Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #947: Dragon's Maze

Episode Date: July 8, 2022

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

I'm pulling my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, today, last couple podcasts, I've been talking about Return to Ravnica block. So I talked about Return to Ravnica. I talked about Gatecrash. So it's time to talk about Dragon's Maze. Okay, so first to understand, Dragon's Maze had a lot of issues with it. So to talk about those issues, I first want to get in on where the change came from. So original Ravnica block had large, small, small. The large set had four sets in it. Each small set had three sets in it.

of three sets in it. And so if you guys remember, after Ravnicka was released that summer, we released a set called Cold Snap. And one of the ideas when we were talking about what to do in that slot, Brady Donovan had pitched the idea of what if there was kind of a best of the guilds? Like, what if, okay, we had the three sets that showed off all the guilds, and then just,

what if the summer was just a bunch more multicolored stuff? Like, just sort of like, now that you've met all the guilds, let's throw them all in one set. And we ended up doing Cold Snap, which was, you know, the Lost Ice Age set. We found it in a file cabinet. It's all made up. But anyway, the idea of what if you end the guild,

like you end a trip to Ravnica with access to all the guilds. I think that was the place where that idea first came about. In Dissension, which was the third set of the original Ravnica, we did, we

had talked a little bit about, is there a way to sort of end the block with a little throwback to all the guilds in the block? And the answer, we did find a way to do it, which was with split cards. So in Dissension, there are split cards which cover all

ten guild pairs. So it was a chance for us to sort of even if, you know, for all the guilds, including the ones in Descension, you got part of a split card. And I think the way it worked is it overlapped between guilds so that the card sort of let you play three different colors, but two colors could be one thing and two colors could be another thing and they overlapped on a color. But anyway, I think the idea of, you know, maybe there's some way in a Ravnica set to have fun by giving you access to everything. But the idea was that really didn't want, you didn't want to start there. You had to kind of

build up to it. For those who don't know the story, when I made Original Ravnica, when we were designed for Original Ravnica, there was a period in time that we hadn't yet split them up. There was actually a playtest where all 10 two-color pairs were in the same playtest, and Hybrid was there. Anyway, the way that story goes is Henry Stern, who, pro player, came in third at Worlds twice, you know, a very, very good player, said this was too much.

It was just too much. There were too many piles that Henry, who was one of the best Magic players I knew, was like, this is too much for me. I can't handle how many decisions have to be made. And that's when we realized that it was too much to put all 10 in the same set um up front the idea is well what if you we sort of introduce you and establish the guilds and establish the keywords um so the idea was we could maybe we

couldn't start there it'd be too much to say here are 10 brand new keywords and here's 10 guilds that you haven't played yet. But the idea we thought was, okay, well, what if, like, what happened was we knew going back that we, it was going to be large, large, small, I think was the original plan. So back in the day, once again, to give a little bit of history. When magic started, or when block started, which was with Mirage, essentially, I guess Ice Age, Ice Age a little bit, Mirage was the idea of, you would have a large fall set, oh these are northern hemisphere seasons, you would have a fall set, a large fall set, then a small winter set, then a small spring set. And for many years, that's what blocks were.

They were large, small, small. And then we decided that we wanted to shake things up. One of the ways to maybe make the third set different was to make it a large set and have it disconnected from the mechanics. And so, have we done that yet? Actually, that's an interesting question. So the first time we did that would be in a, okay, so we haven't, so this is before, this we done that yet? Actually, that's an interesting question. So the first time we did that would be in Astralis. Okay, so this is before that.

So what this means... Okay, sometimes I have to walk myself through history. What this means was Gatecrash was the first large set that wasn't a fall set. I mean, not counting some early sets that were summer sets, but like since the beginning of Block, since Mirage, everything was, all large sets were in the fall. So Gatecrash was the first time we had a large set not in the fall. And so that idea, I think what happened,

so a lot of what we were pitching, we were pitching the return to Ravnica Block was not just we're going to change it up, I think what happened, so a lot of what we were pitching, we were pitching the return to Ravnica block, was not just we're going to change it up, but we were changing the foundation of what the block structure was. We're saying instead of large, small, small, let's do large, large, small. And then by the time that we actually got to Dragon's Maze, it ended up being what I would call medium. I wouldn't even call it small. So you had 156 cards, 70 commons, 40 uncommons, 35 rares, and 11 mythics. So that is a little bit

bigger than small sets. Small sets usually were 143 or sometimes a little bit smaller than that. So this is not, I mean, it is a little bit bigger than a normal small set. But anyway, so when we were proposing the idea of the block, the reason we had done large large is we really felt it was better to have five in one set, that that was just a better experience. And I don't know. I think the way we drafted it was you drafted Return of Rapture and then Gatecrash.

