Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #980: Set Design

Episode Date: October 28, 2022

Unfinity is the first time I ran a Set Design team. This podcast talks about what I learned about set design from the experience.

I'm pulling up in the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so I did a series talking about Infinity. And at the very tail end of it, I came up with an idea for an episode. Literally, I came up with it as I was recording the episode. So you get to hear me do the episode that I got inspired while doing that episode. Anyway, so I want to talk about set design. Today's topic is set design. So the thing that's unique about Infinity for me is I do exploratory design and vision design all the time.

In fact, I'm on, at least for Premiere sets, every single exploratory design team and every single vision design team. So, but I haven't really, in fact, I've never been on a set design team. I did do a lot of development back in the day, so I have been on a lot of products toward the end. But since we've created the, you know, vision design, set design, play design model, I've not done any later design, just because I'm so busy, because there's lots and lots of sets to make. So for those that don't know, let me quickly sort of give my little

house metaphor that I give all the time, but you might not have heard it. So we're building a house, making a set is like building a house, that's my metaphor. Exploratory design is all about sort of scouting out locations and looking at the type of houses that exist. Just doing research on what might be possible. Vision design is the making of the blueprints. It's the architecture. It's deciding what kind of house are we going to build and then figuring out all the elements of how it's structured, what mechanics we might use, what themes we might use.

It's making the blueprints of the set. Set design is actually building the house. It's actually making it. And then play design, I always talk about about as being like sort of interior decorating. It's like coming in and making sure that everything is optimized and cool and putting all the finishing touches on it so it's the best that it can be. So I use that metaphor all the time. But one of the things that's very different between sort of knowing the concept of somebody has to build the house and building the house is a very different animal. So normally, for example, when I hand off

a file in vision design, what I'm saying is, look, we've built a structure. Here's the mechanics. Here's the themes. Here's how we would do it. Here's how I would build it if I were you. But we didn't actually build it. You know, I mean, we did some proof of concept. We made cards. But everything we're doing is kind of proof of concept. We didn't actually get to the point. Like, there's a lot of things that you have to care about when making a set that in vision, you're not there yet.

Like, vision's all about big picture stuff. So we're trying to make the big picture work. We're trying to get all the cohesive glue into place. We're making the toolbox of tools to build the house with, right? But set design is actually, you know, literally, you know, building it. And so what happens is, as you go to build it, there are a lot of things that you might not realize. So today, I want to talk about sort of some of those things that, as I was responsible for actually doing the set design, what were the challenges? Because it really gave me a great respect for set designers.

It's not what I normally do. So it was really interesting to be a set designer and go through that process. So today is about that process. Okay, so set design begins. Vision design, in this case, is me. Normally vision design and set design are not the same person. Vision design hands off a product to set design. So the first thing you want to do, and with Infinity, we did change the team between vision design and set design.

I think the only overlap at the time we changed over was myself and Chris Mooney. Chris was my right-hand person. And so Chris was there the whole time. I was obviously there Chris Mooney. Chris was my right-hand person. And so Chris was there the whole time. I was obviously there the whole time. But other than that, we had a fresh new team. Most importantly is we changed our play designers. When I had gotten permission from Aaron to lead set design, his one caveat is, like, listen to the play designer

because not my area of expertise I'm very very good at big picture stuff I'm very good at mechanic making I'm pretty good at mechanic tweaking and stuff but balancing all that stuff power levels not my forte I'm not I would say this it's not that I have no knowledge of or understanding it

I've worked on magic a long time but it is not my area of expertise at all and unsets tend to mess in virgin territory of things we haven't done, meaning they're even harder to cost than normal things. I had Donald Smith Jr. as my play design lead in vision design, and I listened very carefully to him. And then for set design, we changed over to JC. Both JC Tao.

JC and Donald both came from the pro tour. They were both pro players that we hired because they were very good at sort of crunching the data, understanding what made magic tick and what were the good things and how to make the good decks and stuff like that. And so, it was very, part of set design was I wanted to build the set in a way

that really reinforced what I was trying to do. But also, I wanted it to play well. I wanted it to play well in limited. I wanted it to play well in constructed. I just wanted it to be something that... One of the things in general about a set is you have to understand how is it going to be used. Okay, well, in Onset... Now, given when we first started set design, Eternal wasn't a thing yet.

