Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #132 - Story Through Design

Episode Date: June 20, 2014

Mark talks about how we tell stories through design.

I'm pulling out of my driveway. You know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so last time I talked about the story of the story. So I explained how, through the years, we've found different ways to tell the magic story. So today is kind of part two. Today I'm going to talk about how we've told the story through the design, because I'm in charge of design. And so clearly the pictures and the names and the flavor text are all very, very good vehicles for us communicating some sense of story and flavor. But I'm not in charge of any of those things. And so the thing that I've always been focused on is, how can the game itself tell the story? The gameplay tell the story?

Because one of the things, so let me walk you through some of the history, and you'll see that it evolves over time. So in the beginning, there was Alpha. So the first set that I worked on was Tempest. alpha. So, the first set that I worked on was Tempest. The best way to explain this is, the people that made the sets in the early days were also the ones that did their own

flavor. And so, there were flavors in the sets. I talked last time about how antiquity is clear. There's a story behind the scenes. But one of the things that really didn't happen in the early days was the gameplay wasn't particularly designed to tell the story. There were a lot of top-down cards made, meaning cards that had a particular flavor.

But there was never any sense of the overall gameplay communicating something in the early days. So what would happen is just people would come up with mechanics and then they would try to make sense flavor-wise. Now, there's a little bit of, oh, I want this flavor, and so I'll have this mechanic. But the gameplay itself never really tried to tell the story in the early days. So let's get to Tempest. That's my first set.

So Tempest was the first set that I can think of where we tried to make a connection between mechanics and story, but the way we did it was we made the mechanics. Once the mechanics were known, I then crafted the story to include them. So, for example, the slivers. If you know your Tempest storyline, the slivers play into the storyline. The Weatherlight crew has to fight the Slivers. And, in fact, defeating the Slivers has to do with them understanding how Slivers work. Which is that they have to get them that by separating them, they

depower them because they need to be near each other for them to share information on how to do things. And so one of the key things was by separating them from each other, they were able to defeat them. And so clearly, for the first time at least, the story is acknowledging the mechanic. But, that was very...

The mechanics came first, we made the mechanics, and then I just found ways to work within the story of the mechanics. Which is very, very different than nowadays, which we'll get to in a sec. But, it was really the first time I could think of where we were actually trying to make sure that the story that was trying to be told interconnected with the mechanics. We, we wanted that connection. Um, okay.

So, after Tempest, uh, came Urza Saga. Well, like I said, uh, I was very involved in Tempest. I was not that involved in Urza's Saga story. And so Urza's Saga definitely retreated a bit. In fact, it got even worse. Urza's Saga, we decided to make an enchantment block, and the story wanted to talk about artifacts. And so there's this huge disconnect.

Like, I joke about how it was called the Artifact Saga when the theme of the block was enchantment. So that wasn't exactly things lining up. So, after Urza's saga, we had Mercadian Masks, we had Invasion, and those sets were definitely, there was a story going on, but there wasn't,

part of it was, there was a disconnect between R&D and the story people at that point, but we didn't quite know what the story... The story was being done independently of the mechanics. And so we were always trying at the end to sort of make them fit. But it wasn't like they were being done together.

They were being done independently. And what that meant is there was a lot of disconnect a lot of time. You know, I mean, I think like when we did Mercadian Masks, we knew we were in Mercadia. And so the idea of the Spell shapers was definitely the sense of a marketplace and people selling things. And that flavor was there. But it was only like each of us started from Market City and went our own way. And there wasn't a lot of connections between them.