I don't think you drafted Gatecrash by itself. That technology wouldn't come until Avacyn Restored in Innistrad, where there's a large set in the block that's separate and you would draft it by itself. So we hadn't got to that technology yet. In retrospect, I mean, obviously this is how Guilds of Ravnica did it, I think it would have been best to draft one set, then draft the second set, and then maybe with Dragon Mage, draft it all.

Anyway, what I'm trying to get to is when we were trying to reconfigure and rethink the block, this was back at a point where a block had three sets, and we really felt that the guilds were best served having five of them in a set. So the idea of having large, large

each with five, really felt like it made the most sense. And we had signed off to do two large sets. So the big question mark had been what to do with the last set, what to make the small set. I think we knew we wanted to do five, five, large, large. That out of the gate, we were pretty sure we wanted to do that. And I mean, I got permission from Bill to do large, large. The idea of the sort of conglomerate of everything, I think came about just because, well, what goes there? Like we need a small set, what goes there? And the idea was, I think we

harkened back to Brady's idea for the cold snap slot of, well, it might be fun just to let everybody have access to things. So anyway, this is all set up to explain how we got to Dragon's Maze. I think we really liked the idea of doing large, large, 5-5. We just really liked that. And we just needed something that sort of complemented that with a given that there were three sets. Nowadays, the third set would have been something different. It wouldn't have been probably Ravnica.

But at the time, that's how blocks work. We were trying to be true to the block. Okay, so anyway, the idea of 5-5-10 was baked in from the very beginning. So the design team was led by Alexis Jansen. You might know Alexis as the winner of the first great designer search. The team then had Alexis, Eric Lauer, Aaron Forsyth, Sean Main, Dan Emmons, and myself. That's a pretty potent team. And then the development team was led by Zach Hill.

And then Eric Lauer, Mark Lobis, Mark Gottlieb, Masami Ibamoto, and Sam Stoddard. Mark Lobis, Mark Gottlieb, Masami Ibimoto, and Sam Stoddard. Okay, so the reason I gave a lot of preamble to get to this is we really kind of gave the Dragon Maze design team a really difficult challenge, more so than I think we realized. Now, originally, when we first started, I think it was a normal small size set. I think it was 143 or whatever. And the first problem we ran into was that it was just a very tight fit. Now, we had clearly, like, Dragon's Maze, I should stress this, Dragon's Maze was designed to be drafted with the first two sets. We knew there was no way. If you drafted Dragons and Maids,

Dragons and Maids, Dragons and Maids, you couldn't do that. There just wasn't enough of any... I mean, maybe you could draft three-color decks. I mean, it would not let you draft a two-color deck. There just was not enough depth in any two-color combination to make that work. But the idea was, well,

you're first drafting the other two, and then you get a supplement, was the thought process. Well, and normally for those that haven't done a full Ravnica block draft, since those are a thing of old, normally what would happen is if you're drafting just one set, like just Return of Ravnica, you can, and it's often the right call, to draft a two-color deck.

Normally when you're drafting more than one set, meaning sets with different guilds in them, normally you're trying to draft a three-color set. That's the normal thing you're trying to do in the block. So the idea being is, ideally what you want is you want a Return to Ravnica set, a Gatecrash set that overlap in the color, and then you supplement that with cards from Dragsme. That's sort of how the concept of the draft works.

So, for example, let's say you're drafting Izzet from the very first Return of Ravnica. Well, you would then look at Gatecrash and say, okay, what are the blue and red guilds? Well, Boros is red-white, and Gruul is red-green, and Dimir is blue-red. So those are... And Simic is red-green, and Dimir is blue-red. So those are, and Simic is green-blue.