We didn't make that decision until pretty late in the process. So when I first came in, I was like, okay, we want to make sure Limited's really fun. And we want to focus more on Draft, the same thing we did on Stable. On the kind of mechanics we do, it works better in Draft than it does in Sealed. It works in Sealed, but it's more concentrated and it's optimized to be playing in Draft. That's how we encourage people at the release event to draft it. So I had to make sure that the draft environment was sound.

I wanted to make sure that there were cards for Commander, there were cards for Cube, and there were just cards for general casual play of people that would have fun doing sort of general four-of casual play. So all those things, we want to keep those in mind.

And a lot of sort of building a set when you're actually building it is trying to make sure that you have all the component pieces that you need. You know, it's one thing when you're sort of doing big picture. That's more like, OK, I want to make sure the general concepts are there. But when you're building the set, it's very nitty gritty. It's like I have to have certain types of effects at certain rarities I have to have a certain as fan it's not

it's taking it from the theoretical into the practical that when you start on set design you're making the file that you want to be the actual file now vision design will make things there's plenty of cards that we made in vision design, some even in exploratory design,

that made it all the way through the process. But everything has to get vetted. And one of the things that, as the set designer, I always needed to do was, and then Chris was a great help with this, is always look at what we're doing, look at what we're adding, look at what is structured.

Now, Chris, as a secondhand person, was in charge of the file, meaning Chris put all the stuff in into the set, into the actual database. And they were a good means of recognizing when something might be off. And one of the things that I I did a lot more of as set designer is go through the file and constantly look at the file and think about our everything are everything pushing the way we want to be another part of set design is under sort of figuring out our archetypes that wasn't really figured out in vision design I mean we talked I

mean some of the elements were there in vision, but the real, like, what exactly are the colors that are going to be more sticker leaning? What is more traction leaning? You know, I definitely wanted to make sure that every color had access to the toon main mechanics, but I also wanted to have definition where if I'm drafting white-blue, I'm just building a different deck than if I'm drafting white, green. You know, that you want to make sure that one of the keys to set design in general is you want, like, there's a lot of internal things you want to do to make, like, a draft work. You want to make sure, for example, that any one card is something that majority players, not majority, but multiple different players want.

That if a card is only good for one archetype and nobody else wants it, then that archetype gets it late and they always get it. And it just makes repetition of play. Another thing is that, like once again, you'll probably get sick of me saying this, but it was a big part of all the design process from beginning to end, was really making sure that the variance

was high. That we, you know, one of the things I want when you play in an un-game, whether it's constructed, limited, is that each game you play with the exact same deck plays a lot more differently

on average than most decks play when you play them multiple times. And the mechanics were definitely leaning toward this. You could see in that

both the way we did stickers and the way we did attractions lean into making something that's more random and more like differs from game to game than trying to be making sure the exact same thing happens every time. Because that's just not the goal.

Like I said, this is on the spectrum from casual to competitive, this is as far as it gets on the casual side. There's no product we make more casual than this product. This product is trying to just say, hey, you know, if I'm willing to have fun, what all is available to me? What tools can I do? So that's the first part. We had to start building the actual file. We have to actually, and part of building the file is making sure that all the component pieces are there,

making sure your curve is correct with your creatures, that your as-fan is correct for all your different elements. There's a lot of number crunching that goes into it. Another factor that goes into it is when I work on vision, I do interact with a creative team, but that's more to sort of set up world building, right? I'm trying to make sure that the set I'm making and the world they're building are cohesive and feel connected.

That when you play the set that the design is making, that it feels like the world that creative is building. And there's a lot of back and forth, and Doug Byer and I spend a lot of time, because Doug's in charge of the creative element, I'm in charge of the design, the vision design element, so we spend a lot of time going back and forth making sure that we're having the right balance of what we want.

