Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #163 - Onslaught, Part 1

Episode Date: October 3, 2014

Mark starts a multi-part series on the design of Onslaught.

I'm put on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, it's time for another design story, another series on design. So what I've been doing now is I will pick a block and then I will do the design stories for each block in a row. So I'm now going to start talking about onslaught block. So today I will begin talking about the set onslaught itself. And the next time I do a design series, it'll be on legions. and the one after that will be on Skirt. They won't all be in a row, but just as I did last time with, what did I do last time? I did the Zendikar last time. So, okay, so now let's talk all about the Onslaught. The Onslaught block has an interesting story, and it's not

something I've actually talked a lot about. In some ways, the Onslaught Block. The Onslaught Block has an interesting story, and it's not something I've actually talked a lot about. In some ways, the Onslaught Block is a little bit of a precursor to me becoming head designer, but before I became head designer. So let me explain. So Onslaught Block came out in 2002. It was part of, obviously, the Onslaught Block. Manny, Moe, and Jack were the codenames, Manny being Onslaught. Those are the pep boys. I've talked about this many times before. Anyway,

the set had 350 cards, 110 commons, 110 uncommons, 110 rares, 20 basic lands. This is back in a time when mythic rares didn't exist yet. And the sheets all had 110 cards. So one of the things about printing is the size of the card sheets is

varied over the life of Magic. Back then, the sets were 110. They're now 121, for those that care. Okay. So the set was led by Mike Elliott, and the other person on the team was Mike Donais, and then the lead developer was Randy Buehler. So let me talk a little bit about Mike Elliott and Mike Donais. So Mike Elliott started working at Wizards.

I talked about him in my second wave podcast. He started working at Wizards in January of 1996, shortly after I and Bill Rose and William Jockish started. He was definitely a big, big part of the second wave. In fact, Mike, the only person to lead more designs than Mike Elliott is me. Mike has led a whole mess of designs and, uh, Mike, Mike is a very, very talented designer. Um, and if you go and look at the game stores, you will find lots of games designed by him.

Um, he has since leaving wizards has become, I mean, he was prolific at wizards, but even more prolific outside of wizards. Uh, and he, he's been freelancing and doing work for lots of different companies. So the thing about Mike that you remember is that Mike is super talented, but Mike definitely, much like myself, is a little stubborn. And he and I, because we're two stubborn people, we would bat heads a lot. And that was definitely, there was a period of time where he and I were doing most of the lead designs. And so there was a little bit of a rivalry.

I mean, a healthy rivalry, but... Okay, Mike Donais is, for a long time, he was a judge. In fact, the story about Mike Donais is, I tried, we were at one of the Origins, it's a game convention put on by the people who

I'm blanking on their name it's a organization that runs gaming stuff, why am I blanking on their name Gamma, it's Gamma's convention and at it one year we were running the US Nationals and Bill Rose was going to be there and he said to me, is there anybody you think would be a good fit for R&D?

Let's set up some interviews. I said, fine. I set up three interviews. One was with Brian Weissman, one was with Randy Buehler, and one was with Mike Donais. And the only person to show up for the interview was Randy Buehler,

who obviously would later get hired by Wizards. Mike Donais, because he was head judging the U.S. Nationals, wasn't able to get away. And so I managed to get Mike an interview when I when I Mike came out to visit his brother who worked at Wizards at the time and I set up an interview at my house

between him and Bill anyway, Mike Darnay was for a long time was a developer he would later go on to work for Dungeon Dragons for a while and then he left the company and was working some other places Mike did not do tons of design, this might have been the only design

team that Mike was on, I mean maybe he was on one other but, and the design team was small, it was just Elliot and Dornay it was a two person design team so, let me get, or I get involved in this story, so what had happened was as of Ravnica,

sorry, in Kamigawa, as of, what's the middle set in Kamigawa? Betrayers of Kamigawa. In the middle of that is when I officially became head designer. So Onslaught is back about a year and a half. So before Chimpa Kamigawa, it was Mirrodin Black.

Before Mirrodin Black, it was Onslaught Black. And so one of the things I think was going on, sort of looking back with 2020 Vision the things I think was going on, I mean, sort of looking back with 2020 Vision, was I think Bill was trying to groom me, because Bill at the time was head designer, but he was also the VP of R&D.

