Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #981: BRO with Ari Nieh

Episode Date: November 4, 2022

In this podcast, I sit down with Ari Nieh, the lead vision designer of The Brothers' War, to talk about the set's vision 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 I have Ari Nia with me today to talk all about the making of The Brothers War. Hey, Ari. Hi, Mark. How are you? Okay, so you led the vision design, but our story starts way before the vision design. It does. It starts with a flashback to the past, just going along with the Brothers Wood theme. Yeah, a good theme. So we'll dig up our artifacts, see what we can find out about the past. Okay, so I think our story begins, actually not with either of us, the story begins with Ethan Fleischer. and Ethan Fleischer was asked by

one of the people who one of our producers about what are cool ideas for supplemental sets he pitches the idea of Brothers War Aaron gets the idea and Aaron comes to me and asks what do I think of the idea I said I thought it was a great idea and he's like

do you think it could be a standard set you know a premiere set and I'm like yeah definitely for sure it could And then he's like, do you think it could be a standard set, you know, a premiere set? I'm like, yeah, definitely, for sure it could be. And he's like, he thought too, but he needed proof of concept so he could go to, you know, his bosses and stuff and say, I think we should do this, not just as a set, but as a premiere set. So he then gives me the task of making a demo. So I turn to you and I say, Ari, we need to make a demo.

So what is your memory of starting from me coming to you? So this was in the fall of 2018 when I just got started with Wizards and you were like, I want you to think about some things like as potential things for

us to work on in the future. I want you to think about Unsets and I want you to think about brothers war. Like what could we do with brothers war? And we talked to you and I talked about it some more and then you said, all right, let's, let's make a prototype. You know, you're going to make two decks. I don't remember how we decided exactly what form the prototype would have, but as a proof of concept, we're going to have two decks that showcase if we

were to build a set what are like two imaginary constructed decks that would play against each other that would you know they're like sort of dual decks that show off a whole standard sets worth of stuff um that show what the brothers were could be and i i think urza versus mishra was like from the very very beginning right, right? Yeah, it was. I mean, that was that was just obvious is, of course, Urza versus Mishra is how we're going to show this off. OK, so I mean, you and I talked quite a bit about sort of what should be in it. So what is your memory of like what were the parameters? Like what did we feel had to be in it?

It was obviously going to be an artifact-themed set. That was clear from the beginning. We knew there would be some kind of graveyard theme to at least one of the factions, since digging up old artifacts, digging up the Thran was part of it. gold artifacts, digging up the Thran was part of it. We knew there was going to be some kind of like tinkering or building up sort of theme because this is not just a set about artifacts like Mirrodin is, but it's a set about artificers, the people who build them. And also I think that it was going to be about war, right?

That this is the brother's war. And also I think that it was going to be about war, right? That this is the brother's war. And so we knew it was going to hit all those themes from the very start. I don't remember what parameters you gave me in terms of what else was required. Like we knew we were going to have a bunch of antiquities callbacks, of course. Yeah, I think so. The one thing that I think I said I wanted, and you didn't disagree with me or anything, was the idea that we wanted all the artifacts to be generic in their costs.

Yes. But we knew that we needed to have color in there somewhere, just because we've learned our lesson about making generic artifact sets full of generic artifacts. But I think what we had said, and this is from the very beginning of, okay, we want the mana cost to be generic mana. They could have color in them, and obviously they could be optimized with color. But I think we were trying to capture that. Yeah, it had the Urza and Mishra. Oh, Aaron, from the very beginning, you talked about being interested in Meld. And so we, in the very first promo versions, we had Meld Urza and Meld Mishra.

That was from the very beginning. We did, yes. And we had Urza. In fact, it was with, I think, the flavor underpinnings for what they meld with, like the Power Stones, the Might Stone, the Weak Stone, and the Dragon Engine. Those come directly from the story. That's not something we made up for the cards. So those were there in the things that uh you suggested which i think when i forget which deck it went into i think went into the mishra deck but um you suggested unearth that was something you had suggested um during the promo when we were building the the promo decks

yeah i i went back to and looked through my notes for um that this from from like one of my first notebooks at wizards and like the very first idea i wrote down under brothers war was unearth on artifacts um and and so the in these promo decks mishra had a bunch of you know it had a bunch of self mill from the black side and some rummaging from the red side. So you could like fill your graveyard with artifacts. It had a bunch of sack outlets for artifacts, and then you would unearth them and get double value out of them. And then, yeah, the Urza deck, we were fiddling around more with like, I think the Mishra deck was more about digging things out of the graveyard.