But when you get to set design, first thing that happens is, right at the beginning of set design, after vision design finishes, in fact right after vision design finishes, you have what you call the world push. And what that is, is for three weeks, you have artists come in and the creative team sort of starts to flesh out the world to figure out what the world is. We wait till after vision is done. So we have a general sense of what the set wants

to be, but then we can figure out the look and feel of it. And so the set design lead needs to be at some of the meetings and check in. And, you know, there are updates every day where you go and look and see what the, like the artist will draw stuff. And we have a giant wall where we put all the stuff up. And you want to sort of say, oh, that is cool. Or, you know, this part of the set, like this is an important part of the set. We want to reflect this. I don't see that reflected yet.

Or, ooh, that's really cool. Maybe we could change the set to reflect this. I don't see that reflected yet. Or, ooh, that's really cool. Maybe we could change the set to incorporate that. And there were things during the world push like the Jace fortune-telling machine or the giant triangle-playing robot. There's infinite things that happen that really influenced us and pushed us certain directions. I mean, some of the stuff we had figured out, like, we sort of committed to robots, clowns being robots early on before the world push. Like, there's things we sort of agreed to, but then you sort of see it come to fruition and see what it is. And then one of the cool things about the world push is that's going to shape a little

bit. As you see how the world is being built, as you see how the visuals are coming together, that influences what you want to do. And part of set design is understanding how the world is shaping as it gets more and more real. A lot of vision design is conceptual. Like, no artist has put pen to paper yet. Part of set design is there's pen being put to paper. Things are happening. Things are shaping.

The world is being built and it's coming into focus. And you, as a person building it, have to make sure the set you're building is matching that and is becoming what the two things are merging into one singular thing. Another thing that happens in set design is we have to commission art. Now, it used to be a while ago that art got done really quickly after you started development, back when it was design development. And that's because development happened later in the process. One of the reasons we sort of shifted to the new system was we wanted to give the set designer more time before they had to start committing to art. But one of the things that happens, and this is a big part of set design, is there comes a point where your art director comes to you and says,

OK, I need 80 cards for wave one. It says, okay, I need 80 cards for wave one. And what that means is I have to commit to visuals, to art descriptions, to 80 of the cards. So part of that is picking things like, for example, we knew we wanted the lands to be Outer Space basic lands. Okay, hey, go have fun. Go do those. We, you know, there might be certain characters that we knew we wanted in the set. We knew Myra was going to be in the set. We knew, you know,. We knew Myra was going to be in the set. We knew Captain Erection Nebula was going to be in the set. We knew Devil King Neville was going to be in the set.

There were some characters we had sketched out early on that we knew wanted to be there. And sometimes, like the attractions, for example, we kind of knew the trope space we were playing in. Now, one of the things about attractions is, and attractions actually weren't in Wave 1, and the reason they weren't in Wave 1 was, another issue we had to do, there needed to be frames.

So one of the things you have to do in set design is not just worry about art, but also what are other resources your set needs. In the case of Infinity, we needed a whole new frame. Attractions were a brand new thing. I mean, given they were artifacts, although we didn't know that at the time we started making them, but it still needed a brand new frame.

It needed to look different. It didn't look like a normal magic art. It didn't have a mana cost. And it had a different back. We had to do that. On top of that, we were doing stickers. And so we had to figure out a lot of the logistics of stickers. Okay, how do we do art for

stickers? What does that mean? You know, how do we credit artists for stickers? Like, there's a lot of issues that come up. And you, as part of the set design, have to be there to make sure that as decisions get made, that, you know, they reflect the needs of the mechanics of the set. Okay, we're going to make stickers. And I'm like, well, you know, for example, one of the things that's really important to me was I wanted high diversity. Variance is important. So I wanted all the stickers to be different. I wanted no repeat stickers.

Like, early on, Dawn was like, well, that's a lot of art. You know, maybe we'll double up. Maybe we'll do a piece and it'll show up on two different cards. And I had to say, no, no, no, it's really important to me that things are unique. And I wanted, like, all the text, no, it's really important to me that things are unique. And I wanted, like, all the text was going to be unique other than power toughness couldn't be unique

because it's just not 96 power toughness combinations. But, you know, I wanted to make sure that there was enough unique things there that we could do that. And if the text was going to be unique, I wanted the art to be unique. And also, like, we had to start figuring out, like, okay, well, how does art affect mechanics? Hats matter.

