Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #941: CLB Commander Decks with Gavin Verhey

Episode Date: June 17, 2022

I sit down with Designer Gavin Verhey to talk about the design of Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur's Gate's Commander decks.

I'm not pulling in my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the Drive to Work at Home Edition. Okay, so today I have Gavin Verhey. We're going to talk all about Commander Legends Battle for Baldur's Gate's Commander Decks. Hey, Gavin. Woo! Hey, you know what's exciting with your Commander? A side of Commander. That's right. With the main set this time around, we also made four Commander Decks full of some cool stuff we couldn't put in the main set. So I got to lead design them, which was a blast. And I can't wait to talk about them today.

Okay, so what was the guiding principle in making these commander decks? Yeah, great question. So what we wanted to do was we looked at the main set. We were like, okay, we want to try to figure out two things. We want to do some things that are tied into what the main set is doing. So it makes sense. It can combine with the main set, enhance what the main set and we're like okay we're trying to figure out two things we want to do some things that are tied into what the main set is doing so it makes sense it can combine with the main set enhance what the main set's doing and not blowing out all the way but we also one of the bigger things for us was let's look at what the main set can't do what it isn't doing and try and make so

commander decks based on those themes um so we basically happen we have two commander decks that have themes that aren't anywhere in the main set we thought would be really really awesome to do here um then we have two commander decks that are tied in a little more closely two themes you'll find in the main set um and i think it's a good little split and we ended up with four uh four total decks and there are definitely some i've got a lot of feedback from people these are different themes and they're used to they quite different, and they're really excited about that. Okay, so let's, I'm going to start with the two themes that are not

in the set. We'll start with those. The two themes that, oh, go ahead. Okay, so, I talked with Glenn a couple weeks ago, and he talked about how they tried to do something, and it couldn't work out in the main set. And then he's like, oh, but Gavin found a way to do something and they couldn't it couldn't work out on the main set

and then he's like oh but gavin found a way to do it so i was going to start there just because the audience has heard that talk so let's talk about party how did party get its own deck yes totally so you know i was in addition to lead designing these decks i was also on the design team i worked on the vision team with glenn and on the set design team with corey i given that i led the first commander legends it made sense for me me to be there as a guiding hand on some of this. And early on, Glenn was trying out party and a new mechanic he called Mega Party, which incorporated a lot of different D&D classes, right? You let your bards and whatever join the party.

And what we found was, ultimately, it was really challenging to build into a set because you have to get all your creature types just right for it to work. And in drafting, there's a lot of complications, a lot of big challenges. And so we kind of made the executive decision that it was not going to work out for the main set. But I thought, well, hey, wait, wait a second. I got these four commander decks and party is super resonant, right? In fact, one of the biggest notes I got on Adventures in the Forgotten Realms was where's party? It makes so much sense here. So I was like, well, I don't know what I'm going to do. I'm just going to put party in as one of the biggest notes i got on adventures in the forgotten realms was where's party it makes so much sense here so i was like well i don't know what i'm going to do i'm just going to put

party in as one of the commander decks and um it's slaughtered in and everyone loved it immediately there was no questions in fact the only question was what colors should it be um and the way these decks are all structured is they're all two colored decks because we wanted to use uh the choose a background mechanic there's a choose a background partner pair in each of them which is a new mechanic in the set. So we knew they were all going to be two colors because the backgrounds are all one, two monocolored cards.

So we had to figure out which two colors it was going to be, and we looked at white-blue and white-green and some other stuff, but ultimately settled on white-black as the direction here, and came up with this cool commander, Nalia Derenice.

So why don't you say what Nalia does? Totally. So is pretty exciting it's a three mana three three uh you can look at your top card at any time and you can cast the top card of your library if it's a one of the four party types so it's wizard rogue warrior or cleric so it's future site for party types and then at the beginning of your combat step if if you have a full party, you get to put a plus one plus encounter on all your creatures, and they all get death touch this turn. So she's an assassin in the games of Baldur's Gate, so we wanted to give her a death touch ability to match that. This card is super exciting to me for a few reasons. First of all, three mana future sight for your party types. This is really exciting

and powerful. A lot of cool stuff that you can build there. But one of the things I really liked about it that was subtle from a design perspective is that you can play this as your cleric commander or your warrior commander. You don't have to do the full party thing at all if you don't want to. If you want to just have this as your cleric commander and future site clerics off the top of your library,

