Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #965: DMU Vision Design with Ethan Fleischer

Episode Date: September 9, 2022

In this podcast, I sit down with Ethan Fleischer, the lead vision designer of Dominaria United, to talk about the set's vision design.

I'm not pulling in my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the Drive to Work at Home Edition. Okay, well I like interviewing people when I'm at home, and today I have Ethan Fleischer to talk all about Dominaria United. Hey, Ethan. Hi. Hi, Mark. Okay, so you led the design, the vision design, and exploratory design for the set. So let's talk about where did it start? So what did we know going into this? I mean, you led the team, I was on the team,

so we were both there. What did we know going into this? We knew that this was going to kick off a major story arc that was going to involve the Phyrexians. And we knew that Dominaria was intimately associated with the Phyrexians. The Phyrexians kind of had their beginnings in Dominaria. And they since moved to various other planes over the years. But their roots are here.

We also knew that we'd done a very successful set in 2018 called Dominaria, and we had lots of cool ideas that couldn't fit in one set, so there were lots of good ideas left over. You make a good point, by the way. You and I had both

worked on Dominaria, flipped roles, and then I was leading the set, you were on the set, but you had, and then you led the exploratory for dominaria um right uh so anyway you and i had were familiar and one of the things to point out here in case the audience doesn't know this is you are one of the foremost experts on like dominarian history right i am uh one of i'm one of the people at the company that's read every book and short story about Dominaria. Just as over the course of working on the 2018 Dominaria set, I was also one of the writers for the World Guide. So I just did a huge amount of research and researched everything.

So, yeah, it's all it's all up there in my head somewhere and so I can call upon that information and use it to quickly generate ideas and sort of take different concepts from different sources and kind of find a way

to synthesize concepts out of multiple things. Okay, so where did the set start? So we knew we were going back to Dominaria. We knew it was the beginning of a big story. So where did the design start? That is a good question. I guess I started by establishing

sort of some creative pillars. And it started with Dominaria's original essence that we established in the 2018 Dominaria. So it was high fantasy, rich history and vibrant renewal. And then there were two other big goals here. One was express the environmental story. So in the 2018 Dominaria, we basically spent a lot of time setting up a theme for what this plane was about, those three things.

But we knew that we didn't need to do that again here. Like Dominaria had established its identity and players liked it we didn't need to mess with that but we did need to figure out what else beyond this plane is going on here and the the big thing that's happening uh in dominaria united is phyrexian agents are infiltrating everything trying to sabotage things trying to kidnap people and so discord and confusion meanwhile the good guys are trying to form alliances and form a new coalition to fight back against the phyrexians. So we've got this conflict going on that is happening all over the plain of Dominaria. So we wanted to express that. And then the third thing that we really wanted to establish was setting up kayaking, lacrosse, and marathon. Those are the Brothers War and Phyrexia, All Will Be One, and March of the Machine.

So we wanted to make sure that there were some elements here, both mechanical and creative, that would kind of set things up and sort of prime the audience to be able to enjoy those sets better. The other thing, by the way, is one of the things we had established on Dominaria, the Dominaria set, was the idea that this world is shaped by its history. And that its history, I like to say, its present is shaped by its past. So it's very interesting, of all the places we could have Phyrexians, Dominaria has a really rich history with the Phyrexians.

This is not their first time interacting with them. And so I know we got to play into that. Right. And the thing that's interesting about the Phyrexians and Dominaria is that they have been present throughout Dominaria's story from, you know, the Thran times all the way up to the present. And so they're kind of integrated into Dominaria's setting. They belong here more than anyone else does. Sorry, they belong here more than they do anywhere else. They are part of Dominaria and Dominaria is part of them. Okay, so I know one of the things we did early on is we talked about, like,

okay, what was in Dominaria that we wanted to bring back? Dominaria had gone really well. So when Dominaria came out, we had, I think, a 13-year gap between us being in Dominaria and returning to Dominaria in the set Dominaria. Right. The previous outing was Time Spiral Block. Right. And the set went really well. It was very, very popular. And so we knew we wanted to go back to Dominaria again. So let's talk a little bit about what expectations we had of going back to Dominaria.