And then the Urza deck was more about building things, right, if I remember correctly? Yeah, and like that's that was a reflection of their personalities, right that like they've always been a little that Urza is more the creator and Mishra is more the destroyer

although of course in the context of the war itself they both just destroyed the entire continent but yes but yes the urza deck um used a mechanic that nowadays we call a plus b meld where like you could take um one part of a robot like a core and one other part of a robot that was like the the body of the, and mix and match them together, and they would flip and meld into whatever combined those two things, which would have a combination of the abilities and stats of its component robots. Okay, so we build these two decks,

and I should stress, I mean, I was definitely helping you, but I put you in charge of this, so this was something that you were... Yeah, mostly I built the decks. And I should stress, I mean, I was definitely helping you, but I put you in charge of this, so this was something that you were... Mostly I built the decks, and you gave me feedback on them. I think I designed a few cards, but yeah, you did the lion's share of putting the decks together. And then, I know you played with a lot of people

to get feedback. And then you and I played a couple times, and I gave you feedback. And then once I said we were ready, we then went and played with Aaron. Aaron Forsythe. Yes. And then basically the story is Aaron liked it. He then took the same decks and played with Ken Troop and Bill Rose

and the other people to sort of get sign-off. Everybody says, oh, this looks great. Let's do it. Okay. So now, because you obviously showed a lot of promise, and I thought you'd done great work on the demo decks, I said, Ari, could you lead the vision design for this? Yeah, which, of course, I was really excited to do. You know, that's kind of what I was most excited about, about winning the great designer search and coming to Wizards is I want to lead a vision design team. So this was my first chance to do so, which was really a very unique opportunity.

Okay, so let's talk about where we started. Unlike most sets, we had done some work. We had built decks, we had some themes and mechanics. So where did you start like what was how did the design start yeah so we i mean we started by like looking at these decks um so this was unfortunately like we were starting right at the beginning of the pandemic was around when um when exploratory design began i think that was april 2020 um so so our play testing pipeline at the time was a little a little janky so we we were mostly we were mostly talking about at that stage

we were talking about themes and talking about how we were going to approach things because this is not at all a typical standard set like in many ways the design of brothers war was like the design of a universe is beyond set because the world was settled for us the prominent characters were settled for us that like what objects and and um locations had to appear in this set those were all nailed down for us and the story and the arc of the story were there for us so the questions for us were not okay here are rough themes what can we make out of it and then we fill in the details later the the questions are the details are all here how do we connect the dots and what is the right way to portray all these things what's the approach we are going to take with this story

so there were a couple challenges so uh here's the one that i remember we've talked you can talk through the other challenges as well the one i remember was the story wasn't that kind of green like there wasn't a lot going on like like for example example, when we made the decks, we made the Urza deck white-blue, and we made the Mishra deck black-red in the original demo decks that we made for Aaron. And it was clear that, like, white and blue and black and red, there's plenty of things to do in the Brothers' War. But green, it was a little, it was in weird space.

So let's talk a little bit about, like, you know, like, and this happens a lot with Universes Beyond, interestingly like the story is the story they weren't it wasn't necessarily balanced for the color wheel uh so how did we how did we address that yeah and like not only with universes beyond but i think artifact sets in general there's always a question like with with what does green do like green is the is the color that has the least artifact synergies just built in with its place in the color wheel. So there were a few things. One, I mean, the biggest one is the island of Argot,

which is where the story ends in the third act. And we were thinking at one point of, oh, there's a three-act structure to the story right there's the youth of the brothers and the middle age when they're adults you know building their empires and fighting the war and then there's old age when things come to a head and get like really just absolute environmental devastation and that's when they go to argoth and fight their big final battle and one thing that we eventually decided was that we were not going to try to make these three acts all equal right that it was okay if different acts emphasized different parts of the color pie it was okay if different acts sort of showed up more and less at different rarities like we didn't we weren't going to try to balance them and the raw number of cards

didn't have to be the same so we could put a lot of emphasis on the defenders of argoth right on the elves and the pixies and the sytinal druids and people like titania and Gwenna, that we could flesh those out a little more than maybe you would think in a set that's called The Brothers War. It's not just the brothers, right? It's about the people they affect. And that's another interesting thing is we spent a lot of time, I mean,