So you actually have a lot of options. You, in fact, have four options. In fact, the nice thing about it is, when you draft to that set, there are a lot of ways you could go. Now, I'm not sure every return to Ravdunka set worked that way, but because there were, no, of course it did. The way it worked was every set had two of each color. So no matter what I drafted in the first set, there were two other guilds in each of the second set that had that color in it.

By the nature of how we did it. So no matter what you drafted in the first set, there were four different guilds in the second set that were one color that your first set was. So now the other way to go about it is, in some level you're drafting triads, because let's say I want to play a three-color deck. Let's say I want to play blue, black, red. If I want to play blue, black, red, in the first set I had, let's see, I had Izzet that was blue-red, and I had Rakdos that was black-red. And then in the second set, I had Dimir, which was blue-red.

So you're going to draft two guilds in one of the two sets, and a third guild in the other set, so that you have something to draft in every booster. And then the idea is you supplement with Dragon's Mates. Anyway, that was the master plan. That was the idea. And in concept, it all sounded very easy. The problem we ran into was there's just

in a small set, the reason we make a large set to do five guilds is you really need a large set to flesh out five guilds. So to flesh out ten guilds in not a large set but a small set, you really end up with not a lot of room. It is very, very tight. And one of the issues that we ran into was how do we do that?

How do we make it matter? And so the first thing we did is we made the set a little bit larger. It's 156 rather than 143. We just stretched it up a little bit. We also, I think there were no basic lands in the set. I think the way the set worked is the land slot had the gates and the shock lands that had been in the previous two sets. But for the first time, I think it was the first time ever, we repeated cards within a block. I don't think we had done that up to then. I think that's the first time we did that.

So the idea was the land slot itself just gave you dual lands. Most of the time you got a gate, but every once in a while you got a shock land. And the idea was that was something you could draft and something you could pay attention to. And because the entire slot was that, it just opened up your opportunities in the last draft to help with your color fixing. lot was that. It just opened up your opportunities in the last draft to help with your color fixing. Okay, so there was one new mechanic

in it. So basically, all ten of the original mechanics from the guilds were there. So Detain, Overlay, Populate, Scavenge, Unleash, Battalion, Blood Rush, Cipher, Evolve, Extort. All of those were there. All of them. All of them were there.

And then we tried to do one new thing. And so remember when I talked about when we did Dissension that we used split cards as a way to show off the guilds. So this time we decided to bring back split cards. They had been in the last set of the previous Ravnica block. And we introduced a mechanic called fuse. So what fuse is, is normally when you have a split card, you cast card A or you cast card B. But fuse says, if a card has fuse, you're allowed to cast both sides if you're able. So instead of being A or B,

it's now A or B or A and B. Now, if you cast A and B, you have to cast both A and B, but you are allowed to do that at the time. I think the reason... So one of the challenges of dissension was normally when you do a set, you want to introduce something new, right?

You want to go, oh, here's the brand new thing because players like brand new things. But when you're reintroducing 10 mechanics that, I mean, they're not new in the sense that the previous sets introduced them, but there's still a lot going on. There just wasn't a lot of space. So we liked having the split cards in the set. It helped sort of feel, it gave it a little bit of a feel of original Ravnica that the previous two sets hadn't done and it allowed us to introduce something that was pretty straightforward. I mean we needed a mechanic that was fun but not complex

and Fuse did a good job of introducing that. Okay, so the next way to solve this was you had to figure out sort of how to fit in your mechanics. I'm sorry how to fit in your cycles. So'm sorry, how to fit in your cycles. So there were two kinds of cycles in the set. There were some mono-colored cycles that there were five of, and there were a whole bunch of guild cycles that there were ten of. So let me talk through some of these cycles.

Okay, first was the Gatekeepers. First I'm going to talk about the mono-colored five-card cycles. So the Gatekeepers were, they lost three and a Coward mana, varied in the cycle. They were all two, four creatures. And when they entered, they generated an effect if you controlled two gates.

