Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #993: The Brothers' War with Yoni Skolnik

Episode Date: December 16, 2022

I sit down with Yoni Skolnik, the lead set designer of The Brothers' War, to talk through its design.

I'm not pulling out of the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the Drive to Work at Home Edition. So today I have Yanni Skolnick to talk about The Brothers War. Hey Yanni. Hi Mark. Okay, so you led the set design of the set. So I talked to Ari on a previous podcast and we talked all about the vision design. So we're going to pick up the story, you get handed the set, and let's talk about where it went from set design. So why don't we start with prototype, because that was in fact handed off from Vision Design. So let's talk about what was prototype like and what did you have to do to it?

How did you make prototype a viable thing? Yeah, so prototype stayed in the big picture how it was handed off but a lot of the details changed with the rules implementation of when you cast it you know uh what whatever characteristics of a card there were a lot of concerns of like if we're casting um a seven mana permanent for only three mana are you getting too much power out of having that higher mana value so for example one change we made is we made sure that the alternate version you cast had the lower mana value and the color of what you actually paid for it to better represent here's what you're actually putting into the card instead of getting out of it.

So it's more like a split card than a kicker, for example. Right. When I described how I wanted it to work, I basically said it's more like a split card than a kicker, for example. Right. When I described how I wanted it to work, I basically said, it's like an MDFC in that it's two separate cards. They just happen to have the same name and rule stacks. But the casting cost and power and toughness are different and all the rules that go along with those things. Right.

And that wasn't, when we handed off, it was more kicker... I mean, like reverse kicker, but more kicker-like. Yeah, I think it just set the power and toughness to be different. Yeah. And I think they remained colorless, which was very relevant because for some time, Power Stones were tapping for mana, specifically for colorless cards instead of any artifact card. Okay, so other than making them have two different functions

when you cast them, what else did you have to do to make that work? Yeah, getting that figured out was the biggest part of it. We also had to be careful with a lot of potential combo stuff you can do with them. For example, blinking them, you would still get the bigger side when it came back, or reanimation effects, where it's easy to trade off the prototype version and then reanimate

the big side. So later in set design and working with play design, we had to be very careful that we understood those interactions and were happy with the power level of how they played out. We also ended up using some of the enters the battlefield effects only apply if you cast it from your hand in order to uh rein in that potential of blinking and reanimation so when you're just curious when that comes up when you like here's a normal part of the game magic does this oh but there's a weird interaction how do you handle that yeah that's a great question um for the most part it's on a case-by-case basis you know we have a lot of heuristics of generally we try to make the strong thing to do with the card a the obvious thing to do so we don't want too much power to be in these strange rules

interactions that aren't immediately clear to people always and be also to be the fun thing to do with the card. So that's a bit of why it gets to be down to a case-by-case issue of some cards, the way the power level played out and the effects of the card made it pretty fun if you're bringing it back or using some kind of effect to cheat into play the big side. Whereas for other cards, it felt clearly this is inappropriate, and if we're costing the card to be fair when you're playing with it straightforward and fairly, then

it's too powerful when you're abusing it. And for that, we had to find tools like the If You Cast It From Your Hand to rein that in. Okay. So let's jump to the other mechanic. Big mechanic. So when we handed the set over, I believe we handed over a mechanic called Scrap.

And so Scrap, it's kind of Mutate-ish. It went on artifacts, and then you could exile them from your graveyard to sort of tech splice their ability onto an artifact on the battlefield. So what happened to Scrap? Yeah, one of our early playtests where we had a lot of the higher-ups at Wizards come and try out the set, we got feedback that it was too complicated and there was too much going on. So we both wanted to lower the overall number of mechanics and also remove the most complex one, which was scrap. Scrap was kind of complexity within complexity,

because having a graveyard mechanic like that, where it's in your graveyard, it's face up, both players know it's there, and you constantly need to know it may have an effect, that's already a big complexity cost. But in addition to that, all the cards themselves needed to be complex because they needed to have abilities that mattered on the battlefield

