Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #968: DMU Set Design with Erik Lauer & Ian Duke

Episode Date: September 16, 2022

In this podcast, I sit down with Erik Lauer and Ian Duke, the co-lead set designers of Dominaria United, to talk about the expansion's set design.

I'm not pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for other Drive to Work at Home Edition. So today, I've not one but two guests. So I've invited Eric Lauer and Ian Duke to talk about the set design of Dominaria United. Hey, guys. Hey, Mark. Thanks for having us. Okay, so why don't we start at the handoff. So basically what happened was eric was in charge for the first part of set design and ian you were in charge of the second part that's correct yeah that's right okay so eric we're going to start with you so we'll go chronologically here

okay so ethan and the vision design team make dominar united and they hand it off to you so what was the first thing you did in set design? The first thing was to try and get a sense of what is this set about and so what should the mechanics be and reading through everything Ethan worked on I concluded what this was about was really an analogy that this was to the set dominaria as invasion block was to alpha and so uh this should be advanced along those lines changed some of the mechanics, added with Ethan's Blessing, off-color kicker and domain to give it more of that vibe. And then also I decided we should go with a more classic limited structure where each color has its own identity. So there's a cycle of giant common creatures, which tell you what each color has its own identity so there's a cycle of giant common creatures which tell you what each color does and you can of course you usually play two colors and

then your off color kicker would give you reasons to play the other colors and with that the lands a cycle of common lands to both support domain and uh using extra color mostly for um off color kicker but sometimes playing really more multiple colors three color four color decks so those were the initial things that that's where we took the handoff so when you map out in like a particular draft let's say how many of each comment like how many two color how manycolor, what do you expect people to play? I can jump in on that one, if need be. Yeah, Eric sort of handed off the vision of this being sort of invasion-like and more multicolored as compared to the previous Dominaria. And so myself and my team sort of kind of thought about exactly like you said,

how we would want a typical draft to play out and sort of the distribution of different decks and how many colors they would play. And after a bunch of discussion and iteration, we sort of settled on maybe the typical table would have like two to three pure two-color drafters and then probably the majority, like three or four of the drafters would be like two colors

with a splash or kind of bordering on having a third color. And then the remaining one or two drafters would be like four color plus or like the true five color decks. Okay, so Eric, so it's kind of funny. So you added in Domain, you added in Kicker. Both of which showed up in the original Invasion, right?

That's right. Although there were evolutions. So it was, okay, if we're going to do off color kicker again what would be different about it this time and to me too many of the uh kicker off color kickers did similar things and so i worked on okay let's not do it that way let's say green makes your creatures bigger so if you're not a green card and you want plus one plus one counters, you need to have a green kicker. Maybe a green kicker card, a green card for white or something. But assuming you're not green, the color you go to for plus one plus one counters is green.

The color you go to to draw a card is blue. And kind of divvy that up almost like an off color kicker has its own color pie. And the other part was, okay, we we're gonna make domain a little different so instead of being domain you play a rampant growth type effect and you just have one basic and you just always get that let's make it more oh you look at the top few and you find another land and you build up as you go but you'll go down different game paths and different games because it's not as predictable and reliable as uh just just fetch any basic you want out of your deck so those were the ways we tried to take it like invasion but take it like okay but we have 20 years more game development experience how should we do this a little differently and then

tried to pass off my ideas to ian it's like I don't know if that idea works for a domain, but that's, I got Ian to buy into it and try and develop that, right? It's a new challenge. So you brought up something. I just want to make sure that so the audience becomes aware. You said that each color had its own theme. Can we walk through the five themes? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So white has a, have a lot of creatures and so it has the argivian phalanx that cost one less for each creature you control and blue has an instance and sorcery theme and so it has the talarian terror which similarly has a cost reduction. Black has a graveyard theme. And so it's big common creature costs one less for each creature in your graveyard.

