Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #946: Gatecrash

Episode Date: July 1, 2022

This podcast is part two of a three-part series on the design of Return to Ravnica block. In this episode, I talk about the design of Gatecrash.

I'm pulling into my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work. Okay, so today I'm going to be talking all about Gatecrash. So last time I talked about Return to Ravnica. Today I'm talking about Gatecrash and next time I will talk about Dragon's Maze. So I'm talking, I'm doing a series all about the Return to Ravnica block. We're doing a series all about the Return to Ravnica block. So, okay. So, Gatecrash. So, Gatecrash is interesting.

And it's the first time, I think, that I had done the following. Which is, I co-led the set. So, Mark Gottlieb and I. So, Mark Gottlieb had led smaller sets. I think he had led... He led Mirrored and Besieged, I believe is what he led. And anyway, we wanted to try him on a large set, but he had had less experience than Ken had had. And so what we decided to do was,

we did this, what we call co-lead. So the way it works is, Mark and I were on the design for the whole time. And this is back during the period of design development. So design lasts a whole year rather than the four months vision design lasts. Anyway, for the first half of the design, I led the design with Mark there sort of being my strong second. And then the second half of the design, Mark led the design.

So for the whole time we were both there, it's just sort of handing the reins over. So I was there in the beginning part of just sort of making sure all the structure is set up and everything. And then Gottlieb was there to sort of, you know, make sure all the executions and everything were the best they could be. Anyway, that was, so the design team was me and Mark Gottlieb, Joe Huber, Dave Humphries, and Ethan Fleischer. So Dave was the lead developer, and Dave likes to be on the sets that he leads. He likes to be on the early design slash vision design of sets that he's later going to lead. So nowadays, when he leads the set design, he's on the vision design team. team.

And then the development team led by Dave Humphreys was Zach Hill, Mark Globus, Mark Purvis, Adam Lee, Max McCall, and Gavin Verhey. Adam, I believe, was the creative rep who was doing a lot of the tying into the building of the world. And I think this is one of the earlier sets that Gavin worked on. I'm not sure if it's the first set he worked on, but it's one of the earlier sets that Gavin worked on. I'm not sure if it's the first set he worked on, but it's one of the earlier sets that Gavin worked on. Okay, so as I explained in my Return to Ravnica podcast, we had decided for the block that we wanted to do 5-5-10. That was the master plan.

One of the things that we had realized from original Ravnica is that the sets kind of were the cleanest when you had more guilds to draft. For example, in original Ravnica, you drafted Ravnica by itself, had four guilds in it. When you drafted Guild Pact, you drafted two sets. Between them had seven, and then when you drafted the whole block, you had ten guilds. The later drafts were a little bit better. Having a little bit more guilds, a little more options were better. We found the four for the first one to be a little bit on the tight side, and the way we did original Ravnica is we made extra blue and red cards because those are the two colors that didn't overlap.

And in some ways, you know, we realized we could fit in five guilds. I think we did expand. So the size of the set was 249 cards, 101 commons, 80 uncommons, 53 rares, 15 mythics.

That number would be the size of large sets for quite a while. I think they got established during this block, I believe. But for a long time, those were the numbers for a large set. I won't get into it, but I've done a podcast on collation. A lot of how many cards and what rarity has to do with how we print cards on the sheets and stuff. But anyway, if you're more interested in learning about that, or if you're interested in learning about that, I did a whole podcast talking about collation and how we print. Anyway, so

a lot of gate crash was determined by what Return to Ravnica wanted to do. For example, there were a lot of cycles that once they got set up in Return to Ravnica, were sort of beholden on Gatecrash to do. There is one exception, by the way. It's a fun story.

I think I've talked about this before, but still, it's a fun story, and it's Gatecrash-related, so we'll tell it. So what happened was we were working on Gatecrash, and I realized that we had, um, charms had been introduced in Visions, uh,

I'm sorry, in Mirage and Visions, and we had done monocolored charms, and then we later did three-color charms in, um, uh, Khans of Tarkir. Uh, and I realized we had never done two-color, or sorry, not Khans of Tarkir, uh, Shards of Alara. Um, Khans would comearkir. And I realized we had never done two-color... Oh, sorry, not Khans of Tarkir.