for example if they're affecting combat then it wants to be like fire breathing or keyword effects that change what your attacker is going to be keyword abilities like flying that's going to change what your attacker is um in addition to that they were all either so either they wanted to be those combat bonuses that affect on the board or they wanted to be um more combo type interactions for example a card that says untap myself well that you want to um combine with an artifact that taps itself and now you're getting into this combo territory where it's really not that obvious what to do with the cards at first and you need to look very hard to find the interactions that work with them. So the fact that just there weren't really any simple scrap cards. They were all complex and

needed to have their own, you know, baggage, and here's how you use them in certain situations meant it was just a little bit too much. And then on top of that, there was also a bit of a push to focus more on big robots as kind of the key marketing image of the set. And Scrap did not particularly work well on those since the size was not at all relevant to the ability and most of the power wanted to be in the abilities. So it wasn't really playing well with the big robot theme.

Okay, so it got replaced. Initially with Unearthed, which was a mechanic. I know when Ari and I made the very early... We made Dex as a sort of proof of concept even before it got put into becoming a Pioneer, becoming a Premiere set. So talk about how Unearthed came back. Unearthed came back, as it does.

Yes. Yeah, basically throughout Vision, we always knew that Unearthed was on the table and it was such a strong contender in my mind. I think my opinion on the Vision team was we don't even need to playtest it in Vision. We just know it's something that'll work for the table. And it was such a strong contender in my mind. I think my opinion on the Vision team was we don't even need to playtest it in Vision. We just know it's something that'll work for the set. It fits the archaeological theme. It goes on big robots. It's aggressive and fits the war theme. It just kind of all around works. So us using Scrap was us being experimental and trying to find new space. But when that proved unwieldy and we were already a couple months into set design, going back to Unearthed was just a clear, strong move that

would help give everyone confidence in the set that they understood what's going on. And we knew for sure it could be something we would develop. We could develop pretty easily. Yeah. Something real quickly you might want to say to the audience is one of the things that Vision tries to do is it's Vision's job to push a little bit, and that we want to have backups, right, we want to make sure that there's always something, but Vision does try to be a little more aggressive in that, hey,

if anyone's supposed to try things, we're supposed to try things, and then, right, set design can figure out whether something works or doesn't, and this is a really good example where, hey, we tried Scrap, but we had Unearthed as a backup, so you know, we gave you the set design lead the tools to do what you needed to do and in this case the more adventurous thing didn't work out but the backup was good yeah um and i enjoyed playing with scrap there's a lot of

potential options there it just was um a bit too loud of a mechanic for what the role it needed to play in the set so i do hope one day we get to return to some kind of graveyard mutate like that. Yeah, I mean, the thing for the audience is the, like, magic is littered with things we tried and then didn't use, and then years later, oh, look, you know, Energy is

sort of the classic example where Energy was originally an original Mirrodin, and there's too much there, so we had to take it out. But years later, we're like, oh, here's a good spot for it. I think it was like 10 plus years later. So like, anything we try will be, you know, I'll keep it in mind, so sometime later

we'll find it. Okay, the next mechanic to talk about, you mentioned it very briefly, but let's talk about Power Stones. So, Power Stones went through a bunch of changes. I'm trying to remember what we handed off. I think... Yeah, I know at one point we tried with them only working with abilities and not being able to cast any kind of spell.

Right, and only worked on... Oh, go ahead. Oh, yeah, only worked on abilities and not being for spells. And I think still in Vision, we changed them to being able to cast colorless spells, to work with the casting big artifacts theme and um be more of a ramp mechanic than just using it for mana sinks um but then at some point during set design we i had had this concern of what if they're too strong with the other artifacts and standard and um having it focus on colorless cards meant that it would especially

work well insularly with the Brevors War cards since all of our cards were colorless. But once we got closer to playtesting Standard and seeing what else was in Standard, we realized, no, it'll actually be cool if these Power Stones tap to cast all the other artifacts. And so we made that change. And it also happened alongside us changing the prototype cards to have their lower mana value reflected when you cast them for the lower cost, which to me was a bit more clean to then have them be colored when you cast them that way.