Red rewards you for having a high power creature. And green has domain as its theme. So what is the Yavimaya Sojourner? I think it is. Costs less based on your domain. And so you could just get this big comment. You don't have to read an article. You could just open the set, see this big comment, and just build an intuitive deck.

And it will kind of give you some breadcrumbs and tell you how this color works. this color works. Okay, so one of the things that like obviously we're always thinking about is how to build the limited environment and then also how to build the constructed environment that comes out of the similar themes. So let's, I want to finish walking through the mechanics in the set. So obviously the domains in the set, kickers in the set, what else? What other themes are in the set mechanically? The most interesting part was I was experimenting with different things and I told Ian

I haven't found the right one yet and I gave him some of the things I tried, but we need to figure out a mechanic from Alpha, I think, that we have figured out how to make work now. Interestingly, Ian picked what is that called we're abandoning yeah let's tell the story of of uh it's called enlist i think yeah enlist is the name of final

mechanic so so right as eric said when he handed the set off to me he said you know i still feel like we're kind of missing a little something here you know we're missing either a returning mechanic or a riff on a previous mechanic. So he kind of handed off a list of a bunch of mechanics that we had tried in the early days of Magic back in Invasion and beforehand. Things like the free spell mechanic from the Urza Saga block where you get to untapped lands after you cast the spell. Things along those lines that were interesting, and they appeared in early Magic, and people might remember them and have some nostalgia for them, but they weren't quite executed on perfectly back in those days, and so that we could look for one of those mechanics and try to redo an updated version of it.

So as I was looking through the list that Eric handed off to me and looking through some other ideas that I had, I came to banding as a mechanic that stood out to me as something flavorful, and it made sense to try in early Magic, but I always felt the execution wasn't really there. So I went down the road of exploring what would be a more modern variant of banding that still conveys the flavor of creatures teaming up together, in this case to fight the Phyrexian, so it's very flavorful for the set itself, but executed on in sort of a more clean and updated mechanical way. So we tried a bunch of different things along the way for Enlist and eventually kind of honed in on the final version here. Notably, one of the things that we learned as we were playing is that an earlier version of Enlist, the creatures could tap to assist another creature, even if they had summoning sickness, but we felt that that leaned very aggressive and very snowball-y, so that was one of the early changes that we made for Enlist,

was to make it so that you can only Enlist with a creature that is not Summoning Sick. Real quickly, just for the audience, and then let's read what Enlist does, just in case they don't know. So it says, as this creature attacks, you may tap a non-attacking creature you control without Summoning Sickness. When you do, add its power to this creature until end of turn.

And banding, I mean, we, banding is the kind of thing I know we've played around with. Soulbond, which was in Avacyn Restored, was another pseudo-attempt, I guess, to make a banding-like thing. Right. That's

right. And it's a very natural place to go with design, you know, to represent creatures teaming up. That's something that, you know, happens in all sorts of, you know, role playing games and fantasy IPs and things like that. So it definitely makes sense to do something in that space. But the original banding, I won't even attempt to describe all the rules for the original banding. You all can go look it up if you want to. But it had a lot of rules, intricacies and problems with it that we sought to clean up with Enlist. Yeah, I did a whole podcast on banding, and

one of my running jokes is, I keep telling players that most players don't understand it, and then on social media, they're like, no, I understand it, and they try to explain it to me, and they get it wrong, so it's one of those mechanics that has a lot of complexity to it, and weird ways to, like, attacking and blocking

or different stuff like that. Okay, so another theme of the set was legendary creatures. So one of the things that Dominaria had done is every pack had a legendary creature, and I believe we did that here, right? Yes, that's correct. Every booster of Dominaria has a legendary creature slot for it. So talk a little bit about what does it mean

to have enough volume in your set that you have enough to have one slot in every pack be a legendary creature? Well, it definitely means we need more legends in the set than other sets have. So for example, we have a double cycle, so 20 total uncommon legends for each of the two color pairs,

which definitely adds a lot of legends showing up in the booster packs. And then we have a cycle of 10 rares, I believe, and a smattering of other non-cycle legends throughout the set. So I think there's, I would have to count, but I think there's something like 40 total legends in the set. Now, does that add extra challenges? does having extra legendary creatures cause problems it definitely does um you know i guess just as a starting point you know the legend rule is a challenge in and of itself especially for the lower red rarity legends um it's definitely possible you know for example when you're drafting the set to have multiple copies of your color pairs uncommon legend um in your deck you know which then means you might draw them both in your hand.

