Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #251 - Block Inspirations, Part 1

Episode Date: August 7, 2015

Mark begins a two-parter about the inspiration behind each block in the history of Magic.

I'm pulling out of the parking lot. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. I had to drop off my son at camp today, but we will still have a full podcast. Okay, so today's podcast is based on an article I wrote called Being Inspired, where I talked about what the inspiration was for each of the blocks that we have made. And so what I'm going to do today is I'm going to start chronologically with the most recent block, which is Kantar Tarkir, and then I'm going to go back, and for each one, I'm going to talk about what was the inspiration for making that block and sort of the thought behind it.

I don't know how many podcasts this will be. It might be one, it might be two, maybe three, I don't know. We shall see. But the idea is, today is all about talking about sort of inspiration. Where did the idea start? What were we trying to do? And the interesting thing is, where we start and where we end up are often very different things. But today is like, okay, what was our jumping off point? And hopefully, I want to talk a little bit about the creative process of how do you start things, you know? talk a little bit about the creative process of how do you start things, you know, because one of my big beliefs, and this is sort of like my hypothesis for this podcast or series podcast, is that you need to start from somewhere. Part of a creative endeavor is you need to have some idea,

you need some inkling of something to start with. What that is doesn't really matter, you just need something to focus on that is a unique focus. One of the things I always say is I think when you're doing creative stuff, you just want to start from a place that you haven't started before. And I talk about this all the time, but the reason it's so important is you want to think about things in a different way. That if you present the same problem, you tend to come up with the same solutions. But if you just offer up a slightly different problem, your brain just goes to new places. Okay, that said, let's start.

So we're going to start with cons of Tarkir. So cons of Tarkir started structurally. We didn't know at the time there was going to be our last three block set, but we knew we had to do a three block set. We knew it was going to be large, small, large because we rotate. So basically every year we were doing large, small, small, and every other year we're doing large, small, large. So we knew it was large, small, large's turn. And I was just trying to find a way to do large, small, large in a slightly different manner. And the idea that had come up a couple

times, we'd actually talked about it for Return to Ravnica, is the idea of having a middle block that pivots and drafts with both large sets. That was the idea. So I was like, okay, we've never done that. Let's start there. Let's make that the place to jump off. And so the key was, the way we started the concept of Tarkir was we asked the question, why?

Why would a block be structured that way? And the interesting thing is, so what happened, for those that don't remember the story, I talked about this in my Exploratory Design podcast, both Sean Main and Ethan Fleischer, who had, Ethan had won the Great Designer Search 2, Sean had come in second in the Great Designer Search 2,

both of them got internships, and I wanted to test them. I wanted to see who, you know, one of the reasons, one of the things about the second grade designer search was I was more interested in finding people that could build worlds. In fact, if you notice, for those who pay attention in the second grade designer search, very, very much we had them pick a world that they made of their own creation, and every challenge was them building on their own world. Bar one, where they built somebody else's world. and every challenge was them building on their own world. Bar one, where they built somebody else's world. But anyway, so the idea was that these people,

I selected Sean and Ethan because of their ability to sort of do large, holistic-style world building. So it only made sense. I said, okay, let's put them to a task. So I put them to the task of trying to solve the problem of why would the middle set rotate? So once we had that, that's when we said, okay, what would this be? And they came up with a whole bunch of different things. We're at one place, like one of the ideas was we were at one place,

and then we're traveling, and so the middle set's like the vehicle we travel on, a boat or something, and the second set is the new place. So the reason that the thing would be drafted with both was it existed with both places. You know, it's the original place and the boat, and then the boat travels now to the boat in the new place. We messed around with the idea of two sides that were fighting, and so the center represented the war between the sides. We thought about the idea of having two places, and this was the intermediate ground between them, that they're like two bordering countries, and this was sort of the area that was over dispute. But in the end, Ethan actually came up with what I thought was the best idea,

which we used, was the idea of a time travel story. That what if there's a world, it got, you know, the middle set was the past where they went back and changed it, and then we were now in an alternate version of the timeline, and the reason the middle set drafted with both sets was, both versions of the timeline, the early set existed, and it was the changing of something that made different timelines. I'm a big time travel buff, for those that are not unaware. I love time travel.