So that change with Power Stones also helped us enable, enabled us to evolve Prototype. So which came first? Which one led the, which was, led the other? They were kind of both ideas in the ether that we were considering, and when it all came together, we kind of made both changes at once. Okay, so the next thing I'm curious to talk about is this set very much was influenced by Antiquities, right? Antiquities was the original set that introduced the Brothers War.

It was Magic's second ever set. And before that, Magic didn't really have a story per se. It was the first set to even hint at a story. But the way Antiquities did it was you first set to even hint at a story um but the way antiquities did it was you were digging up like you know antiquities from the past and it it kind of hinted at a story but it didn't really tell the story it just made sort of vague allusions that there was some conflict and it mentioned urza and misha and stuff um so you had to sort of tell the story that there was a book i a book, I guess, that told the story.

And we wanted to reference antiquities. So I want to sort of talk about how did you, what did you need to do to capture the story of the Brothers' War and how did you capture the feeling of antiquities? I guess two questions I put into one. Yeah. I like to say it's a magic set based on a book based on a magic set, since the book was based on antiquities, but you magic set based on a book based on a magic set, since the book was based on Antiquities, but mostly based on the book.

But I did always have a search up for all the cards in Antiquities, just that I would look over once a week, and I would make sure everyone in my team also looked at a search of all those cards to serve as inspiration. For a while, we had some reprints from there, but then we decided to do the artifact retro sheet, which meant we didn't want to have any reprint artifacts since all those were going onto the sheet. And that sheet did end up with some of them like Ornithopter. But yeah, in the end, there weren't many cards from Antiquities that had exactly the right power level for our modern magic. So we ended up looking there a lot more for inspiration than for actual cards. I'll also note Urza's Saga, the green cards. Something not everyone's aware about Urza's Saga is that every different color in Urza's Saga

is telling its own story and its own time and location. So in Urza's Saga, the green cards are from Argoff at the end of the Brevors War. So we also looked there for inspiration, as well as to some of the black cards, because those feature old Phyrexia, which the Brevors War briefly touches upon. So do you have a favorite of a,

like a card inspired by antiquities? I love the Onulet Evolution. So it's a talk to here. Let me see what there's

Takasha's Onulet. So that's what I mentioned the card in the set. So cost five. It says when

Takasha's Onulet leaves the battlefield, you gain two life, unearth three and a white. And unearth

three and a white, return this card from your graveyard to the battlefield. It gains haste, exile at the beginning of the next end step, or if it would leave the battlefield, unearth only as a sorcery.

So real quickly, before you explain this card, I want to explain the background of an annulant. There's a very funny story about annulant. So let me tell that story and then you'll explain how you made the case. So the team that made the original Antiquities,

we call the East Coast Playtafters, Scaffolias, Jim Lynn, Dave Petty, Chris Page, and I believe Joel Mick also worked on Antiquities. He was with the group that made Mirage, but he worked with them on this one set. Anyway, they made a card that was kind of a creature that acted a lot like the card soul net uh and so they made they called it onulets because it was an anagram of soul net and that's where the name

came from but when they got the art back there was only one of them so they had to change the name to onulet so it didn't even have the anagram anymore um but that's where it came from it was supposed to be an anagram because back in the day we did lots and lots of anagrams and stuff. Yep. And so if you played early magic or chandelar, like I did, then you might be familiar with the onulet. And it was just kind of a cute, goofy card

with this very odd art that stuck around in a lot of people's minds. So I was very happy to just be able to get any reference into it at all. Now I'm remembering, there's another card, the Cave Guardian Suchi, which is an evolution of the card Suchi from Antiquities.

Let me read this real quick. Suchi, Cave Guard, 8 mana, Artifact, Creature, Construct, 8-8, Vigilance, Ward 4. When Suchi, Cave Guard dies, add 8 Cullis mana. Until end of of turn you don't lose this mana as steps and phases end right so the original suchi was just a four mana four four that when it died it gave you four colorless mana and at the time there was mana burn so that was

effectively a downside um so we wanted to show some evolution of this and you know we got to thinking okay maybe it's a five mana five five that dies into five mana. And I remember being proud of myself, very proud of myself for saying, oh, or what if it's double Su Qi and it's an eight eight that gives eight mana? So that's probably actually my favorite

antiquities reference. That's funny. The other thing is, I believe that Su and Qi are both four in other languages. Oh, I didn't know that. Oh, yeah, that's where they're named. A lot of antiquities names, early magic naming,

the designers used to do the naming. This was before there was sort of a creative team. And so a lot of early magic has a lot of in-jokes. That's the way naming used to work. Yep. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about the making of a story. So one of the things I've mentioned is that in some ways we joked that this was kind of like a Universe is Beyond set in the sense that the story was a story.