The other thing that was very funny is, so Orm, who's the Samite healer, who's the healer of the group, when we made her, she was supposed to be a pretty minor character. Also, by the way, for those who don't know, Orm originally was O-R-A-M, which was Morrow backwards, and we decided that it was hard to pronounce, so we changed it to O-R-I-M. She was actually not meant to be a very major character, but

then, during the Mercadian Math story, they needed a Weatherlight crew member, yeah, a Weatherlight crew member to fall in love with the what was his name? The one who led the rebels. He's a famous

legendary card which is slipping my mind. And you guys are all screaming it. I always imagine, by the way, when I'm trying to remember a card and I can't remember it, that everybody listening is just screaming the name. Chomano. That's his name. Everyone's just screaming like, Chomano! Chomano! You know, Orm and Chomano, I believe, had a thing. So Orm actually

ended up playing a much bigger role than she. In our mind, when we had filled out the Weatherlight, we definitely archetypally thought of it like Star Trek. And we're like, okay, what kind of characters do we need? And we knew we needed the engineer that was Hannah. And we needed security that was Tongarth. And we needed

So we knew we needed a doctor. We needed somebody. I'm like, okay, a Samite healer makes a lot of sense for a doctor. And so we had her on the ship. Like I said, she was meant to be a smaller role character. But ended up being a bigger role in Mercadian Masks. Anyway, during those time period, we definitely were

doing our thing. Like Invasion, for example, we decided to do this multicolor block. I don't think the story people were even aware we were doing multicolor or played into multicolor in any way. So, I mean, it definitely, I mean, we, Apocalypse, we ended up

doing this enemy color thing and it was a big finale and so there was a fight, so maybe enemies were fighting, I don't know. You've got to rationalize it, but it wasn't really well planned out. Then comes Odyssey and Onslaught, which if you have any idea of, so,

clearly, when we were doing Odyssey, I had this brilliant idea of, you have to see me, brilliant in quotes, of changing up our creature types. And we followed that up with Onslaught, which cared all about creature types. And creatively, it was set in the same world.

Yes, the Odyssey world and the Onslaught world were the same continent of Otaria. And the two blocks had nothing to do with each other. Even the creature types didn't have anything to do with each other. It's like all of a sudden, on this side of thearia, and the two blocks had nothing to do with each other. Even the creature types didn't have anything to do with each other. It's like, all of a sudden, on this side of the island, there's merfolk and goblins, and or there wasn't merfolk, but there were goblins and elves and such. Anyway, so we finally will get to Mirrodin. So Mirrodin was the first time.

So what happened was, there was a big change-up on the creative team between Onslaught and Mirrodin was the first time. So what happened was there was a big change-up on the creative team between Onslaught and Mirrodin. Technically, I guess it was between Odyssey and Onslaught, but a lot of Onslaught was the team finishing off the story that had begun by the team before them. And Mirrodin was the first chance for this new creative team, led by Brady Darmuth, to really sort of do their thing. And so the idea of Mirrodin was, I'd worked with Tyler Bielman, who at the time was in charge of the creative team, although Brady was the creative director. Tyler was kind of the manager of the creative team. And we had come up with

an idea. We wanted to do an artifact block. We knew that. And we said, okay, well, let's make a world that makes sense. So it's not just like, hey, after the fact, here's something. And so we came up with the idea of this mechanical world, a metal world, where things, for some reason, there were a lot of metallic components to it. Anyway, so the creative team really created Mirrodin. That's the first, when I think of kind of modern world building that we do,

kind of what is now our bread and butter that we do awesomely, that was the first really chance of the creative team doing that. I mean, there are some other worlds that have been made. Obviously, Wrath had some energy put into it. Mercadia had some energy put into it. So it's not that we hadn't done worlds per se, but this is kind of the push of the

modern day world building. And so Brady and his team crafted a metal world, a world in which our story could take place. And one of the things that happened was we actually talked with... So the creative team, one of the things about the change of the creative team... One of the things about the change over the creative team was I had known Brady for a long time. He had been an editor before he got on the creative team. And I had

a good rapport with Brady. And I knew most of the people on the creative team. And as we had restarted a new team, the bonds were repaired and R&D was, once again working very closely with the creative team and so what happened was

the what happened was let me see if I get the story right so we they were doing concepting while we were building and early on Tyler and I had come up with some different ideas. Originally, by the way, I mentioned this in my column, that we were going to do a, we had an idea

for a three-block story in which the first block was mirrored in, and it was supposed to be this world where the main character was experimenting and trapping people and then making them fight, and the second world was going to be an underground prison world in which also there were pit fights and stuff. And then you would learn that in the third world, it was the leader of the first world versus the leader of the second world, and each one of them had brought the forces

that they discovered through their means to have this big battle in the third thing. Anyway, that was our idea. Hold on one second. Got to lower my mirror. Anyway, that was our idea. Hold on one second. Gotta lower my mirror. Sorry, I had a... My mirror was pushed in and I realized I needed to be able to see.

