Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #252 - Block Inspirations, Part 2

Episode Date: August 14, 2015

Mark concludes his 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. And it means I took my son to camp again. Okay, so, last time I started a podcast based on an article I had done talking about the inspiration of all the different blocks. So there have been 20 blocks in Magic, 10 of which I oversaw as head designer, 10 of which I didn't. So yesterday, or sorry, last podcast, I talked about the 10 that I had overseen. So Concept Arc here, all the way back to Ravnica, original Ravnica. So today, I'm going to talk about the 10 before that. Now, I was around for all of these, but, well, I was around for all of these,

except for Ice Age, I was only there at the end part of it. But anyway, I was around for all these, except for Ice Age, I was only there at the end part of it. But anyway, I was around for all these other blocks. So I'm going to talk about sort of what I believe the inspiration was. These are a little more, some of these I was very involved in, some of these is more second-hand knowledge. But anyway, we're going to start with Champions of Kamigawa, work our way back to Ice Age, and talk about the other ten blocks. Okay, so the important thing to remember, by the way, is as of Champions of Kamigawa, in the middle of Champions of Kamigawa, I took

over as head designer, but we're going back in time. So before me, the head designer, now back in the day, the actual way the role work has changed a little bit. I now focus just on design. Before me, the role was sort of a combined role where one person oversaw both design and development.

Now we have a head designer and we have a head developer. So before me, the head designer slash developer was Bill Rose, our current VP of R&D. So Bill Rose was before me. So the next batch of blocks I'm talking about, Bill Rose oversaw these blocks. These are Bill Rose's reign as head designer. Okay, so let's start with Champions of Kamigawa. So Bill had a vision for Champions of Kamigawa. And his vision was, what if we started with flavor rather than with mechanics?

Which now seems quite quaint since we do it all the time. But back in the day, that wasn't something we had ever done before. So the way it used to work was, the designers would design something. In the early, early days, the designers would also do something creative. But anyway, the idea was, you mechanically would figure out what you want, and then after the mechanics were done, you would then get

flavors that sort of made sense with the mechanics. And so Bill's idea was, what if I go to the creative team and I say okay we're going to do all the creative work first we're going to flesh out a world and once we have a fleshed out world

only then will we start doing design and so Bill went to talk with the creative team they examined a bunch of different ideas Bill really liked the idea of doing a top-down based on a real source to be inspired by. I know we looked at Greek mythology.

I know we looked at Egyptian. I know we looked at a whole bunch of different top-down things. But in the end, Bill decided that Japanese would be cool. There was a lot of anime.

I mean, it's still big, but anime was real big. There was just a lot of Japanese-inspired things that were very popular. I'm like, okay, this would be a cool thing to do. So they went to the creative team, who at the time was Run, or Brady Dommerfuss in charge, and said to him, okay, make me a cool Japanese-inspired world. And so Brady and his team did a lot of research. It turns out Brady actually was a big, big fan of a lot of Japanese,

of anime and Japanese mizaki and all sorts of different Japanese-inspired pop culture type things. And they really did a lot of research, and they ended up coming up with this story. The idea was, a little twist that Brady had liked, was the idea of having a mono-black protagonist and a mono-white antagonist. So the story briefly was about this emperor, who was the mono-white antagonist, Kanda,

who, for the good of his world, I'm trying to remember exactly, like, there was a creature that was a spirit baby or something that he took that, in doing so, I think it made him immortal, maybe, and he felt like he was the one who could best run the kingdom, and by him becoming immortal, he guaranteed that his reign would last forever and that he would bring, I don't know, he would make a great kingdom. So in a true example of a white villain, they did something that they believe was for the good of the society,

something, you know, good for all, but, you know, it was kind of not a good thing to do. Anyway, the spirits did not like that they had stolen this, that the spirit baby was important, had a philosophical meaning to them, it was very important, and so there was a war. There was a war to get it back, and so there was a war between the spirits and the humans. And so Brady had based a lot of this on a lot of, I guess, Shinto. Anyway, it was based on a lot of really, you know, he did a lot of research on Japanese culture