How many hat stickers are there supposed to be? And we had to figure out those numbers. You know, we had to figure out sort of like what exactly was on the sticker. Um, and a lot of that was like, it's, Vision said we want stickers and Vision even said, these are the kinds of stickers. But set design has to figure out how many stickers, how many name stickers, how many art stickers, how many power toughness stickers, how many ability stickers, how many will be. And we then had to figure out that dynamic of how to make that work.

Plus, you know, there was a lot of work of like we had to make names. And, you know, we could work with a creative team as far as the novelty and flavor of the names. But there was a lot of mechanical things. Oh, we have to care about unique vowel because of fill in the blank cards. We have to care about O's and U's and like, we, there's a lot of, like I had to write every single criteria that any card cared about in a name and then made sure that our stickers reflected those needs. Likewise with art where what are the things we visually care about? And where we could, on cards that mattered, some cards, like, not every card that cared

about art could care about the stickers. Like, for example, Ignacio cares about casting and it's tricky to cast something. I mean, you cast out your graveyard, but it's tricky to do that. But anyway, we had to sort of look at all. So, and that's, okay, that's the stickers, that's the frames. We had a brand new symbol. We had a ticket symbol.

So we had to make an icon for that. And unsets sort of have some demands and some needs that normal sets don't have. For example, we had a double-faced token. Our contortionist was a two-sided token. We don't often do two-sided. I mean, we have done them in certain products, but we don't do them often. And it was a weird token. You had to fold it, and so it had to be foldable, and it worked as you folded it. And we had to explain that to somebody. I had to explain that to somebody. I had to mock it up on paper and demonstrate it so people understood it.

And then there were constant challenges. A form of the approach of the second son didn't fit. How do we make it fit? Do we change the frame? In that particular case, I got the agreement that one card could have tiny font on it. And we felt like that was the funniest place to do it, because we really wanted that name. And so, like, okay, well, in this card, it's kind of funny that the text is smaller than normal. We don't want to do that all the time. It's not

something we want to do most of the time. Oh, and that's getting the whole other thing. So another big thing about set design is you're starting to get into templating. You have to start working with your editor. You have to start working with the rules manager. We have to turn cards, some ideas into actual cards. And when you do that, sometimes things don't work the way you think they will. I mean, the onsets have a little bit more latitude because if you go to Acorn World, we can do a little more like trust us, it works. But we still had to make things work. We had to sort of go through that. So, you know, you have to work with your editor

and figure out all the stuff that's going to figure out, you have to figure out all the stuff that's going to affect how the card actually looks. Meanwhile, you're trying to build your set. You're trying to make the set functional. And a lot of things get thrown in your way. A lot of things, you know, one of the things that we were constantly doing is keeping notes of what the problems were. Plus, I had JC as my play designer. You know, I was constantly talking to JC. What if we do this? You know, and JC would bring me

concerns about, you know, where there might be problems or where things might lead. And we do playtests and like people are playing stickers too much. They're not playing stickers enough. They're playing attractions too much. You know, what's the right balance? Because you want to make sure that the things are good enough that people play them, but not so good that that's all they play. You know, that you want to have that balance, and that there's a lot of give and take. And to make

things especially, like, I mean, I understand we have contraptions, so attractions had something to look at, but how attractions work to how contraptions work, sort of in how you balance them, is completely different. I mean, there's some overlap in templating because how you get it is similar. I mean, you assemble a contraction, you open an attraction.

But other than some verbiage, a lot of the templating works similarly. But we also had to figure out, like, you know, how do the light-up things work? And another thing I had, like, one of my visions was I really wanted cards to have different light-up numbers, so from game to game when you play them, that it

wasn't like, oh, every time I play, these two things always go off at the same time. I wanted to mix it up, so there would be variance from game to game, especially limited game to limited game. Or limited, you know, sorry, play session to limited play session. But that required talking with the person who did correlation and explaining what it is that I wanted to go on. How did I want the cards laid out?

And, you know, there was a lot of crunching to figure out numbers. In the middle of doing it we changed sort of how we did some of our numbers. So I had to redo numbers and rechange rarities. And all that, like all of figuring out what's going on and how to make that work is part of set design. In addition, I talked about the art. Well, that's just the making of the art. That's just, like, I had to do concepting. So I think at this point I'll have the podcast with Annie.