Okay, so Mirrodin was definitely the first time in which there was some talk back and forth between trying to have some components of what was going on. But still, I mean, mostly we wanted the flavor of there's lots of artifacts and you care about artifacts

and wanted a world in which the caring about artifacts tied into what the world was oh and what happened was we originally pitched this different kind of metal world and then Brady was the one that came up with the idea of well what if these things have been brought there and now we flash forward a hundred years

or something, in which the new generations as they're born start having metal be part of them, and that the creatures don't even remember where they came from originally at this point. That, you know, the ones that were actually plucked from other worlds had died off, and that the world has slowly started changing them and weaving metal into them, so that everything, that the artifact-ness

was a biology of the plane. And so, Mirren in my mind definitely for the first time had that sort of flowing in, in the sense of I want you to care about artifacts, and I want you to care about, so that as you play the game, there's some sense of that.

So follow that with Mercadian Masks, not Mercadian Masks, with Champions of Gamagawa, and the idea of that was to do a top-down world in which we'd start with, essentially the story would come first, and then we'd do mechanics to it. So the problem we found was that story is much, much more flexible than mechanics. And so if you look at Champions of Kamigawa, we did do the story first. The idea of this war between the spirit plane and the mortal plane, and spirits mattered, and there was, you know, all that was woven into it. There were samurai, there were ninjas, come on, betrayers, there were the sneak people, I think binaga they're called.

And so what happened is that there was this neat thing that was happening where they had designed something and we could make things to match. The problem we found was that mechanics are pretty limiting. So you want to do samurai? Okay, we can make a samurai mechanic, but then every samurai just has the samurai mechanic, and every snake has the snake mechanic, and it was a little ham-fisted in that the way to paint by numbers with mechanics made it such that it was just very limiting. It was a bit repetitive, and worst of all, it led to gameplay that just, there was a lot of the same style of gameplay to it.

And that we weren't, you know, when we came in after the fact to try to match stuff, you know, we were very limited in how we could do things. The other problem is, the way mechanics work is, the first mechanic you put in the set, you have all the room in the world. You can do whatever you need to do is the first mechanic you put in the set you have all the room in the world you can do whatever you need to do with the first mechanic the second mechanic has to stay out of the way of the first mechanic so you're a little more eliminated well by the time you get to the last mechanic you just got to fit it where it fits and so the problem with doing story

first is that you can choose one element of story to match and do a pretty good job but eventually what starts happening is you start not having the ability to get things in. And so to make them fit, you end up making things very parasitic. What parasitic means is that they make sense here, but they don't make sense in larger magic. For example, Samurai Matters, cards that care about samurai. Well, we'd never ever done samurai in magic before.

This card cared about samurai. Okay, we'd never ever done samurai and magic before. This card cared about samurai. Okay, well, these cards are only good here. Splice into Arcane. Well, we had some neat stuff doing Splice into Arcane, but Arcane magic didn't exist anymore but here. So Splice was limited to just here. Even Spirits Mattering, at least Magic had had some spirits before,

but it turns out we hadn't had a lot of spirits. And so Spirit Mattering, and we hadn't had very many good spirits. And so, yeah, it tied into the past a little, but not in a way that had a big impact. Most of the good spirits were in this block. Okay, so we move on from Champions Kamigawa to after Champions was Ravnica. Okay, so now, my friends, we started getting to what I consider to be the start of the modern era of storytelling and design.