So remember, the common dual lands, which showed up in the previous two sets and in the land slot, or mostly in the land slot in this set, were enter the battle tap lands that we wanted to give a little something extra to. We made them gates. And then we decided we wanted to have, like, the reason gates would matter is there'd be a little smidgen of stuff in the set that mattered. We wanted to play in that a little more. And one of the

things about Dragon's Maze in the story, let me talk about the story real quick. So, basically, there is a giant race that happens, and each guild sends, what do they call them, a maze runner to be part of that. And Jace gets involved, Jace wins the race, which is how he becomes the guild pact of Ravnica, for those who remember that part of the story.

But anyway, there was a... The main key of the event was all the guilds were coming together for this race. That was kind of the main storyline. Oh, real quickly, just because, before I forget to tell this story, it's a funny story. So, the maze, the idea was

that, I guess the maze was the creation of of Niv-Mizzet, who is a dragon mastermind, he created the Izzet guild. He's always played a big role in the set. And so basically, he had created this maze as a means to capture the guild. I forget exactly, but anyway,

it was his idea. It was Niv-Mizzet's. So they wanted, in the name of the set, to reference the maze, right? They wanted to reference this race that was going to happen. So they came up with the idea of Dragon's Maze because it's Niv-Mizzet's maze. The problem was Niv-Mizzet was in the very first set. Niv-Mizzet wasn't in the set.

So Niv-Mizzet wasn't here. He was in the first set for story reasons and we had so much to get in the set it just wasn't easy to fit dragons in and so I don't know if this set even had a dragon it might have had one dragon but really it wasn't about dragons

and so when they first pitched the name Dragons Maze we said we can't call it Dragons Maze there aren't dragons in it. Like, what had happened earlier, just real quickly, is, sorry, I keep back telling my stories. It's like Shazad, there's stories and stories. When we made Scourge, Brian Tinsman had made the set.

There's a little bit of concern that the set wasn't exciting enough. So in development, they added this dragon theme that they used for marketing. Except the set didn't really have dragons. I mean, it did a little bit. I mean, there was a smattering of dragons. But for a set called Scourge with a dragon theme, that was marketed with a dragon theme, there was not enough dragons in it.

Like, later on, we would do a dragon set like we did with Dragon Stark here. Okay, we put a lot of dragons in it. Like, later on, we would do a dragon set, like we did with Dragon Stark here. Okay, we put a lot of dragons in it. It's Dragon Stark here. But anyway, we realized we had made a mistake. We sort of, I mean, once again, R&D doesn't do marketing, but we recognized that there had been a mistake with Scourge. So when we saw this, we're like,

okay, whoa, whoa, whoa, we've done this before. We made a set where the audience expected dragons, we didn't deliver dragons, and the audience got upset because, hey, when you hint there's dragons, give the audience dragons. So we tried very hard to change this name. I know I, in particular,

I was like, why in the world would we and the funny thing is the creative team at the time who I think had come up with the the name, kept saying, well, no, no, no. It's not dragons with an S. It's dragon apostrophe S. It's a certain dragon. It's not like a maze of dragons. It's this dragon's maze.

And I'm like, I get it. I get it. It doesn't matter. You have dragon in the name. You can't have dragon in the name of a set and not have the audience go, ooh, dragons and anyway so we tried

very hard to change the name of the set and I lost, obviously, because it's called Dragons Maze but to my credit when the set came out there was a lot of confusion and a lot of people were upset, like, where's all the dragons? It's called Dragons Maze anyway, okay, back to our story cycle. So

the reason I brought this whole thing up was the part of the maze was this race that involved the gates. There's a card called Maze's End in this set where it's an alt-win condition and the idea is, if you get ten gates onto the battlefield, I think it's ten differently named gates, you win the game.

And that represented, in the race, you had to race to all ten gates, I believe is how it worked. Anyway, so that meant that we wanted gates to play a little bit more role they were part of the story so we made a whole cycle caring about gates

that was my long winded story explaining the gatekeepers next were the maze elementals these all cost 5 and colored mana and they had basically one ability naturally and then they granted a combat-oriented ability to all your multicolor creatures. One of the themes that we put into Dragon's Maze was caring about multicolor, because there were ten different guilds that were all very different.

