Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #19 - Innistrad, Part One

Episode Date: February 1, 2013

Mark Rosewater talks about Innistrad.

Okay, pulling out of the garage. That means it's time for another drive to work. Okay, so one of the comments I've gotten is that a lot of my stories are from long ago. And so I thought today I would tell a story from not so long ago. Today I'm going to tell the story of the design of Innistrad. So, where shall we begin? The funny thing about Innistrad is, the idea actually goes way back. Like, so I think what happened was, Odyssey, one of the sets I did, I wanted to be able to do a podcast on it,

and I did not do the creative for Odyssey. I'll do a podcast on it. And I did not do the creative for Odyssey. I just, back then, I would do mechanical stuff. Creatives would slap whatever they want on it. There wasn't a lot of connection between them. And Brady Dommermuth, who at the time wasn't in charge, or wasn't even doing creative, he wasn't on the creative team,

really bemoaned the fact that Odyssey really wanted, it was a graveyard set, like wanted to be all about, you know, horror kind of things, and he said that he really felt like we missed the opportunity, that he thought that Odyssey wanted to be like a gothic horror set. And I had this idea back in my head that I thought it would be very cool, I liked the idea of doing horror of the genre, and so it kind of all came together. Like, Brady had this idea for this gothic horror world, and I had this idea for a world that was all about,

you know, the horror genre. And anyway, it coalesced many years ago, and so I would, from time to time, pitch this and say, what do you think of this? And I always got very cool receptions. I mean, they weren't like, no, but just like, eh, I don't know. You know, I'm like, but, you know, the vampires and zombies and werewolves. And they were sort of like, eh, I don't know.

I'm not sure how popular that would be. And so I think it wasn't in the original six-year plan, but it was kind of like the seventh optional year in the six year plan where I sort of wrote six years and I'm like, oh by the way, it was not official but I have an idea for the year after that and so what happened was as we started getting closer to the year that I had pegged for

for the horror genre by the way, and I'm speaking because it's a podcast, one of the running jokes has been, the word horror is very dangerous to say wrong. So I'm going to try my best to actually enunciate today. But it's, especially on an audio format, it can go awry. Okay, so I had this idea. I wanted to do it. I knew mechanically we could do neat things with it. I knew there would be a tribal component

because I knew we'd want to do monsters. I knew there would be a graveyard component because that's where the idea came from in the first place with Odyssey. But anyway, the problem was that it wasn't really exciting anybody. And I think when I first pitched it, the response was, well, yeah, maybe we can get a large set out of that. But I don't think we can do a whole year on that.

There's not a lot of depth there. And so originally, in the slot that Innistrad ended up, there was a different set there. And the plan was it was going to be a large set and then a small set of that world, and I was told, okay, at the end of the year, we want a large set in the slot that would become Avacyn Restored.

And your horror set, that'll just be, it's only worth, it's only got enough for maybe one large set. We'll put that at the end of the year, and we'll do this other idea. And then, you know, the idea was we needed some standalone thing. The idea was maybe it'll just be separate. We'll have one world that's these two, and your world will stand by itself as B1.

And then along the way, someone said, well, it's a little weird. If we're going to do a horror set, do we want it near Halloween? Like, do we want it in the fall? And so they said, oh, well, okay, maybe we should have it in the fall, you know? And then they're like, but we're doing the fall, the small set's going to be, and they're like, well, do you think maybe you could do two sets instead of one? And I'm like, I could do three sets, but okay, yes, I can do two sets. And they're like, okay. And then later on, when I get to the podcast on Everson Restored,

that was going to be all sorts of things. It was going to be a prequel to Return to Ravnica. It was going to be its own thing. And eventually we decided to make it a component of the Indestruct block. But anyway, like I said, different podcast. So once, finally, years later, I got the go. So I put together my team.