you can. So I'm always interested in commander decks where there's a few different ways to build them. And here, yeah, you can build the party deck, but you could also build some of these classes together or go heavier on one than the other or what have you. And that's pretty exciting to me. Yeah, white-black is interesting. I mean, one of the things we did way back in original Zendikar Rising

was kind of divvy up where all the different creature types were. So did you guys go back and look at Magic's past to see what colors had the most clerics, rogues, warriors, and wizards? Yeah, we went back and looked, and some colors were going to be more of a challenge than others. For example, in white, there's so few rogues to choose from. You don't get a lot of white rogues. So immediately from off the bat, we were like, okay, we know we're going to need to make, we're looking to make some white rogues potentially for this product to help balance that out.

But white and black gives a good spread of all four types. And the one other thing we could do as a little cheat here is we could pick a class to put on our face commander that was the hardest one to get. So as you'll note here, Nalia is a rogue. And we're like, well, white doesn't have a lot of rogues. But if we make the face commander a rogue, that won't be a problem because you'll always have access to a rogue. So it's kind of a little cheat you can do here with the commander.

So any other interesting little tidbits about the party deck? Yeah, well, so there's a few things. First of all, it was the only white deck of our product, and we've been trying to do a lot on the commander side to give white more awesome tools. And so we made some pretty spicy uh white cards that are in this deck there's folk hero which is a background so every deck like i said has one background pair and so you've got folk hero which says it's a background it says commander creatures you own have whenever you cast a spell that shares a creature type with this creature you draw a card and this ability only triggers once each turn so it's really good for your creature type matters

decks um So a lot of folks just want to pick up this card for their angel deck or whatever. But then the other commander, Burakos, has all of the party types. It's an orc for four mana. He's also a cleric, rogue, warrior, and wizard. And whenever he attacks, the defending player loses X life

and you create X treasure tokens, where X is your party size. So in this deck, if you have folk here on Burakos together, you'll draw a card every time you play party size. So in this deck, if you have Folk Hero and Baracos together, you'll draw a card every time you play basically any creature in your deck. But you can take this Folk Hero card and put it in a lot of other places, which is one of the things I think is really exciting about the mechanic, is the interchangeability. But anyway, so a lot of exciting white cards, including that,

and then the Deep Gnome Terramancer, which is a card I designed and immediately was like, players are going to love this. It's a two-mana 2-2 with flash, and it has a Mold Earth. Whenever one or more lands enter the battlefield under an opponent's control without being played, you may search your library for a planes card, put it onto the battlefield tapped, and then shuffle. Do this only once each turn. So it's like any time someone cracks a Fetchland or Rampant Groves,

you get planes out of your deck, which is very powerful. So we put a lot of juice in the white cards here because it was the only white cards we had access to in the Commander decks. Other than that, I mean, this deck is just really interesting because it's very on board. You know, normally a lot of Commander decks are not about going wide with creatures,

and this deck goes really wide with its creatures. You want to hit your party, of course, and then have enough gas that after you get swept, you can play stuff back out again. My favorite card in the deck is called Stick Together. It's a five-mana sorcery, and it says each player chooses a party from

among the creatures they control, and then sacrifices the rest. So in this deck, I get to keep my full party. I get to quit, Erk, Rogue, Warrior, and Wizard. But in every other deck, maybe they get to keep one creature or something. There was a lot of fun in playtesting, learning things like Niv-Mizzet is a wizard, or whatever, right? Where it was like people

used to keep these funny creatures around. So that's a card I really enjoyed. Okay. So we have our white-black deck. So you said there were two decks that were playing themes not in the main set. What was the other one? Right. So the other one right so the other one is um so we looked ahead to balder's gate three we're thinking about balder's gate three and it's

not out yet but if you played through the bit that has been released the like early access pieces of it you'll know that mind flayers play a pretty big role in balder's gate three and we thought well there's not really enough support you were looking at other creature types that we could make matter i looked at like beholders for example but there's so few Beholders in Magic. We just have a couple from Adventures in the Forgotten Realms. We couldn't really do a Beholder deck. But Mind Flayers in Magic are type Horror. And we thought, okay, Mind Flayers play a big part of Baldur's Gate 3.

