? I'm not so sure. I have a lot of thoughts in general, so if you want to ask any questions, I know I'm doing a... of thoughts in general so if you want to ask any questions i know i'm doing a um you could just honestly tweet at me at at uh cory j bowen c-o-r-e-y-j-b-o-w-e-n and i'm happy to answer any questions about this sets because i have nothing i cannot stop talking about it if you

have a question about it i can say something about it so what is here's my final thought for you which is i understand you're proud of the set as a whole. There's lots of cool things going on. What is the little detail that you might think people might not notice, but you think is just an awesome little detail in the set? Just an awesome little detail in the set. Something subtle that you're proud of, but it's subtle.

So that people might not even notice it, but here's something cool that you're proud of, but it's subtle. So people might not even notice it, but here's something cool that's there. There's so many little details. I feel like the set is made up of small little details and small little cards that interact with other little cards. Like here's this random artifact feature that is just doing some weird different thing, but it connects with three or four different legends.

It's hard to pick just one detail, so I'll leave you with an unsatisfying. I love all of the tiny little details, because there are so many tiny little details. The other thing the set does, by the way, speaking of tiny little details, is there are a lot of references. Obviously, this is a D&D licensed set. And I know you guys spend a huge amount of time just making every reference you could everywhere you could. And so there's a lot of really fun D&D references for

D&D fans. Yeah, I spent a lot of time researching Baldur's Gate stuff and common D&D tropes and stuff. So, hope you guys like the flavor. But anyway, I'm now at my desk. So we all know what that means. It means the end of my drive to work.

So instead of talking magic it's time for me to be making magic. So thanks Corey. Thanks for joining us today. Thanks Mark. And to all you, I will see you next time. Bye-bye.