Yeah. So one of the big successes of Dominaria was the Legends theme. We had one Legendary creature per pack in Dominaria, and we thought that that was just a slam dunk and decided to do that again for Dominaria United. I love designing legendary cards and so um and that coupled with my uh good understanding of the background all the different cultures and history here meant that i was much more involved in top lining the legends than I ordinarily would have been. Almost, I believe all of the members of the world building team who worked on the Dominaria world guide originally have since left the company.

And so it kind of fell to me to kind of be the Dominaria expert and work with the world building team to at least come up with an initial list of legends and figure out what the cool things could be to resonate with the audience and call back to previous things. Later on in the process, during set

design, the concepting burdens fell more and more on the world building team as they solved problems at a more tactical level. You used a word I wanted sometimes we use words

because we use them at work all the time, but I wanted to make sure the audience understands what it means. So you talked about top lining. What is top lining? Oh, top lining. Yeah. Top lining is the first step in creating an illustration and name for a magic card. So usually what happens is we, the game designers will design a card

and figure out what it wants to do mechanically. And then the world building team will have a series of meetings called top lining, where they look at the cards and brainstorm ideas for what the concept could be. What should be in the illustration here? What should be the name of this card? Just very roughly and simply and then the conceptors will take those top lines pick the coolest idea that doesn't overlap with any of the other top lines from anywhere else in the set and then they'll write an art description

that the artists can use to illustrate it and then, the creative text team will figure out what the final name of the card should be. But top lining is sort of the very first thing that the world building team does for an individual magic card. Now, a lot of the time, we don't start with a mechanic, we'll start with a creative idea. And that was certainly the case with many of these legendary creatures in Dominaria United, though definitely not all by all means. Do you have an example of a legendary creature? Like, just use it as a story here. What's a legendary creature that you feel exemplifies what we're talking about?

I think Joda's a great example. Okay, let me read Joda to everybody, and then you can tell all about how Joda came to be. So, Joda the Unifier, white, blue, black, red, green, it's of all five colors and it's mana cost. He's a legendary creature, human wizard, 5-5.

Legendary creatures you control get plus S plus X, where X is the number of legendary creatures you control. Whenever you cast a legendary spell from your hand exile cards from the top of your library and to exile a legendary non-land card with lesser mana value you may cast that card without paying its mana cost put the rest on the bottom of your library in a random order right so jah is a descendant of characters from the Brothers War. He is either Urza or Mishra's son, and he's Caleb and Krug's son. And so because Dominaria has this theme of history, we like to have characters who are descendants of famous other characters. have characters who are descendants of famous other characters.

It is one of the very few people who is known to be a descendant of a character from the Brothers War. And the fact that we're doing a set about the Brothers War meant that we really wanted to make sure that Joda was in this set so that he could sort of represent the brothers as far as his family. A lot of the time in the novels where Jota appeared, in the Ice Age novels, he did a lot of diplomatic work where he was going from place to place and helping people to put aside their differences.

He was instrumental, for example, in establishing peace between the Balduvians and the Kildorens so that they could form the nation of New Argive. We wanted to put him into that role again here. So his mechanic is all about getting these characters and helping them to work together, right? Yeah, one of the things that's interesting about Joda is I think Joda is motivated by the fact that whoever his father is,

whether it's Urza or Mishra, they did the exact opposite, right? They were sort of destroyers rather than builders. Right. Yes. He's very much. Yes.

You're never going to see Joda wreaking havoc, destroying civilization, things like that. Joda is all about building up. He's all about helping people. Uh, he just cannot help himself. Can't stop helping people. Uh, but yeah, he, he's not one to, uh, throw his weight around or, uh, or destroy things. And that's, that's very conscious.