Horror is an interesting creature type matters deck we haven't done before. Could we combine those two things together and do a blue black horror commander deck and we tried it out it was pretty fun to build um there's a lot of weird old horrors in magic history and um you know a lot of them have to do with millings we're like okay we'll bring all this together under the banner of this like kind of milling blue black deck with a horror sub themetheme. And so, it's pretty cool. You play, like I said, a very wide variety of horrors from throughout Magic. And if you're playing this deck, my biggest tip to you is

even though the face commander, who I'll read off here in a second, mills your opponents, you're not trying to mill them down to zero cards. You're trying to mill them for some value. And then your cards will turn on because of it. So, to read him off here, he's Captain Negathrod, who goes between worlds.

He's a horror pirate. He's a pretty cool-looking mind player. Three blue, black for a 3-6. He says horrors you control have menace. So, of course, horrors are scary. We know that was a great line of text. Whenever a horror you control deals combat damage to a player, that player mills that many cards. And then at the beginning of your end step,

you choose target artifact or creature in an opponent's graveyard that was put there from their library this turn, and then you put it on the battlefield under your control. So every turn you get to mill them a little bit, you get to take one cool thing that got milled this turn for yourself, an artifact or creature of your choice. It makes sense. He's a horror pirate.

He goes plundering. And there's that, and all kinds of other cards in the deck synergize with your point-milling cards. Okay, very cool. Yeah, it's funny. Horror is a very catch-all. We've used it, like, Magic has, we call them in R&D catch-alls,

because, like, oh, I don't know what to call it. So it's a beast. I'm not sure what to call it. So it's a Horror that we just use, and Horror has been one of the catch-alls we've used, like, since the very beginning, very early on. So it's kind of cool to see use and horror has been one of the catchalls we've used like since the very beginning very early on So it's kind of cool to see horrors kind of get their own deck Right for dating the the correct scene picture type a lot of things that were Frexen's were just horrors, right? You know, you look at like a Urza block a lot of those in there. So

Yeah, very it's a very weird and belongs of creatures and to me It's part of the charm of commander is like here's a bunch of weird cards you would not normally put in a deck together, but you met it under Captain Negathrod. They all make sense, which I think is pretty cool. Anything else cool in the deck that you appreciate? I mean, there's a lot of cards that I really like. I will tell a fun story that I really like. So there's this card.

So I was trying to figure out, like, not just Mind Flayers to do, although they made a lot of sense, but I was also trying to figure out other interesting, not just mind flayers to do, although they made a lot of sense, but I was also trying to figure out other interesting flurrists in D&D that people love. So we got some obscure ones in there. We got this thing called a grell. It's like a big brain with a beak. We got this Uchelon, which is a crab ooze horror, pretty wacky type. But there's one thing I thought would be awesome. I was like, you know what would be awesome? is if we could do a dragon mind flayer if i wonder if in dnd anywhere there's

ever been a dragon mind flayer and so i went over to mike morals who was an encyclopedia of dnd knowledge um used to work on the dnd team now works on magic and i just went over to him and i was like hey mike do you know of any dragon mind flayers and without skipping a beat mike was like oh yes of course in this 2003 issue of dragon magazine there's a story that talks about uh the brain stealer dragon and so i was like i gotta have a little bit that sounds awesome um so we uh so we made a card brain stealer dragon which is inspired from this one story that wasn't a dragon magazine uh because we really wanted to have a horror dragon, and the card turned out awesome.

It's a 7-mana 6-6 dragon horror with flying. At the beginning of your end step, you exile the top card of each opponent's library. You can play those cards for as long as they remain exiled, and you can spend mana as a vote or any mana of any color to cast it, so a mana watch is it for you. And then whenever a non-land permanent opponent controls enters the battlefield under your control,

they lose life if it includes mana value. So when you steal their stuff, either with, say, Captain Negathrub or the Brainstormer Dragon, they take damage as you take it. So it really feels like this big, giant dragon is just taking your things, casting them, and dealing you damage.

Really like a mind flayer for a dragon. So that was the design that has a funny story behind it and tickled me a lot. Yeah, it's kind of cool. Okay, so now we have the two decks that were non-themes that weren't in the main set. So what were the two themes? What's the first theme that was in the main set that you made a deck out of? First theme is we decided to make a deck that cared about adventures.