In fact, if I recall correctly, I believe a very early version of the set even had common legends. Is that right, Eric? Can you tell us more about that? Yeah, there were common legends, and the experiment was, what would common legends look like?

And we used a mechanic from Planar Chaos, which, of course, is a dominaria based set future future site is where it came from by the way yeah but go ahead you could discard another copy for an effect the problem was the effects that people wanted as a reward to discard your legend didn't make for good gameplay being that this is a common and you're getting this huge reward for just drawing two copies of a comment so uh it didn't it was there were really interesting experiments we were trying actually even more legends which of course i think it's important to try overshooting and test and be like oh what what does go wrong it was like well things

definitely go wrong and i think we arrived at the right spot, but, but it definitely, we, we had a journey of trying even more. Yeah. The mechanic by the way was called Granger. In future site on the future shifted sheet, there were a cycle of five legend creatures that all had that ability. And I think the idea of having commons with Granger was just like,

oh, is there a way to, yeah, is there a way to have common legends? But obviously at common, you show up and you'd have a lot of them and that's why we tried the grandeur experiment all right and so we eventually decided that common red legends weren't right but we knew we still wanted to have a lot a lot of legends in the set and one of the things that we sort of played around with and dialed up and down throughout the process to experiment with

was how much legendary matters we wanted to have in the set um i believe as of eric's handoff we had a cycle of legends at rare or maybe combination of rare and mythic that all had sort of upgrades to their abilities um in the context of having other legends so it might you know give all of your creatures a bonus but then it also gives all of your other legendary creatures an additional bonus on top of that. And they all work in various different ways, but they all shared that similarity of they cared about having other legends. And what we found over time is that having too much legendary matters made it more that you just cared about having legends, but not what they did. And it also sort of constrained what we could do with the different legends because we needed them to work together in the same deck. So we experimented a bit and tried the other direction of instead of having a lot of stuff that just cares about having a legend,

instead we made the legends independently kind of going in different directions and doing their own cool things. And once we made that change, we found that that route was much more promising in that we valued having a variety of different legends each doing their own cool things rather than a bunch of legends that are all trying to go in the same deck with each other and also just uh for commander because obviously legendary creatures matter a lot for commander having them go in different directions kind of is better for commander yeah absolutely it was an experiment of what if you had a tribe of legends? Although there also was, I was skeptical it was right. So the backup tribe was defenders. Having defenders as a tribe. Okay, so is there any defender theme or did that not end up in the set? Okay, so is there any Defender theme, or did that not end up in the set?

There is a Defender theme, yeah. It's centered in the Esper colors, so white, blue, and black, and it's definitely something that you can pursue in Unlimited and draft around it. Yeah, as Eric said, that was sort of like a backup, sort of sideways theme in the set as the time of the handoff, and I decided to run with it. I grew up playing Magic in the early days, and one of the things that i remember fondly from early magic was walls um there were all these cards that you know people used to love collect walls and make walls decks and play with cards like rolling stones that

let your walls attack and things like that so i thought that would be another neat thing to kind of pay homage to from early magic history so we took that defender theme and kind of ran with it and made it um it's i wouldn't call it its own like deck that you can always build in limited but it's definitely like a sub sub theme that runs throughout the set and sometimes you know your deck alongside doing other things will also have a little defender package in it um and then there's defenders that pay you off for having multiple other defenders like for example the core coral colony is one in a blue for a one four defender you can pay one in a blue and tap it to mill your opponent for X cards,

where X is the number of creatures you control with Defender. So if you collect enough Defenders, that can be its own path to victory in and of itself. Yeah, one of the things you talk about that's really interesting to me is when we made Dominaria, one of the things we were trying to do is to give an identity to Dominaria, the world, in a way that matched how the other worlds in Magic worked. Dominaria had the problem of there was just too much in Dominaria to have a clean identity.

