Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #945: Return to Ravnica

Episode Date: July 1, 2022

This podcast is part one of a three-part series on the design of Return to Ravnica block. I start by talking about the design of Return to Ravnica.

I'm pulling in my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today and the next two podcasts, I'm going to do a three podcast series on Return to Ravnica block. So I'm going to talk about Return to Ravnica now, then I will talk about Gatecrash and Dragon's Maze. Okay, so today we return to Ravnica. So the original Ravnica, so the very first I became head designer in 2003, and that was like in the middle of Champions of Kamigawa block. But the first block that I got to sort of put my thumbprint on, if you will, as a head designer, where I planned it from the beginning, was Ravnica, the original Ravnica block.

And that had just started out as, hey, it was time to do another gold block. And anyway, it ended up becoming very, very popular. And so we knew that we wanted to revisit it. We had, we had, I think we put it out and like, right off the bat, it was like, oh, wow, this was really successful. We need to do this again. And I think we penciled it in at five years later is what we did. So I think original Ravnica came out. Then there was Time Spiral. Then there was Lorwyn. Then there was Shards of Lara. Then there was Zendikar.

Then Innishrod. And then Ravnica. Return to Ravnica. At this point, I think when I first took over as head designer, I was trying to mix up a lot of people. So I had a lot of different people leading the large sets. There were some issues. So for a while, I was leading off of large fall sets.

So like I did, I did Zendikar, I did Scars of Mirrodin, I did Innistrad. And so Ken Nagel had, we had discovered Ken Nagel through the first great designer search. Ken and Alexis and Graham were the final three. All of which ended up getting full-time jobs at Wizards. Not all in R&D, but all ended up getting full-time jobs.

Anyway, so I wanted Ken. I felt like Ken had gotten to the point where I thought Ken could lead a large set. But normally when someone leads a large set for the first time, I like to them to do returns if possible. Just because a return, there's a lot of known qualities there. I mean, there's not plenty to figure out and you've got to make something, but there's a structure already there. And so usually when someone's leading a large set for the first time, it's the easiest thing to do as you're learning how to work on sets.

So anyway, I decided that I wanted Ken to do Return to Ravnica. And so the design team was led by Ken Nagel, Zach Hill, Alexis Jansen, Ken Troop, and myself. So Zach was one of the developers at the time, now probably called play designer. Alexis had won the developers at the time, now private call play designer. Alexis had won the first great designer search, and we were planning for Alexis to lead Dragon's Maze. So I wanted her familiar with the block. Gatecrash would be co-led by me and Mark Gottlieb.

We'll talk about that next time. And then Kentroop now runs Tabletop Magic. At the time, I think he was in charge of the creative team at the time, I'm trying to remember. Anyway, and then I was on the team. And the development team, Eric Lauer ran it. It was Zach Hill, Dave Humphries, Tom Lapilli, Adam Lee, Billy Miranda, and Sean Main. Okay, so, and the set was called Hook, for Hook, Line, and Synchronous, his codename.

224 cards, 101 commons, 80 uncommons, 55 rares, 15 mythics, and 25 basic land cards. Okay, so now, let me walk through how we did this. So, we knew we were going back. how we did this. So we knew we were going back. The one change we decided, the original Ravnica block, which was Ravnica dissension, or no, Ravnica guild pact dissension. We had done it, it was a large, small, small thing, and it was 4-3-3. We'd broken them up.

So it was the first time we'd sort of taken the theme and broken it up during a block. One of my big things that really mattered a lot to me as a designer was I wanted to do more block planning, and so that was me experimenting. Ravnica was me trying something new at the time, which was what if we took something, chopped it up, and then put it out during the course of the block? We decided when visiting Ravnica, we were interested, obviously it was going to be guilds, that's what people loved, but looking at it, instead of doing large, small, small, we did large, large, small to medium.

I think back in the day it was a little bigger than a small. small to medium. I think Dragon's Nail was a little bigger than a small. And so the idea we came up with was instead of doing 4-3-3 what if we do 5-5-10 was the idea. So the idea was both Return to Ravnica

and Gatecrash would be large sets and they could fit a full 5 guilds in it. And then the last set, which was a small to medium set would sort of be kind of something for everybody. It would have stuff from all 10 sets in it. And then the last set, which was a small to medium set, would sort of be kind of something for everybody. It would have stuff from all ten sets in it. That was the plan. So the idea was, we basically wanted to revisit what Ravnica was,

except we wanted it to be, we changed the block structure a little bit. I mean, it still had all ten blocks in the block. All ten guilds in the block. But it was five and five broken up. And the idea of having a set at the end that had everything was brand new. And then I think what happened was we said, okay, here's how we want to break it up. We want each set that has five blocks to have every color represented twice. And then we had a whole bunch of criterias.