So what happened there was, the whole design started with me wanting to do, it was a gold block, and I liked the idea of playing up two-color pairs because the previous gold block, Invasion, had idea of playing up two-color pairs because the previous gold block, Invasion, had been all about play as many colors as you could. So what happened was I had

gone to Brady, and I said to him, okay, Brady, here's what we're going to do. The focus is going to be on two-color pairs, and we're going to focus on ally and enemy equally. That all the two-color pairs are going to be treated the same. And then Brady came back with the awesome idea of the guild. What if we have ten guilds? It was a city.

We decided it was going to be... Actually, I don't know. I think Brady decided it was going to be a city, because Brady decided, let's have ten factions. Oh, we could do guilds. Oh, that would make sense in the city. And I think Brady came sense in the city. And I think Brady came back with the city.

And then, once Brady came up with the idea of the guilds, I said, I love it. Let's run with it. And I decided to make the guilds the cornerstone of the block plan. That we're going to play with guilds. Okay. So, what happened was, and that's where I realized that if we were going to build the wrong guilds, I came up with the 4-3-3 model where the first set only had four guilds in it, which at the time, by the way, was really radical because how could you not have all the combinations in it? What do you mean only four two-color combinations are in the set?

What about the other six-color two combinations? And it was very radical at the time, but part of what I was trying to do was I wanted the design to play up the flavor. And if you wanted the guilds to matter, then I needed to give guilds the time to focus. And it was clearly, in my mind, the right call. But it was an example of the reason it was the right call was I wanted mechanics to play up the flavor. I wanted the focus to be on the guilds. In order to do that, I couldn't give you all the guilds. If each set had all 10 guilds, then it isn't about the guilds. You know, whereas if I say it's four, then three, then three, then this set's about these four guilds and there's focus and it's loud and mechanically you can tell what it is and then I said not only is it about this guild

but we're going to figure out the flavors of the guild and we're going to match the guild flavor in the mechanics meaning we had the Golgari, that's black and green what are the Golgari going to do? we had to figure that out and once we realized they had to figure that out.

And once we realized they had to focus on the graveyard, we're like, okay, we're going to give them a graveyard mechanic and we're going to, you know, one of the things that Ravnica did for the first time is it said, okay, as you play, you are going to learn about what the guilds mean and represent. And not just through the flavor text

and the art and the name, but the actual mechanics, the gameplay. Oh, well the Azorius tie things up, and the Golgari care about the graveyard, and the Boros are aggressive and work together. That each one of them sort of showed you the

essence of what they were. And that the thing to me that I love from a game design perspective is I want you when you play the game to walk away knowing more about the story and the environment than you knew before you played.

That playing isn't an adjunct to the flavor, it's part of the flavor. And that I feel like Mirrodin was the first set where we constantly said, okay, let's try to mix them together, but Ravnica was the first set where the gameplay and the story just wove so closely

that you learned things about the guilds by playing them. That the act of playing the game was one of the most instrumental ways of learning about what the guilds were and what they represented. Okay. So Ravnica was followed up by Lorwyn.

So Lorwyn block, we had an entire we came up with an idea for structure. We wanted to do a four block structure. I wanted to mirror them with two mini blocks. And so we sat down with Brady and his team and said, okay, how do we do this? And the creative team said, okay,

if we're going to do them, we want to contrast them. And and said, okay, how do we do this? And the creative team said, okay, if we're going to do them, we want to contrast them. And I said, okay, I like that idea. So they said, okay, what if we do light world, dark world, and the things transition over? And so we figured out, and then the thing I was playing around with mechanically was I like the idea of

having tribes in the first set, and a mechanic in the second set that you cared about. So it ended up being hybrid. So the idea was, the first set and a mechanic in the second set that you cared about. I wanted, so it ended up being hybrid. So the idea was, the first set cared about creature type and the second set cared about color. But you know what? The first set had cards that were of color

and the second set had the creature types that you cared about in the first set. Now that would change a little bit. Even Titan ended up to move farther away. The plan originally was that when we shifted over, we would shift colors of, so like all of the creature types would shift colors