and to try to create this world that had a lot of very true Japanese inspiration. Brady made one small mistake, which we learned from, which was the stuff that he used, while very true to the source material, was not what we call resonant, meaning most people who played the game were unaware of it. that he used, while very true to the source material, was not what we call resonant, meaning most people who played the game were unaware of it. If you were really into Japanese mythology, you might be aware of some of this stuff, but if you had a less, you know, if your knowledge wasn't quite as deep, you were just unaware of it. And so a lot of what went on in the

set just read as not Japanese, but just kind of weird. You know, a lot of the spirit imagery and stuff, it didn't read to a lot of the audience as if it were, they didn't recognize a lot of it. And one of the things we've learned about doing top-down things is you need to hit resonance for the audience, meaning you need to hit expectations of what the audience understands and knows, and that you can throw in some more realistic qualities that are lesser known, but you have to do it at higher rarities. A good example is in Theros, we had a hundred-handed one, which if you know Greek mythology is

a key character, or characters, but it wasn't something the average person had heard of. So what we did is we put it at rare and did this cool card at rare. If you know what the 100-handed one is, that's cool, and the card was a fun card. But if you didn't, you weren't seeing it all the time. The stuff at lower rarities were things that people were more aware of. So anyway, what happened was Bill said, okay, we're going to do all the creative work first, and then they were done, and then design had a design to match the world. The problem that we learned, the lessons of

Champs-Élysées Kamigawa is creative is a lot more flexible than mechanics. Mechanics, there's only so many things you can do. And when things start getting locked in, the problem we started running into was, okay, well, this is this quality of Japanese mythology that we're, you know, inspiration that we're doing. But you're like, oh, but the problem is this color can only do certain things. And that concept isn't really a monocolored thing, but we're not a multicolored set because we were doing Ravnica the next year. We didn't want to do multicolor. So like trying to get the nuance of actual Japanese inspiration

when you were stuck in a monocolored... And this is back in the day where we had this belief back in the day that if the set's going to be about something, we would starve it before you got to it, so people would be excited to get to it. So, like, we wouldn't do gold for a couple years, so we finally did a multicolor set. You're like, ooh, yay, a multicolor set.

But what we discovered later on was it made it harder to balance. We had what we called a block monster problem, where all the tools you needed to do it were in the block, so it became this sort of monster, and it was hard to deal with because all the cards for the one deck came from the same block. So when we rotated, it didn't change at all. We used to call them block monsters. And part of that was because we would

starve things ahead of time, so there was no other... What would you put in your two-color deck? We hadn't given you other two-color cards before that. I mean, obviously you could put some monocolor cards in. Anyway, so the structure of the block was trying to match this.

And like, we did the things, like, we knew ninjas would be popular, so we held back ninjas and held them for the second set, and so Brian Tinsman was the lead of this, of a, of a fall set, um, and there's a lot of challenges, because trying to match a pre-existing thing was like, okay, this is the flavor, you're like, okay, my tools to capture this are limited, especially when I don't have any multicolor cards I get to use. And it's like, you know, it was just really hard because there were a lot of concepts like, oh, how exactly do we represent this?

But anyway, that block structure was very, very much dictated by the idea of we're going to have a flavor and a story, and we're just going to follow along. And it was a failure. The lesson there was that design is good. Design is flexible, but design is not infinitely flexible. And part of what you need to do, and we learn now, is you have to work with creative to figure out how to make a

resonant world that fits into a magic world. Meaning there's going to be, you know, the basic land types. You know, there's going to be things that are of these colors. You've got to make sure that your world sort of easily fits these things. And so part of that when you're doing top-down is trying to figure out how to, it's not that when you're doing top-down is trying to figure out how to, it's not that every element of the top-down necessarily finds a home. You figure out the ones that make sense and play those up. So when we were doing Gothic Core, for example,

we spent a lot of time and energy figuring out where the monsters went. Now also, we allowed ourselves multicolor, so it helped there. But a lot of top-down we've learned is you need to involve design early in the process. is you need to involve design early in the process, and you need to involve creative early in the process. That doing one before the other

and then make the other sort of fill in the gaps isn't how we get our best work. And that was a big lesson in the Champions of Kamigawa. Okay, Mirrodin. So this was, I was big involved in Mirrodin. So Mirrodin, we started from a very mechanical place. So this is back in the day, um, during, uh, Bill's reign, one of the big things that happened was really the play up of

themes in design. Um, so your Chensukamagawa was the flavor block, right? The Japanese block. So, um, Mirrodin very first and foremost was we are going to make a block about artifacts. As you'll see as we go back, we had a couple different themes, and we're like, okay, what would players like? What's a theme they would like? And I really argued that artifacts were popular. People liked artifacts.