The main set brings back Adventure from Eldraine, which is perfect fit for dnd right you send stuff out on adventures and even has the twist this time of um so there's some equipment and artifacts with adventure which is pretty cool um so we took that direction and we started there and then we kind of expanded it out a little bit to not just be about adventure so we ended up with this deck called exit from exile which is all about casting spells from exile so you know suspend and uh rebound and of course adventure still there's some cool new adventures in there too and then it has this commander to kind of tie it all together the commander is called faldorn dreadwolf herald it's one red green for a three three human druid whenever you cast a spell from exile or a land enters the battlefield under your control from exile, you make a 2-2 green wolf,

and then you can pay one mana, tap, discard a card to exile the top card of your library, and you can play it this turn. And notably, of course, all the red bottling effects where you can exile your top card and play them work with this mechanic too, so it was a really great fit for red-green. And yeah, so it's a really unique

kind of deck because you can use adventures like I mentioned before but it also has you going through like every card in magic to see okay what can cast from exile a lot of weird little mechanics that are casting from exile or you know what's a what funny ways do I have to play lands from exile or things like that so there's a lot of fun to be had had with that mechanically here and the deck ended up very even though it plays with a lot of adventures and does have that kind of main set theme, it ended up playing a lot different than the main set theme does.

Yeah, it's interesting. One of the things that's fun is when you make it open-ended, sometimes we'll make a mechanic and then we'll ask ourselves, oh, can we just not name it specifically and pull back a little bit? And like, oh, that way it'll care about more things.

Like I know when I originally made Proliferate, originally it only worked on minus one, minus one counters and poison, because the original flavor was like disease or something. And then I remember team member Mark Lobis was like, couldn't it just be all counters? And we're like,

yeah, it could. It could be all counters. Why are you restricting it? So it's fun when you sort of pull back and just make the mechanic, you know, a little more broader. That's a lesson I've definitely learned so many times in design of like, you can have your vision for what you want to do and let the players, you know, do the thing that it says intending. But Magic has so many different pieces.

It's really fun when people get to take it and do entirely different things they never expected, right? That's part of the fun of the game. So your proliferate example is great, and here, like, yeah, you can do what the deck is telling you to do, or you can go find whatever your weird, very new card is, um, and do it with that, too.

So, uh, any particular cards in this deck that you sort of tricked or fancy? Uh, I mean, my favorite part of this deck was just finding those old mechanics to do as one of. You know, one of the cool things about Commander decks is we can use whatever mechanics we want. I guess maybe not banding, right? But for the most part, whatever mechanics we want.

And so going back through the history of old mechanics, we made a new adventure of course. We made a new suspend card. We made Scrumptious Adventure 4th. It was one of my favorites. It's 3 energy for sorcery where you exile cards from the top of your library until you hit a land.

You put the land into play, the rest on the bottom, and then you exile Venture Force with three time counters, and it has to spend three for two mana. So just every three turns, it's just going to catch from exile and get you another land. And this is modeled after a cycle from Future Sight, this recurring cycle that you've had in Future Sight. And then we started doing a commander super cycle of these. So we did a blue one and a red one already in previous Commander decks that are resuspending. And then we did this one here as the green entry in that cycle. I'll tell a real quick story

where that mechanic came from, just because you're hearing about something that I made long ago. We originally there's this unglued, there's this card that's called the double cycle, where you get to do something now and something next game. And so

we wanted to put that in a future site. It was going to be in the same match was the idea. And then okay, you do something now and then in the next game in the same match with that player, you get this thing at the beginning of the game. And digital came back to us and were like, we literally can't program that.

Our games can't see each other. It's not even like it would take a lot of work. We physically can't do it. And so like, okay, well, how... Because we really... It was future site, right? How do we sort of make things where you predict the future? And then we came up with the idea of,

oh, maybe we can use suspend and we loop it so it's just always going off. And so that mechanic came out of it just not being able to do the thing we wanted to do first, and that was kind of our workaround to find another way to sort of play things in the future. That's a really fun story. I didn't know the history of discards, actually.

I remember when I was a player when Future State came out, and they really tickled me at the time. I thought it was cool to have a card that just slowly, every three turns, you get to come off of Suspend, right? And there was a lot of fun to be had with those.