so one would stay the same, but one would shift. So elves, for example, were originally, in Lorwyn, were black-green, and then they ended up being white-green when you shifted to Shadowmoor. The goblins, I think,

were black-red, and they shifted to red-green. And the idea was the base color stayed the same, but we shifted so that part of moving was, now you had new decks that were available to you, so that the new block would give you new tools. Regifex, by the way, I probably needed to keep them in the same colors, but

anyway, lessons learned. But anyway, the important part of this was that we sat down and we figured out what creature types were going to be in this world by figuring out what the world was. It wasn't like we just picked some creature types that we wanted and said, okay, creative, make this make sense. No, we sat down with them and it was a careful deliberation between what do we need, and what happened was we started picking a few things we needed, and as the world started to flesh itself out,

you know, creators said, well, what if we do these? That started figuring out where things went. And it was a very collaborative process to figure that out. And Lorewyn very much tried to communicate what was going on through the gameplay itself. That, you know, obviously the creatures matter very much in the first set. We got to Shattermore. We played up the fact that it shifted, you know.

We wanted the gameplay for you to get a sense of here are these things and now watch them change. And that was important. So Loreland was followed by Time Spiral. So Time Spiral, we wanted to, it started with me wanting to do some time-flavored mechanics, and then Brady and team figuring out that they needed to revamp the Planeswalkers. And so we were going to do a major story about this accident, and then it wove time into it. And then we ended up doing this time travel flavor where things in the past got washed in.

So as nostalgia came up, we interwove it with the time travel stuff. So it definitely, there was this idea of everything breaking apart, of this temporal disaster. And now, like I said, it's a little mishmashy in that I don't know if we conveyed the story as well as we could have through the mechanics.

We definitely conveyed the idea of time breaking down and time mattering and the past slipping in, some level of the future slipping in. But I mean, it definitely was one where we communicated. So after that was Lorwyn. And Lorwyn was another one where it was a gold set. Bill, who was the lead designer, really wanted to stress three-color play. And the creative team said, OK, let's really play three-color play. How about a world in which it's chopped in five, of which

each shard of the world is only three-color? And so we played around with that to figure out what it meant. And a lot of our design came from the creative team made five worlds, and then we went back and said, okay, oh, Esper is this thing, and we, for example, got the whole idea of the artifact thing from understanding what Esper was. Oh, these are people that are constantly trying to improve themselves to the point in which they're part artificial now. Like, awesome, they're all artifact creatures,

because they've made so many changes that they have an artifact component to them. And that was the perfect thing, where the gameplay came from matching the story. So, after Shards of Alara, after Shards of Alara was Zendikar. So Zendikar was the next, probably, well, I have to take it back. Scars of Mirrodin was probably the next evolution. In fact, Scars of Mirrodin is where I start the next Age of Design.

What happened in Zendikar was I wanted to do a land matter set. We figured that out. We figured outar was I wanted to do a land matter set. We figured that out. We figured out the mechanics we wanted to do for land. Creative said, okay, if you want land to matter, here's an idea, Adventure World. We then took the idea of Adventure World, and then the second half of design, we built into Adventure World. So traps and quests and allies were all designed to be part of Adventure World. That we left ourselves some mechanical space. So we designed some stuff that matched lands.

The creative team made a world that made sense of that. We then used the second half of our design to match the world the creative had made to match us. And this idea of a back and forth is a theme that becomes much more popular as you look at how design happened. becomes much more popular as you look at how design happened. Okay, so, next, after, let's see, after, it's the end of the car, it's the end of the Myrden. Okay, the end of the Myrden, in my mind, is the next step up.

It's the next age, by the way. It's the beginning of the fifth age, which was, we knew that we were going to have, I mean, when the dust settled, we understood we were going to have a war between the Phyrexians and the Myrians. And so I said, okay, I'm setting up a set, and my entire block structure was set into, I'm going to create this conflict. And the idea was, in the first set, we figured out what was the smallest percentage we could have of the Phyrexians, so that you felt their presence, but most of it felt mirrored. And then, the middle set, we went halfway, halfway.