I think we went to the creative team and said, story-wise, who do you need in the first set? And I think they said, is it, is what they needed in the first set. And then we went through, I forget exactly, there were all these parameters of what mattered and where we wanted things. And so we prioritized. The other thing we did is we looked at the data from the first time to figure out what was the most popular guild, what was the least popular guild, and sort of spaced things around.

I think Izzet, besides Izzet being what was needed for the story, I think Izzet had been the most popular guild the first time around. is needed for the story, I think Izzet had been the most popular guild the first time around. Anyway, so we decided, uh, we went through, we had a whole bunch of criteria for picking this. I don't remember all the things. I probably wrote an article that did

a better job of explaining all the criteria. I just don't remember all the criteria. Um, I do know we needed Izzet for the story, and I do know we were trying to divvy up what we thought would be the popular guilds, or the more popular guilds, so that each set had some of them. What we ended up with was this set had Azorius, white-blue, it had Selesnya, green-white, it had Rakdos, black-red, and it had Izzet,

blue-red, and a Gilgari, black-green. So it had three allied colors and two enemy colors. I think we had decided we didn't want to do ally and enemy specifically, just because we do sets that are ally and enemy. This was the one set where it allowed us to sort of break things up in untraditional ways. So we wanted a mix of ally and enemy. If you do a mix of ally and enemy, I think you kind of have to break it three-two for the numbers to work.

So it was going to be 3 of something and 2 of something. I think, yeah, so that was the major criteria. The big thing we also decided was we wanted to revisit the basics of Ravnica. I mean, we wanted to feel like Ravnica is going to be guild-centric, there are going to be legendary creatures from each guild, there are going to be cycles, like 10-card cycles that cross over both sets,

you know, guild mages, and so there are a bunch of different things we wanted that make it feel very Ravnica, and hybrid in it. It had a lot of things. We looked and said, what basically made Ravnica Ravnica. It had a hybrid in it. It had a lot of things. We looked and said, what basically made Ravnica Ravnica? With the sole exception of all the mechanics

were going to be different. So we were going to make five brand new mechanics, but we were going to make the structure exactly the same. Now once again, these five guilds had not been together before. So the first time through, in original Ravnica, original Ravnica had the Boros and Selesnya and Golgari and Dimir.

And then the second set, Guildpact, had Izzet and Rakdos and Orzhov. And Descension, the third one, had Selesnya and Rakdos and and Orzhov. And Dissension, the third one, had Selesnya and Rakdos and Sivik. So this time we were mixing them up. Obviously, Azorius had been Dissension, Izzet had been Guild Pack, Selesnya and Golgari had been from original Ravnica, and then what did I forget?

from original Ravnica, and then what did I forget? Rakdos had been in Dissension as well. So we had guilds from all three of the sets in the original block. So we really mixed it up. So the real big question was, what were the mechanics? What did we want to do? Now, one of the guidelines we had was if you mix the original if, like, we've

used watermarks again. So we said, okay, if you took all the cards with the same watermark, you took all the Rakdos cards and put them together, we wanted the deck to play. It's not that it had to be the same mechanic as last time. We just wanted to hit the larger themes of it so that it was something that would be synergistic with what happened

before. Okay, I will start with Azorius. So what happened in Descension was Azorius, at the time, in Standard, there was a very dominant white-blue control deck. So one of the things that we had been asked when we did Azorius in Descension was to kind of not lean so heavily into the control aspects of white-blue. Which is the low-hanging

fruit of white-blue. So we definitely saw, it was the one, of all ten guilds, it was the one guild that probably was the least, like, the least low, least tied into the low-hanging fruit of what the color combinations are. But this time, we didn't have the restrictions, so we said, okay,

we can make white-blue a little more controlled. Asurius in Descension was a little more about flyers. And there were control elements, but not as strongly and not as pushed as we could have done. So we decided, okay, this time we're doing the Zorius. We're going to do them as a control-oriented guild. And we spent a lot of time. I think the first thing we tried was we tried this enchantment theme.

So Constellation, which would later show up in Theros, first came up here. And the idea was, what if there's all these enchantments that represent all the laws? The Azorius are the bureaucrats of Ravnica. They're the ones that make the laws. They very much control.

Their form of control is through the law. And so we said, okay, it might be fun if we do a lot of enchantments that represent restrictions and rules. It's something white does primarily and blue does secondary. And, you know, it might be sort of cool. And then we reward you for having enchantments, and we looked at all the different ways to reward you for enchantments, and in the end we decided that just playing them was the best reward. So we gave, so Constellation, it wasn't called Constellation, obviously, was the original mechanic.

