Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #949: Double Masters 2022 with Bryan

Episode Date: July 15, 2022

I sit down with Designer Bryan Hawley to talk about the design of Double Masters 2022.

I'm not pulling out the driveway! We all know what that means! It's time for another drive to work at home edition! Okay, so today I'm here with Brian Hawley and we're going to talk about the design of Double Masters 2022. Hey Brian! Hello! Hooray! I'm Double Masters 2022. Okay, so we're going to start the story at the very beginning. What was your earliest involvement with this set? We're going to start the story at the very beginning. What was your earliest involvement with this set? So my earliest involvement with the set was, I mean, after, you know, deciding we were going to do it and getting signed up by Brady. We were like, guess who's leading this one?

It's you. I was like, yay, hooray. My earliest involvement was a couple of meetings with me Eric Lauer and Yanni Skolnick who are both designers that have worked on a bunch of previous Master's sets as have I kind of deciding like, alright, so we want to do

another Master's set we want to do another double Master's set that set was cool but one of the things we've been kind of shifting towards or just did shift towards with Double Masters and Double Masters 2 was having kind of a more

thematic limited environment. Something that sort of like Double Masters 1 was very artifacts matter. This one going in we didn't know what we wanted it to be. We had a few different ideas. But I'm going to go ahead and be cagey about those, because we may still do them someday in the far-flung future.

Who knows? But we eventually landed on Multi-Color Masters. We liked Double Masters 1, we were pretty sure that we were just going to call it Double Masters 2022 but we still wanted a central theme with the limited environment so those meetings

that kind of there wasn't really a lead of that team, it was just the three of us talking and kind of coming to a general plan that we all liked. And the kind of thing we were trying to figure out is Master Sets in a lot of ways are kind of trying to do. The synergy level of the draft format is pretty high, as is the power level and just splash value of a lot of the cards. So the thing that we settled on was, okay, this is a

multicolor environment. We've done a bunch of multicolor environments. We've done multicolor environments with five two-color pairs, five three-color environment we've done a bunch of multi-color environments we've done multi-color environments with like five two-color pairs five three-color trios we've never done one that is all 10 three-color trios um so like if we just if we want to turn it up to 12 that's where we would want to go yeah let me jump in real quickly just to explain a little bit um original ravnica for a very short period of time, was all 10 two-color pairs. And what we found in a premiere set is it's just too much. Like, it is just too... A, you have some space issues, but more than that, it's just too much for the average drafter to process.

drafter to process. And so we have sort of drawn the line that in a premier set, that usually about five is the most that we do when we do factions. We don't tend to go above five. But you guys were going where premier sets cannot go. Yes, we did that.

Yeah, like, Sentimasters are kind of a much smaller print run. They're, you know, like, pretty heavily you know, like, pretty heavily targeted at, like, players who have been around a while, really understand Magic, really understand the ecosystem, and

have experienced a lot of those, you know, the usual fare that we give in Premiere sets. We're trying to give something that's, like, very, very different. The problem, of course, is, like, by now we have a pretty good understanding of what a two-color set or a three-color set with five factions looks like and how to design one. We didn't really have much of an idea of how we were going to actually go about making these ten three-color trios work. actually go about making these 10 three-color trios work.

And the thing we quickly found was that it was a very, very difficult math puzzle. And one of the things that we also found very early is it was really, really important that people drafting the set did not need to care about that math puzzle. Like, to your point, having all 10 three-color trios available is, like, already a lot of complexity. Needing to think through, like, how each of those trios interacted with the other trios in the set and, like, how am I going to be able to pivot from, like, if I start drafting Jund cards and then I want to go into Esper?