It was locked. It was what it was. Normally we make a magic set. If things don't work out, we can change the story to make it work. We can change the environment to make it work. But you were trying to tell something that was pretty much a locked story. So talk about the challenges of doing that.

For the most part, it was a lot more opportunity than challenge. We came in being like, the story is what the set is about. This is the big thing. So we got to start by including all these characters and story moments. We had, you know, lists of all the important characters and all the important story moments and all the important emotional beats. We wanted to go along with those story

moments. And everyone who was, you know, who was leading the set in any capacity, the art lead and the writing lead and Ari, the vision lead, myself, we're all very intimately familiar with the story. So in my mind, it went very smoothly to incorporate all the tiny details and yeah, get them in there. Well, I mean, I think the positive

thing about having a known story is you have all these references to use. I think the challenge is it doesn't necessarily neatly fit. Magic needs certain things and let's talk about green, for example. Most of the story

has no green in it. Yep. Yeah, but I think I guess most of those challenges were at the vision level and vision solved them all. So, you know, Rean has Argoff from the third act of the story, which serves a lot.

We also decided the Falaji Mishra's faction could have some green cards, and Rean also fits very well in mechanically with Vulva Ramp and Power Stone themes. So at the end of the day, or, you um so at the end of the day you know or you know at the start of the day in vision we kind of solved here's a whole bunch of green concepts so that by the time it was set design it was really just executing on those um and it went pretty smoothly is there anything that you wanted to capture that you weren't able

to capture or do you think you did pretty much everything you needed to capture you captured pretty much everything we needed to capture yeah um like you know we went in from the start very prepared with all these lists um there were a couple last minute things that only got in flavor text for example uh there's a character who's kind of a comic relief character called rusco who is urza works for him briefly before he becomes Prince. And he's kind of a silly character, so we didn't want to give him a card. But at the end, we were able to put him in flavor text on one of the retro artifacts. And so I found that very charming. Also, one of the last changes I made to the set was to ask for Thanos's nickname from

Ashnod, which is Duck. Ashnod calls Thanos Duck. Mm. To get into a piece of flavor text. And, uh, with that crowning jewel, I got in everything I wanted. Yeah, the other thing is, um, there's a few cards, not a lot, but there's, like, uh, we had to make up a few characters, right? There are at least one character I know that didn't exist that we made, I mean, we made it fit in the story and everything, but,, but the character doesn't appear in the novel. Yeah.

I believe there's two characters like those that were essentially handed off to me by, or I think it was really just one character that was whole cloth created just for the story. And that's what, it's the white, what is her name? Sorry. Meryl. Meryl Shield of Ar What is her name? Sorry. Miro. Miro shield of our guy, right?

Yeah. Miro was actually started just as a we want a legendary soldier commander. And I said, hey, here's this super minor character that we could name it after. But nobody remembers. Lieutenant Charmon, I think. But after I handed it off, Miguel said, oh, actually, I want this new new character so that wasn't any work for us um and then the other character was from the commander decks um and just wanted to be one of the point of view characters uh farid um and other than that it was

basically all just all the legends are things that directly appeared in the book and was us kind of designing top-down towards. One of the things that I know players were very excited, there are a bunch of characters that players have been asking forever. People had wanted a Gix character, people had wanted an Ashnod card, so it was a lot of fun