The problem we ran into was, and this is a common problem in faction sets, is when you're building your faction, you have to make it such that not only does it play well by itself, but it plays well with the overlapping colors. So Azorius, for example, was white-blue. Well, the other blue guild was Izzet, which is blue-red, and the other white guild was Selesnya, which is green-white. So Azorius wanted to play nicely with Selesnya, and wanted to play nicely with Izzet. Well, it was tricky making the enchantments in such a way that it would work. And the caring about playing enchantments, when all the enchantments are in white and blue,

I mean, we could have made a few enchantments in blue-red, like blue-red or red, and green-white or green. Could have some enchantments, especially green is're like blue red or red and green white or green could have some enchantments especially green is a little easier to do that but it just wasn't blending well like one of the big things about how faction sets have to work is normally the

mechanics it's a little bit smaller space because instead of fitting like normally when you do a normal magic set you have like two to three bigger mechanics that are stretched across most of the colors. In a guild set or a faction set, this is a two color faction set, you are taking five mechanics stretched across but not every color has access to all the mechanics. So it's a little bit smaller space. One of the nice things about faction mechanics

is you can do some things that might not be as grandiose because you only have to make like 10 to 12 cards. So it's, it's just a little tighter and it's a little easier to sort of pull that off. And so, um, anyway, it turns out the constellation was a neat idea and obviously we'd later find a home for it. Uh, but it's, this wasn't the right place. Um, we tried a couple different things. But the thing we ended up on, the main thing we ended up on after trying the enchantment route was Detain. So Detain was a keyword action.

And basically what it says is until your next turn, target creature could not attack, block, or use activated abilities. So there's a card called Arrest, which is an enchantment that does that permanently. Like, enchanted creature can attack, block, or use activated abilities. So we liked the idea of, hey, well, if you're in charge of the structure, maybe you could lock people up. Maybe you could use the law to control people people and part of controlling people is controlling who has access to what. And so it was a neat way to sort of temporarily control things in a more tempo based way. And it just

it ended up playing really neat. It was a cool mechanic. And as a keyword action it allowed us to put it on a lot more different types of cards. It could go on spells, it could go on permanents, you know, it was very flexible in how to use it. And it had, one of the things that we were looking for, like one of the challenges of making a control archetype is making sure that you have some ability to control things that is not too daunting. Like if a control is turned up a little too high,

it's just like your opponent can't do anything ever, and that's not fun. And so this was a lot more about, well, I'm temporarily halting things, which allows me to attack or, you know, maybe protect myself. But it's done in smaller doses, and so it does not forever prevent the opponent from doing something. You know, the answers are temporary answers. And so that ended up playing very nice. Okay, next up, Selesnya. Oh, sorry, next up is Rakdos. Rakdos is black-red. So the Rakdos mechanic,

I know we tried a bunch of different things for Rakdos. Really, you want a sense of, you know, no-holds-barred, that the Rakdos will do whatever it takes to get what they want but one of the things that you want when making Rakdos is this feeling of you're sort of opting into something a little wilder, that you're opting

into something where you're gaining something but it comes at a cost because one of the things about Rakdos that's really interesting as a guild is, you know, they're very hedonistic, they're very in the moment, they very want to do what they want to do, but they're also scheming, you know, they're definitely trying to do things that might take advantage for them. Like, Gruul is sort of a little more mindless, where Raktors does think about what they do,

but they have this hedonistic quality that, I'm going to do something, it's going to come at a cost, but I'm not going to worry about that right now. That is kind of fun to tap into. So, oh, I didn't mention before, so the first time we had done Azorius in Descension, we did a mechanic where you revealed cards from your hand, and they had effects while they were in your hand. Rakdos, it was a mechanic where if you had no cards in your hand, a hellbent, it was called,

if you had no cards in your hand, then you got a bonus. So it kind of encouraged you to be very aggressive and empty your hand. Cast your creatures, cast your spells. So we wanted something here to be equally sort of aggressive in its nature. Black-red as a color combination can get very controlling because they're the two colors that are the best for removal. So you want to make sure that you're giving them something that pushes toward aggression.

So what we ended up doing for Rakdos was what we called Unleash. So what Unleash is are creatures that when you play them you can opt to give them a plus one, plus one counter. But if you do, they can't block. So the idea essentially is, do I want to make my creature more aggressive, but less defensive? Do I want to opt into that?