How is that going to work? We really needed it to be a pretty intuitive experience. A lot of people only draft Master Sets one, two, three times at most. Some people go really deep and draft them a bunch of times. But the experience does really need to be going to the first time because a lot of people will only draft it once. So

we sketched out a few ideas and I'll cut to the chase. Our first two ideas did not work. The thing we were trying to do, kind of using normal tools, we were like, okay, so what if we just turn up the strength of the mana fixing in the format? What if we just have all ten trilands, like the ETB Taplands that produce three colors colors of mana all ten of them are common and then we have other fixtures as well that was the closest of our early experiments

we also tried things like two ETB tapped lands that are two colors per pack and we were kind of trying to find a middle ground where people were able to get enough mana fixing to play three colors but didn't have so much that they just kind of felt compelled or like it was totally free to play four or five colors. Because if everyone at the table is doing that, it's not a very fun draft environment. Like everyone's deck looks the same, you can pretty much tell that everyone's deck looks the same, there's no real like you're not really trying to figure out what you're trying to do. You're just taking the best

card you see every time. So we didn't, like, it's fine if a couple of people do that, but if that's the default thing people did, we wouldn't be happy. So the problem that we found with some of those kind of early initial tools was that when you take a Triland, or take three Trilands, let's say you're trying to draft blue, white, and green. Maybe you find a blue, white, green Triland. You might find like a blue, white, black Triland and a green, white, red Triland. And now you're like, okay, well, now I have a little bit of an in to be able to play these other colors too. Like now I'm kind of more interested in splashing a red card or splashing a black card.

And kind of having those like extra free mana sources in your deck was kind of pushing people into that sort of four color and five color soup and was winding up making the draft a lot more complicated because you couldn't find a lane and kind of decide, like, okay, I can mostly ignore cards that have red mana in them at this point in the draft. Like, when you're opening your second or third pack, usually you want to be kind of, like, have a general idea of what you're trying to accomplish and when you were kind of accruing these incidental sources

of mana that you weren't necessarily planning on using you couldn't really do that because you were like well I can splash red and I can splash black um let me explain something to the audience that something about the math of three color so when you have a three color faction,

there's no such thing as, as no overlap, right? Every other three color factions going to overlap with your three color faction, no matter what, when you do two colors, you can have two colors that don't overlap,

but with three colors, there's always some overlap. And in fact, there is a bunch of double color, things that overlap by two color, especially when you're talking about having 10 things. So one of the big challenges,

no matter what you do, like we like having some overlap because some overlap allows flexibility. You don't want only one drafter to want any one card. You want people to fight over things. That makes for a more robust draft thing. But when you're talk about figuring out the

map, the fact that, hey, I'm playing a three-color deck, and I overlap with, what, three? I overlap in two colors with three other decks, and I think you overlap with one color with an additional... Like, the only thing you don't overlap with at all... No, you overlap with everything.

In a three-color environment, you overlap with everything. Yeah. There are two monocolor pairs that you cannot use and only and depending on how willing you are to splash or whether it's hybrid,

I mean, obviously there's the two-color pair that you're not using, but you can use 60%, like 6 of the 10 of the two- color pairs. So the challenge, yeah, very quickly gets to be what you were describing of like blending archetypes, like overlapping with adjacent archetypes gets really, really intertwined really, really quickly. adjacent archetypes gets really, really intertwined really, really quickly. And when we were using normal tools for dual lands, what we were finding is those overlaps became even more enmeshed, which is where we enter cryptic spires.

In design, it was called Malleable Wilderness. That was just the name that I came up with while you were talking about it. It's actually something that, like, something like three or four years ago, we were exploring as just, like, something to add. Like, do we want to just add this to every draft forever onwards? We very quickly found that we didn't really want to do that. Yeah, yeah. This is a cool story.aron made a mini team i mean he wasn't on it but he made a

mini team i think eric lauer was on it chris mooney was on it and he said to them and you were on okay and the goal was can you improve draft is there anything we can do to improve draft what can you do to improve draft and right one of the ideas the team floated was what if all drafts came with what ended up being cryptic spires that you i think i think everybody got two of them is that was that you guys ended up that was that was kind of the like best solution but it was also a solution that we were like this is the best we came up with but we don't like it um so we're not gonna push on it. The benefit, the problem that it's trying to solve is that there is some benefit in mana fixing in Limited just being a little bit stronger. Mana bases that are all basic lands are a little bit less reliable, they're significantly less

reliable than constructed mana bases, and we were looking like, is there a way that we can kind of elegantly and cleanly bridge that gap a little bit? The... And to, just so they understand, you guys came to the conclusion that three-color lands got you in trouble, but that two-color lands

did just a much better job of getting people to play three colors. So for, just going to Devilmasters 2, so having a larger number of two-color lands makes your mana base more consistent. Like a three-color, let's say you have three three-color lands or six two-color lands, the amount of variance,

like the randomness game-to-game of the tri-land mana base is higher because if you don't draw one of those three cards, you're just drawing basics, whereas you're a lot more likely to draw at least one or two of your two-color lands. So that helped. But the real heart of the problem was the fact that when you have to pick, like, a jungle shrine, like a three-color land that already has three colors defined, or like a, what's it? I'm blanking on the, like, stone quarry, I think is the name of the red-white. Anyway, if you need to pick a land where it has those predefined colors, a lot of times you wind up taking those somewhat speculatively.