If not, it's coming up. Talking about sort of how you do card concepting. And so part of being on set design was having all these meetings to say, what could this card be? What could the image be? What's the art direction? What do we, what do you think the card represents? And I want to make sure, A, that it represents the mechanic.

But B, I also wanted to be funny. And I, you know, we're trying to do this top down thing. And I had a giant list of all the top down things we were trying to do. And so Andy and I were constantly talking about, oh, you know, we, you know, could this be where we do the ball toss? Can this be where we do the dunk tank? You know, we were always looking at where can we get I had my list of top downs and I wanted to get everything I possibly could.

And sometimes they didn't fit in one place so we tried to do a perfect example with the petting zoo. We wanted the petting zoo to be an attraction. But it just didn't work out. We didn't end up getting something we were happy with. And we only had so many, I think 35 flats for attractions. So, hey, there's only so many attractions we happy with. And we only had so many, I think 35 flats for attractions.

So, hey, there's only so many attractions we could get. So it's like, oh, we weren't able to do the petting zoo as an attraction, but I want to have a petting zoo. So we went and found a place where we could reference petting zoo in one of the creatives. So there's a card called Petting Zoo Keeper. And we were able to make the joke about a petting zoo there. So a lot of doing all this was keeping a bigger picture.

And then working, another big thing about set design, it's not that vision design doesn't work with other parts of the department. But the number one people in vision design we work with is the creative team. And we do a little bit of work with editing and rules. Other than that, inside, we do some work with play design. Other than that, there's not a lot you know but as you start getting involved

in set design I'm dealing with frames I'm dealing with art I'm dealing with digital like I have to have meetings to talk to the digital people and you know

this is for a set where like Arena decided not to do in the unstable cards but Magic Online decided to do some of the eternal ones so we did have meetings

we had to have meetings with digital talk about that and then so okay so I have to but Magic Online decided to do some of the Eternal ones. So we did have meetings with Digital. We'll talk about that. And then, so, okay, so I have to, we have art waves, and I have to assign my art waves to figure out, you know, and the way that works is, okay, I've got to get 80 cards I'm going to commit to,

and once I commit to, they're going to have images. And once they have images, I'm more limited what the card can be. And so we want to be careful and pick those images. And then there's a wave two and a wave three. Normally you have two waves, but because we were sort of a weird set and we started early, they would stick

us, I think we ended up having five different waves. So we sort of did things a little bit here and a little bit there. But every once in a while, Dawn would come to me and say, okay, Mark, I need another, or Dawn or Annie, would say, I need another 70 cards, another 60 cards. And I would have to figure say, okay, Mark, I need another, or Dawn or Annie, would say, I need another 70 cards, another 60 cards. And I would have to figure out, okay, what do we want to commit to?

Because once you commit to an image, it doesn't mean you can't change the card some, but it does lock you in. It does sort of say, conceptually, that's what this card is. And then, once you put out the art and it goes out, then sketches come back in. And you need to look at sketches and make sure the sketches are reinforcing the thing you want and um because there's a top down set and there are a lot of flavors and things that i wanted i needed to be careful plus um infinity is the one product where art literally affects the mechanics that whether a creature has a hat or doesn't have a hat affects how the card how the gameplay works like if i want

to make sure my hat archetype works i need enough headed creatures in white and black for example um and so there was a lot of sort of watching for that and then uh other things that came up where you know things would come in and i had to deal with you know um like part of set design is saying to people, here are things I need and letting other teams come to them. But sometimes something would come in and some other team hadn't had a chance to look at it yet. And, you know, you have to on the fly figure things out. And there was a lot of decisions were like, oh, there's some small issue with this.