Shards of Alara. Khans would come after this set. We did do them in Khans, but they were not... The first ones, I think, were done in Shards. Anyway, we had never done two-color charms. I was very excited by the two-color charm idea. But the way cycles work is usually you want to do

ten-card cycles. So what I did was I put them into Gatecrash and then I went and talked to Ken, Ken Nagel, who is leading Return of Ravnica, and said,

just so you know, I stuck some charm. I did some guild charms and I put them in Gatecrash. And he's like, okay, fine, I'll put them in Return to Ravnica. So that was the one cycle that started in Gatecrash, and then Return to Ravnica followed our lead. Most of the other cycles in the set, Return to Ravnica started them.

Like I talked about the gate lands last time, for example. So a lot of the way a Ravnica block works, or multiple Ravnica sets work, is you're sort of beholden to 10 card cycles. So once you start the 10 card cycles in one set, you then finish them in the other set. So a lot of Gatecrash was sort of lining up with what Return to Ravnica had done. Now, obviously, I'd been on Return to Ravnica, making sure that... I was the one person on both sets, just making sure that everything was lining up, and I was sort of the conduit between the sets. But also, I was head designer, so I guess my job regardless.

Okay, so in this set, we had five guilds. We had Blue-Black, the Dimir. We had Red-Green, the Dimir. We had red-green, the Gruul. We had white-black, the Orzhov. We had red-white, the Boros. And we had green-blue, the Simic. So we had two allies and three enemy. The mirror of what we had done in Return to Ravnica.

Like I said last time in the last podcast, we had a bunch of parameters. Each set had to have two of every color. We didn't want all allies and all enemies. We wanted a mix of ally and enemies. And for story reasons, there was some stuff like the is that they wanted in the first one. So these were what we ended up having. The original block,

Boros and Dimir had been in original Ravnica. Gruul had been in Guildpact and Orzhov. Gruul and Orzhov had been in Guildpact and then Simic had been in Descension. So, once again, we took stuff that had been spread out before

and sort of changed them around just to mix them up. Like one of the fun things about doing a faction set is not only can you sort of redo things, but you can mix and match a little bit differently. Just having different mechanics, different guilds overlap with other guilds just makes the gameplay feel different and have different things.

So that was a conscious choice. Okay, so let's walk through the things. So we'll start with Dimir, blue-black. So Dimir are the sneaky ones. We had some challenge with them. I think that the two hardest guilds for us to design this time were Dimir and Orzhov. I think Orzhov ended up being the hardest.

But anyway, for Dimir, the Dimir mechanic was called Cypher. And the way Cypher works is it goes on Instants and Sorceries, and when you cast the spell, you sort of encode it to a creature. It means you exile it, but for all intents and purposes, you put it underneath the creature. The idea is you're now attaching that spell to this creature. Then, whenever this creature deals combat damage to an opponent, that spell sort of goes off for free. So the idea is I have a spell I cast, I get the effect, and then I now have turned one of my creatures into a saboteur with this spell effect, essentially.

Dimir is all about being sneaky and about unblockability. So the idea of this was kind of cool. It went on spells, which is what we wanted. One of the things about guild mechanics in general is you want to have a mix. And so Boros, for for example was a creature mechanic Gruul was a creature mechanic Evolve was a creature mechanic Extort went on creatures

but also could go on non-creatures so there were a lot of creature mechanics so there was some pressure on Dimir to try to come up with something and once again it's tied to creatures you encode it on a creature. So it's not... I mean, it only went on Instants and Sorceries,

but it was connected to creatures. So even the Cypher mechanic was creature-oriented, if not a creature mechanic straight out. So Cypher was inspired by the Splice mechanic that I made way back in Champions of Kamigawa. The idea of the splice mechanic was that you could pay mana from your hand to sort of attach that effect onto a spell you were casting. So that you could just cast it

from your hand, or you could cast the splice cost to generate the effect onto another spell. So another spell would have that effect as a rider, sort of. I really liked the idea of sort of stapling spells to other things, stapling effects to other things. And I think the idea here that I was entranced by was the idea that you could make a saboteur ability. I think the earliest version, they were just, spend this mana, like I think

you could cast it from your hand, or you could spend mana to encode it. I think that's how it originally worked. So, oh, I could, you know, cast a spell to draw cards, or I can encode my creature, and whenever it deals damage, I draw cards. And what we found was, it just wasn't, um, you tended to just cast the spell and not encode it. That even though the encoding part was kind of a fun part of it, that too often when you had to make the choice between encoding and not encoding it, you wouldn't encode it because it just wasn't worth it.