So, clearly, there's progression. The Phyrexians are gaining ground. Now we have a war. And then the third set was, here's the outcome of the war. And so, one of the things I was very proud about Scars of Mirrodin is, at every level, as you played that block, you were part of that battle. You were part of the battle for Mirrodin. Not only whether you were on the Phyrexian side or the Mirrodin side, but clearly the gameplay there, and

one of the things I tried really, really hard to do was, I wanted to give the Phyrexians a feel. I wanted you to be afraid of the Phyrexians. I probably succeeded a little too well. But the reasons I played with them, in fact, and the reason I did proliferate, and a lot of mechanics we chose for them was, I wanted

them to do this scary thing that you didn't know quite how to answer. And the fact that I didn't let you remove poison was part of it. I needed them to be intimidating and scary and feel invasive. And the funny thing is, I think I succeeded.

I think that I succeeded almost too well, where people were kind of freaked out by the Phyrexians, and that I think a lot of the reaction to Infect was just this idea of, I feel kind of helpless. What can I do? I can't remove them, you know. And that was the feeling I was trying to create, but I definitely made a lot of strong emotions with the Frexians. And the thing that's great is I love that it was a battle and a war and that you were part of that.

So Scars of Miriam was followed by Innistrad. So Innistrad was a similar thing. And then this is, to me, part of Fifth Age of Design, is the idea of what's the emotion? I built my mechanics so you playing the mechanics make you feel the emotion we want you to feel. Um, Innishrod, uh, was about horror. That I wanted you to feel dread. I wanted you to feel suspense. I wanted you to feel like you felt when you watched a horror movie. I needed you to have that kind of, um, the, the hesitance, the, I needed you to be concerned.

And so one of the things that if you look at, I did a lot of things built into the Innistrad design to create that sense of tension. A lot of the double-faced cards with the idea of, you know,

like you would get out of the werewolf and like you knew the bad side was coming, you knew the werewolf was coming and You knew the werewolf was coming. And you were trying desperately to stop it, but you were always nervous because you knew at any moment this thing could happen.

And that Morbid was put on the set because we wanted death to matter. That when things died, that all of a sudden you were worried. That there was a lot of stuff in the set to make you worry. That when things happen, you were kind of suspenseful. That I wanted the gameplay to reinforce that.

Also, I wanted the gameplay to say, here are our monsters. I want our monsters to feel like the monsters. The zombies feel like zombies. The werewolves feel like werewolves. The vampires feel like vampires. That was really important. Now, that followed by Return to Ravnica.

Return to Ravnica, we had a lot on our plate, and we were trying to recreate what we had done in Ravnica. Return to Ravnica, we had a lot on our plate and we were trying to recreate what we had done in Ravnica. And Ravnica had done a pretty good sense of the gameplay representing what the guilds were. I will admit, I'm a little...

I didn't... When the dust settles, when I look back at Ravnica, I feel like I didn't next level it. And what that means is I like when we go back somewhere, or to be fair, when we revisit a theme, it doesn't necessarily need to be revisit a place,

but when we revisit a theme, I want us adding something that is over and above what we had done the time before. That we can use our design skills and do something that we hadn't done before. And we did mix it up with the block plan, and that was different in a lot of ways. But I feel like we didn't really next-level Return to Ravnica.

It's one of my regrets in that. I think we did the guilds very well. I think we executed wonderfully on the guilds. But I feel like we didn't offer you, other than the block plan, something in the core of the design that's a little bit different. We sprinkled a little bit of city flavor,

but anyway, it's one of my regrets that I feel like of the fifth age design, it's one of the sets that had the most fourth ageness to it. Luckily it was Ravnica, and Ravnica, of any fourth age design that we had done, it was the one that had the most flavor built into the design, so

maybe in some ways Ravnica was a precursor to Fifth Age. So I guess if any set was going to be that. The final block that we worked on, that you guys know about, I've worked on other sets, was the Theros block. And the Theros block was very much me saying,

okay, what does Greek mythology mean to modern sensibilities? And one of the people people noticed, by the way, when I made Theros is, I didn't match actual Greek mythology. I matched modern sensibilities through pop culture. Meaning, there in fact was a thread on Reddit of, did I have all my understanding of Greek mythology from Hercules, the Disney movie?