So the way that design teams work now is there's a lot of slots. So for example, one of the things is we always have a dev rep. One of the core developers is always on the set. The reason you want that person is they help with costing and balance

and they just bring development issues that will later become a problem and make sure that you're aware of them during design. Some of them design cares about, some we care less about, but it's good to have a developer there to sort of raise that, and it's a good perspective to have on the team. And now also, we have designers on the development team. So there's always a core designer on the development team,

just like a core developer on the design team, which I think is very good. So our developer was Tom Lapilli. I think that was his first design. I don't think he'd been on Magic Design before. And as you'll see, Tom was very influential on a few key things. Second is, usually on the large set, we have a member of the creative team. This set in particular, because it was a top-down set.

The whole point of the set was, we're going to capture the world of horror. I felt it was very important to have someone doing flavor. And we also, a lot of times what happens is the creative person who's on the team ends up doing the concepting for the set because they're the most in tune with what's going on. So Jenna Helen, who does the Wednesday column, Uncharted Realms, she wanted to do it. She was excited to buy it, and she really wanted to do the card concept thing for the horror set, and so it worked out really well.

Janet ended up being, actually, like, a lot of times people will be on your set, and they have a role, and like, her role wasn't necessarily to make a lot of cards. Her role was to sort of capture flavor and stuff. But she ended up making a bunch of nice cards, so that was very good.

Next, I always have somebody who, what do you call them? I call them sort of like a power hitter, which is I want to make sure that somebody on the design team is just someone who's good at just making lots of cards. I knew other people would make cards,

but you kind of want to make sure that you have one just, you know, powerhouse, just giving you cards by the dozens, because an important part of design is just having volume. And so I want to make sure there's always a heavy hitter on the design team. I mean, the lead's always a heavy hitter. You don't get to be a lead without being a heavy hitter.

But I always want a second heavy hitter. And that was Graham. Graham. I'm blanking on Graham's last name. I'm thinking of other Grahams that I know. Graham Hopkins is his last name. Graham Tatimer? No, he won the juniors in the very first Pro Tour.

Anyway, Graham Hopkins, his claim to fame is he came in third in the first grade designer search. Now, the funny thing is there are four people who finished the top four in the first great designer search. Ken Nagel, now full-time designer, and has led four or five sets already, led Return of Ravnuk, obviously. You have Alexis Janssen, who is leading Sinker, Dragon's Maze, and has been on many, many sets. You have Mark Globus, who led one of the

core sets. Was it 2013? Maybe 2013? Anyway, so each of the three of them has actually led a set. Graham has not led a set yet. Part of the reason for that is Graham is not in R&D, although I guess Alexis is not in R&D either.

Graham does programming, and he does a lot of stuff for Magic Online and other things. But whenever I can use Graham, I always use him. He's very good, obviously. That's why he came in third. And so he is a pleasure to work with. Graham always comes up with stuff that, like, here's the thing that people, it's very funny, that whenever people try out, they always try to explain to me how they're like me. And then the answer is, I'm not looking for someone like me. I have someone like me. Me. What I'm looking

for is someone who's going to think of things I'm not going to think of, you know. And Graham is great. Graham comes up with stuff I would never think of. And that's awesome. That's what I want in other designers is they have their own sensibility. They're going to come up with their own kind of cards. And Graham is that in a nutshell. The final member of our team is someone new to the magic design scene.

I think his name was Richard Garfield. So let me explain how Richard got on the team. So every year, well, every year that Worlds existed, now it's shifted a little bit. But the World Championships, I used to always go to the World Championships. In fact, I went to every single one except for one. I miss Rome, but I was to every other one. Uh, and so Richard and I were both at the Memphis World Championships, and Richard, uh, made his own deck, and he was playing, he was, uh, gunslinging or spell-slinging with a deck he had made, cards he had made. And he and I talked a little bit, and I helped him fine-tune his cards.

And Richard had a good time. He said, you know, I miss making magic cards. You know what? The next time you have a slot mark on one of your teams, I would love to do it. And one of the things is Richard and I go way back. We've worked on a lot of stuff. The vast majority of magic sections that Richard didn't do, like Richard did Alpha and did Arabian Nights.