I know, to make some of those. Yeah, I remember towards the end of a set after we announced a brother's war i saw a thread on reddit of like what what card what characters you want from the story and i looked through it and was very glad to see if you're all represented with the exception of many characters people asked for if it weren't actually in the brother's story and people just didn't know that they were from later in magic's history. So the one other interesting thing, the way the story works is there's a framing device to the story,

which is to modern day, you know, to fairy from modern day needs to go back to learn about the Silex. And so how did you capture that part of the story? Because I know we really wanted to show the Brothers Wars as the Brothers War, but we needed to sort of tie it in. How did you fit that in? Yeah, so we have the two Planeswalkers, Teferi and Saheeli. And other than them, I think there's four cards that tell the present day story. And it was kind of just always planned

that this would be a very small piece of a set. And so for Creative Lead, Miguel handed me just a small handful of story moments, which is, you know, Teferi gets his soul taken out by Kaya, sent backward in time. Saheeli makes the object that goes backward in time. And Teferi gets his, you know, gets lost, gets desynchronized, I think is what the card ended up being called. And so with that being a pretty small thing in the set, it was very easy to incorporate. Yeah, the touch I liked is... So one of the things that we had done, once again, way back in the decks from the very beginning, was this idea that the artifacts were all going to be colorless

because we were trying to be reflective of sort of antiquities. And the cards had color in them. And there are activations and unearthing and prototyping, whatever. But there's only one colored artifact in the whole set. And that's because it's the time machine from the present. In the present, we have colored artifacts,

so that was okay. I like that touch. Yeah, I think of all the challenges that Vision handed off to us, that was probably the bigger one. And I knew it would be a challenge and it's what we signed up for. And I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

Yeah, but having, you know, we just generally balance Magic cards around being of colors. So having all these generic cards pose some challenges. And so we kind of got to thread the line with Prototype and unearth both being mechanics that let us put colored mana costs on them but we still had to be very thoughtful with how we um with how we costed those cards given that they also had a colorless mode and um i'm quite happy with how that turned out in in limited there are a decent number of unearth

cards where you usually want to have the color available but you can also play it a little bit off color if you have access to something that gives you man of any color um or an evolving wilds that lets you you know go get your one mountain to play your scrap work mutt um and then with prototype cards, they let you be... They're just always big robots on the colorless side, so if you're a slow control deck and you open this bomb, you can splash it off color or unsealed. If you just want more high drops,

you'll always have access to a ton of them in your pool. Yeah, it's a neat thing when you're balancing. Sometimes cards have multiple functions, and the question is, might some players use some function but not all functions? And that's a neat thing when you're balancing. Sometimes cards have multiple functions, and the question is, might some players use some function but not all functions? And that's always neat to do. Yeah.

And I particularly enjoy thinking about that for Limited, like when it was always clear to me from the start that we should have slightly less color fixing than most sets because the colorless aspect makes it easier to splash. So if we wanted to be as multicolored as the average set, then we need to have slightly less mana fixing than most sets because the colorless aspect makes it easier to splash. So if we wanted to be as multicolored as the average set, we need to have slightly less

mana fixing. And it was very satisfying for me to see previews, people talking about them and be like, oh, I guess you can't really splash in the set. There isn't quite enough mana fixing. But people were ignoring the fact that colorless cards make it easier to splash, as well as the fact that there's a lot of color fixing on the retro artifact sheet. So it was fun to see people have that reaction and then a week later realize, oh no, actually splashing is a big part of the set and totally something you can do.

Okay, well you mentioned the retro sheet. Let's talk a little bit about making of the retro sheet. Yeah. What were the challenges? So internally in R&D, we refer to that as a bonus sheet. I think Time Spiral had the very first one. And we've used the bonus sheets from time to time.

What's the challenges of making this bonus sheet? Yeah, so first off, I also led Strixhaven and was kind of the engineer architect for the structure of the bonus sheet on that set, the Mystical Archive. So I was able to directly copy my homework from that set and just have the exact same structure here. All colorless cards on the bonus sheet was also a challenge, the set being a little too bomb heavy because of all these additional colorless rares was a big concern. And so with rares and mythics, we put in a lot of thought

to make sure that we're picking cards that, for the most part, aren't too obnoxious and limited. We let a couple of crazy cards through, Wormcoil being the big example, the big groaner of the format. But yeah, so for rares and mythics, we wanted to have a lot of iconic cards, a lot of cards that let you do interesting sideways stuff and limit the number of very powerful limited bombs. I really enjoyed the uncommons we got to use because the uncommons show up at the same rate as any other uncommon.