And so the identity we ended up going with is this sort of historical aspect that it's the plane of history. So it's fun that every time we visit it, it's like we go back into a different part of Magic history and pull stuff from it. One of the things that we wanted to bring back that Ethan had in was sagas, but he had a variant with read ahead where you can skip your early chapters. And so his view was a good saga that read ahead is one where you could imagine starting on any of the three chapters. And I decided it should be.

The game is more fun because you can start on any of the three chapters, usually because it's an interesting choice. But not every card might provide an interesting choice. But it's more fun because you can do them. Make sure the designs accomplish that uh and i think is this right ethan they all are read ahead sagas that's right yeah all the sagas in the set are read ahead um and these were i can say one of the more challenging aspects of working on the latter half of set design i agree completely with all the things that eric said um some of our goals for the read ahead sagas are that you shouldn't

put one in your deck planning to always start on the same chapter. In other words, you shouldn't build around always having the same plan game to game, and then dynamically depending on the board state in different games that you would make different choices and kind of adapt to what's happening there. It turns out these are difficult to design.

Sagas in general are difficult to design, but layering on top of it, hey, it has to make sense starting on any of the different chapters and it has to be relatively balanced enough. So maybe you won't start on each of them an equal amount of the time, but that there are enough different times when you would start on, say, the second or the third chapter instead of the first chapter that it makes for interesting cards. So I believe at the time of handoff, we actually had more sagas in the set.

We might have had 15 or maybe even a few more than that and we found that over time they were difficult enough to work on that we would rather concentrate them down i think we ended up with 10 when all was said and done um in order to make sure that we could have just the very best designs that met all those criteria yeah there's two there's two cycles one uncommon one rare one uncommon one rare. One uncommon, one rare. And Ian kept what I thought was the funniest of all the stories, where Yoshen declares war, where it said in the book that he used ornithopters to bomb the enemies. And, of course, ornithopters is zero to flyer, so it doesn't really make a lot of sense.

But I thought that was a delightful design and a little bit of a callback for people who remember the early lore of just kind of how the text and the actual creature Ornithopter juxtaposed in a weird way. So that to me was the funniest one to keep. And of course, there's the world tree, which is mythic rare. But yeah, I thought this was a very challenging part. And it's something to think about. Don't make too many challenging things, because really you need to be spending your effort on how it makes a tapestry and everything comes together and not just have a bunch of

individual hard challenges. But I thought this one was worth it. Yeah. So the read ahead, this came from Vision. Can we pick one of them? I kind of want to walk through talking about the decisions you had to make in making it. Is there a good saga to talk about, like, just examine sort of the making of it?

Maybe the love song. Is that a good one, Ethan? Ian, rather? Sorry, which one did you say, Eric? He said love song of night and day. Is that a good one ethan uh ian rather sorry which one did you say eric he said love song of night and day is that a good one oh sure yeah the love song of night and day yeah i love this one let me read it let me read it and then i'll you explain how it got put together so love song night and day two in a white it's a enchantment saga it's got read ahead choose a chapter and start with that many lower counters add one after your draw step skip chapters don't trigger sacrifice after three.