One thing I love about, you know, these cycles, the cycle that we're making here, is I just love making super cycles across Magic products. It's a fun little thing

I like to do. So, of course, you've got the blue, red, and green ones now and now players are speculating, ooh, what are the black and white ones going to do, right? So there's some fun there.

And then finally, just one more card I want to call out is, you know, another mechanic we tapped into is actually a recent one, Fortel, right? Fortel casts from Exile, which is good in call time. So we have this card called Green Slime. It's one of my favorites in our set. It's a two green for a 2-2 flash, and it's got Fortel for a G,

so you can set it off to the side for two mana and cast it later for just single green mana. And when green slime enters the battlefield, you counter an activated or triggered ability from an artifact or an enchantment, and if it counters a permanent ability, you get to destroy that permanent. So it's very much like your opponent activates their thing, and you're like, surprise! The green

slime drops down and gets you. If you've ever played D&D for, I guess, a long enough time, you have probably encountered a green slime that has dropped onto you, if you've ever played D&D for, I guess, a long enough time, you have probably encountered a green slime that has dropped on you in a dungeon and eaten your armor or something like that. So, it was a great flavor fit, but also a very unique thing for green to do, right? Green doesn't get a lot of countering abilities,

but this was a way we could do it where it felt green to do. Yeah, is this the first time? I know green has counter-activated abilities before. Usually it's on artifacts. Has it done enchantments before? It might have. I don't know if it's done enchantments or anything, I think there's a dragon in this very set actually that has an adventure

side where you get to counter an activated or triggered ability, but in this bind is a card I always think about, which maybe counters an activated ability from invasion, but yeah, the idea here is they have an enchantment, and it triggers, and you play with it and you counter it and you counter the ability and kill it. Which, for green, of course green hates artifacts and enchantments, so very implying for it to destroy one of those.

But a unique little twist to counter the ability, too. Okay, so let's get on to the fourth deck. So what was the theme of the fourth deck? The fourth deck? Okay. So the fourth deck, the main has um three different dragon themes so teamer green red blue and the main set are all about dragons and when you're drafting the set both green blue blue red and um blue red green red are all about uh dragons and it's pretty cool actually because dnd is one of the few places where you have a world with small dragons, right?

There are dragon more than running around, so you can actually have non-flying dragons. You can build three kinds of dragon decks. So we thought, we started from a place of like, okay, well, let's think about doing a dragon deck. Maybe there's something interesting here. And what we found was we've done a couple dragon decks already, and literally with the last D&D set of

decks, we did a dragon deck too. So we're like, okay, well, let's table the dragon deck thing for a second. Let's see what else is happening in the main set. And one thing that we've been doing a lot more, in fact, I made a video about this on Good Morning Magic a little bit ago, is Goad, right? So Goad is, we're calling it Commander Evergreen now, so it can show up in, like, Commander main set.

So you'll find it all around Battle for Baller's Gate. And what if we tried building a deck that cared about goad? And so we started there, and one of my teammates, the team for this, I should say, I was the lead designer, and then I also had Ken Nagel, of course, design style work. He led the Horrors deck. I led the Party deck, but I ultimately led all the decks, but I was in charge of the Party deck for a while. Ken led the Horrors deck. Daniel Holt, who I'm sure you've talked to before with Kamigawa, led the Red-Green deck. And then Noah Milrod, a name a lot of people don't know, who has unfortunately since left the company,

but we got him on loan from basically his other job at Wizards. I thought he was a great designer, would come in and help us out. He worked on this Blue-Red deck, and he had this interesting idea. Instead of making the deck about goad, specifically the word goad, what if we made it about creatures that had to attack? And we actually had to rework with Jess

Dunks, our rules manager, to get this card to work. But the front-facing commander, I'll read it off to you, and then I'll explain what I mean. It's Furkrog, Cunning Instigator, 3 blue-red a three three dragon it's got it's got angst whenever one or more dragons you control attack an opponent go target creature that player controls but here's the really interesting part to me whenever a creature deals combat damage to one of your opponents if that creature had to attack this combat you put a plus one plus one counter on furkrog and

you draw a card so So what that means is of course it works with goads. That works great. But any red creatures that have to attack every combat if able, it works with those. Any red cards that make your opponent's cards forced to attack, it works with those. Any blue cards that make your opponent's cards forced to attack, it works with those.