So we decided we needed a very simple theme that could connect them. And so Dragon's Mid had a little bit of, not a lot because there wasn't a lot of room, a little bit of a theme of multicolored matters. And multicolored and Dragon's Maid was all two-colored. So essentially it was two-colored matters. I think it said multicolored so if you played with old cards, if you cared about

anything, it was multicolored. And then we had made a cycle of one-color I think of one-color few spells, I believe. I think there was one cycle of, I think, I didn't write this down. I think there was a cycle, there was a five card cycle, and then there was a ten card guild cycle, I believe is how we did it. Okay. Now, we also made a bunch of guild cycles.

Now, guild cycles are ten card cycles. we also made a bunch of guild cycles. Now, guild cycles are 10 card cycles. Now, normally when we do guild cycles in Return to Ravnica or Gatecrash, they are five card cycles because there's only five of the 10 guilds in that set. So normally when we do guild cycles, it's a 10 card cycle, but broken up over two sets. In this set, it's all in one set. So it means you have to fit in 10 cards, which is trickier. When doing cycles, five card cycles are the norm. They're much easier to fit in. 10 card cycles are just difficult. And doing a bunch of 10 card cycles creates a lot of challenge and a lot of overlap. For example, let's take one of the 10 card cycles, the Runners. So the idea was each of the guilds has somebody who's running the maze for their guild. Now part of the story had Raul Zarek running the

maze for Izzet, but we made a cycle of Maze Runners that were legendary creatures. So we decided, like we had done with in all previous Ravnica sets, we had done cycles of legendary creatures. Now, this is before Commander, I mean, existed, but it wasn't quite as big as it is now. But we still liked the idea of, hey, we're in a Ravnica set, we're going to introduce stuff. Part of the idea is we had done the leaders of the guild

in the previous two sets. So here is sort of a champion of the guild. We ended up there having to do somebody in order to do a card fill-up cycle we made a blue-red one who was like the mage runner that's supposed to run for Izzet that Raul Zarek runs in place of. So we had to do that as a little

because Raul Zarek was a planeswalker in the set. Another thing we did is we did a cycle of mythic rare spells. So for each of the ten guilds, we just wanted something mythic that seemed grandiose that we did. We did lieutenants that were kind of draft-arounds, that were sort of saying, hey, here's a neat thing to draft around. They were two colors to say,

oh, we might want to be in these two colors, among others, in order to do the strategy. We had some fused cards that were hitting all 10 guilds. We had the Cluestones. So the Cluestones were artifacts that cost three and that you could then tap for one of the two colors. So let's say it was the Azorius Cluestones were artifacts that cost three, and that you could then tap for one of the two colors. So let's say it was the Azorius Cluestone.

So it's three generic mana. Tap for white or tap for blue. Or, I think it was white-blue-tap-sack, you could draw a card. So the idea was they did color fixing, but also later in the game, when you no longer need the color fixing, you could get a card out of them. when you no longer need the color fixing, you could get a card out of them. Anyway, what else I can say about the set?

Looking back with 2020 hindsight, and I want to stress that this is not, I think the design team did a great job. Alexis and her team worked very hard. I think a lot of the problems on Dragon's Maze was in the structure. So this was on me. I did this. This was not Alexis. This was not her team. In trying

to make a block work and trying to make the 5-5 large, large work, like I said, it's not that I don't think there were some fun parts of Dragon's Maze. I just think sometimes we sort of ask the design team to... We bite off more than we can chew, as they say. And I think this set suffered a little bit from... There was just too much being asked of it.

And so it just was... It was a lot. There was a lot of moving pieces. And one of the questions I get all the time is, Hey, why not just make a set with ten factions in it? Why is there always five factions? Why not ten factions? And the answer is that barring something like, you know,

Double Masters 2022, barring something that just has a higher complexity level, it is really, really hard to get ten factions in. I mean, a lot of times what we do is we make five factions and then there's ways to combine the factions or play subsets of the factions, but it is really, really hard to have ten distinct

each with their own keyword. That's just, it's a lot to do. It's a little bit more to manage. And even though, like I said, even though we've sort of warmed you up, like we introduced the five in Return to Ravnica and then the five different ones in Gatecrash, like even though you had sort of like eight months of buildup before you got to this, it still ended up being quite a bit. It was just a lot going on. And now the interesting thing is, and this is true about, we always do market research and understand how do the audience take the limited.