Like, you're not sure if you want to play red, but you take the white-red dual land to make it possible later. And what that was doing is it was kind of pushing you into playing more colors than just the cards you were trying to draft would naturally and organically make you want to do. So the reason we went back to cryptic spires, we liked how it played in draft at large. The problem is just the amount of complexity that adds to learning how to draft in general, which is already a somewhat daunting task for any player, was really high.

Having to know what this land is, how it works, it's a slightly weird object. Parsing that was too much for main sets. But again, master sets can go where main sets can't sometimes. And this is one of them. So the thing we were trying to solve and the things that cryptic spires kind of uniquely solved is that when you're taking cryptic spires, you're getting the perfect land for your deck, which means that if you want

to play more colors, you are necessarily giving something up, because you could have made them into more fixing for your three main colors. Like, if you have five Cryptic Spires, and you want to splash a fourth color, you need to either play basics or kind of divert some of your fixing into being that fourth color, so it destabilizes your three-color base. Whereas when you've just been accruing as many two-color lands of whatever colors you can find throughout the draft that are tangential to what you're doing, the incentives sometimes that fourth color is closer to free,

which is something that we were finding is a problem given the sheer density of gold cards and other options. Yeah, this is a cool concept. The idea that if I pick a land that... Let's say I'm playing white, blue, black. If I take a dual land that has red in it, I now psychologically say, oh, maybe I want to think about red. I have a land that could produce red. But a cryptic spire, because you don't make that decision until kind of later, it doesn't, like, even though the potential exists, you don't think that way, right?

That's an interesting thing in that cryptic spire is like, well, I'm just going to make it what I need to make it to make my deck work. And you think about it later. But it doesn't open your mind up to thinking about other colors unless you're a pretty advanced drafter. And even if you are a pretty advanced drafter, it's like, then you're kind of trading the, like, the cost-benefit analysis of, like, okay, well, if I want to play that fourth color, I'm going to need more cryptic spires. If I only want to play three colors, I might need four, five, six, maybe seven if I'm particularly greedy

with cards with lots of mana pips on them. But if I really want to play that off-color, three-color gold card, I'm probably going to need to pick up an additional two or three cryptic spires and more of my lands are going to play that like off color three color gold card i'm probably going to need to pick up like an additional two or three cryptic spires and more of my lands are going to play tapped so like

there's kind of yeah that like smooth transition of like you're not really thinking about it until like even when you do think about it the incentives still line up so like what we were going for okay so you added encrypted spire that was a a big part. What else did you need to do? Here's one of the challenges. I know. I didn't work on this set. So one of the challenges that would concern me is 10 is a lot. Just fitting in 10 is a lot.

So how did you solve that? How did you fit it in? That's what I would worry about. How do you even fit it in? Very carefully and with a lot of overlap so like going back to that concept that you raised earlier with um kind of uh we need people like cards to be relevant to multiple archetypes so that multiple people at the table are interested in them um you're kind of competing for resources um that needs to happen about twice as often in this, like,

10 three-color trio world as it does in a normal, like, modern color two-color world. So the, because it's basically like we need a certain number of cards to support blue, white, black. We also need a certain number of cards to support red, white, black, and so on and so forth around this three-color wheel. When you kind of just like multiply that out and add it up to your point, like 10 three-color trios, just each of those trios needs the same number of

cards supporting it as a two-color pair, but there are just so many more combinations that each common has to go in more of the decks. So, for instance, like when you kind of look through the common file for Double Masters 2, the limited archetypes, like kind of synergy themes, the limited archetypes, like kind of synergy themes, are very core, like central limited themes that have shown up over and over in Magic in a bunch of different ways.