So there's a lot of ways you can build this deck. If you want to make it a goad deck, sure, go nuts. Make it a goad deck. But if you want to, you can play this deck with a lot of ways you can build this deck, right? If you want to make it a goad deck, sure, go nuts. Make it a goad deck. But if you want to, you know, you can play this deck with a bunch of red creatures that have to attack you every turn. Like your Tanner, you know, your whatever, your red 2-1 that has to attack every turn or whatever. And it'll also draw you cards off the program. So there's a lot of very interesting ways to build this deck. And, you know, Jess and I and actually Magic Online all had to get into a room and figure out how to word this,

make it work on those products and change the rules a little bit. But it's a really cool design and inspires hope there's a new novel next. Okay, so what are some fun cards in this deck? Well, my favorite card in this deck is a card, as I always say, it's guaranteed that it usually ends the game, but you're not sure who's going to win. And it's this card. It's Spectacular Showdown. It's one and a red for a sorcery. You put a double strike counter.

It's using that keyword counter technology. You put a double strike counter on target creature, and then goad each creature that had a double strike counter put on it this way. And it has overload for seven mana. So the most common way this card is played is for seven mana, you give everything on the table a double strike counter and goad everything. And this card is hilarious, because you cast it,

and then you attack and deal some damage, probably. And then everyone else attacks, and maybe some players die or something. But then all those creatures still have double strike counters on them. So then you're sitting there like, uh-oh, it's very red, right? You're like, all right, great effect right now. Next turn, uh-oh, all their stuff has double strike and can attack me next turn. What am I going to do about it?

And this card was a blast. Everyone enjoyed playing with this card, and it was a huge favorite for us out of these decks. But yeah, a good mix of stuff. One other card I want to call out that I was really happy to get in here is, so Jules Robbins led the design of Adventures in the Forgotten Realms, or led the final design of it, at least. And he made those class cards, all these different classes. Well, he made one for all the D&D classes that were the main ones, but he didn't make one for Artificer class, which was an expansion of D&D.

It was an expansion book for D&D. And so Jules reached out to me and was like, hey, you're working on the Commander decks. Could you make an Artificer class to kind of fill that missing gap? And I was like, oh, that sounds really cool. So I went into the tank, we did a bunch of iterating on it, and we came up with the missing Artificer class, which players have asked me for since Adventures in the Forgotten Realms. I'm sure you get questions about it sometimes, too. It's a one and a blue for a class.

So the way these work, if you don't remember them from Adventures in the Forgotten Realms, is they start with an ability, and then they level up. You pay some mana to level them up and get another effect or ability. So it's one and a blue for an Enchanted class. The first artifacts while you cast each turn cost one less. So once it's in play, your first artifacts always cost you one less. Then for one and a blue, you can go to level two. And when it becomes level two, you get to flip cards from the top of your deck until you find an artifact.

You put the artifact into your hand and the rest on the bottom of your library. And then for 6 mana, for 5 and a blue, you can kick it up to level 3, and this is really exciting, which says at the beginning of your end step, you create a token that's a copy of target artifact you control. So it tells a little story, right? You get to play your artifacts for cheaper, you get to find an artifact, and then every turn you get to copy one of your artifacts. And I think this is going to be a hot card from this set, and I'm happy we got to get Artificer Class in here. Some players have asked me why this deck for it, by the way. And my answer is, first of all,

this deck actually does have a decent amount of artifacts. But two, the Blue-Red Goat deck, Goat is really good about getting down to two players, but it's very bad at actually winning a game. And so having a card that would give you an advantage every single turn on that last mode to help get you to win the game was a really important piece of the puzzle here. So that's Artificer Glass.

Also, there are only two blue decks, right? I mean, if this are hordes, right? It makes a lot more sense here than it would put them on the hordes now. Okay, so here's a question I have. One of the things that's interesting when you're working in another IP, right? This is D&D. Of, like, the four main characters, how did you find the characters? Like, how did you figure out what character gets to be – because a lot of what you're saying is it's very mechanical, right?

Oh, we wanted to make a deck that did this mechanical thing. How did you find the characters? How did you figure that out? Yeah, so I'll say when it comes to the flavor of things, the legendary face characters were mostly bottom-up. I'll get to how that works in a second. And then the other cards that were in the deck were pretty top-down. So I'll talk about the legends first. So the legends, what we did is we came up with the shape, generally what we wanted the card to kind of do.