And then once we did that, once we make Rakdos, once plus one, plus one counters mattered, we then were able to play around with that a little bit as a theme. So that there's things that can reward you having plus one, plus one counters matter, we then were able to play around with that a little bit as a theme. So that there's things that can reward you having plus one, plus one counters. And the other thing, by the way, is if you have a plus one, plus one counter, if an unleashed creature has a plus one, plus one counter, they can't block. So if somehow you get a plus one, plus one counter on you through other means, there's been times when the opponent will put it on you to be able to attack, there's times when you put it on you for other benefits.

It also ties into that. So whether or not the creature has a possible counter granted by itself or by something else, it can't block. So Rattus definitely has that feel. Next up, Selesnya, green-white. So Selesnya is sort of the group they had convoked in the

first set that you tap creatures to cast things. They're all about being the guild that most cares about creatures. That, you know, their strength lies in numbers. So we wanted to do something that played in there. The original mechanic that I pitched was a token version of proliferate. So proliferate was a mechanic from Scars of Mirrodin that had been very popular, where you, of every permanent or player that is a counter, you can choose to give that permanent or player another

kind of that counter. And so I said, oh, what if we could do that with tokens rather than counters? So the first version of populate said, for every token that exists on the board, you can choose to copy it. It was exactly proliferate for tokens. At the time, by the way, there really weren't anything but creature tokens. So we, I believe the original version just copied all tokens, but we didn't really have tokens or very, very few, maybe FutureSight made one, but very, very few. Anyway, so I think early on it was just copy every token.

And then we decided that was too good. It was way too good. So the next version we did, which was close to the version we printed, we said, okay, what if you just pick one token? I think we ended up just saying it's a creature token. So basically, Populate says, I get a creature token that's a copy of a creature token that I have. And then we just gave a lot of tokens. The thing about Populate is it needs a lot of support.

It's a fun mechanic, and people liked it, but it only works if you have creature tokens. If your deck doesn't have creature tokens, it doesn't even do anything. So one of the fun things we did with Selesnya, because they all are about strength and numbers, is we made a bunch of cards that came with the token. So one of the neat things about that is when you can make a token that creatures that enter with a token

is you're able to make multiple bodies for one mana cost and one card cost. And that played really well. So Selesnya sort of messed around that space. And then Populate allowed you to sort of copy whatever your best token was. And that ended up playing pretty fun. Okay, next is Izzet. So Izzet is the... Izzet has the interesting quality that the flavor of the guild and the archetype of the guild were the most disconnected. From a flavor standpoint, the Izzet are inventors, and they're always making crazy, wacky, nutty inventions.

But from a gameplay standpoint, they're the spell-oriented colors. Because blue is number one in non-creature spells, and red is number two. So just so people, so you know. White has the most creatures, green has the second most creatures, black is third, red is fourth, blue is fifth, and then flip them on their head. So blue, red, black, green, white, as far as who is the most non-creature spells. Anyway, the Izzet tend to be a tempo-based spell matters deck. And so that stuck around.

I will admit that the designer in me always gets a little frustrated in that. I like the flavor of who it's at our creatively. And one of these days maybe we'll more lean into that. For Guilds of Ravnica I had a very radical idea, but we ended up choosing not to do it. So we ended up doing a more normal guild. But anyway, sorry. Wrong side. I'm talking about Return to Ravnica. Okay, so the Izzet mechanic was the absolute earliest mechanic.

And the reason for that is... So Overload is their mechanic. In the original set, they were in Guild Pact. Replicate was their mechanic. So Replicate allows you to... It's a spell that you could pay the Replicate cost as many times as you want, and it copies it for as many times as you pay the Replicate cost. This time, they had a mechanical overload.

So overload says, here's the cost. So you cast the spell, it's always targeted, it hits a single target, or you can pay the overload cost, and if you do, it hits all legal targets. So, overload had been a mechanic that Ken had used in the first grade designer search. So, he designed it and he liked it. And it was a spell-oriented mechanic, and he was working on the spell, so he put it for the is it. and he was working on the spell, so he put it for the Izzet. It was one of those mechanics that proved to be a little more challenging to design than at first blush,

and the reason for that is the idea that it has to be something that hits a single target, but you can hit multiple targets, and multiple targets make sense in the rarity that normally for most effects, like if I kill a creature, that's a common spell. If I kill all creatures, that's a rare spell. So we had to sort of pick things that made sense hitting a single target, but when you overloaded it at low rarities, it still made sense in that rarity. Now we allowed ourselves to push a little bit. Some of the commons, for example, when you overloaded it at low rarities, it still made sense in that rarity. Now, we allowed ourselves to push a little bit. Some of the commons, for example, when you overload them feel a little bit like uncommons. But still, one of the design challenges was trying to fit that and make it make sense.