And, you know, sometimes it's like, oh, go to to um dawn and say dawn can we go back to the artist to change this slight thing or you know there's lots and lots of different things that come up um and that's the thing that is was very eye-opening to me is when you're sort of at the end part of making a set you are responsible for all these these. Oh, and then I haven't even got into names and flavor text. Now, because Unsets are a little more holistic than normal, and, look, I'm a comedy writer, I like writing comedy, I got very involved in the names and flavor text. I was not only on the team, but I worked very closely with Ari,

who was in charge of it. You know, when we were deciding, Ari and I would get together and sort of talk through things, and, you know, sometimes it was really clear, like, this is by far the best name, or this is by far the best piece of flavor text. But sometimes, I liked one thing, and Ari liked a different thing, and we had to talk it through. You know,

and there were give and takes where, you know, I really liked something, so I goes, okay, I get that you like it, and there's things that Ari liked that I wasn't crazy about, but Ari really liked it. One of those, by the way, is a car call hat trick, where the flavor text is kind of really riffing off the art in a goofy, silly way. And Ari loved, loved, loved that piece of flavor text,

which I think Ari wrote. And I was not the biggest fan of it. I thought it was a little... I thought it was sort of making fun of the art, which I always want to be careful. It's something that back in the day I was bad about, that I would make flavor texts that kind of made fun of the art. And I realized that that really was part of being a team player,

is not, you know... I'm not a big fan of sort of mocking other people's work. So I've done it in the past. It was a mistake. I regret doing it. And so this wasn't exactly that, to be fair. It was more Ari having fun with sort of, well, what does the image represent? So it was more having fun with the image, I guess, than really picking on the artist in any way.

So I do think this wasn't picking on the artist, that should be fair to Ari. But anyway, I didn't think it this. That should be fair to Ari. But anyway, I don't know. I didn't think it was the funniest choice of what we had. But Ari loved it. And I said, okay,

I respect that you really love this, Ari. Okay, we want different kinds of humor and, hey, there'll be stuff that I don't find funny

but you find funny and you represent other players that will find it really funny. Anyway, it came out. We previewed it.

Players loved it. They thought it was very funny. So Ari was correct. I mean, I did give in and let Ari do it. But I Anyway, it came out. We previewed it. Players loved it. They thought it was very funny. So, Ari was correct. I mean, I did give in and let Ari do it. But I'm happy that I did. And Ari was correct. I told Ari. I went to Ari and said, Ari, you were right. And Ari goes, Aha! So, anyway, Ari was happy

I told him that. Anyway, so, the names and flavor text comes later in the process where I'm trying to finalize things. Oh, another thing that happens later in the process where, you know, I'm trying to finalize things. Oh, another thing that happens later in the process is editing. So, like, there's a point at which it's kind of hands-off. I mean, I'm, or not hands-off.

I'm turning the file over to editing. But I'm still able to make changes. And so Matt Tabak was my editor. So there's a lot of communicating with him, talking. Like, whenever I make a change once Matt has control of the file, I'm going through Matt to make the change. I'm not making the change. So there was a lot.

I mean, at every stage along the way when you're doing set design, the set's becoming more and more solidified, if you will. It's starting to get art. It's starting to get templating. And so there's just constant things you're working with to make sure that all the moving pieces are coming together. Unsets have a little extra,

unsets are weird and what that means is that more often things happen that you haven't predicted because it's not something we've done before. Normally in doing a set,

a lot of making a magic set is, look, we're doing what we normally do. We get it. We know it. We understand it. It's not hard to do. It's easy to template. It's easy to balance. It's easy to concept in art. Like, you know, some stuff we do, like, okay, we've done this enough that we, as an institution, get it. We know how to do it. But whenever you're doing new things, and every set has new things, it's just the percentage of new things.

Whenever you're doing new things, and every set is new things, it's just the percentage of new things. Unsets are very high, about the highest of any set we make of, we haven't done that before, because the very essence of what we're doing is messing in space we haven't messed before. Now, some of it, I mean, the one thing I will say is we do more unsets, we have some grounding from previous unsets. So, every unset we do is less chaotic in the sense that there's certain things that unsets like to do that we've learned. You know, we like to do a sub-game. We like to do a psychographic or aesthetic profile.

There's just things that we like to do that we have some understanding of how we do them. Not that the new one doesn't cause chaos, because it can, but we just have some... And, like, for example, you know, Unstable created Outside Assistance. It was a really valuable tool.

Unglued introduced Dice, a very valuable tool. So as we sort of go forward, I bring those tools in. I go, oh, you know, Dexterity. Like, there's stuff that we've established as being unset things that we know players have enjoyed, that we got a lot of feedback, that the players had fun with it,

that we want to carry some of that stuff over. So the more unsets we do, the more sort of we start building a vocabulary for them and a color pie for them. Like, for example, we have a color pie for dice rolling. How colors interact with dice rolling is something we slowly, through multiple sets, worked out. So I now know, for example, that black is the one that raises and lowers dice roll.