And we had messed around with time travel a little bit in Urza's saga. Karn the Silver Golem was made of silver because in the time travel technique that Urza was able to figure out, the only thing that could actually travel was silver. And so he made a being out of silver so that he could do his time travel stuff, for those that don't know the origin of Karn. But anyway, the interesting thing about Karn to Tarkir was that once we had a structure, once we said,

okay, we're doing time travel, then a lot of the design became making time travel work. So the neat thing about it was we started with a very mechanical inspiration. That mechanical inspiration led us to a very creative inspiration and we used the creative inspiration to guide a lot of what we were doing.

And once we knew we were doing a time travel world, then it became a matter of us figuring out sort of what the things represented. Anyway, I'm going to very shortly do a Cons of Tarkir podcast. So I don't want to get too much into this story because I will go in great detail in the Khans of Tarkir podcast. The thing I want to point about this particular inspiration was

it started very mechanically. Oh, so let me explain this. I use these terms from time to time. What I call bottoms up and top down. Okay, so the idea is when you were designing something, the way originally, when Magic first started, we would mechanically make something and then hand it over to the creative team

and they would put a layering of flavor on it. In fact, early, early on, the design team also made up the flavor, but eventually there was a separate team for it. And bottoms up meant you start from the bottom, from the structure of the design. So bottoms-up means you have a mechanical means and like, okay, it's a set all about this mechanical thing, and then you start layering the flavor on top of it. Top-down means oh, you start with the flavor, oh, we're going to try to capture this flavor

and then you work downward and get mechanics to match the flavor. Now, if we're doing our job well, for example, Kansu Tarkir technically was a bottoms-up set, meaning we started with a mechanical origin. Now, it quickly got a flavor component to it, and we built a lot of stuff from that flavor so we're doing our job nowadays um it becomes harder and harder to tell what is top up and what's what's top down what's bottoms up um oh people ask all the time why up and down um i don't know my best guess on it is we look at a magic card that the top part of the magic card is more flavor and the bottom part of the magic card is more the mechanics.

You know, the top is like the name and the art and maybe the type line. And then the rules text is down below, which has the rules in it and the power of toughness. And so I think top-down means you start from the top of the card and work down, and bottom-up means you start from the bottom of the card and work up. I think that's where the terms come from. It's possible the terms have nothing to do with magic and I borrowed them from somewhere else. I don't know.

I know I've used them. I don't know where I got them. So for those looking for the origins of bottoms up and top down, I don't know. On my blog all the time, people ask, and they've never heard the terms before. So if I got them from somewhere, they're relatively obscure, I think, because no one seems to know what

the terms mean. Okay, so next, that was Constantine Arcadius. Next is Theros. So Theros was clearly, clearly, clearly top-down. Theros was, you know what, we've always wanted to do a world inspired by Greek mythology, let's do it. So Theros was like day one, we come in the meeting and it's like, okay, what do you expect a Greek mythological world to be? And we just wrote things on the board. And early on, we got to our theme of gods, heroes, and monsters. But that was just a way for us to consolidate basically a top-down theme. But Theros very, very much was like,

we want to represent Greek mythology. Now, we had walked into it with the idea that maybe we'd make use of enchantments when Brady Donruth first pitched the idea of a Greek world. Originally, by the way, when I did my seven-year plan or whatever, this block, the original plan, was to do a block similar to what got proposed by Ethan Fleischer in The Great Sensors 2 although this was done before

that even happened. I had pitched a world in which we started like prehistoric and then the next set was you know thousands of years in the future and was sort of like middle ages and then you jump