And the answer was, in some way, the Hercules, the Disney movie. And the answer was, in some way, the Hercules, the Disney movie is what I was talking about, which is, you know, when you take Clash of the Titans, or you take Xena and Hercules, or take modern interpretations, pop culture interpretations of Greek mythology, Greek mythology in the day was about the sensibilities of the actual Greeks. Greek mythology, modern,

has to do with how we, in our society, interpret the Greeks. And so one of the big things that came out of the actual Greeks. Greek mythology, modern, has to do with how we, in our society, interpret the Greeks. And so one of the big things that came out of the Greek is the idea of the hero's journey. And what happened over time was, back in the day, the heroes were all demigods

and the heroes themselves were not that far removed from the gods. But in modern day, the hero's journey, which we talk about Joseph Campbell and stuff, it represents the everyman,

that anybody could be the hero. And so what happened was, I was playing in that style. I was doing the hero's journey, which is inspired by Greek mythology, but is a modern take on it. It's a modern sort of, everyman could be the hero, not just, well, you have to already be, you know, the heroes in Greek mythology

were kings and demigods, people that were already born into places of something special. You weren't an ordinary person who became something special. But now, in our modern sensibilities, that you know, Luke Skywalker, well, Luke Skywalker, he actually was born royalty, but the idea

in a lot of our storytelling was that somebody who can feel as though they're the everyday person could discover that there's something more than that. And so I was trying to play into the idea of the sense of building up. And so if you notice in Theros, the design is all about building up. Are you a hero that is slowly through adventures going to start from a lowly hero and become a mighty hero through the heroic mechanic?

Are you a monster that's going to go out and as you get experience, use monstrous and become a big giant monster? Are you a god that's going to get followers and get devotion and try to get to the point where your true god powers come to form? All of Theros had this theory of building up.

And why I wanted to build up was I was trying to get a sense of accomplishment. I wanted you to feel this thrill of making something that to me was a big part of the modern sensibility of Greek mythology. That there was a quest that you went on and you became something. That I wanted you, the player, to build something

and make it. And even, the funny thing is, and now I can talk about Journey to Nyx, I didn't talk about this when I talked about Theros, was another component was having enchantments mean something, and that the enchantments for us represented the touch of the gods.

And so there was this thing I saved to the final set that there's a different way to build, that says collect these things, get a lot of these enchantments, you know, go the way of the gods and collect the gods' things, and then there's ways for that to pay off in a different way. That there's a way to build up by having lots

of enchantments, which is a very different way to do it. Anyway, I'm now parking in the parking spot, and um, so hopefully today was, I was trying to demonstrate how... Last time I was talking about how we tell the story through the sets. Today I'm trying to

say that we're going a step farther. That magic isn't just the titles and the art and the flavor text. That's important. And the creative team works really, really hard to have those convey as much story as possible. But we don't stop there. Gameplay is as important as anything else in being able for you to understand

what's going on. And part of what I try to do and my team has tried to do is make each experience, each world, something in which you, through the gameplay, are living and experiencing the world you're in and you are learning something about the story we're trying to convey. Anyway, hopefully that is coming

through. I'm very proud of how we've done this and around the corner I get to do it again. Um, by the time I talked about this, I assume I've talked about, I won't mention if I name it because I'm not 100%, but I assume I'll talk about the next year's block. Uh, and if you want to talk about top-down design, reinforcing flavor, that, that block's going to come through in spades. So anyway, I love talking about magic design and magic story, but even more, I like making magic.

So it's time for me to go. Talk to you guys next time.