So eventually what we said is, well, what if we just let you have both? What if when you cast it, you get to encode it? And that way people did do the thing that was the fun thing I talk about this a lot but this is a good example where it's the job of the game designer to make sure the fun is

the right thing to do players will try to win if the correct thing to do is not use your mechanic that's not how you win players will do the thing that helps them win and so if it's like either cast this or encode it, if that's not how you win, players will do the thing that helps them win. And so if it's like either cast this or encode it, if casting is just the right choice most of the time, then they won't encode it. Or vice versa, maybe the players that are following what you say do do it. Oh, the fun is to encode it, and then I'm never winning. I'm encoding it, but I'm not

getting the opportunity to do it. The card is weak. So by casting it and encoding it, it just let us sort of have the best of both worlds. The big challenge we had with Cypher was it was a very narrow band of abilities. And the reason for that is it had to be something that I wanted to cast as a spell that was worth it, like that both made sense as a saboteur and worked at the time that a saboteur happens. A saboteur effect happens at the end of combat. So anything that affects combat doesn't make sense. And anything that's combat-oriented doesn't make sense.

It's just, it's a very narrow band of things. It has to be generally useful things. And in Blue and Black, there wasn't an infinite amount. Yeah, we could draw cards. Yeah, we could draw cards. Yeah, we could do discard. I mean, there were things we could do. But it ended up being very tight. Now, I talked about last time that a guild mechanic usually needs like 10 to 12 cards.

Meaning, you can do mechanics that aren't that big. You can do sort of medium-sized mechanics because you just don't have to generate that many cards. Cypher, we struggled to get the number of cards. In fact, there's a few cards in there. I think we did like a slight where you change the color word. And that's something we hadn't done in forever. That was a sign that we were running out.

They were like, we were stretching to find things that you could do. So Cypher is one of those mechanics that the reason I'm a little dubious of it coming back is we kind of used up all the space. There's not a lot of space on Cypher. We barely, barely got enough cards for the set, so that is a not good sign for it coming

back. I did enjoy I mean, the flavor was cool, and it was a neat mechanic, and it was I think players liked the idea of it. It's one of those mechanics that didn't play... Really, the big issue is it's hard to get... Like, saboteur abilities in general are difficult.

Now, we did give you some ways to make unblockability and stuff, but... Anyway. That was the... That was the Demir mechanic. I did... I mean, like I said, it was my mechanic. I did like the essence of what it was. It was one of those mechanics that just was a lot harder to use and design with.

Like it seemed cool in a vacuum, but it was tricky to make cards that were fun to play. And that's another, by the way, another big thing when you're making mechanics is you want mechanics that sort of read well, meaning people are excited to hear about them, but they also need to play well. And so read well but play poorly is not the great comment. I mean, we did the best we could. I do think some cipher is fun, but it definitely was mechanics that read better than it played. We're much more willing to make mechanics that play better than they read. Like, well, that doesn't sound that good, but you play it like, oh, wow, this is actually, this is really good. That's a lot more fun. Like having discovery that things are better than you think is fun.

Discovering that things aren't as good as you think, less fun. So that was a tricky thing. Okay, next up, Gruul. So Gruul had a mechanic called Blood Rush. Oh, by the way, I forgot to mention this. The original Dimir mechanic was Transmute, which allowed you to take a card in your hand that had this ability and pay a mana to exchange it for a card in your library that had the

same mana value. So it was sort of a tutoring mechanic. Now we don't do tutoring mechanics anymore. The first time up, Dimir was more focused on the library, just because they are the two colors that most interact with the library. But, we've kind of learned that we don't like tutoring effects on mechanics. Like, we have to be very judicious with how much

we do tutoring. And so, we ended up focusing more on the sneakiness of Dimir. So, much like I talked last time how Zorius was more about flying and ended up being more about control in this time, Dimir was another one that we had to swap a little bit. It was a little less about the library. There were still library shenanigans and stuff,

but it was a little bit less about the library, a little more about sort of the sneakiness on the battlefield. Okay, Gruul. So Gruul's mechanic in Guildpact was, what was it called? Blood Thirst,