But since then, with the one exception of Judgment, of which Brian Tinsman was the lead on the billet, I guess really did the work. But anyway, I was on that team, but I wasn't leading it. All the other teams that Richard's been on, Tempest, Odyssey, Return, not Return to, Ravnica, were all teams that I

led. So Richard was very comfortable with me. And I was comfortable with Richard. And Richard, like I said, Richard is always fun. Every time Richard says that we have a design team, I will stick Richard on the design team. He is fun to work with. I knew this was his kind of set, too, because Richard loves top-down design. I mean, Alpha is, you know, pretty much

that's what Alpha was. I mean, it was card-by-card top-down design, but it was top-down design. Richard loves top-down design, so he seemed like the perfect fit for this set. Okay. Had my team. It was a very strong team. And so, day one, here's what I said. Okay, guys, here's what we're doing. We're going to start with the following premise. We're making a set that's going to capture all the horror tropes. And that's what's going to guide us. I will do mechanically whatever we want to do that does that.

So the first thing we talked about is what do you expect to see in a set that was about horror. And so we made a list. We just literally made a list on the board. Okay, so the number one thing that we listed were monsters, basically. Because what defines the horror genre is monsters. Monsters are what define it. And we talked a lot about kind of like what is the horror genre about. It has a lot to do with people's fears.

kind of like, what is the horror genre about? It has a lot to do with people's fears. It has a lot to do with sort of the idea of if somehow you're doing something wrong, I mean, they're cautionary tales. That in literature, horror is a cautionary tale. It's sort of to teach people right and wrong. Because if you notice in the stories, the person who does right survives.

The person who does wrong does not. And there's a lot of interesting moralizing under the surface. But anyway, so we decided, A, we needed monsters. That was very important. B, we decided we needed humans. Because

you needed the victims. That in order to have the monsters mean something, well, they're always victims. We need the victims. And then there were a lot of trappings, there were a bunch of objects, so we made a long list. So once we figured out those monsters, we said, okay, what are the monsters we want? And we ended up realizing the big three. Which I joked as the Halloween 3.

So that's vampires, like Count Dracula, werewolves, like the Wolfman, and zombies, like Frankenstein. And most people don't realize that Frankenstein is a zombie, but he's made up of dead pieces. Now, as you'll see, by the way, we actually went two different ways with zombies and split the colors,

but I'll get there in a second. Okay, so once I knew we wanted monsters, I'm like, okay, well, I mean, and going in, I kind of knew that. It wasn't a big surprise. That led to the idea of tribal. And then we knew that we wanted victims. And so humans, so what happened was, during Mirrodin, we instituted a race class to magic. Yes, the year after tribal, we instituted a race class to magic. Yes, the year after Tribal, we instituted a race class.

And the idea there was, well, race class is borrowed from role-playing. And the idea is every character has a race. Are you human? Are you elf? Are you goblin? What are you? And you have a class. What do you do? What's your job? What's your occupation? Are you a fighter? Are you a wizard? What are you? And so in order to make that work, once we had race class, before that, humans were always kind of default. Like if I were a human, why would I just say my class? So if I were a fighter or a warrior, it would just say warrior.

But we're like, well, in race class model, I have to name your race. So we had to do human for the first time. And a lot of people were very upset and like, oh, you can't do that. And so we made a rule of the time to say, well, we're going to do human to match race class, but we're not going to make human tribal. That's just weird to have cards that say, you know, saccharine is a human. It sounded weird or whatever. But anyway, so we followed that rule for quite a while. But now it's like, okay, well, I need humans.

I need my victims. And part of what the story ended up being was like, look, the monsters have to be feeding on somebody. Somebody has to be fighting the monsters. Humans made a lot of sense. And I said, look, if we're going to do humans and we're going to have a lot of tribal, well, look, the humans are going to want to band together.

And so I said, okay, we're going to do human tribal. Never done before. Now is the time. We're going to do it. Now, the next thing we did is we said, okay, we're going to do human tribal. Never done before. Now is the time. We're going to do it. Now, the next thing we did is we said, okay, one of the things I know about tribal is I have a big belief that tribal is more fun if you spread the colors a little bit. If you notice, during Lorwyn, I was the one that pushed us to make sure that all the tribes, or most of the tribes, were in multiple colors. You know, and so that, like, you know, fairies weren't just blue. They were blue and black.