He does not want to be like Urza. He does not want to be like Mishra. Yeah, so one of the tricky things about this set, even though there were a lot of legends, because we had, once again, the one legend per pack thing, there are more legends that exist in Dominaria than we can do. It's very rich with characters yeah i i sat down with annie sardellis uh who was the creative lead during vision design and we just

generated a huge list of legends and there were lots of great ideas in there many of them made it into the set many of them like got left by the wayside for one reason or another i'm like oh man if we ever do dominaria 3 we got uh we got plenty of good ideas left in the tank yeah it's it's a world kind of rich in embarrassment of how much creative like stuff is there right and that's sort of a consequence of the fact that there are, I think it's 27, 28 magic sets, uh, set in Dominaria. So like, there's just a huge amount of material out there and, you know, anything could be the inspiration for a legendary creature. And just when you have a, uh, you know,

world building that's three times as deep as, as any other plane, it really, uh, just provides a lot of grist for the mill okay so that let's talk deep cuts what is the legendary creature in this set that you think is the deepest cut that you were excited to see oh i i think that the deepest cut has probably got to be erg spawn of tururg. So I'll explain this one. Oh, okay. Go ahead. Do you have the card?

So, oh, yeah, you read the card, and I'll think about what I want to say about it. Urg, Spawn of Turg, black, black, green. So three mana total, two black, one green. He's a legendary creature, Frog Beast. His power is star, and his toughness is five. Urg, Spawn of Turg's power is equal to the number of lands in your graveyard. At the beginning of your upkeep, look at the top card of your library. You may put that card into your graveyard.

Black, green, sacrifice the land. You gain 2 life. So tell me about this Frog Beast. Who is he? Where does he come from? How this Frog Beast came about. So tell me about this frog beast. Who is he?

Where does he come from? How this frog beast came about. Back in Onslaught block, there were these creatures called anirids. I guess it was Odyssey block. So these were frog beasts. And in the novels, we used to release a novel with every magic set. In the novels, one of the characters was one of these anirans and his name was turg and he loved to eat things he was not very smart he was um ambassador laquatus's original champion so i don't know if everyone remembers ambassador

laquatus he was a merfolk who was a jerk he was the bad guy of that of the odyssey story right yeah um so and there were there were several cards representing these anurids in uh in in that uh that sort of two-year otarian uh block there so when we were making uh modern horizons one we made an android we made a new android card uh calledcavating Android. And I was also on the creative text team for that set. And so one of the creative text writers came up with an outrageous pun for the flavor text, which was very appropriate because, of course,

you were in charge of flavor text during Odyssey, right? I was. I was in charge of the flavor text for Odyssey. So there were more puns per card in Odyssey block than any other magic block that I'm aware of. None unset, yes. Well, yeah, aside from unsets. We'll leave those aside. But as far as blackboarded magic goes, more puns in flavor text and names than anywhere else. So we knew we had to have an outrageous pun on this anirid. So one of the flavor text writers wrote, Turg's spawn ruled long after he croaked.

So this was a callback to Turg from the Odyssey novels and, of course, has a pun, which would be appropriate for this Odyssey callback to turg from these from the odyssey novels and of course has a pun which would be appropriate for this odyssey callback now of course when we're when i was coming back to do dominaria united i was thinking about like what are all the different families we got the the carthalians they stretch back to before the brothers war we've got joda here he's one of urza's kids got some capuchins um and i was i was remembered this uh this flavor text about turg's spawn so i was like all right let's make a card about turg's spawn and so we have erg spawnurg, here. That's good. That's probably the deepest cut. Okay, so let's transition from legendary creatures and talking about some of the mechanics of the set.

So one of the things that Dominaria introduced to the world was sagas. We wanted to represent stories, and we used some technology of like early versions of planeswalkers and we ended up making sagas. Sagas have gone on to be very popular and many sets have had sagas in them. But we knew coming back to Dominaria,

like how do we not have sagas in a setting on Dominaria? So let's talk about how did you come up with a different take on sagas? So let's talk about how did you come up with a different take on sagas? Yeah, we did sort of the first major twist on sagas. You know, we've done multicolored sagas in a previous Magic set, but this was the first time we added a new mechanical element. So somebody on the design team came up with the idea for the read-ahead mechanic, which normally you have to start on chapter one with the saga and proceed, and it plays out the same way every time.