And so for a while, Bill was trying to do both, and it was clear it was just too much work for him. And so I think Bill was trying to groom me to become head designer. So what happened was, the team had been working on some stuff, and it was just, there were interesting individual mechanics, but the set as a whole wasn't really clicking. And so Bill came to me and said, can you take a look at this set?

And so I did, and he said, what do you think? And I gave him the note that I've sort of just explained, which was, I think there were neat things going on but they weren't it wasn't really coalescing and that some of the mechanics that had been used I thought didn't play as well in the volume they were being used at so what I said to Bill is I go you know

in the set there was these one of the little mini mechanics Mike had put in the set was these creatures that could change their own creature type. That you spent one mana and changed the creature type. And I said, you know what, for a long time I've been thinking that we should be doing a tribal-themed

block. And the argument I made to Bill is I said, look, you know, whenever people try to do something when it's bad but they try really hard, there's a sign there's something good there. Because, for example, people were building goblin decks, or merfolk decks, they were building tribal

decks, and they were horrible, because there just wasn't the tools to do it. But they were still trying. The same argument I made with poison, where people make poison decks, and they were horrible, but people kept doing it. And what that says to me, when people are constantly trying to take something that just doesn't work, and is kind of low power level, but they won't

give up on it, it says, you know, there's something fun here. Like, people are fighting against, you know, the decks are telling them, don't do this, but they just keep trying to do it. And I said, you know, I think tribal would be a fun theme. And Mike had had this thing of creatures that changed the tribe, but there wasn't a lot in the set that really cared about it. You know, it had

these things that cared a little bit. And so, it was a theme that was in Mike's set at a really low level. And I said, you know what? Let's say it was at a level one in the set. I go, let's go to 10. Let's ramp it up. And so I gave an example.

So Bill's like, well, what do you mean? So I went back and I redid some of the comments. I said, okay, imagine this. It's like common cards were cared about goblins and cared about elves and, you know, just the core stapled races that we cared about. They were just common cards that said, you want to have this card. You know, this creature type.

Oh, this is good with goblins. Well, you better get some goblins. And Bill liked the idea and I talked with Mike and Mike took a little convincing but Mike eventually got on board. And so then we started adding a tribal theme, which, like I said, it was kind of there. It was there at a very, very low level.

Really, my influence was to take it from a 1 to a 10. In fact, I don't even know if it ever got to a 10. I was trying to get it to a 10. I think it got to, like, an 8, you know. I kept trying to up the amount of tribal in it. Like, they would do a little bit of, no, we can do more, and they'd do a little bit, no no we can do more oh the other thing that happened by the way, and this one was my fault

was the previous year had been the Odyssey block and I on a whim, just decided it would be fun if we just tried some different creature types so I didn't have goblins and I didn't have elves I sort of took all the staples and I didn't have goblins and I didn't have elves and I, you know, I sort of took all the staples

and I didn't use them. Now, now we plan ahead. Now we know what blocks we're doing. But the problem we had is Odyssey had this theme and then Onslaught had this creature tribal theme and we hadn't really set it up.

And so one of the problems we would end up with a block was because we didn't have enough stuff before it because there were no goblins and no elves other than the core set. We had this what we call block monster problem where all the cards that made the deck really good were all from the same block. So when rotation happened, it didn't knock things out of it.

Anyway, something we've learned and we've gotten much better at is one of the things we'll do now is when we're building a block, we know what our themes of the upcoming block are, so we make sure that the set, you know, the block before the block has some cards that play into the theme, so when the set comes out, it's very strong, but that things will change upon rotation, so that

the new set after that has some stuff that you can focus on, and it's not the same, you don't want the same deck being standard for the entire run of standard. You want some ebb and flow. And so part of that is making sure that all the cool things that go in any one deck aren't from the same block. You want kind of a mix.

So anyway, I managed to convince Mike that we should up the amount of tribal in it. Okay. Meanwhile, the rules team was trying to solve two cards. One was camouflage and the other was illusionary mask. Both these cards are from Alpha.