They are things with a bunch of different options. And a lot of the reason for that is we needed so many more cards that are like, this card is interesting to the blue, white, red Spells Matter deck. It also needs to go into the red-white-green Heroic deck. It also needs to go into the green-white-black Counters deck. looking at, we need more slots to just have text that is relevant to two to four of these

different archetypes instead of like, it's fine if this is mostly just interesting to like the white black player and the white red player. Yeah, here's another thing for the audience to remember is normally that's hard, but you had an extra problem thrown at you to make things even more complicated, which is, this is a reprint set. You can make no new cards. Like a lot of times when we're,

we're stuck, like, Oh, we have to overlap. Okay. We'll make the card that overlaps, right. We'll make the thing,

but you don't have that luxury. And so talk a little bit about like having to find the card that existed already. Yep. Yeah, and, like, the process of creating the archetype grid for Duel Masters 2 was similarly very complex. Like, the, again, yeah, like, to your point, most of the commons need to be, like, this has an ET ETB for blink and it puts counters on things for the counters deck. This is a aggressively slanted two-drop that also has a prowess

trigger. Things like we need those overlaps so much that the process of building out that grid is a lot of like we build a grid where we know what we want each three-color trio to do. We know how each of those two-color trios, and kind of remember that, like, the blue-white multicolor cards, and commons especially, kind of need to be relevant to at least two or three of the blue-, X trios. So like there are three, you know, blue, white, red, black, or green as your three color

trios involving blue, white. We need to know what those blue, white cards can do that is interesting or relevant to preferably as many of those three as possible. And then we also need to know what the monocolor cards do and those need to also go in a bunch of different decks. So a lot of times it was like, we would build out this grid, and then, yeah, we just need to go and look and see whether the cards exist to make it work. And what we very quickly found is that, like, in a lot of master sets we can kind of use oddball, quirky draft archetypes that really only barely work. Like, they have exactly enough cards

to make it work in this master set, but if we were to do it again, we'd have to use basically all the same cards. It's a pretty, like, we can get one set out of it, and it's cool, but, like, if that combination of cards doesn't work, it just doesn't work at all. We very quickly found that, like, those

are total non-starters in this world. So, like, all of the core synergies of Double Masters 2, we needed a lot of flexibility because we needed a lot of cards that went into multiple of them. And finding those crossover cards just meant that we had to use, like, very kind of core central to magic themes. Now, layered on top of that, when we're talking about limited,

it's much more common and uncommon, right? That's usually definitionally. How much did you even think about limited and doing the rares and mythic rares? Because it's a Dullemaster set, quite a lot. Like, rares and mythics, if you have 10 rares and mythics in your pool, and 10 commons and uncommons in your pool, it's likely that you're playing most or all of the rares, and, you know, some percentage of the commons and uncommons. So when we double the

amount of rares in the packs, we're essentially also doubling the amount of rares in people's decks. So the amount of rares, and especially given it has a larger than normal number of rares in the set, it has, I believe, 120 rares. has, I believe, 120 rares. We need those rares to integrate fairly well with Limited. And then going back to that, we want people's first experience drafting the set to be really fun. We want to make sure that there aren't rares that kind of send them on some quest

that the rest of the file doesn't support. some quest that the rest of the file doesn't support. Again, that kind of core archetype theme helped us there because it meant that the pool of rares was similarly pretty large that we could pull from. But definitely meshing the cards that see play in Commander or Modern or Pioneer or whatever else with that sort of plays well in Limited

definitely presented some challenges. But honestly, the sheer quantity of rares helped a bunch in that regard. Because when we have 120 rares, we have a lot of space to make sure that the suite of rares had to support a lot of the same basic effects for limited that commons and uncommons

would normally do. effects for Limited that other, that like, commons and uncommons would normally do. So like, you know, there are a decent number of just like, Restoration Angel is just a good card in your Flicker deck. Like, it does what that card, what the deck wants to do, it does it pretty well. You know, you get on the aft cards like Chaos Chaos Warp or like Anguished Unmaking or like Crackling Doom. They're just like, they're powerful and they kind of do unusual things for removal spells,

but like in Limited, they mostly just play as like, this is just a good, solid removal spell. Okay, so we're talking a lot about limited, and so I want to bring up that this is a reprint set. So we have all the issues for limited, but also on top of that, look, you want to reprint cards people want, right? Part of a

reprint set is letting people get access to cards that are excited, because this is all about reprinting old cards. There's no new cards. How do you find balancing kind of the need for exciting cards for constructed purposes versus making the limited environment work? In this case, they actually synergized really well.