But anyway, there definitely were a bunch of overload cards, and there's a few pretty famous ones that still get played. Anyway, so that was overload. Finally, we had Golgari, black-green, graveyard-based. They had Dredge in original Ravnica, which was probably the most broken mechanic of the original Ravnica block. We knew

we wanted to be graveyard-oriented. They're all about the graveyard. That's kind of their big theme. Black and green are two biggest cards that care about the graveyard. As always is the case, Golgari takes forever to find. We went through a lot of iterations to find the Golgari. In the end, we ended up with a mechanic called Scavenge. So what Scavenging is, it went on creatures and then you could scavenge a creature out of your graveyard

by paying its scavenge cost when it's in your graveyard. And then you've got to put a number of plus one, plus one counters on target creature on the battlefield you control. Or on target creature, I guess you don't have to control. But it allows you essentially to take dead things and sort of use them to reinforce creatures you have. I think the earliest version of scavenge also granted the ability of the creature. So if it had trample, it also granted trample. If we had keyword counters back then,

it probably is what it would have done. It's okay, you grant that many explosive counters and a trample counter, but we didn't have that technology. But it was something, like I said, we had been, whenever you make, whenever you look back and the last time you've done something,

you kind of messed up on it. Like dredge, dredge was a mechanic where you could mill some cards so that you could draw this card from your graveyard. Instead of drawing from the top of your library, you could draw this card from your graveyard. So it lets you reuse cards. And Dredge ended up being uber powerful. So anyway, that was sort of hanging over our shoulders. We wanted to make a fun go-guided mechanic, but not something that was going to hanging over our shoulders we wanted to make a fun go-garage mechanic but not something that was going to break the bank

or cause problems and Scavenged ended up being a pretty solid mechanic I think a lot of these mechanics saw some constructive play, I know Detain did and I know Overlid did I think Scavenged did, I'm not sure about By Plane Unleash but they were all pretty solid, Ileashed. But they were all pretty solid

mechanics. I like the mechanics. They were all pretty solid mechanics. The one other new thing they introduced was so one of the mistakes we made in original Ravnica we felt was we were not aggressive enough on mana fixing. And one of the challenges in making

a multicolor set is you want enough fixing that people can do the thing you want them to do, but not so much fixing that you could do the thing you don't want them to do. So in a Ravnica setting, we wanted you to draft two or three colors, and, um, you know, combine them in such a way that every two-colored set had a theme, and then the overlap of three colors would have a theme. But we didn't really want you drafting four colors, or five colors for that matter. So the key to that really was two-color lands. That if I just give you two-color lands,

it'll allow you to play three colors, but makes it hard to play four or five colors consistently. So we knew we wanted to have a common set of dual lands. It was so basic to the environment. You know, you're playing, there's common gold cards. We want you to have access to that. So the big question was how to do that.

And what we realized is basically what we wanted to do was make tap dual lands. We had done them in other sets and they were like the perfect kind of common Duel Lands. But we were like, oh, is there some way to make it feel a little more Ravnica-y? I'm not even sure if the names of the Tapped Lands made perfect sense in Ravnica. But that's when we came up with the idea of the gates.

So the chance of the gates was, what if we put a land subtype onto our Tapped D dual lands, and then there was just enough cards in the set that carried a little bit that, you know, it, like, that gave them a little extra something. Other sets that had tap dual lands, you know, you gain a life, or we've done other things, and so the idea of having this quality that could matter, and I know we went to the creative team, and they said, okay, well, what if, you know, what if each of the guilds has their own compound and there's a front gate, there's a gate at

each one. And so, so we tied the gates into the guilds. And it actually ended up working pretty well. Like I, I know we were a little skeptical going into it, but the flavor was good. We wanted the tap doulans. And it sort of taught us, and you've seen us do other stuff. I mean, it wasn't the first subtype. I think desert was the first subtype back in Raven Knights, but we sort of liked, it just gave us a little special something. Oh, okay.

So, that, guys, I can see wizards right now. Return of Ravnica was definitely a really fun, exciting set to work on, and it was, like I said, I won't talk about the rest of the block in future podcasts. But like I said, I felt our team did a good job. I think all the guild mechanics ended up being pretty good guild mechanics. None of them ended up being broken. I think all of them saw some play. So I'll chalk that up as a

positive thing. But anyway, that is I am pulling into the parking lot. So, I guess 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.

Hope you enjoyed today's talk, and I will see you next time for Guild Pact. Or not Guild Pact. Gate Crash. Bye-bye.