I know we looked through the book and looked at all the characters, but there's a lot of factions that aren't the brothers fighting. There are other factions that come into play. And I know there's a lot of factions that aren't the brothers fighting there are other factions that come into play and i know we spent a lot of time like making sure we we represented those as well absolutely and that was also one of the places where we looked for like room to flex in in the color pie that you know the the factions in brothers were like it's not a faction set it's not a ravnica or stririxhaven style set where like you have these strict, okay, if you belong to this faction, then that means you're exactly these two colors because the faction represents these colors in its underlying philosophy.

philogy for example that that follow mishra uh they're not defined by yes we the the philosophies of red as a color and black as a color are what make us so that you could conceivably have people who are philogy but are green or another color um similarly like we looked in factions like the um the third path right the people at the ivory tower we're like well these people could be a lot of different colors like they're they're exploring artifice they're exploring magic they want peace like there's there's definitely some colors that they have to be but like yeah we tried to explore that and make sure we could find color balance in um by by like by looking at the different people in the world and how they might manifest, not just narrowly the brothers or this,

and so everyone who follows them is this. Okay, so let's start talking mechanics. So obviously we went in looking at the mechanics we had done in the demo decks. we went in looking at the mechanics we had done in the demo decks. But what, so, I mean, what, how did we get to the mechanics that we handed off? Yeah. So, well, at the time,

at the time of handoff, well, we were, we were definitely happy with, sorry, we, we, we had Power Stones that had been settled pretty early on because Ethan and I had agreed oh yeah we want this mechanic. Ethan Fleischer had done

Dominar United and we agreed that would be a great mechanic to carry over between the two sets, right? Because the Power Stones have such a pivotal role in the story of the Brothers War. But there should still be some left on Dominaria today for people to be building up. In general, we wanted to connect the two sets in little ways just so that people were like, oh, yes, we have these two consecutive sets

and even though they're very different, we can tell they took place on the same world and in the way this one that comes later laid the grounds for what Dominaria would become 4,500 years in the future. I think the plan for Dominaria United, by the way, was they put them in and then said, brothers, we'll figure out what Power Stones do, and we'll just update once they figure out exactly what they do.

Because they knew that it was going to have more of a role in the Brothers War than it would in Dominar United. Yes. So, I think during exploratory design, we came up with Prototype, which was this ability that would let you cast an artifact creature as a smaller version of itself for less mana. So, it's kind of like a reverse kicker, though it's not quite kicker because the big version of our sneaky ways of making colorless artifact cards that aren't really colorless, that you have to have lands of the appropriate type in your deck in order to get the most out of them. Yeah, and one of the cool things about Prototype is there are actually archetypes in Draft, for example, where you might not have the color to play the small version of the prototype, but it ramps it up. Man, you can play the big versions of the prototype. And that's another thing Power Stones were really good for. Yeah, exactly.

So that was a nice fit, and we were pretty happy with that. For our graveyard mechanic, at the time of Vision Handoff, we were not using Unearth. We were using something that we called Scrap, which I believe was one of your ideas, Mark. It was more or less artifact mutate from the graveyard. So if I had some artifact that was in my graveyard, I could pay some mana and exile it to grant all of its abilities to one of my artifacts on the battlefield permanently. Yeah, the flavor that I liked a lot, where it came from

was, a lot of the story of the Brothers' War is Urza and Mishra finding old artifacts made by the Thran and stuff, but then adapting them and sort of turning it into their own purposes. And I thought it was kind of neat that you could sort of take things out of the graveyard and

make use of them to change what you're building. Anyway, like I said, I thought it was flavorfully really interesting, and it definitely made for weird, very Johnny-ish designs where you cobble things together and it