I think it was called. So it was basically a mechanic that you got plus one, plus one counters if you had dealt damage to your opponent. So we wanted something that was very aggro. I mean, the Gruul philosophy and the red-green archetype in general, it's kind of aggressive mid-range. Just keep playing creatures, always use your mana, make bigger and bigger creatures, and just keep attacking. And the Gruul philosophy is very one of just, of aggression,

of we're going to do what we want to do, and we're going to, we have big bad monsters, and we're just going to hit you. You know, we have big beasts, and we're just going to keep hitting you. So we wanted to play into that space. So what Blood Rush is, is a mechanic that goes on creatures, so what Blood Rush is is a mechanic that goes on creatures and it allows you to discard the creature to basically

giant growth the creature if that makes sense so if the creature was a 2-2 when you pay the mana and discard it it grants the creature a plus 2 plus 2 if it was a 4-2 it grants plus 4 plus 2 so whatever it is it grants those abilities to the creature.

I think we had toyed around with also granting other abilities besides power and toughness. I think we might have done a little of that in High Rarities, but we didn't. Originally, all of them were going to do that, and I think we pulled back and just did it on a little tiny bit. Mostly, it's just the power and toughness. And the idea essentially is it lets you pack your deck with lots of creatures, and then your creatures kind of act as

removal in that whenever another creature is going to destroy my creature, I can then use my Bloodroach creature to save it. I know when we made this mechanic, there was some concern of was there enough variety because the power toughness

we decided to tie the power toughness boost to the power and toughness of the creature we had talked about doing things where it wasn't always the same we had talked about it where the boost was like it was always a giant growth or something but it felt a little too samey.

And the neat thing about the power toughness as setting the power toughness boost was it just gave it a flavor that was pretty cool. And it also meant that if I was going to, you know, discard a larger creature, there was a bigger bonus for it. Yeah, if I discarded a cheap creature, it might be a tiny bonus, but if I discarded a bigger creature, you want to make it worth it a while. It also allowed you to put more large creatures in your deck because usually the blood rush cost was cheaper than the creature cost.

So it kind of made the spells have a double function. Early game, I could use them as their blood rush ability, and later game, I can cast the creatures. So it allowed you to put more larger creatures in your deck and just let the deck sort of ramp a little more like it wanted to. But it did a very good job. The mechanic did a very good job of having that aggro quality we wanted for the gruel. That sort of mid-range aggro that we were looking for. Okay, next up is the Orzhov. So the Orzhov had a mechanic called Extort. So what Extort

said is whenever you cast a spell, you can spend a white or a black mana. It was a hybrid. You can spend a white or black to drain the opponent for one. Now, the Orzhov mechanic in Guilt Act had been Haunt, which was a mechanic that went on spells and creatures where... Haunt's a confusing mechanic. Basically, spells would turn into death triggers on creatures, and creatures enter the battlefield effects would turn into death effects on creatures, and creatures enter the battlefield effects return of into death effects on creatures. So the idea is, I cast a spell, or I cast

a creature that doesn't enter the battlefield effect. When the spell is resolved, or the creature dies, I then exile it and sort of attach it to a creature in play. I haunt it. And then that creature, when it dies, will generate the effect from the spell. Either the spell or the effect of the spell, or if it's a creature, will generate the effect from the spell. Either the effect of the spell,

or if it's a creature, the edge of the battlefield effect. Haunt had been a bit confusing. The flavor was nice, but it had been a little confusing how it worked. And we were interested... So one of the things about the Orzhov is they're the ones that are sort of... They run the religion of the place,

and they tend to extort people, a.k.a. mechanicals extort. And so they're also the ones loaning you money, and they're the ones, they sort of have a little bit of an organized crime feel. We always joke that white-black is organized crime, because it's organized crime feel. We always joke that white-black is organized crime because it's organized crime. Anyway, we had a hard time finding this mechanic. We went through so many mechanics. In original Ravnica, I think it was Golgari that we went through

in different mechanics. We went through so many mechanics that at one point we made a mini-team that I think Sean Main led. We had a mini-team looking for mechanics. And I believe so many mechanics that at one point we made a mini team that I think Sean Main led. We had a mini team looking for mechanics and I believe Sean Main and his team ended up coming with Extort. So Extort is

interesting by the way in that draining is not a white ability. Draining is much more a black ability. White does do life gain and white does do limited damage to the opponent, usually under very peculiar circumstances.