And both of them make you take a card and put it face down and then play around with the fact that you don't know what the card is. And, I mean, Alpha has a lot of really neat cool cards Richard definitely where Richard thrives is just finding neat space to play in the area that Alpha had the most problem is Richard didn't always worry

about the rules like he's like well the rules will figure it out and he would just make cool cards and there were a bunch of cards from Alpha that were like how does this work you know and Camouflage and Illusionary Mask were one of those. So the rules team, at the time, it worked a little differently than that, but at the time there was like a set group that met, I think like once a week, of people that were all rule officials, like the rule manager and a bunch of people,

and they would meet and they would have issues every week and they would have these meetings. So one of the things on their agenda was solving camouflage and illusionary masks. So they finally came up with an idea, and their solution was, okay, what we need to do is, we need to define what a face-down card is. We just need to define it. And if it's defined, then when someone gets turned face-down, okay, well, while it's face-down, it's this thing.

And if you have the way to turn it back up, then it'll turn back into the thing it normally is. And while they were figuring this out, they realized they go, oh, well, if face down cards have a value, maybe there's something neat you could do where you could play cards face down and then have the ability to turn them up, and they

would turn into whatever they are. So, the rules team, I think, went to Mike, because Mike was leading the set, and said, we into whatever they are. So the rules team, I think, went to Mike, because Mike was leading the set, and said, we have a neat idea. The neat idea is he has a mechanic, and you can play cards face down, and then for a certain cost, you can play them face up,

and they become what they are. And Mike was like, eh. So then they went to Bill, and they said to Bill, we have a neat idea for a mechanic. Here's what you do. You play things face down, and then you can dispense a man and turn it face up. And Bill was like, eh. And so they came to me, and they said, Mark, here's what you do. You play it face down, and you dispense a man, and

you turn it face up. And I went, ooh, that sounds awesome. I was very excited. And I knew that both Mike and Bill had just not been really cool to the idea at first blush. And part of it was, I said, okay, what I learned is it's one thing to sort of say something in passing. It's another thing to actually play with it. So I said, let me work with you to make some cards and actually what I want to do is not explain it to them. I want to play with them. And I go, before we go back to Mike and Bill,

let me make a deck, let me put other members of R&D that haven't seen this yet, sort of build up a little bit of momentum and then I will go to Mike and Bill. The one change I suggested is, what they had wanted to do was, they wanted the face-down creature to be a 1-1. And I think the idea was, you spent two mana to get a 1-1. I think of what it was. And I said, well, I just don't think 1-1 is substantial enough.

What if we made it a 2-2? And so I suggested they change it from a two-mana 1-1 to a three-mana 2-2. Because at the time, by the way, a Grey Ogre was... I mean, when I get to do the Concertar Kier podcast, there's a lot of interesting questions about what morphs should cost. But anyway, I convinced them at the time to do 3-mana 2-2. And then I made some designs. So while doing designs, first of all,

I made a bunch of vanilla morph cards where you play it face down as a 2-2, spend some mana, turn face up. I then started playing them on some other things. The thing that I came up with is the idea of, well, what if when you reveal it, not only does it change into another creature, but what if there was a spell effect? So, you know, not only could they function

as maybe the creature changes size, but maybe it does something. And so I made a deck that had a bunch of cards. It was two colors. I forget. One of the colors was blue, I believe. But anyway, I made a deck. I made two decks.

One deck that had the mechanic and one deck that didn't so you could play against it. And the idea was, okay, let's come play. And then I sat down and I played with R&D. And little by little, as I played with people, I really started to win R&D over. As I played with it, it was interesting. It had a lot of neat decisions to it. People really sort of, I mean, Morph is a very cool mechanic. Obviously, we've brought it back

twice now. It's something we consider to be fun, players like. And it's a very neat mechanic. It's very interesting. There's a lot of bluffing elements to it. So what I did was I played it, I built up consensus, and enough people really liked it that I then went to Bill. So what I've learned about Bill is Bill is very receptive to the feeling of R&D, meaning if Bill doesn't like something, but the majority of R&D does like it, Bill will sit up and go, okay, well, maybe I'm misjudging something. Or, you know, a lot of people, you know. So Bill very much listens to the general consensus. And so I had done a pretty good job of getting most of R&D on board. I showed to Bill.