did something kind of neat in the interactions. Um, I think that was, that was what a lot of us liked about it is that it was, it was the flavor of invention made very concrete. And in particular, it connected it sort of on both of the thematic ends that invention has in Brothers War. Like it connected it with the archaeology end because you're digging stuff up, and it connected it with the warfare end where I'm repurposing something that I found in the dirt and now grafting it onto my golem or my war tank to make that thing more powerful somehow. We thought that was super cool it ended up being i think a little too complex um a little too challenging um and so part way into set design we got feedback from people saying like hey this there is a little too much going on

here we can't we can't quite understand and so we went to our backup graveyard mechanic which was unearth instead yeah so during vision brother we did make unearth cards like we did design unearth cards and it was always a given like we knew that scrap was asking a little much and and like it has a so one of the things we do in design just so the audience understands is when you sort of push when you sort of do something that's a little, you know is a little more out there, one of the things we do is we'll make backups for it saying, hey, we're trying something, but if this experiment doesn't quite work out, here's the more easy thing we know you can do. Yeah, and that's sort of part of just our vision design methodology is to take big swings, right? To try things that you think might work and might not work so that if they do work, fantastic. You tried something that was more ambitious than you would have otherwise. And if it doesn't work, then you have backups for set design to implement. But that enables us to take the big risks.

Okay, so speaking of swings, we talked about there was a lot of complexity. Let's talk about some other stuff. There's a few other things that we handed over. So we obviously, the finished product has the three meld pairs at Rare Mythic Rare, Urza and Mishra, and then we added Titania, so we balanced it out since we had white, blue, and black, red, but we didn't have green. And that was, I think we very early decided to do that.

I think that was... Oh, yeah. Yeah. But we had common meld cards. So let's talk a little bit about the common meld cards that we handed over. Do you remember these? Yes, that's right.

So our common meld cards were it it was a cycle um so one pair for each color and each cycle consisted of uh one artifact creature and one sorcery or instant spell so this was again a sneaky way to to make things color colored without actually while the artifact still looks colorless, that what you do is you have a red spell that's like some kind of flamethrower thing, like some sort of torch, and then an artifact creature,

which is some sort of, I don't know, vehicle. not the card type vehicle, but like, you know, a cart or something. And then you would exile the red spell, the sorcery or instant spell, from your graveyard to meld it with your... Was it from your graveyard? I think it was. Yeah, you'd pay a cost and exile it from your graveyard to meld it with your little cart. And then you would have a flamethrower cart instead, which was more powerful, and it had an activated ability that mimicked the function of the spell. So the idea, flavorfully, is like here is some peaceful tool, right, some peaceful welding torch that I am now going to glue to my cart, which is also like just a mine cart or something. And then I'm making a flaming mine cart that I can use as a war machine to

send it my brother whom I hate. Yeah. And the idea was when we had done meld way back in Eldritch Moon, which is where I introduced, we didn't, I think there was a vertical cycle, so there was one common thing. Yeah. But it just, people had always said, oh, we wanted to see

more meld, you know, it was hard to, like, do that. And so, we were trying to get meld at a lower rarity. There were a whole bunch of issues with it. The ass fans is quirky. It requires a lot of infrastructure to make it work. And part of the lesson we got when we handed it all off was there's just too much going on. And I think part of making it a little simpler was taking out the common meld.

Yeah, and I think overall meld just kind of presents a problem that like you want the difference between the two cards individually and the power of them put together to be not too small, right? Like it has to be a little big. So it's a reward like, all right, I did the thing. I put the two pieces together and now I feel really cool. But if it's too big, then that means that your individual pieces are too weak. And so you don't take them to begin with. So you never start drafting them. So it's hard to fall into the archetype.

And even with draft, like because it's two pieces, like how do we exactly get the same person to draft both pieces? You know, and that's tricky as well. Like in booster packs, we can, we have the technology now that we could, in theory, have them show up in the same booster pack. But if you're drafting, you pick one of the, you know, I think one day we will crack common meld in a way that's viable. But it's going to require a set that like, that's what it's doing. It's going to, it requires a lot of structure to make it work. And this set had a lot going on. So in the end, it just wasn't the right place for it's doing. It requires a lot of structure to make it work. And this set had a lot going on, so in the end, it just wasn't the right place for it.