But, we decided that we really liked the flavor of this. I don't think we put it on a lot of white cards, but we put it on some white cards, and so it was definitely a more serious bend, just because draining isn't white. It's not... I mean, white does life gain and white can

damage, so it's not... It wasn't a break or anything, but it was pushing it directly. Don't expect to see mono-white draining cards anytime soon. It was definitely less pushing than that. Also, interesting story there is it made

the commander team sort of rejigger the rules of where and how you count hybrid. I think because it's in reminder text, it doesn't get counted. So a card that has extort doesn't count as a white and black card if the base card isn't white and black,

I believe is how that works. Anyway, the reason I think we did the hybrid mana there is we wanted to, we were trying to keep it tied and we, I think we wanted you to have to spend

some color, like it was a mechanic that felt like it wanted to have color associated with it. In retrospect, I don't know, maybe we should have just,

maybe it should have been two mana, I don't know. Extort is pretty powerful. It's definitely one of those mechanics. And you can have multiple extorts out. So if I have more than one extort out, that means for every...

Let's say I have two extort out. That means every time I cast a spell, I can pay up to two mana to drain my opponent for two. And anyway, it can become... It ended up being a fun mechanic, and it feels very Orzhov-y. Yeah, the Orzhov are

one of those guilds that have a very distinct feel that trying to capture them mechanically has been challenging at times. Okay, that is Extort. Next, we go to the Boros Battalion.

So Battalion was a creature mechanic, and it said whenever I attack with two or more creatures... So the Battalion mechanic was designed by Sean Main in the Second Great Designer Search. Sean had turned that in. I think we had fiddled a bit. The mechanic... The original mechanic that he had turned in, I believe, was, it said whenever you attack with three or more creatures.

So it didn't require the creature it was on to attack. But what we found was, and you never attack, you never attack with Italian creatures unless you had to. And you just attack with other creatures, meaning there never was a threat there. So one of the things that we like is attacking as a cost is interesting because it puts the creature at risk. It puts the ability at risk. So it allows us to be more aggressive with what it can do. And so you'll notice sometimes we like tying attack triggers to things. It just does a good job of giving the opponent some way to interact with it.

Like, one of the things you always have to think about when you make a mechanic is, okay, how exactly is the opponent going to deal with this? Now, this mechanic is sitting on a creature. So your opponent could have creature removal. But what we found was by, first off, making you attack with a creature. So your opponent could have creature removal. But what we found was by, first off, making you attack with a creature made a lot better flavor sense. Like, I'm attacking, and if enough people attack with me,

then I do something. But I have to sort of be aggressive. Oh, so red, white, the Boros is the aggro. They're the small weenie colors. Red and white have the best small creatures. And so they tend to be the most aggro deck. So Boros has been an aggro. They're the small weenie colors. Red and white have the best small creatures. And so they tend to be the most aggro deck. Boris has been an aggro deck

in all its incarnations in Ravnica sets. The original Ravnica, if Boris was the original Ravnica, had Radiance. And those were spells that when you targeted a creature, it also targeted every creature that you controlled that shared a color with that creature.

Oh, not that you controlled. I think it might have been on the battlefield. Anyway, Radiance looking back at original Ravnica, well, I don't mind the Radiance mechanic. I mean, there's a bunch of things I would do to clean it up, like only figure stuff. But

the Radiance mechanic wasn't a wonderful fit for Boros. I mean, it was nice in the fact that Boros wanted to go wide, and that the Radiance did work with a go-wide strategy, especially when you can hit multicolored creatures that would then hit your whole team. So if I target a red-white creature with a bonus attacking effect, oh, it worked for all my red and white creatures, which is good. There were things that I like about Radiance.

It wasn't a perfect fit for Boros. And a lot of the way that you wanted to use it... There were spells that worked really well with Boros like combat aggressive spells. But there were a lot of other spells that were... I don't know, didn't feel quite as... Anyway, I'm deviating. So anyway, we wanted to get a more aggressive mechanic.