But with the read-ahead mechanic, you can start on any chapter. So if you want to skip straight to the end and read the last chapter on the turn the Saga comes into play, you can do that. This was a challenging mechanic to work on, because not only did you have all of the normal constraints that Saga labors under, which are, they're difficult, they're hard to design, they very satisfying once they're done but they're they require a lot of work for each card uh but on top of all the normal problems with the saga you needed to make sure that every chapter was something that you might want to do but you might not want to do except for the last one of course which should be something you always want so that was an extra challenge uh mostly for the set design team to to deal with but uh ultimately like i think they did a great job and uh you know made made these sort of cards that had a lot of

what we would the sort of effects that we put on a modal card like a charm or something uh but they're here on a saga, so you kind of get to choose which thing to do. Do you remember, I'm trying to think, we must have tried other things, although this is the part I remember, like I don't remember what the other things were, but I know we

experimented with different takes on sagas. Yeah, we did, let's see, there were a few things that we also thought about oh i remember one we discussed we discussed um chapters that go backward or forward or in a circle we were talking about locks where like a chapter won't proceed unless you've met a certain condition. We've talked about aura sagas. So they go on creatures and like the creature is telling the story.

We talked about some iconic spell sagas. There were sort of sagas that give you access to an iconic spell that relates to the story. So maybe it lets you cast a copy of that spell, sort of like Garth One-Eye or something. Yeah, those were the ideas that we played around with besides just doing sagas as they originally appeared, which would have been acceptable, I think, or the read-ahead sagas. Yeah, the one I remember is the branching path where you would come to a thing where you had to choose which way you wanted to go.

So the saga, like, chapter one would be the same, but then there's two choices for chapter two, and then two different choices for three, depending on which choice for 2 you made. Yes. Yes, that was another one. Yeah. Yeah, some of these were things we had originally talked about in original... When we originally made Saigas, we came up

with a lot of ideas, and then simplified them, and we went back and said, oh, here's some ideas we had, but they, you know, so... But Read Ahead was... I think it was made up during this design. That't an idea we had before yeah i don't i don't recall anyone discussing read ahead uh during the the original dominaria design um so that i think it was james rose that came up with the idea but i wouldn't swear swear by it. It's been a couple of years since the Vision Design team. But yeah, that was the innovation that I had the highest confidence in coming out of exploratory design.

And yes, it made it all the way through Vision Design and all the way through set design. Okay, so I want to talk about something that Vision did, but it didn't make it through set design. Because there's an interesting story of sort of what happened to it, which is historic. So historic was a mechanic we had made for original Dominaria that batched together three things.

So if you were historic, it's if you were either an artifact, or you were a legendary permanent, or you were a saga permanent or you were a saga. A legendary anything. A legendary non-permanence. A legendary thing. Right, right. And so... Right, and it seemed obvious

to bring historic back, right? It seemed like this is the mechanic that sort of mechanically ties together these three things that exemplify history, that illustrate history is happening. However, we can't just look back. We have to look forward, right?

We have to think about what's happening in the sets ahead. We have to look forward, right? We have to think about what's happening in the sets ahead. I'm going to say, spoiler warning, the Brothers War set is going to involve artifacts, lots of artifacts. I don't think that's going to be a shock to anyone. And so historic, of course, is a mechanic that rewards you for collecting things, right? It rewards you for collecting artifacts and legendaries and sagas and putting them in your deck. And those kinds of rewards are fun deck building hooks, right? They get you to put these things together and players like to be told to collect this or collect that and build a deck with it.

Players like to be told to collect this or collect that and build a deck with it. But they also are risky in standard, right? If we've got a bunch of rewards for artifacts, that kind of puts a ceiling on how strong we can make those artifacts. Because at some point, if you put them all together in your deck with your historic cards, those historic cards are going to power them up and create synergy. And ultimately, we didn't want to place any sort of artificial ceiling on how strong these artifacts could be coming up. the designers of the future set, Brothers War set, the ability to make the artifacts at the right power level without any artificial constraints imposed by these historic cards. So we cut the historic stuff out of the Dominaria set. The set still has legendaries, it still has sagas, and it still has artifacts. It just doesn't have that historic mechanic to sort of explain why they're all here. Yeah, and it's interesting to note in that one of the reasons we were excited by historic was it was going to lead into what follows.