And elves weren't just green, you know, they pushed out into black, and later pushed out into white, and anyway, the idea was, I think Tribal's more fun with a little bit of depth, you know, there's a little more colors, and you have a little more options of how to play things. So, I said, okay, let's figure out who our monsters are, and what colors we'll put them in. Okay, we'll start with Dracula. Vampires.

Okay, well, vampires are black normally. And one of the things about the set we figured out really quickly was everything wanted to go black. In fact, you could do a mono-black set all about the horror genre because everything that you connect to horror tends to be in black. So I said, okay, if it doesn't have to go in black, we're going to try to find other places for it. But vampires are like one of our staple black races, so clearly vampires are going to be black. So we looked elsewhere, and I said, okay, if it doesn't have to go in black, we're going to try to find other places for it. But vampires are like one of our staple black races, so clearly vampires can be black.

So we looked elsewhere, and I said, well, red made a lot of sense to me, because they can be bloodlusty, they can be very fair. I could see them being very impulsive. And so the idea was, well, we have vampires. Some of them are a little more restrained, but some of them are a little wilder and we push into red and that can make, you know, very aggressive, blood hungry vampires.

Okay. Black, red made sense. Next we went to, um, werewolves. Okay. Well, the obvious place to put werewolves is green. Um, but we need a secondary color. Now you could put them in black, but we follow the rule. If it doesn't need to be in black, don't put it in black.

So the other thing I said is one of the things I like doing, and this is maybe the writer in me, is I like always exploring literature and, like, well, what do they represent? And so werewolves, if I talked earlier about horror represents kind of fears and moral tales, well, what is the story of the werewolf about? Well, really it's about repressed anger. You know, it's about people who, like, live in a cultured society

and where they have to suppress their anger and then it comes out in this monstrous form. And that's kind of what werewolves were all about. I'm like, well, if werewolves are about anger, well, then rad makes a lot of sense, you know, that they just control things, but then they burst out. And if you really look at the idea of a werewolf just sort of being emotion, you're like, I'm going to do the thing I want to do, then it makes sense in red. So green-red made a lot of sense. We decided to put werewolves in green-red. Next, we had zombies. Well, zombies, once again, are a pretty staple black race. And we had trouble for a while. What are they called?

Can you give me zombies? The dead, you know. And then finally I realized that there are actually two kinds of zombies. When I was doing my Halloween thing, I said, well, you know, Frankenstein's a zombie. And I thought, oh, there's actually two different kinds of zombies. So there are the, you know, raised from the dead, you know, brains, that kind of zombie. And that is black. That's black's bread and butter.

But there also is the Frankenstein zombie, which is a zombie made by science. Made by science? Aha! That's blue. And then we realized that, okay, well, if we did zombies in which, because one of the things I knew I wanted to do

was scientists messing with things, so that's a very tropey of horror. And for us, it meant, oh, blue. Well, blue wizards are going to do that. So, okay, well, we could make zombies in black and blue. Humans was pretty clearly wanted to be in white. And so I realized we had four tribes. I'm like, well, we're kind of close to having five tribes.

And three of the tribes were in allied colors already. So I said, well, what's missing? So I turned to cereal. So if you look at horror tropes on cereal boxes, you will find Count Chocula, the vampire, got it covered. Frankenberry, the zombie, had that covered. Fruit Brute, which was a very little known version of the cereal that died quickly, but werewolf. But the last one is Booberry, the ghost.

I was like, oh, okay, well, the ghost is, that's very, you know, probably right after the three I named, ghosts are right up there. I was like, okay, we need ghosts. And ghosts very clearly could go in blue and white. You know, they're the two colors that add all the flying. And, like, spirits made a lot of sense in in blue and white. You know, they're the two colors that are all the flying, and, like, spirits made a lot of sense in both blue and white. So what we said is, okay, well, if we just give a little bit of green help to humans, then we'd have five allied colors.

And we didn't plan it that way. It just kind of, one of the things that happens a lot in design is you kind of naturally follow where things go, and then when you start seeing patterns, then you can complete them. Like, once they realized that we were almost there, it's like, okay, these three naturally fit what they want. Spirits make a lot of sense. Okay, well, fine. Our humans will have a little green component that we finish the circle off.