Chapter one is you and target opponent each draw two cards. Chapter two is create a 1-1 white bird creature token with flying. Chapter three is put a plus one plus one counter on each of up to two target creatures. I also want to mention real quickly for the audience that this is referencing a poem that

was from Mirage that was in the flavor text that had been written by one of the editors and that's what this is referencing. It's a was from Mirage that was in the flavor text that had been written by one of the editors. And that's what this is referencing. It's a thing from Mirage. Okay, go ahead, Ian. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, definitely. And sort of just building on that flavor. First of all, I'd highly encourage anybody in the audience to go out and look up those flavor texts. They're some of the best flavor texts from early magic. Absolutely. And I love all the references to the love song of night and day throughout the Mirage block and sort of the poetry there is kind of about like people kind of exploring and learning about life and finding peace and happiness together and

things like that so we wanted to kind of play on that general theme um of of sort of like you know pairs of two creatures or like having lots of twos um throughout the the abilities here so the first ability is you and target opponent each draw two cards. So you're kind of sharing a little bit of the wealth with your opponent and kind of making friends with them, or maybe in multiplayer you're making an ally. The second chapter is to create a 1-1 bird token with flying. So you can kind of imagine like a dove as a symbol of peace

or maybe something that you would see at a wedding or something along those lines. And the third chapter is putting a plus or minus one counter on each of up to two target creatures. So representing that we are getting stronger together. So we felt that we could kind of convey that sort of general sense of flavor with the card. And that also that the abilities mechanically are very interesting. So the first chapter, for example, you and target opponent each draw two cards. This is something that you may want to do, but not always.

You know, for example, if it's late in the game and you still have some cards left in your hand but your opponent doesn't you may want to keep your opponent's hand empty and not give them extra cards because you still have things that you have to do with your mana because you have cards in your hand so you might want to skip over that one the second chapter is creating a creature this one you might want to start with on this in some cases it's skipping over the first ones that you get your creature on the battlefield earlier and you can start attacking your opponent or finally the third chapters you know you're getting even more power onto the battlefield right away by putting a plus one plus one counter on each of up to two target creatures so if you already have a

built out board with multiple creatures and you want to just attack your opponent right away or get that crucial extra power or toughness to get over a blocker that you might skip all the way to the third chapter to get that biggest payoff right away. Yeah, they turned out really cool. Sagas, so Dominaria was the first time we did sagas. And I don't think we knew when we did them there kind of how popular they would end up being. They've become deciduous

and a lot of sets that have sagas in them. So it's fun to find ways to evolve them because they are, you're right, they're a tricky thing to make. Okay, I want to move on to a different cycle that I know got a lot of attention. So there is a rare lord cycle. So Ian, I think you added this? Yep, this was something we added later on in set design.

And I added it because I realized that we had a lot of cool things going on in the set. We had these legends, we had multicolor, kicker, domain, lots of stuff going on. But I wanted to add something that was a little bit more for the player that maybe isn't as interested in all this complex stuff and maybe just really likes one color instead of going multicolor. And I thought, what better way to do that than to have these creature-type lords that are very focused on creature types that often are associated with a single color.

So, for example, in red we have a goblin lord that gives bonuses to your other goblins and cares about having lots of goblins. So if you're the player who really likes goblins or you just really like mono-red, that there's something in the set for you um these are also callbacks toward early magic which had you know creatures like uh goblin king and lord of atlantis in in alpha and other early magic sets had these creature type lords that were very very popular back in the day so once again another thing that we sort of picked up from ancient magic history

and kind of brought back and modernized so how did you pick the ones you i mean i'm sort of curious like a lot i've got a lot of questions for like why exactly these five so yeah so so soldiers make a lot of sense there's something that we can do in every set and so that we knew um in an up good both in previous sets and new sets coming forward that we'd be able to add more soldiers to the environment so that's why we picked that one it's also very flavorful in terms of the the lore of the dominarians fighting against the phyrexians right there's a war going on so soldiers is kind of a natural thing to go to there um merfolk was just sort of a call back to classic dominaria and lord of atlantis same thing with goblins there and calling back to goblin king so those felt like natural fits uh and then in green elves is i i i would wager to say by far the most popular green creature type if you look all throughout magic's history so we knew we wanted to deliver on that one