And they got to be a very meaningful part of the limited environment and have a lot of cute combos there for example self-assembler helps you bring together the three tron creatures um there's a bunch of sacrifice effects like chromatic star and elsewhere flask that enable your sacrifice archetype elsewhere flask works with the mono color cards like corrupt and Corrupt and Flow of Knowledge. So, yeah, I absolutely love these bonus sheets and what they add to Limited. And it had a lot of stuff that we had to tweak and get right, but I think it was totally worth it. Okay, the last question for you,

since I'm almost at my desk here. There's one last mechanic I actually didn't talk about. So I want to talk about MELD. Um, there's one last mechanic I actually didn't talk about. So I want to talk about meld. So, uh, we, the idea of having, uh, the, the three rare melded creatures was, Vision handed that off. But we also gave you common meld cards. Uh, so I want to talk a little bit about what happened to the common meld cards and then the challenges of making the rare meld cards.

Yep. So the common meld cards, I, I'm a huge fan of the Melt mechanic. I actually remember at the time that Eldritch Moon was being made, I was roommates with Ben Hayes, who was on the team for that, who was on the Eldritch Moon design team. And he came home one day and told me about this Melt mechanic

that Kent Nagle wanted to add. And I was immediately like, great, it's my favorite mechanic. I've never seen a single card with Melt and already it's my favorite magic mechanic. So awesome to bring it back here. Common melt, we did some good stuff to make it work. But at the end of the day, it was too complex, along with other stuff in the set going on. It also had a lot of similarity to prototype, where you were taking a small robot and then making it bigger. So it wasn't really adding something unique to the set. And it was a casualty of just wanting to simplify things.

Making of the rare ones, what are the challenges of making... Yeah, the early part of making them went very smoothly i think both both urza and mishra were something we figured out early in vision design hey we're going to they're going to meld with this type of card and on the back they're going to have six abilities and it'll be crazy and we're going to do a titania who melts with a land and she'll be all about lands um so the big idea of them was pretty simple to capture balancing them uh with play design for standard was a big challenge because you're essentially balancing three cards as if they're one card and there's so much going on there um but i'm pretty happy with

where they all ended up i'm also really happy with their potential in commander because all their color combinations of the legendary side of it is very good at searching up the other side. So a lot of people at first thought it'd be disappointing for Commander that you can't have them as if they're partners. But your white-blue Urza is very good at searching out artifacts. Your black-red Mishra is very good at searching out any cards like black does. And especially good if you can put them straight into a graveyard, like Red can sometimes do with Gamble. And Green, of course, is great at searching out lands.

Yeah, I think they ended up... It's kind of funny. I did an article where I showed our first take at Urza, which was, I mean, a lot changed. But the basic concept of the first Urza was not really far away from where Urza ended up thematically. I mean, you guys made infinite small changes and small, you know, but...

And I remember you coming up with the Mishra, which was great. I remember us trying to come up with what the backside of Mishra did after it melted, and you were just like, yeah, all these cards, they're not that exciting. And we're like, okay, well, what's your idea, Mark?

And then you're like, it has six abilities, just like Urza. And we're like, great. You do have a good idea, Mark. Well done. There's something fun about one choose three, four choose two. How about six choose three? Yep. Well, that's harder to cycle.

So anyway, we are almost out of time here. Any final thoughts on the making of The Brothers War? Any final... No, I think I covered everything I wanted to discuss. It was a great pleasure. It's a story that I've been... was very passionate about.

I read the story when I was a kid and I played Magic with my older brother, so it was a huge honor to get to work on the set. Well, I think you did an amazing job, Yanni. The set came out wonderful. I've been hearing nothing but just raves from the limited to all the individual cars and constructed, so good job, Yanni.

Thank you. To everybody else, I'm at my desk, so we all know what that means. Instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. So I want to thank Yanni for being with us. Yeah, thanks for having me. And I'll see all of you guys next time.

Bye-bye.