I explained. I played with him. And Bill, once he played with it, he's like, okay, you're right. He likes the change to the 2-2. He felt like just a lot of things had been very oblique in the explanation. Once you played with it, it was a little more spelled out, Bill really liked how it played. And so Bill was on board.

And then Bill and I together went to Mike and explained to Mike. Mike, like I said, a little more stubborn, but Mike also came around. Once again, I think as we played with it, it went from being sort of this random weird idea that the rules team pitched to actual cards you were playing with. So anyway, after a little bit of playing, I managed to convince Bill and Mike that Morph was a good idea.

The other thing I liked about Morph is it played with Tribal in a way that when you were Morph, you didn't have any qualities to, but when you turned up, you did, and that because we cared about Tribal in the set, that the Morph card being of a certain tribe could matter. That I could have some effect that cared about the number of goblins

I had, and maybe I un-morphed something just to get another goblin. So those two things actually played well together. Meanwhile, so what happened was a bunch of different mechanics that Mike and Mike had come up with, we realized this weren't working in the volume we needed.

And so we were missing a mechanic. Meanwhile, one of the ongoing discussions we'd been having was about returning mechanics. So I've talked about this a lot, but this was an important moment. So let me explain. At the time, we had brought back mechanics in sets, but we had never brought back a non-Evergreen mechanic. And what that meant was, if you had a name,

either you were Evergreen, something we did on regularity, or we used you once and we didn't use you again. And originally in Magic, like I said, I've talked about this in the podcast a lot of times, that we had this quality of, or this thought process that, like, mechanics were disposable. Like, you used them, and then it was gone. And then, and we started to realize that as we were designing, like, you know what? There's good mechanics. And cycling was a good example

of mechanics that we hadn't even used at all up. Like, we knew that we could cycle for other costs, but we only cycled for two. And I'm like, why did we do that? Like, down deep, we must have known that maybe one day we wanted to revisit it and why spend more than we needed to. So I had it in my head that we could bring a mechanic back.

And we spent a lot of time trying to find, it's funny, because we were trying to find a mechanic that was, you know, filled a similar void to cycling.

And I just, one day I'm like, why are we trying to find a car similar to cycling? You're going to be really good here, cycling. And so I went back

to Bill and Mike and I'm like, guys, maybe the correct answer here is just do cycling instead of doing something like cycling. And the response was,

well, they didn't know. You know, if you're just going to bring a mechanic back and not do anything with it, you know, maybe players will be unhappy.

It's like, no, no, we can do something with it. So I said, okay, first off, we could have different cycling costs. And I pitched the idea of the land cycle, not basic lands, but the land cycle, where the idea was it came into play tapped, and tapped for a certain color, and then for one color. Because originally when we first did cycling, it cost two to cycle the lands. And I said, well, instead of two, it costs one for one color. Because originally when we first did cycling, it cost two to cycle

the lands. And I said, well, instead of two, it costs one of that color. The idea is if I already have this color, if I don't need it anymore, then I'll have the color I can cycle away for one. And so Bill's take on it was, or maybe actually Bill and Mike, was, well, is that enough? I don't know if that's enough. So I said, okay, okay. So I fiddled around a little more, and I came up with a couple other things we could do with cycling. Probably the most successful thing I came up with was the idea of things that cared about cycling.

So I think the card I made was Lightning Rift was my card. I didn't have mana on it at the time. The development would have mana on it. But I'm like, okay, every time you cycle, you can do damage. Okay, well now you can set up a deck in which, oh, I want a bunch of cycling cards. Like before, you didn't have any encouragement to want a lot of cycling cards.

So I said, well, what if we make some cards that care about cycling, to sort of make cycling a little more linear, to make you want to play a bunch of cycling cards? And I go, that's a very different deck. No one was doing that before. I also did some stuff with cycling as generating effects,

where the idea is that I could play this card or I could cycle it and get a smaller version or some effect that thematically was a smaller version of the big thing. So, like, for example, I could... I don't remember off the top of my head, but, you know, I could do so much damage, or I could cycle and do a little bit of damage.

And the idea was, when you cycle, that you always got to draw a card, because it's cycling. So the idea, essentially, is, do I want a big version of the spell, or a small cantrip version of the spell? So what I did is I made a bunch of different cycling things, just sort of... And once again,

one of the lessons that Onslaught really, really taught me, and this is important to understand, is when you're designing a game, talk only gets you so far. And one of the biggest problems I actually see, especially with newer designers, is they want to explain everything through explaining it.