When Sean had made this, I knew the return of Ravnica was coming, and the block was coming. So I had tagged it when I saw it in the Great Designer Surge as this might be a Boros mechanic. So I had tagged it very early. Anyway, the original mechanic said, when you tag with three or more, we said when you attack with this or two or more. Looking back with 2020 hindsight, I think in retrospect, we had wished we had done this plus one

rather than this plus two. This plus two works fine and limited, but it really, really had a hard time in constructed. It is just a lot to ask to have three creatures that you can attack with in constructed. So in retrospect, I think we kind of wish we had done this and another creature. So attack with two or more

rather than attack with this plus one, rather than this plus two. Okay, next up, or last up, the final guild is Simic. Simic is green-blue. So Simic in the original

Descension had a mechanic called Graft. And the way Graft had worked is it came with so many plus and plus one counters and then whenever another creature entered the battlefield you could choose to put

a plus and plus one counter. You could move it from the Graft creature to the new creature that's entering the battlefield. So essentially it's sort of like oh, I had some counters that I could distribute as I saw fit.

Except the time to choose to do it was when the creature was entering the battlefield. So that really tied in the Simic to plus one, plus one counters. The Simic had been, had sort of this Dr. Moreau feel, like experimentation with animals and improving upon nature was what we always joked as the Simic line. But anyway, we wanted to play in that space. We wanted to do something with creatures somehow changing.

We knew we wanted to put some matter in some way. So interestingly, just like Battalion, the great designer Surge 2 helped with this. So Ethan Fleischer had made a mechanic called Evolve. So the way Evolve works, well the way Evolve works in the set is whenever a creature with a higher power or toughness enters the battlefield, you put a plus one, plus one counter on this creature. And the idea essentially is, as you are playing bigger things, this creature gets bigger.

It was nice that it played into sort of the evolution theme. It played into the plus one plus encounter theme. It just did a good job of hitting a lot of the things that the original one had done. Now, the original Evolve, I think, only cared about power. It just had a creature with greater power. We then decided in design to expand that so that it allowed you to care about higher power or toughness. One of the challenges about making Evolve work, so when you

make a mechanic, one of the questions is how environmental is the mechanic? What that means is, how much do you have to shape the environment to make the mechanic work? For example, last time I talked about Propagate. Propagate required copied creature tokens. Well, that's not interesting in an environment without a lot of creature tokens. So Propagate really made us think about how many creature tokens we need. The set wanted a lot of creature tokens.

tokens weekly. The set wanted a lot of creature tokens. What Evolve did for this set is it really made you want to have a lot of differentials where either you had high power or high toughness, usually with something that's lower so you could get it out cheaply. So it was the kind of set where like, oh, a two mana three one is really interesting. Or, you know, a 2-0-4. Like, there were just combinations of things that, or even a 1-4. Like, a 1-4, not that you never play a 1-4, but you don't always play a 1-4, but in Evolve World where, oh, it makes my creature

bigger, all of a sudden it gets interesting. Also, because Evolve made use of plus-one, plus-one counters, that allowed us to have some plus-, plus one counters matters cards. As I said earlier, one of the... So every guild has a watermark on it. The cards have watermarks on it.

The idea being that if I threw together cards with the same watermark on it, meaning cards from original Ravnica block and returner Ravnica block, we wanted that combined sort of guild deck to be coherent and synergistic. So one of the things we were looking at when we were making the new mechanics is just making sure they played into what the old mechanics were doing. And Evolve is a good example where Graft and Evolve are not super synergistic in a vacuum, right? But because Evolve moved counters, it had a lot of plus one, plus one counter matter stuff. So it wasn't that Graft worked great with Evolve in a vacuum,

but the things you needed to make Graft work were synergistic with what Evolve was doing. And so that was one of the things that we had to keep in mind. Sometimes it's not that the two mechanics in isolation work together but the things you need to make one work help enable the other. The enablers of Graft also enabled Evolve. And that was pretty cool as a means to help glue them together. And looking back, let's see.

Cypher and Transmute, I mean, they were synergistic only in the sense that there were things you could go and get that would help your board state or help your cypher creatures get through. It was more conditional than straight up. Gruul had Blood Rush and Blood Thirst. Those actually were pretty synergistic. A lot of times, for example, I could use my Blood Rush creatures to be aggressively attacking in a way where

my opponent might let me through with early creatures because I could have that in my hand, which allows you to sort of enable the Bloodthirst. So there's some combination there. Orzhov had Extort and Haunt. I'll admit that one, less synergistic. I mean, once again, the nice thing about Extort is Extort just wants you to play cards. So just even playing Haunt cards when I Extort and play, there was a little bit of synergy there. But yeah, it's less synergistic.