Like one of the things we do to understand how limited formats are is we can look on like on digital play and sanction play. Like who all was playing this format? How are they playing it? digital was the easiest place to see this, was there was an audience that enjoyed Return of Ravna, the full block, drafting the full block. There definitely was an audience that just got in. I mean, like, the reason we make Modern Horizon sets is there is an audience that just,

you can't get too deep for them. They just throw the complexity at them. There is a very enfranchised audience, and a lot of them are into drafting. One of the interesting trend lines is the longer you play Magic, the more likely you draft. And the longer

you play, the more likely you can handle more complexity. So the idea of a complex draft, there's an audience for that. That's why we make Modern Horizons. But Dragon's Maze, the full block with Dragon's Maze, was starting to Dragon's Maze was starting to get to some of the complexity levels

you'd see in Modern Horizon in that there was so much to think about and so much to combine together it just was a lot and that is why

we don't normally do 10 factions 10 factions is just a little bit too much outside of a high complexity set which is not something we'll do

in a normal premiere set so so I mean like I said there's a lot of fun stuff outside of a high complexity set, which is not something we'll do in a normal Premiere set. So, I mean, like I said, there's a lot of fun stuff. To answer a couple questions, number one is, will Fuse ever come back? I think so. I mean, we do split cards from time to time.

Obviously, with modal double-faced cards, that's another form of split cards. I don't think we will do Fuse on modal double-faced cards that's another form of split cards I don't think we will do fuse on modal double-faced cards because they often have permanency it can only represent one thing at a time so fuse doesn't really work on MDFCs but on split cards I do think fuse will come back at some point

it just needs to be the right set and the right reason but fuse was generally well liked will we ever do a hodgepodge all Ravnica, every guild set again? I wouldn't put past something like a Modern Horizons doing something like that. Like, I don't think it's an impossibility. I don't think we'd do it again as a premiere set. I think it was a little bit much. Although, I will say this.

I'm always happy that we try things. Even when we do something and it ends up not quite working out, I appreciate that part of what we do in magic is we try new things and we push boundaries and we experiment. And even when something doesn't quite turn out the way we want, I'm happy that we tried the experiment. I'm happy that we, like, a lot of great magic things came about because we were pushing boundaries. But part of pushing boundaries is hey, not everything's going to work out. And part of things sometimes

working out is accepting that, hey, you've got to try things. And I'm happy we tried Dragon's Maze. And I do want to stress once again, none of these faults really fall on the design team. I think the design team did an amazing job with the constraints that I gave them of, hey, it's a set with all the guilds of this size, and wrap it up, and, you know, that was just a really daunting challenge.

Anyway, guys, I hope you enjoyed my three-series talk on Return to Ravnica block. Like I said, I... Looking back on the block, I, my biggest sort of lessons learned in general, and I did a lessons learned on,

at least on Gatecrash, because I call it Gatecrash, is I wish this and Guilds of Ravnica, I wish I'd innovated a little more than I did. I guess you could argue that we innovated on Return of Ravnica with the block structure. It was the first time we ever did a second large set, 5-5-10. We did experiment a lot. So it's not, I guess on some level, we did experiment

with this block more so than we did with Guilds of Ravnica. But it was more in the structure than it was in the individual sets. So I guess we did experiment, just in a different way. But anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed my talk all about Guilds of Ravnica. It was fun. I like doing these series where I revisit sets. It lets me think back to times. So these were fun sets to make. I enjoyed Return of Ravnica. I enjoyed Greatcrash.

I enjoyed Dragon's Maze. They all were fun sets to work on. And I think there are a lot of fun cards that came out of them. returned Ravnica. I enjoyed Great Crash. I enjoyed Dragon's Maze. They all were fun sets to work on, and I think there are a lot of fun cards that came out of them. So anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed this jaunt back, looking back at Ravnica Visit number two. But anyway, guys, I'm at work. And I'm going to be late for a meeting

if I don't get going. So as we all know, this is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. Thanks for joining me today.