It's like, here's what I want to do, and here's this idea, and they try to convince you whether it's good or not by talking to you about it. And my lesson to them is, look, at some level, talk is cheap. You know, what you need to do is, you have a neat idea? Make cards. Make them, play them.

And the way you convince somebody something is awesome is play it with them and have them play it, and they'll go, ooh, this is pretty cool. That's how you convince somebody that something will work, is, you know, make it functional. It's one thing to say, hey, I have a neat idea for a new car. It's another idea to build a new car and let someone drive it. And that's basically what you want to do with your game mechanics, which is don't talk about them. Make them, you know, don't have people listen about them.

Have people play and experience them. Okay. So, I managed to talk. and experience them. Okay, so, I managed to talk, I mean, like I said, I made some cards, I demonstrated, I think I made a little lightning rift deck

where I'm like, look, I have lightning rifts and I get this out and now I'm using cycling in a whole new manner. So what happened was, once all this played out, we decided that

we had a lot of evolutions that we should save some stuff. And so what we did is, for example, with Morph. Everybody liked the idea of the Morph triggers, but you know what? Let's introduce Morph, not have the triggers yet, and then in Legions we could have some triggers. Now another thing to be aware of is a little bit of a precursor to Legions. Legions, for those who don't know, had a gimmick that it was all creatures. And so one of the things that affected the Onslaught

design was you don't just do something like all creatures without setting it up. And so part of Onslaught's design was trying to get to the gimmick. I think the all creature gimmick was Mike's. It was either Mike or Bill all-creature gimmick was Mike's. It was either Mike or Bill's, but I think it was Mike's. And Mike would go on to design Legions. So one of the things that we were trying to do is when making Onslaught, because we knew that Legions was all creatures, is we were trying to make sure that we set ourselves up.

So one of the neat things about the cycling triggers was they allowed creatures to have a spell-like feel to them. Because I could play it face down, and when I needed it, I could do reactive stuff. One of the things that's really tricky about an all-creature set is you want to have tricks that can happen at any time in your hand.

That hidden information is very important. Oh, I'm going to attack. Oh, I'm going to block. Oh, what's going to happen? And the nice thing about having morphed creatures with reveal triggers is that it allows you to have hidden information but still be a creature sitting on the board. The other thing we did with cycling is some of the cycling ideas get introduced right away,

and then we save some of the cycling ideas for the second and third set. Well, actually, we saved it for the second set. Third set, when I get discouraged, that was the Brian Tins third set. Well, actually, we saved it for the second set. Third set, when I get discouraged, that was the Brian Tinsman set. That was definitely Brian sort of really deviating from what the Black was doing so far. So, when I got there, like I said, the plan is I will do these sequentially.

So, okay. So, what happened is we... Tribal gets in the set. we managed to up Tribal. Like I said, we kept putting it in, I kept sort of getting Mike to turn it up. Like, they would put it in, like, okay, louder. I felt like it was at a one, and I got them to, like, I was like, okay, we're going to make a big theme out of this.

And they did it to a four. I'm like, come on, they did it to a five. I'm like, come on, six. And I think we finally got it about an eight. I never quite got to the ten that I wanted, though. At some level, Lorwyn would go to twelve and probably teach us that you have to be careful how high that you turn the knob. Okay, so tribal got in at a decent level. Morph got in. Cycling got in. And so the set started to come

together. And like I said, it's a very interesting set in that it definitely was a little bit of a precursor of my head designer days where I'm not credited on the set. I'm not listed as a designer. And really my role was I was sort of, Bill was helping me learn my wings and learn to fly. And so I like to think in a lot of ways it was my precursor to being head designer, that a lot of the work I did on this set was me helping the team sort of figure out, you know, things they needed and tools that helped make the set work.

So the interesting thing, by the way, was... So Randy Buehler was the lead developer. So Randy had just come... Randy's first set had been in Invasion, which was the previous year. Randy Randy had just come. Randy's first set had been Invasion, which was the previous year. Randy had been on the Invasion development team. And I think Onslaught was his first development lead, I believe. Or maybe Odyssey.