Then we get to Boros. Boros was Radiance and Battalion. Once again, I think if you're playing the combat-oriented Radiance cards, those are synergistic. And then finally on Simic, Evolve and Graft, I thought were... the enablers work together. Anyway,

there wasn't... other than the five guild mechanics, like I said, we had worked very hard with the Return of Ravnica team to sort of understand the 10 card blocks. And so stuff like gates, we did parallel along. Oh, the one thing that Dave Humphreys did do, which was something that would influence Fisher Design,

is Dave ended up saying, I'm going to take the main, I'm going to take the land the main I'm going to take the land slot that normally would be basic lands and I'm going to put other dual lands in that slot. So when you open up the booster pack, you're not just getting basic lands, you're getting dual lands

at a higher percentage of the time. So the idea is really rethinking the land slot to say this doesn't have to be the basic land slot this could be the land slot. say, this doesn't have to be the basic land slot. This could be the land slot. And in a set where we really care about the as-fan of your land, that we want to kind of guarantee that you have enough land to make things work, we could use that slot to do that.

Now, I don't remember. It's possible that Dave did it and then Ravnica matched it, or it might have just been in Gatecrash. I know Dave was the first one to do that in Gatecrash that it happened. And that's one of the things that's, by the way, always interesting is when I look back,

it's fun to see somebody try, like, for example, this was the first set that I did a co-lead with, right, with Gottlieb. But I would go do a co-lead with Kaladesh and Amonkhet and Ixalan and some upcoming sets. So the, you know,

we had found some technology and did something we hadn't done before and we liked it. And then it became a tool in our toolbox. Likewise, David really messed around with rethinking of how you can use the land slot. It became a useful tool and the future sets were made sense.

We made use of it again. And so there's a lot kind of looking back, there's some history to me of sort of being aware of innovations and stuff. Another interesting thing about this was the idea of doing a block and saying, we're going to do another block, but we're going to rejigger sort of the block structure as a whole. We did, obviously, we did the pie method. The pie method is what is you chop things up during the course of the block. So during the course of the block, you get all the pieces of the pie, but not any one set doesn't have all the pieces.

Oh, another interesting thing, by the way, if you ever heard me tell the story of original Ravnica, there's a lot of resistance early on when I did the guilds, when we did the 4-3-3. The idea that we're doing a multicolor set, but this set just adds these combinations. And the other combination, they're not here, was radical at the time. By the time we got to Guildpact, or not Guildpact, got to Gatecrashed and Return of Ravnica, it was sort of just accepted as this is the way to do it. In fact, one of the interesting things about innovating is when your innovation is successful, there's a lot of pressure to continue to do it. In fact, one of the interesting things about innovating is when your innovation is successful, there's a lot of pressure to continue to do it the same way. So return to Ravnica, like one of the things that I

always felt a little, as the head designer, we did not innovate a lot. I mean, we innovated a little bit in the structure of the block. And next time I'll talk about Dragon's Maze, which is probably the biggest change we made. But we didn't really, the structure was very much what Ravnica had done. I kind of joked because

technology design keeps improving, right? We keep sort of evolving. And I joked that, like, we were sort of doing older technology because we really were doing it like we had done it five years earlier. Anyway, I enjoyed Gatecrash. It was a lot of fun. I liked working with Mark.

Mark's proven to be a great designer, even though he wasn't in the great designer search. If he had been, we would have chosen him because he's very good. So it was a lot of fun to make Gatecrash and like I said, I have a soft spot in my heart for Ravnica sets.

I really I enjoy making them. And making guild mechanics is interesting in that you just have a smaller space. So it's making a medium-sized mechanic. So having to make medium-sized mechanics that synergize with each other

is interesting. It's neat to say, oh, well, Battalion wants to be aggressive in this way, and Gru wants to be aggressive in that way, so okay, Battalion and Blood Rush could blend together because there's times we want to be aggro

and attack with more creatures, but then use the Blood Rush to support something if it gets blocked, stuff like that. That's one of the things that's enjoyable is watching the things click together. So I do enjoy making guild sets. They're fun. And faction sets in general. But anyway, guys, I'm now at work. So I had a little extra traffic

today, so you got a little bonus time. But I, as we all know, once I park, we all know what that means. It means it's time to end my drive to work. Instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. So guys, hope you enjoyed this talk on Guildpact. Not Guildpact. Gatecrash. Hope you enjoyed this talk on Gatecrash.

And I'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.