again and last it was like Renaissance or whatever the latest version we'd be willing to do of magic. I mean, magic tends to do... We don't like to do super modern, but whatever the most modern version, whether it's the 1800s or 1900s or the Renaissance, I'm not quite sure where magic

would end up at. But the idea was that we'd watch a civilization go from prehistoric to as advanced as we get. And Brady's issue with it was he felt like it really required the creative team making three unique different worlds. And at the time, he just didn't have the resources to do that. And so he ended up pitching a Greek world where... And we had talked about doing Greek mythology worlds forever

so he's like, look, we know we keep wanting to do a Greek mythology world and we keep talking about maybe doing an enchantment based world enchantments make a lot of sense there's a lot to do with dreamscapes and stuff for Greek mythology maybe somehow we can combine Greek mythology with enchantments so I walked in. It's a top-down set trying to capture Greece, but I also knew that there was an enchantment

component that we were going to try to find. So, while it had a top-down flavor component, there was a mechanical component, which, to be fair, came out of what Brady felt made sense creatively. So, it was really all top-down, but we did have a mechanical component we walked in with. So, it wasn't like Theros was a complete unknown. It was kind of like, okay, we're going to do this top-down, but we did have a mechanical component we walked in with. So it wasn't like Theros was a complete unknown.

It was kind of like, okay, we're going to do this top-down flavor and then try to fill it in with this enchantment mechanical component. Okay, next, return to Ravnica. So this one was dirt simple. We had been to Ravnica. People loved Ravnica. We're like, we need to go back to Ravnica. If anything, this one should have been more planned. It was just like, eh, we're going back to Ravnica. People loved Ravnica. We're like, we need to go back to Ravnica. If anything, this one should have been more planned. It was just like, eh, we're going back to

Ravnica. That was literally like return to Ravnica was the impetus. We like Ravnica, let's go back to Ravnica. We knew in returning to Ravnica that we had to capture the things that people loved about Ravnica. Of course, it was going to be guild-related. Even though, by the way, at the end of the guild story

in Dissension, the guild had broken. The guild had fallen. The guild-related. Even though, by the way, at the end of the guild story in Dissension, the guild had broken. The guild had fallen. The guild pack had fallen. But people wanted guilds. So we're like, okay, we'll figure out how to get the guilds back. Because going back to Ravn and going, remember the guilds you loved? Yeah, they're not here. That would not have been very popular.

So there was a means by which the guilds reformed. And you came back and saw the guilds. But there wasn't, as far as inspiration, it wasn't particularly, it was really like we're going back to the place we've been before. We get to Scars of Mirrodin, you'll see, that was very different. But this was like, we're going

back. It really was, we're just going back. How do we recapture the thing we wanted? Information was, look, we have ten guilds, let's capture the ten guilds in the same way, well, the same feel guilds in the same way, or the same feel, but in a new way. So we wanted it to sort of be like, hey, remember this clan? Yeah, it still

feels like that, or not clan, guild. Remember that guild? Still feels like that guild, but mechanically just a little bit different. The overview is the same, the archetypes are similar, but the mechanics and stuff are done differently. So just, you know, the goal was to make cards that were new and fun, but that if you mixed

your new guild cards with your old guild cards, they'd all play well together. That was kind of the goal. Okay, next. Innistrad. So Innistrad really was a top-down... The idea was when we

had done Odyssey, Brady Downer commented to me that we missed an opportunity to do a graveyard set that really played in, that flavor-wise played into the graveyard. And he had pitched the idea of a gothic horror. And I love genres as a writer. I can get very fascinated. One of the neat things about writing is that there's different rules for different genres of writing and it's just that I used to do a lot of improv in college and one of the things we would do is one of the sketches

is people would write down different genres and then you'd be doing a sketch and the genres would keep changing on you so you're in the middle of a soap opera and all of a sudden it's a horror film or you're in the middle of a horror film and all of a sudden it's the news you just jump around sudden it's a horror film or you're in the middle of a horror film and all of a sudden it's the news. You just jump around or it's a sitcom. And the dynamics of watching a scene change from genre

to genre was fascinating because there's just different tropes and different sort of feel for different genres. So I was fascinated when Brady said that of the idea of capturing the genre of horror. So while it was a top-down set, the inspiration was more trying to capture the feel and trope space of a genre of storytelling. That's what excited me and where I came from. And for those who know the story, it took a while to get made.