No, no, no. I'm sorry. Odyssey was his first. So he came for Invasion. Odyssey was his first development lead. Onslaught was his second development lead. And Randy was really, really gung-ho on Morph. And as far as Randy was concerned, it was the Morph set.

That's how Randy saw it. And it's funny, because we went to the pre-release, and we came back. Randy was blown away. I mean, people liked Morph, but Randy was blown away how much love the tribal component had. And he's like, it's not even like a Morph set. People treat it more like it's a tribal set.

Which is funny, because you have to imagine all these meetings which I was trying to get people to turn up the volume. And they're like, really, Randy? Really? Yeah, that's what they see it as. So it was funny. That was definitely one of the things that took a little bit of time for Randy and I, in that Randy was one of the people that really ended up

sort of making the head designer thing happen for me. I think Bill had done some grooming, but Randy's the one that finally... Bill had advanced up to become VP of R&D, and Randy was the director. And Bill, for a while, had been director and head designer, but once he became VP, it was just too much stuff. And Randy knew he needed to get re...

We needed a head designer, and so Randy really sort of pushed the ball to get me to officially get the job. But anyway, it is very interesting in that I think that's one of those times where I started to get Randy to see that I was good at big picture stuff. That I got it was the tribal set

before he went and watched all the players play it. For those that don't know, by the way, real quickly, a little rundown on the story. And then what'll happen is, on my future podcast, I'll go through the cards. That's normally how I do it. I do a podcast where I sort of talk the basic structure of it,

and then I will do some card-by-card stuff and talk about it. There's lots of fun stories about the cards, which I will do in my next few podcasts. Okay, so for those that don't know the story, this actually was a continuation. This story started the year before in Odyssey, which

took place on the continent of Oteria. So what had happened was, during invasion, things had gotten really really bad in the war, because there was a war, because there was an invasion by the Phyrexians, which was stopped, thanks to the Weatherlight Saga and the master plan of Urza and Gerard.

But anyway, we went to a distant continent that was far away from the invasion itself, called Oteria. And there, there was pit fighting, and there was Kamal, who was a pit fighter. And the pit fights were run by the Cabal. So it was Kamal and the Cabal. So it's like an animated special.

So there was a whole story in the first Odyssey, but the story starts in the onslaught part was about, there's a guy named Ixador. So Ixador and his lover, Nevia, who was a sorceress, I believe they were fighting in the pit fights,

and Nevia got killed by Phage. So Phage, by the way, was part of the previous year's story, where Kamal had a sister named Jessica, and he had a mentor named Balthor, and bad things happened to

people that knew Kamal. His sister got turned into Phage, Balthor got killed and became a zombie, but anyway, Phage killed Balthor got killed and became a zombie. But anyway, Phage killed Nivea, and Ixador was mighty sad, and so he

wandered the deserts, and somehow he had these powers that, in his grief, he realized where he had the ability to shape reality, sculpt reality. And so, he ended up making an angel named Avacyn. I said not Avacyn, named Akroma.

Sorry, Avacyn's a different angel. He made an angel named Akroma who looked just like Nevia. And she was his tool for revenge. And so you get farther into the story, Phage and Akromo will actually fight, but that doesn't happen yet. But anyway,

so Ixador, Ixador is the bad guy in the story, although he's a bad guy that, you know, kind of gets there from a place of grief. He starts out a good guy,

and in his grief he kind of does some stuff that he probably shouldn't have done. But the funny thing about the story is, in the previous story, Kamal was fighting against the Cabal, that they were enemies. And in this story, they get a shared enemy.

And so Kamal and the Cabal have to team up to fight against Exedor, the reality sculptor. But anyway, for those that are interested, I try whenever I do this to get a little bit of a hint of the story so that people that are interested can go back and read. There's actually, this is the period of time where we have books, so you can go read books all about Akroma and Kamal

and the Cabal and Phage and Ixador and such. So anyway, like I said, this is just part one of the podcast on OnSlot. So I will do some future podcasts where I go card by card. Like I said, there's lots of fun card stories. But that is all there is in the overview today. And I'm now in my parking spot. So that means that this is the end of Drive to Work.

So thank you very much for listening to me today. And I will talk to you next time with more on OnSlot. See you guys.