Like, hey, this is going to be a blue-red dragon that cares about goading. Or, hey, this is going to be a red-green character that gives you tokens when you cast it from exile then we went to the creative team and we looked through balder's gate lore and we're like okay what are some characters that could be a good fit for this so then we chose the character and then we went back to our design and said okay given this character what can we do to make it feel a little bit more like that character like nalia daranis is a great example where we have this future site commander we're like okay well we want a rogue future site commander so we looked at our options like nalia makes a lot of sense for this because she's a rogue that's trying to um create a band of people from balder's gate so that was a lot of sense about party if you will and um that but then

um on the last ability it originally didn't grant death that you granted some other ability it granted menace or something i think and we're like oh we didn't grant death touch. It granted some other ability. It granted menace or something, I think. And we're like, oh, we should make this death touch, because she's a rogue, right? So it makes a lot more sense for this character, given what she does in the game. So it was kind of like a... We came up with the original base, we found the character, and we tweaked the card based on the character

that we chose. So, like I said, the front facing commanders were a lot more bottom-up. But a lot of the non-legendary new cards were very top-down. We're just like, hey, we want to make an Aboleth. Like, this is a cool D&D monster, we didn't make one before. What kind of thing could we do here for this? Hey, let's make a party

person that recruits people, right? That's in town searching for new party members. So we want to make a card called the Laid Blast Fireball. We couldn't get that in Adventures in the Ground Realms. We couldn't get that here in the main set. And I thought, okay, the Commander, that's the perfect place for it.

And fortunately, the Fortel mechanic, which is on the Laid Blast Fireball, ended up being a really great fit for that spell in D&D. So a lot of those cards were very top-down. So it was an interesting mix there. Yeah, the thing that's really fun, I i mean the thing that i like a lot about the balder's gate in general is if you don't know balder's gate they're kind of just cool characters but if you know balder's gate like you can recognize them so like that's it's definitely it plays on two different levels one of the challenges of working with other ips is hey if

you know nothing it needs to be compelling and cool but if you know something it also wants you it has that next level of oh i get it it's this lenticular design right i said over and over again it's a great term you came up with one of your articles mark but lenticular design really is i think the key to a lot of this this cross ip stuff and you know dnd is like barely cross ip but just you know showing people a card that's like if you get it that's awesome but if you get it, that's awesome. But if you don't, it's still cool is really, really important. And I think a lot of these cards just will work that way.

There's a few exceptions. There's a couple cards in the set that maybe are a little more esoteric. But for the most part, you can look at one of these cards and just kind of get what's going on, which is great. So anyway, I can see my desk from here, so we've got to wrap this up. So any final thoughts on the Commander decks? You know, I'll just say that this was a really cool project to work on. You know, it was the first time that we've done four Commander decks associated with an ancillary set like this.

And it was fun to kind of create the biodome and get to pull some really fun D&D themed stuff, D&D stuff for it. So, you know, I had a blast working on them, and I just hope you all enjoy them a ton. If you want, tweet me at Gavin Verhey with what your favorite cards are. I'd love to hear from it. And I'm just really happy that I'm having it together. I think one thing you're going to see us doing is, I've got really good feedback on here, are there more unique themes?

So one thing I've been thinking about are what are some very different feeling themes we could be doing future Commander products instead of just, you know, artifacts again or something. And other than that, just have to wait and see. We have a lot of cool Commander stuff in store, and I can't wait for you to see the rest of what we have this year. I was the lead designer on some other stuff coming out this year, so stay tuned for that.

Yeah, one of the things that's very fun is I was in the pit the other day, and I'm just hearing them play a game on a future product that no one knows about, but the, just, it was clear the themes were very, very different from anything I've heard before, so there definitely is a lot of really cool and crazy stuff coming, so.

Yeah, for sure. It was really an exciting time to be a Magic player. Like, there was some neat stuff coming down the pipeline. I can't wait to tell you all about it, but that's for another podcast, I suppose. Okay, anyways, thank you, Gavin. Thank you so much for joining us today. Oh, my pleasure to be here. Anytime you want me to be back, Mark. Always happy to drive from our desk to not work with you. But guys, I can see my desk, so we all know what that means. This is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic

it's time for me to be making magic so thanks Gavin for being with us and all you I'll see you all next time bye bye