Like, especially with a lot of the legends and multicolored cards. Like, a lot of multicolored cards in general are just strong cards that see play in a variety of formats like go in a bunch of commander decks or just like generally appealing cool cards and when we're looking for just like cards that we think people really like and just kind of going off of you know what cards see play and are appealing and that we haven't banned in this format or that format, they're mostly pretty fun cards. Those are the ones that stick around in a lot of cases. And as commander has been growing as kind of just a percentage of

play and magic in general um a lot of the sort of basic core effects like point removal sweepers like strong creatures that see a bunch of play in Commander are rare anyway. And so we were kind of finding that, I mean, that's also true in Modern and Pioneer and Legacy, etc., that each of those formats has their own quirks and a much more constrained pool of cards. And we were finding that a lot of those cards just wind up being, yeah, I mean, there's cool fun cards that do things that you need in Limited, just at a kind of higher rate or kind of more game-defining impact than we would put it on our Uncommon. It definitely causes us to...we have to evaluate especially the removal at lower rarities through that lens.

A lot of the rare creatures are very game-defining if left completely unchecked. So the removal at lower rarities is kind of disproportionally... There's a lot more like kills almost everything as opposed to the more like kills some stuff or kills some stuff or kills everything at a kind of low rate. A lot of the removal at lower rarities is just kind of making sure that you have a way to answer those like powerful cards that will run away with the game unchecked. But yeah, I mean like with regards to kind of choosing which cards we go in a lot of sort of a

balancing act between different formats like we're looking for kind of the headlining cards of you know Commander, Modern, etc.

But we're also looking to reintroduce people to cool old cards that are strong, but they may have just fallen out of favor or may have forgot about. And one of the things that we really like doing in Master Sets is recontextualizing those, showing them off in a new light. And a lot of those cards, especially like parts from Commander pre-constructed decks, are cards that people have never played in London

and just do really fun things in the kind of bounds of that format that's kind of different from how they play in Commander and how they're used to being seen. So anyway, I can see my desk here, so I'm almost at work. So I just want to get some final thoughts from you, like sort of looking back,

seeing what Double Master 2022 became, sort of what are your final thoughts for how it all came together? Ultimately, I'm really happy with how it came together. I definitely saw some confusion about how Cryptic Spires worked and different theories of how it was going to play out. But from what I've seen and what I've heard, that kind of goal that we aimed for of

mostly you just take a card you like, settle into a like kind of three-color path um and then the kind of the synergies kind of uh if you're looking for them do come together for you and then kind of crypt expires kind of silently um you know makes your mana work um and uh you're able to cast your cards um i haven't, like, one of the things that I was kind of, you know, a little nervous about is sort of, like, is this format just going to be too hard to draft? And from what I've seen, like, you know,

it's a usual master set level difficult to draft. Like, the synergies are fairly intensive. A lot of the cards are, like, pretty quirky. But the, like, I intensive, a lot of the cards are like pretty quirky, but the like I think that they kind of the mission we set out to do of like make this mostly three color draft format where people can occasionally play two colors or four colors or whatever if they want to, but kind of just being able to do the thing that Sett is trying to tell you to do and have it just kind of work out for you, I think, has gone really well. And I'm really happy seeing how people are liking it. Okay, so my final question before we leave for today.

What is the most number of cryptic spires you've ever drafted? I was never quite the all-in cryptic spires, take-every-Cryptic Spires I see person. Well, what is the most anyone drafted? Not just you. What's the most you've seen drafted? I've seen about 12, but I don't know. I think that they did play all 12, but after the drafts told me they wouldn't have done it again. Okay. Well, so thank you, Brian. Thank you for joining with us.

It's a lot of fun hearing about Double Masters 2022. So thank you so much for being here. Yeah, thanks for having me. And everybody else, I am at my desk. We all know what that means. It means the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. So thank you guys for joining me. We all know what that means. It means at the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic.

So thank you guys for joining me. Brian, thanks for being here. And I'll see all of you next time. Bye-bye.