and then the black one was actually probably the most surprising to people um from what i saw people's reactions here and i definitely understand that i think most people seeing like for example the merfolk the goblins and the elves would have expected black to be zombies and in fact that's one of the things that we initially considered as a creature type there but we got feedback from our play design team that hey we just had a large focus on zombies back with midnight hunt and crimson vow and now this is the next year of standard and hey we're a little bit worried like if we miss high on the zombies and they're a really popular thing in the previous year of Standard, we wouldn't want to rotate into Dominaria and then give them even more power

by having a zombie lord there. So we wanted to kind of hedge our bets a little bit and go for a different creature type, and Clerics is one that stood out to me. That was one that was supported in Onslaught Block way back when, and we thought we could kind of give them more support there, and that Clerics, again, like soldiers, are something that we can do in lots of different magic sets, so we knew that there would be backward support and more coming forward support

as we go. I like to see us doing sort of not always the obvious ones from time to time, just to, you know... It's like a little bit of meeting expectations, and then a little bit of like, oh, I didn't expect this, this is surprising. I think a good mix of that is appropriate.

Anyway, we don't have too much time left. Is there any aspect of the set we haven't talked about yet that you'd like to talk about? Anything that you guys added in that you're like, oh, this was a cool aspect of the set? Well, there's definitely the cycle of common dual lands that have multiple basic land types. So, for example, the white-blue one enters the battlefield tapped, can tap for a white or a blue, and counts as both a plains and island. And so these are kind of sort of the glue that holds the format together, both in terms of supporting domain, because they have the basic land types, but also being able to splash some of your off-color kicker spells.

And that was definitely a goal for us, is that we wanted to make sure, since we knew we had off-color kicker spells at common, and those kind of behave like gold cards in a way we didn't want them just endlessly floating around the draft table if nobody was in exactly that pair of two colors so for most of the kicker spells we tried to make them something where you're mostly happy with the base effect even if you can't kick it all of the time but that um you would you know play it with uh maybe splash a little bit of an extra color even if it's not one of your main colors so you could sometimes kick the spell in the late game so that's kind of how we tried to position and balance those and having these 10 dual lands at common um cycling around the table

and available for people to pick up makes it so it's much easier to do domain or to splash a third color or splash your kicker spells if you need to. Yeah, it's funny. These cards, this cycle has been, we've been talking about this cycle for so long. I'm happy to see it finally find a home. Another thing was, so there's the Ravenman, who's a legend. I think he's Liliana's mentor. Is that right?

Not mentor. Tormentor probably is a better term. He's going to have a Liliana in the set to go with him and I wasn't sure Liliana of the Veil would make it through Andrew Brown

suggested he thought it was worth trying so I was pretty excited to see that Liliana of the Veil made it all the way through development because she's a powerful magic card. Yeah, we actually tried in the past to have her

she was in a previous standard set. I forget which one, but we tried it once before and it didn't happen. So it's nice to see it happen this time. So anything else in the set? Any other things as we wind up here? Any other fond memories of things in the set? Mostly just that it was a lot of fun to work on.

I mean, as somebody who grew up playing early Magic, it was just great seeing all of these little references and Easter eggs that Ethan's team and Eric's team had already put into the set even before I got my hands on the file and then being able to add even more of my own you know like the the creature type lord cycle that we talked about and just kind of getting to play around with all of the different domain and kicker designs and make references back to old cards it felt very nostalgic for me both to work on and then seeing it you know come to light in the real world also uh getting getting pains of nostalgia as uh as i see the preview season roll out yeah you're not great i'm from the example set that i have nostalgia from was rock hydra

so i put in uh what became shivan devastator uh which is xr It's flying haste, has 0-0 with X plus 1 plus 1 counters. But I think the surprise to me is normally you expect development to change something. And, of course, things will change along the way. I believe just other than the name, everything is the same as it was. It's even a Dragon Hydra, isn't it? Right. Shivan Devastator is the official name in was. It's even a Dragon Hydra, isn't it? Right, so Shivan Devastator is the official name in the set.