I think what happened was, finally horror really kind of returned to the zeitgeist, and there was just sort of a... It got popular again. Horror was something that was hot. And so it was easier for me to returned to the zeitgeist, and there was just sort of a... It got popular again. Horror was something that was hot. And so it was easier for me to go to the people and say, look, horror's real hot right now. You know, vampires and Twilight.

I go, come on, we could get into this. I mean, I'd want to do this for years, but I felt like a reason to justify saying, okay, this is the right time to do it. And went through the rigmarole, but finally it all worked out and we got Innistrad. Okay, next, Scars of Mirrodin. So Scars of Mirrodin is a good example where the set started in a completely different place from where it ended up.

So Scars of Mirrodin, I mean, to be blunt, was when we had been in original Mirrodin, Brady had figured out a way to get back to Phyrexians. And so what he'd done is he had laid the groundwork. I mean, I've talked about this so many times, but really what we were trying to do is reintroduce the Phyrexians. That was the major goal. It's like, okay, we had this awesome villain.

We really had revamped things. We had brought back Nicole Bowles. We had introduced the Eldrazi. I'm like, okay, it's time to make the Phyrexians. And we had gotten into... I wanted to find a way to bring the Phyrexians to gameplay in a way... This is the first set where I was really messing around more with emotional beats. In some ways, I don't want the fifth age of design starting.

To me, Scars of Mirrodin is where it started. And it was really about finding this emotional read that I wanted the audience, when they played, to experience something that matched the flavor of what the world was. And part of it was, I really wanted to give the Phyrexians a visceral feel. And the funny thing is, it wasn't that I started saying, I wanted to create this emotional thing. It's that I just, I wanted to capture the Phyrexians a visceral feel. And the funny thing is, it wasn't that I started saying I wanted to create this emotional thing. It's just I wanted to capture the Phyrexians.

And I said, I don't want to just capture them in creative. I want to capture them in gameplay. How do I make the Phyrexians, through gameplay, feel like the Phyrexians? That's where infect came from. That's where proliferate came from. That, you know, a lot of the stuff we were doing was just trying to get a feel for the Phyrexians. We had come up with four words. Can you remember the four words?

They were, let's see, toxic, adaptive, viral, and persistent, relentless, and relentless. And I was trying to make sure that we could capture all that feel of those things. So when we made it, so really the inspiration for Scars of Mirrodin was just capturing the Phyrexians reintroducing the Phyrexians and making them something to really be afraid of which I think I achieved

maybe slightly too well okay, next, Shards of Alara so Shards of Alara, it was time to do a gold set. Players really like multicolor sets. It was clear that it was kind of time to do a multicolor set. We actually were trying to experiment where we did it one earlier than we had meant to. I mean, not meant to, we meant to,

but before we had a certain amount of gap between, and we decided let's do it one year earlier to see if that's too early. Ended up being a little too early. I think we pushed it a little bit. But anyway, Shards of Alara was interestingly trying to be a multicolor set that wasn't Invasion, but wasn't