Like, oh, this will be very synergistic with what comes after it. But the problem was it was kind of too synergistic. what comes after it uh but the problem was it was kind of too synergistic and that yeah while you want things to connect what you don't want to do is sort of trump what's coming right you don't want to like we do something here which limits what they can do on the set after us and that was its fundamental problem which was we would have to lock in our cards before they would know exactly everything they're doing and that we would make choices that would then force their hand and we didn't want to do that right ultimately from a sort of architecting standard uh standpoint it's much better to make the cards and then in a later set build add the synergy cards that kind of tie things together because

you're you're sort of uh enabling a deck using components with a known power level whereas speculating and trying to guess what the power level of these cards is going to be in the future is much more risky and could lead to unfun situations where there's just some decks that are just way stronger than the rest and dominate the the standard metagame okay so we're not too far from my death care so i want to sort of finish up is there any area that you were interested in talking about that we haven't got you yet of of dominar united oh well um let's talk about power stone Dominaria United? Oh, well, um... Let's talk about Power Stone tokens a little bit. Okay.

So there are two cards that make Power Stone tokens in Dominaria United. We've got your Mana Rig and the new Karn card. And why don't you read off what Power Stones do? Sure. Okay, so let me read Power Stones.

Okay, so Power Stones say it's an artifact with, quote, tap, add colorless. This mana can't be spent to cast a non-artifact spell. I'm just going gonna say that our team did not design the Power Stone tokens. Yeah, when the Brothers' War

comes out, I will tell that the Power Stone went through a lot of changes, and there's a story to tell there, but it is not Dominar United's story to tell. This was what we called, by the way, we called this a throw forward, which means it's nice sometimes to just tease something that gets paid off larger in a later set and magic has done

a few throw forwards in in its time yeah i i think it's fun it really tickles the audience's imagination and lets them speculate about like oh what oh, what's this going to mean? So you will see what Power Stones are all about pretty soon. And for those that don't know the Brothers War, the Power Stones are important in the story of the Brothers War. Yeah.

The Power Stones are sort of magical batteries that power the artifacts. Yes. Spoiler alert, Urza and Mishra were artificers. It always feels funny to be able to say so many things about this upcoming badge. Yeah, it's true.

When you base it on a story that came out almost 30 years ago, you can say some stuff. But yeah, one of the things we wanted was we wanted to do a throw forward. I think there were more power. I think at some point there were like five or six power stones in the set. Yeah, I think there were more initially and we pared it down to

the two cards that you see here. There are a lot of other throw forwards. Many of them are creative rather than mechanical but uh there are lots of lots of little seeds planted here that will grow into things that you'll you'll see in the upcoming sets here we tried to set things up so that there were going to be a lot of fun payoffs so pay attention to all the little details and stay tuned for more Phyrexian arc stuff.

Yeah, and one of the things to remember is these two sets, Dominaria United and Brothers War, are both set on Dominaria. They're many years apart, but we get to have some fun where things you'll see in this set might show up in the story

or in other ways in Brothers War. So there's definitely a lot of us, more so than normal, there's more sort of Easter eggs for Brothers War sitting in this set. Yeah. Like the whole reason that we added this whole new faction, the new Argive, was that they are the modern day descendants of one of the factions from the Brothers War. So anyway,

I'm at my desk here. So I... There's a lot more to talk about. Dominaria has a lot of cool things in it, but it was... It's neat looking back. Like, one of the things that's fun is Dominaria has this sense of kind of being home in a way just because magic spent so long

there in its early days. So it's always fun to go back and visit Dominaria has a sense of kind of being home in a way, just because Magic spent so long there in its early days. So it's always fun to go back and visit Dominaria. Yep, I agree. It was fun to work on it, and it's fun to watch everyone's reaction to the card previews. So I want to thank you, Ethan, for joining us. It was fun talking with you. And to everybody else, I'm now at my desk.

So we all know what that means. It means it's the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. So once again, thanks, Ethan. Thank you. And I'll see all you guys next time. Bye-bye.