Yeah, so this is X in a red for a 0-0 Flying Haste that enters with X plus or plus 1 counters on it. Very simple, straightforward design. And as Eric said, it actually turned out the same way it was handed off by his team to me. However, that isn't to say we didn't change it.

Funny story about this card is we actually changed it many, many times. The changes that we made were pretty much trying it with trample, then without trample, then with trample again, and then ultimately deciding that, nope, the trample was too much. We're going to take it back off again, and it ended up the same. So funny story of a card that went through a bunch of changes throughout the process, and we tested a lot, but it actually ended uh the very same at the end of the day and and the one thing we the other thing that we did change about it is uh toward the end of the process as we were um sort of commissioning

our art and planning around the art somebody suggested hey it wouldn't it be cool if this was a hydra in addition to a dragon so the original version was only a dragon but we actually added the hydra later in the process as a reference to the X mana and starting with X counters, which, of course, many Hydras do throughout Magic's history. Yeah, here's another story you guys might not know about this card. We had big discussions in the Council of Colors because red really isn't the pay X, get X plus one plus one counters. But what we decided was it was just such a lovely card and, you know, it was not, it was more of a bend in red. It wasn't a break or anything. And so we thought the card was so lovely.

We said, okay, we shouldn't be doing this tons and tons in red. But, you know, it made sense for this card. Wow, I had no idea. It is a very cute card. So I know a lot of times when we talk about cards, like just the card as a package is something we always want to consider because we want to make really fun and cool cards for the audience.

Oh, and Mark, I did think of one more cycle that I forgot to talk about here, which is the cycle of defilers. So these are the Phyrexianized denizens of Dominaria here. So the one I have pulled up here is called Defiler of Instinct. This is the red one.

It's two colorless and two red for a 4-4 first strike. And it says an additional cost to cast red permanent spells you may pay two life instead of paying one of the red mana in their cost and whenever you cast a red permanent spell it deals one damage to any target so these came out of wanting to have some amount of phyrexian representation in the set we were kind of calling it like ballpark we wanted the set to be about feeling about like 80 to 85 percent dominarian and 15 to 20% Phyrexian, you know, to kind of represent that there's a threat that's there. We're more about Dominaria, but there is kind of this looming threat here.

And so I developed this sort of high profile cycle to kind of represent some of the more terrifying, terrorizing Phyrexian creatures. And in order to kind of tie them in flavorfully with Phyrexia, I went to the Phyrexian creatures. And in order to kind of tie them in flavorfully with Phyrexia, I went to the Phyrexian mana mechanic, which allows you to pay two life instead of paying a mana and a cost that was back from the new Phyrexia set. So these are a callback to that mechanic to sort of help them feel more Phyrexian and kind of represent that influence in the set. Yeah, the other thing which, I mean, we have to wrap up here, but the final piece we can talk about real quickly is this is the beginning sort of a story like the the next year the the freck scenes are going to feature pretty prominently in a pretty large story uh so you guys were definitely sort

of setting up a lot of what was going on so there are there are probably some reasons for some things in the set that we shouldn't you know spoil yet but we were definitely thinking about this the ongoing story and the future sets and kind of setting up for them as we went. So if you pay close attention to the stuff in Dominaria, you'll probably see maybe some hints that things that are to come, or when those new things come out,

you'll be like, ah, I get it. I see why they did this. So I want to thank you guys for joining me today. It's a lot of fun talking about set design. So thank you guys for being here. Thank you, Mark. Thanks for having us. But guys, I can see my desk, so we all know what that means. It means this

is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. Again, thanks for joining me, guys. Bye, Mark. And I'll see all you guys next time. Bye-bye.