Ravnica. And Invasion was all about play five colors, and Ravnica was all about play two colors. So Bill Rose, who was the lead designer, said, okay, what if the inspiration was play three color? And then Bill got this neat idea of doing a small set

that was all gold, all multicolor. And so really the inspiration for the block was two things. One was not being wrapped in an invasion, but also he wanted to figure out how to end it

on an all gold small set. He knew he couldn't start with a large all gold set. He knew it needed to be a small set. There was too much going on and he had to set it up ahead of time. So the inspiration

in Shards of Lara was those two things. To kind of make a unique multicolor world and set up an all gold set. Lorwyn and Shadowmoor. So Lorwyn and Shadowmoor,

when, two years before when we made Original Ravnica and we had a summer set that ended up being Colt's nap, we weren't really happy with how Colt's nap played out. So I said to Bill, I go, Bill, next time you want a fourth set,

talk to me, I will incorporate it. I will make it part of the plan. I don't want it to feel like an add-on. I want you to feel like, well, of course it exists. It had to exist because it was an endemic part of what we were doing. So Bill came to me that year and said, okay, we're doing four sets. Figure out how to make them all work together. And so I was inspired by trying to make sense of four sets. Now I came back and pitched the idea of two mini sets of large, small, large, small. At the time, we had never done a large set other than the fall.

So I was proposing them pretty crazy, but it all stemmed from me trying to make a world that felt natural. And once I had large, small, large, small, then we had the idea of what if you had a world that somehow radically changed itself, that the two blocks were connected because if they weren't different worlds, they were the same worlds. Part of that was to have a thematic connection for the year. Part of it was it was a little bit easier for creative. If it's 100% a new world, that's a little bit more work than if it's a tweaked version of a world. Still was a lot of work. Shadowmore was a lot of work.

Shadowmore being a shadow of Lorwyn helped a little bit in figuring out some of the identity. But that's where Lorwyn and Shadowmore came from was just us trying to make sense of a four block structure. That's right.

The inspiration came from me making that make sense. Okay, next. Time spiral. So time spiral started because I collected a bunch of different mechanics that were time based. Brian Tinsman had come up with one in Saviors of Kamigawa, I think. I'd wanted to do instant as a card type, as a super type, and I was going to try to make my big move to make instant a super type. There was actually a mechanic made during Cold Snap that ended up being, we took, which was

the, what's it called? You play it and they can't respond to it. Split second. So, I just had all these mechanics that played an interesting... Oh, did I skip Zendikar? I did skip Zendikar. Let me jump back to Zendikar. Zendikar, which was in between

Scars of Mirrodin and Shadalara, was me having a whole bunch of mechanics for lands. And I just said to Randy Buehler, my boss at the time, look, I want to do experimental. I want to just dig as deep as we can and find out land mechanics and do fun stuff with land. And we found the mechanics.

We ended up doing kicker. We did landfall. And then from that, the creative team spun out the idea to do an adventure world. And from then, once we knew we had adventure world, we used the second part of our design to make traps and quests and allies and do all these things to make Adventure World make sense.

But the inspiration for Zendikar was trying to mine a bit of space. Which is interesting because Time Spiral was the same thing. I was trying to mine space. The space I was trying to mine for Time Spiral was time-related mechanics. So spend was really like,

okay, it's cheaper. I have less mana to spend because I'm spending time. That was the idearelated mechanics. So spend was really like, okay, it's cheaper. I have less mana to spend because I'm spending time. That was the idea behind it. And then as I started working on the block structure, I came up with the idea of past, present, and future because I felt like, oh, we have a time-related block. How does time break up in a nice, clean way? Well, past, present, and future did very well. And then from there, I figured out what it meant to be a past set and well past, present, future did very well. And then from there I figured out what it

meant to be a past set and a present set and a future set. But the original inspiration wasn't the original inspiration was time mechanics is interesting enough. And then once I had the time mechanics I sort of was able to piece together sort of how the block structure would

work. And once again you'll notice one of the ongoing themes is, I start somewhere, I figure something out. That can shift where I'm going. Like, the idea of Scars of Mirrodin shifting from being, oh my god, we're introducing the Phyrexians and everything, it's just new Phyrexia,

ended up being, oh, we're coming back to Mirrodin and we're watching the Phyrexians take over Mirrodin. That's not where I started. You know, Zendikar didn't start with Adventure World. It started with, hey, I have land mechanics. Okay, one more. So my plan is I'm going to break these into two pieces.