Yeah. So one other mechanic that we had at handoff that I believe eventually got cut was Raid. We had Raid in the set, and because, you know, Raid is just a fine mechanic, and it's all about sort of attacking and so it encourages aggression and it sort of encourages different things from these decks that are these artifact based that are all about ramping into giant things um and also that was a cool opportunity

to put raid in green since it was that would be the flavor for the Argothians fighting off the invaders. And I think that wasn't cut for any structural reasons. That was probably just cut for space. Yeah, so the reason we put it in originally was it was a war, and all the mechanics we had done were more about invention and building things. And we were like, oh, but we really need something about war, right? We need something that encouraged fighting because that is an important part of it. And I think what happened was

when they took out Scrap and replaced it with Unearthed, Unearthed also does this good job of promoting aggression because when you unearth a creature, look, it's going to go away at the end of the turn. Why not attack with the creature? So I think Unearthed filled a little bit of that void,

and when they were trying to cut for space and stuff, I think that they're like, well, Unearthed's doing enough of that that we can make some individual cards to do that, that they didn't feel they needed Raid. I mean, everybody likes Raid. Raids are always good in sets. It's one of those mechanics that, like, no set's

unhappy having Raid. You know, it's a game about attacking with creatures, so, um, okay. Should I talk a bit about the mechanics that we cut sort of beforehand? Oh, sure. Sure. Yeah. Let's talk about stuff that we tried. This was kind of interesting that like when we were trying to decide, like, what is the, what is the big splashy mechanic with the most sort of, uh, not mechanical novelty to it um you know

what are our sort of like what vehicles were to caladesh or something like that um there were three directions that we considered considered going in and scrap was the one we ended up picking but i i think people might be interested in hearing what the two others were. They would. Absolutely. So one of them was the mechanic from the 2018 proof of concept decks that we made, which was the A plus B meld,

right, where you have cards where any A can meld with any B. In some ways that solves certain problems with meld, but of course it also created a lot more. We thought this was super cool, but its biggest problem was that it was very parasitic, right?

That like these cards work with each other and they don't really work with anything else, which is, that's not great. There was one other problem with it, by the way, which is I went to our art people, because the problem is any front has to go with any back. Right, and the art people were like, are you serious? Yeah, so we obviously, Unstable messed around with this

with Host Augment, but we kind of leaned into the silly there. It's like, it's the head of this and the tail of that. And it was kind of entertaining and fun, but it was goofy. And it worked in that set, because that it was kind of entertaining and fun but it was goofy uh and it worked in that set because that set was sort of a goofy set um but there was a lot of resistance when we talked to the art like they didn't think that they could come up with i mean one day maybe we'll do and we'll come up with a solution but they there wasn't an obvious solution to them yeah and i think the the other major problem um was with the rise of commander like it's just it's less

appealing to have a mechanic in your set where like part of what makes it work is you can have four of each card right that i have four of this a and four of that a and four of this b and four of that b so all together i have eight plus eight in my 60 card deck i can make it work i'll find a way to combine them but if i just have one of each in my hundred card deck it I can make it work. I'll find a way to combine them. But if I just have one of each in my 100 card deck, it's like, this just isn't going to happen. Yeah, that's definitely true. Okay, what was the third path?

You said there were three paths. Yes, just as in the Brothers' War, there's a third path. The third idea, which I think was also very interesting, was an exploration of colorless mana as colorless costs that is different from how it was done in the Oath of the Gatewatch in particular the idea was what if we genuinely instead of

just having a few weirdo colorless cards that like represent the Eldrazi because they're strange and alien what if we went all in on colorless equals Thran artifacts and we made it a whole sixth color right that like in your draft environment instead of you have five colors to pick from and so there's like 10 signposts on commons, one for each two-color pair, like five choose two is 10. Instead, you have six colors, right? The normal five plus colorless, and there's an equal number of colorless cards, at least at common and uncommon, so that it can work out in limited, right? and uncommon so that it can work out and limit it right there's an equal number of colorless cards and there's signpost uncommons for each archetype so there's um six choose two right 15 draft archetypes like the 10 normal ones and then each color like white colorless, blue colorless, et cetera. We thought that would be super, super interesting.