So what happened was, okay, we had our tribal, we had our monster things. And so what we wanted to do was we wanted to make sure that each one felt what they needed to feel. Now, the tricky one was going to be werewolves. So I knew going in that werewolves was going to be our make-or-break monster tribe because Magic has done tons of vampires, tons of zombies, tons of spirits, tons of humans. I mean, hadn't done human tribal, but the other four, we've done lots of. Magic has done lots of. But werewolves, I believe there were three werewolves before Innistrad entered the picture.

And over 15 years of the game, three werewolves. And all of them pretty much sucked. So it wasn't like we were competing against something awesome. We had three, eh, past examples, and really it was open to us. So I sat down with the team and I said, okay, guys, we have to make an awesome werewolf. What do we know about werewolves? And the answer was, we know that they're human.

And then at some point, well, not some point, at night, they become werewolves. When they become werewolves, they're bigger and scarier. And I'm like, okay, well, I like that. That seemed pretty cool. I like the idea that, you know, I like the idea that there was a human element of them and then something would happen and they would change. So I said, okay. And then as we explored, I realized something else very important. And once again, I don't know whether this is my background as a writer. Like this is, I very much, I like to analyze what makes

things work from a story standpoint and apply them. So one of the things I realized once we explored and looked at werewolves is how much transformation is a part of horror. You know, vampires turn into bats. You know, there's the idea of the little child that becomes pizzazz. You have Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. You have the scientist that becomes the fly. You know, all these things in which usually it's innocent

thing turns into monster. That's the most common way. I guess bat into vampires is unique at that camp. So there's a lot of these transformations and I said, oh, well, what if we found a way to capture transformation? I like the idea that at night things turn into, you know, they were kind of

by day innocent and by night they were evil. So what I say to my team is, okay, we've got to come up with multiple ways, or we need one way, but let's, we need one way to represent the transformation, the dark transformation. So

Tom Lapilli came to me and said he had worked on a duel master. So long ago, Magic used to make Pokemon. With the license run out, we no longer made it. And so we decided that if we wanted to sort of get in on the kids thing, all the good kids games were coming out of Japan, why don't we just make a game in Japan?

That game ended up being called Duel Masters. Now, by the way, Kaijudo is the English-American version of that, by the way. A good game. You can play it for your kids. Okay, so on Duel Masters, they had made cards that were double-sided. And so Tom said, well, that would capture it. And so, okay, well, double-sided cards. It was a little out there, but I like in design. One of the things I've learned early on is that before you

shoot things down, try the crazy stuff. Because what you learn sometimes is, A, sometimes things aren't as crazy as you think they are, and B, sometimes crazy things lead you to the same things, where they're stepping stones to things that you might get. So what I found with the double-sided cards was, it was a little weird, but I'm like, okay, let's try it out. Before I condemn it, I'm like, are we ever going to bring magic to it? I was skeptical. I was very skeptical. But I said, okay, let's try it.

I'm not going to rule on anything. Let's see if it's fun. And then I came up with something called Day-Night. But first, let's talk about the Devil Face cards or actually, let's talk about Day-Night because the Devil Face cards are where we went so let me talk about where we didn't go so the idea of Day-Night was I liked the idea that creatures by day were one thing

and by night were another so what if we had a subset of creatures that had a day quality and a night quality but how do they turn? What constitutes night? And finally I came up with what I thought was a pretty clever solution, which was imagine if certain cards that came into play, they said, if there's not one already, put a day-night card in play.

And the idea was this would be a double-sided card that would come in place of a rules card, like one of the add cards, and the card would have all the rules of how to use it. And the idea was, all the normal cards did, it said, get this thing in play. And then once you got this thing in play,

this thing would tell you how to use it. And the idea was that you would, it would come in play as day, there'd be a sun on the sun side, there were three spots, and then every time anybody cast a spell, it would advance. And then when it's on the fourth spell,

it would turn to night, and then there were three spells, it became day again. And the flavor was kind of, the spells represented the passing of time. And the thing I liked about it was that it created this lovely minigame, which was somebody always had the advantage of it being night. And so the guy who was advantaged by night, he was always fighting to make it night.