So I'll probably do a second podcast since I'm almost to work. Ravnica is my final one of the ten today. Interestingly, there's twenty sets. The first, the ten I did today are the ten that I was head designer for, and the 10 that come next are ones that I was around for most of them. I was around

for all of them but Ice Age, and I was there for the very tail end of Ice Age. Anyway, that's next time. So Ravnica, Ravnica was, we wanted to do a multicolor world, we were doing a multicolor theme. We had been to Invasion before, Invasion was five color, I was just trying to go the opposite end of the spectrum.

Instead of caring about lots of colors, you care about very few colors. But in order to be gold, you had to care about at least two. So we made it about two. But that's where I started. The guild thing came about because Brady Dommermuth, who was the creative director at the time, said, okay, well, I said to him, I want

to care about all ten color pairs equally. And then Brady walked away saying, oh, well, what if we built around that and made a city and made guilds? And then once he had the guilds, I'm like, okay, we're basing this entire thing on guilds. And then I came up with the 433 model. But that, once again, Ragnar is a good example where I started trying to come up with a unique way to do multicolor,

which led into a creative decision to try to do guilds, which led me to use guilds as a unique way to do multicolor, which led into a creative decision to try to do guilds, which led me to use guilds as a mechanical thing to cement everything. But I never would have got to 433 had not Brady in between had come up with the idea of the guilds, which I then latched onto. And so once again,

as we look at today, sort of the inspirations, like Ravnica started pretty mechanical, Time's Freljord started very mechanical, Lorwyn was structural,avnica started pretty mechanical, Time's Fright started very mechanical, Lorwyn was structural, so that was pretty mechanical, Shards of Alara was structural, Zendikar, structural, Scars of Mirrodin

was pretty structural. Then, we get to Innistrad, all of a sudden we start getting a little more creative, return to Ravnica, it was kind of a mix, because we definitely kind of captured the guilds that we had pre-established. I get to Theros, that was very flavorful, and by the time I get to Contra Tarqir, it technically had mechanical starting,

but we quickly got into the flavor. So you can see one of the interesting things as we go along is how we've shifted from having a little more of a mechanical center to having a little bit more of a flavor center. Another big part of that is we've changed the relationship between how creative and design work.

So, although it's funny, I mean, even back to Ravnica, I had a close relationship. And like I said, I came up with something. I got a response from creative. So even go back 10 years, there was always some interplay with creative. I think what's happened is in the more recent sets, creative has taken some lead on some of the stuff and there's just more creative stuff happening earlier than they had before. But the neat thing, one of the things

about today's podcast and next time's as well is I think when you're starting out to make something, the most important thing is that you just have something to stir you. I've talked about this a lot, that a blank page is intimidating. I can do anything is really intimidating. And just giving yourself even a

little bit of a restriction helps give you a place to start. Like when I started design, I want a goal. I want, I don't want to start a design and go, okay, we can do anything. I'm like, I want to start my team by saying, okay, team, day one, we're going to walk in and say, team, we're doing this thing. Now, one of the things that's happened recently is because of the shift more towards story and a lot of other factors, I now come in having a sense of what world we're going to go to, and that is very different. Like, when I started, actually, it's funny, the stuff I'm getting into we haven't even really got to yet.

Khans of Tarkir, I didn't completely know the world. I worked with creative to figure out the world. But what's happening is in the current sets upcoming, we're starting with worlds. That's kind of a future thing.

A little hint of the future of magic is a lot more of we have a good idea of what worlds we're going to and creative has done a little bit of a job fleshing out what that world is. The Creative team started to do

exploratory world building design. So while we're doing exploratory design, they're also doing exploratory world building. It's something that's relatively new. But anyway, like I said, the reason this is fun is I don't think people always realize necessarily where things came from. And sometimes something that might seem like it'd be one way,

like it's very easy to look at Zendikar and go, oh, you wanted to build Adventure World. I'm like, interesting. Not actually what I did. I didn't build Adventure World. I mean, I did build Adventure World, but I didn't build Adventure World by starting with Adventure World.