Blue is the one that re-rolls dice. Green is the one, you know, that red and green like to roll a lot of dice. And green particularly likes things to happen when you roll dice. And there's just certain effects that work in different things that we start to get a working of how things happen. And that doesn't mean that we can't try things and bend things and tweak things, whatever. But as we do more of them, like, because this was my fourth unset and fifth unproduct, because unsanctioned wasn't a set, but we did make some cards in it. You know, I keep learning sort of new ways of how to make uncards.

But, like I said, we're talking about set design today. I've never had a balance on cards before, or at least I wasn't the one in charge of it. I was there, but I wasn't the one in charge of it. And so, you know, there's a lot, the chaos that is set design, where I got a lot of respect for set design, is that end of the process where everything's coming together,

where all these individual people are making things, and it's your job as kind of the person in charge of the set to see all these different things and think about them in conjunction with each other because all those different pieces aren't talking together. And so you have to really keep in mind, oh, the rules have to work a certain way to make sure to communicate stuff with the editor, although the rules and editor to talk. Or the way art might be played.

There's a lot of subtle things. And because of the holistic nature of the unset, names can, like, for example, when we were making How Is This a Par 3, we decided that the name had to be six letters. That mechanically, for the car to do

what we wanted, we needed it to be six words long. Or, for example, we had a card that cared about alliteration in the set. So I had to track alliteration. I had to make sure when we were doing names that there was enough alliteration, but not too much alliteration. And so, for example, there was a point that came during names where we were a little too high on alliteration. I had to go to Ari and say, okay, we've got to pull back on alliteration. We're getting a little bit high. I'd figured out the sweet

spot of what made sense and what played correctly, and I wanted to make sure that we stayed within a certain range. And there were a few cards that had alliterative names that we changed to have non-alliterative names because we were a little bit high on alliteration. Anyway, and there's just that times, you know, a thousand that every card, you know, there's cards that mechanically care about all sorts of things. I had to care about length of flavor text. I had to care about number of words. I had to care about what image was in the art.

I had to care about whether there were hats on characters in the art. You know, there's so many things to care about. And so, I've actually made a little spreadsheet of here are all the things I have to care about. Here are all the things

that some, you know, and then I was constantly sort of checking back. And another thing that happens is you want to make sure when you care about something that you understand

like the aspen it needs to be at. Oh, we care about alliteration. Well, where does that need to be? And another big thing is one of the parts of balancing any limited, but especially to an unset, is you want to make sure that there aren't what we call traps in limited where you're asking somebody to do something that the set can't then follow through on.

So I was very careful of looking at our rare cards and making sure, okay, well, if you got this at rare, you know, and you drafted it, is there a path where you can do something? And I tried to be very hard where I could. There's a few exceptions, just because some of the cards were made for constructed, not for limited. And those tend to go to higher rarities. But I tried as much as I can. Like, the alliterative card was rare,

but I did want it to be, when you drew the alliterative card and you first picked it, that you could draft an alliterative deck. It was a possible thing to do. I didn't want to make it too easy, but I wanted to make sure that it was viable and doable. You know, and there was endless questions. That's one of the things that I realized about set design, is there's so many things going on in so many

different departments and so many different moving pieces and I need the frames to work and I need the symbol to work and I need to get the art and I need to make sure the rules are working and the template is working and digital implications working and marketing. You've got to work with marketing and you've got to work with you know, at some point

you're eventually doing previews and interviews and like, it's a never ending thing. And so, well, I guess technically it ends because the product comes out. But it is something that goes on for quite a while. And, you know, that was really eye-opening in the amount of things that are being juggled. I'm used to juggling, meaning I'm working on a lot of sets and I'm juggling it all. But I'm not used to, within the context of one set, juggling so many different components I had not done that before and so it was very illuminating

and it was very interesting to see it so like I said I got a lot of respect for all the sets I mean I had respect for them I got even more respect for them because it was very challenging to do anyway guys I am now at Wizards so we all know what that means it's the end of my drive to work so instead of talking magic

it's time for me to be making magic see you guys next time