The guy who was advantaged by being day, he was always fighting for being day. And so there's this nice dynamic. So one player was trying to keep the status quo and one was trying to create change. And I liked a lot how that played. In fact, as you will see, a lot of that got kept for the werewolf mechanic. So anyway, so we played with this. And there were a couple problems. I mean, when it was doing its thing, it was awesome.

It was awesome. Like, I had some great games where, like, you know, I would have my werewolves, and they were doing great, and I'm fighting zombies, and, like, you know, the guy was fighting, the sun would come, and all my werewolves started to humanize. The zombies didn't care it was day, so they kept coming. Like, no, no, I need night, you know, and I'd be scrambling, trying to make it night again. And those games were fun. So, but, here's an important thing. You can't judge your mechanic by when it's succeeding.

You have to judge it by when it's succeeding. You have to judge it by when it's not. Meaning, most things, when they're doing well, will do well. Not everything. I mean, if your thing at its best is not great, you're in trouble. But if your thing at its best is awesome, that doesn't mean you're out of the woods yet. Because you have to see the thing in this not awesome state. And the problem we had was, once I brought something that cared about day and night, the day and night card had to come into play, and then I had to monitor it. And then, if the thing that cared left, well, the card stayed in play because otherwise I'd have a lot of words saying it didn't stay in play. And, like, I just didn't have the

word space. So, I kind of, because of the necessity, it would stay in play, and then you were monitoring this thing that didn't matter. And maybe, and that's the worst part, maybe it would matter. You know, maybe things would come out. And then, so I don't like bookkeeping that can be irrelevant. And trying to have the car to come and go

was just, that was complicated. Like now the sun's here, now it's gone. And so what happened was it just became a little too bulky. It just didn't do enough. It wasn't doing enough to sort of justify its existence. And like I said,

when it shined, it really did shine. It was awesome. And I had a few playtests where I was convinced day and night was the thing. But then I had a bunch of playtests where it wasn't the thing

and it just kind of got gunky for the sake of gunky. And the worst part is when you don't care, and it just was kind of it just kind of got gunky for the sake of gunky and the worst part is when you don't care when nobody cares then you're just not tracking like you just forget to advance things and then later on it's like oh i forgot and isn't it night and it just got really really ugly and so we ended up we ended up not going with that although like i said the here's an important thing whenever you failures, you always want to look at your failures and say, what were the good things in the failures? I think sometimes people want to think of successes as being all good

and failures as being all bad. And the reality is, successes have more good than bad, and failures have more bad than good. But there is good in failures, and there is bad things in successes. And you have to look for both. So I sort of said to myself, well, what are the successes of this? Number one, I loved the dynamic of spell playing. I loved the idea that, you know,

each person had cared about something, and so there was an interplay between the two. I thought that worked very well. And I still liked the essence of the day-night versions of things, you know, especially the werewolves. I loved that all of a sudden, you know, there the werewolves. I loved that all of a sudden, you know, there's the humans, I'm not that afraid of them,

bam, they're werewolves, now I'm afraid, bam, they're back to humans. And now I'm, you know, like, I love the idea, and what made werewolves werewolves is this dual state is a very cool part of them. That, you know, at one moment they're this ferocious scary thing, and next they're not. And that, I thought, was a very dynamic

part of them. That if we were going to make a werewolf sing and really sell them, this quality of werewolves and having this dual state was really important. So anyway, an interesting first for me. I have just arrived at work. I'm nowhere near done talking about Innistrad.

So what I'm going to do is I am going to do my first two-parter. Maybe even a three-parter. I have no idea. But I'm not done talking about Innistrad yet. So anyway, as I'm looking for my parking space, I will stop right now. So as we leave, we've just decided that day and night will not work. So now we are turning our attention to double-faced cards. Something tells me those might have a little better chance.

Anyway, I have a lot more to talk about. I've not covered a good chunk of the design. And so, this podcast is about I don't know, but winging it. So, I guess, join me next week when we'll have Innistrad Part 2. Until then, it's time to

make the magic cards.