I built Adventure World because I was trying to take advantage of pretty cool land stuff. So let's see, any final thoughts here? I realized I actually didn't have much traffic today. And I started from my son's camp, so it was a little different. So, let's see if I have a few extra words here.

Yeah, the biggest thing is I look at these ten sets, and like I said, these are the ten sets that I oversaw. I walked into the middle of Champions of Kamigawa, so I really didn't guide that block so Ravnica, Time Spiral, Lormund, Shadowmour Shards of Alara, Zendikar, Skarsgård, Mirrodin, Innistrad Return of Ravnica, Theros, Constant Arcaer

these are all sets that as a lead designer or head designer I oversaw the crafting of what they were doing I didn't lead all of them but I did sort of formulate the blocks and it's interesting like, here I did sort of formulate the blocks. And it's interesting, like, here's the kind of neat thing is Ravnica we started,

I had no idea what the block design was. It wasn't until we figured out the guilds that I knew that the guilds would be the structure. Time Spiral, once again, we started with time mechanics, but it wasn't until I dug in a little bit and said, okay, we're doing past, present, future. Lore and Shadow Market, that I started with the structure.

I knew the block was built around having the four sets, and I very quickly got to large, small, large, small, and I knew they were dual parallel. So the structure, that started very early. Shards of Alara was the one of all these that I was probably the least directly involved in. I mean, I worked with Bill a little bit,

but Bill, who's their VP, Bill had a lot of experience, so Bill did a lot of the structuring himself, but Shards of Alara did not really figure out quite what it was doing when I take that back. Bill, early on, knew he wanted to get to all of Gold's final set, so I think the structure

that Bill had worked out came pretty early on, now that I think about it. Zendikar, Zendikar block, we knew we were doing land, and we knew we were going to go to a different place for the third set, and Creative came up with a way to not have to leave, to not have to leave Zendikar.

So we did Rise of the Eldrazi. But that didn't happen. We didn't even know where we were going until we were well into the design. So that part of the design, we knew we were going to radically do something different and have mechanics change, but we didn't quite know what we were doing until later on. Scars of Mirrodin, once again,

we started in a different place, but during the course of the design, we figured out, oh, we're going to watch the fall of Mirrodin, and then we ended up coming to the cool thing of not knowing the winner and all that. Innistrad was another one where we originally were planning to just have two sets and then go to a completely different world

for the third set. Creative once again came up with a way to radically alter the current world to keep it we managed to keep a little more mechanical connection. But yeah, Innistrad, its structure wasn't really known too much other than we knew large, small, large. Return to Ravnica,

we knew very early going in. The 5.5.10 was really the inspiration for the whole set. We knew that going pretty early. Pharos, Pharos was, we knew, I had a general idea where we were going and that changed a lot.

That's definitely something that the creative, the story sort of took over and it really changed kind of where the block was going. I had a little bit of a mechanical identity of how enchantments were playing. Theros actually didn't quite work quite the way we had originally planned. And then Conjuring Tarkir, like I said, we started knowing

the basic structure of it and that was definitely something where I had a really good sense of the structure. So, future blocks? Oh, lots of cool stuff coming after that, and like I said, we're really sort of changing how we're doing design. That's not the topic of this set. So anyway, next time, join me.

I'm going to start with Chances of Kamigawa, work all the way back, talk about Mirrodin, Onslaught, Odyssey, Invasion, Mercadian Mass, Urza Saga, Tempest, Mirage, and end with Ice Age, and I'll talk about how all those came toslaught, Odyssey, Invasion, Mercadian Mass, Urza Saga, Tempest, Mirage, and end with Ice Age. And I'll talk about how all those came to be. So anyway, I hope you enjoyed today's podcast and a little insight into the inspiration that made the blocks. But anyway, I'm in my parking space, so we all know what that means.

It means it's time for me to end my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you next time.