I think we decided not to do it for a few reasons. One was that, like, thus far in Magic, the flavor connection we've made between colorless costs and Eldrazi has been pretty strong. And so bringing that back in a block that's fundamentally disconnected from the Eldrazi and where the Phyrexians are sort of the menacing underlying villain seemed just a little bit of a mismatch flavor-wise. I think we were also a little scared about like like how easy is it

to build a draft environment with six colors instead of five and fifteen archetypes instead of ten like no one's ever done that we don't know how easy or hard it is I think the biggest thing about it was it's the kind of idea that like that's what the set has to be about like if you're doing it it takes

over everything and that's just the set right our set was about the Brothers' War. That was the thing that guided us. And so it just, sometimes ideas have too much volume. Like, it just, like, if you're going to do it, you've got to do it. That's what it's about. And this set already had its central theme, which was, hey, we're capturing the story. And I think that was the biggest problem with it was it wasn't fundamentally what the story was about.

And so it just was sort of hijacking things and taking them somewhere else yeah like you want a like a sort of like giant sized mechanical theme with this beautiful intricate constraint like that you want that for a bottom-up set right like that's how you build your sets like you know dragons of tar or like the kark here block, or Strixhaven, or whatever, where you're like, it's about this thing, and then you build your set around that entirely. And you can't do that for what is essentially a Universe is Beyond set. Yeah, I mean, this wasn't very much a top-down set. It's very much, we're capturing this story. That's what we're capturing. You know, in some ways, it's kind of what we call an event set,

capturing this story. That's what we were capturing. In some ways, it's kind of what we call an event set, right? It's built around a story. Yeah, and the model I was taking for this set, like the set that I thought we needed to most emulate was War of the Spark. Right, which was our first event set.

Yeah, and it's not a top-down set like Eldraine is a top-down set, because Eldraine looks at individual tropes. It's like, top-down set like Eldraine is a top-down set because Eldraine looks at like, you know, individual tropes. It's like, oh, we've got our golden goose and our gingerbread man, right? And Jack the Giant Slayer. Like, that's card-by-card top-down. And we do some card-by-card top-down in Brothers War.

Like, you know, we're giving you your legendary creatures and your dragon engine and your onulit and things like that. But, like, we're also more top-down of the story. What we care about more is top-down. Here's what happened in the Brothers War. Here's this iconic event that takes place over decades and decades. We want to show the magnitude of that war, the sweep of it, and its effect on the inhabitants of Terrasia. Yeah, so anyway, I can see my desk here,

so I'm not too far from work. So we've got to wrap up here. Yeah, one of the things that I'm real happy with, like I really, I think we did a great job and all the set designers after us, of really making something that does capture the Brothers war in a way that's really fun um and i know i mean the amount of work that you and the team ever put into like you know what are all the characters and what are all the places and the things and you know there was so much time and energy trying to get all that

the there's a lot of like easter eggs in some level here right absolutely yeah like when you're when you're doing this kind of fan service if you will like if you're doing something that you're like okay this is for the longtime players and the hardcore vorthoses who really care about the story and the people and the places that make up this world like you've got a deep dive and do it right and so um you know both both the creative world building team um which uh emily tang was was leading that side of it at the time um and people like ethan fleischer who has read every single magic novel in existence he was an amazing resource for getting all of our deep cuts exactly the way we wanted them yeah so anyway i'm like i said i'm excited for the players to actually get a chance to play it was an amazing resource for getting all of our deep cuts exactly the way we wanted them.

Yeah, so anyway, like I said, I'm excited for the players to actually get a chance to play it. It's a really fun set, and also, it plays really well. The thing I love about top-down sets is when the gameplay itself matches the feel you're trying to get out of the story, and look, the gameplay is about, you're going to build giant artifact

machines, and you're going to smash them into your opponent's artifact machines and I think that's great I'm really looking forward to it So any last thoughts before we wrap up today? Any last thoughts on the Brothers War? I'm just really so excited to see it in stores So you know this but the listeners may not.

I actually left Wizards before the Brothers War was all the way complete. It was partway through set design at the time that I left. So I'd seen some of the artwork for it. I'd seen some of the concept push. some of the concept push. But now that preview season is starting and I'm getting to see like the final art for it and all the different concepts for these cards, some of which, some of these cards go back to 2018.

Like that for me is just supremely exciting. And I just can't wait to go to the pre-release myself. Okay, well, thank you so much for being with us today, Ari. It's always great talking with you. Thank you for having me, Mark. To Mark to everybody else guys I am 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 thanks Ari and I'll see all of you next time bye bye