They're flavorful, they go in any deck. And I said, we got to make an artifact block. So Bill said, okay, you're in charge, Mark. Tell me what you want to do. So I went and talked with the creative team and I said, okay, here's what I want. I want a world in which artifacts go to the core of the world. Could we make a metal world? And so, in fact fact it's a funny thing the original inspiration for mirrodin was we wanted to artifacts uh originally what's going to happen tyler beelman who was in charge of the creative team uh during mirrodin um brady was there but uh tyler was in

charge of the team at the time um so what happened was he and i were trying to revamp artifacts a little bit there's a bunch of things we thought we could clean up artifacts and uh he and I were trying to revamp artifacts a little bit. There was a bunch of things. We thought we could clean up artifacts, and he and I spent a lot of time making subtypes for artifacts, the idea being there would be different kinds of artifacts, kind of like there were creature types. We spent a lot of time on this, and we were going to— we had done a whole bunch of stuff to how to separate artifacts from enchantments

to try to clean that up. So the original idea was we were going to do an artifact set, and we were going to make it, use it to clean up a lot of some issues with artifacts. Most of that didn't happen. But what did happen was the idea of a world in which artifacts goes to its core. And so the idea of a metal world

where artifacts were the biology of the world. And we, Tyler and I, did a first stab at it. We had come up with this idea of an artificially created plane. And then we handed it over to a creative team

and they took our not so wonderful idea and turned it into a much, much cooler world. So at the time, the art director, a guy named Jeremy Cranford, did a lot of,

worked some concept artists, did some concept work, and he was the one that really said, what if there was metal going through the creatures themselves,

which I had not thought of, and so it's pretty cool. So anyway, that's where Mirrodin came from. Mirrodin really was trying to be

the artifact block. What happened was, what happens a lot in early magic sets blocks is we kind of painted ourself into a corner that we started making the block and by the time we got to the third set, we realized that we had caused all sorts of problems developmentally

and that we had broken some stuff. And so the third set was all about let's not do what the previous two sets did. And so we came up with this whole spell, sunburst five color thing. Hey, it's an artifact block, but at the end, you want to play five color. The problem was, we didn't really know this going in. And so the earlier sets, especially Mirrodin, hadn't really set up this five color theme. And remember, back in the day, we didn't draft backwards.

Now, we draft the latest set day, we didn't draft backwards. Now we draft the latest at first. We didn't do that. So you would play Mirrodin, which had nothing to help you do five-color, then draft Darksteel to a little bit, and then draft Fifth Arm, which had a lot, but

you just couldn't bank on. By the time you got there, it was like if you planned to get it and then you didn't somehow pick it up in the third pack, you were just in trouble. So it just didn't become a good draft strategy. But anyway, that is how Mirrodin came to be. So Onslaught, I did a whole podcast on Onslaught. Onslaught definitely started somewhere else. Mike Elliott was the one who did Onslaught. I don't know what his original inspiration was. Onslaught. I don't know what his original inspiration was. It drifted a lot during

Divine, which actually wasn't even called Divine at the time. During the end of Design, it drifted quite a bit. It ended up becoming this tribal set. But that's not where it started. That was actually not the inspiration. And in fact, I don't even know the inspiration for Onslaught. I'm not sure what Mike

was trying to do. I know that he experimented with some stuff that didn't quite work. And one of the themes he had done was he had done a little bit of playing around.

He had made the Moonmist creatures, or creature, not Moonmist, what were they called? Mistform. He made the Mistform creatures that could change

their creature type. And he hadn't done too much with it, and I really latched on to that. And I'd wanted to do a tribal set. I really thought a tribal theme was something that would resonate. And so this is me early on. And I explained on the podcast that Bill had me sort of helping him. So this is like my precursor to my becoming head designer.

And so I had worked with Mike, and we did a lot to sort of... I really... I saw some elements of a tribal set and sort of pulled those way up because I really thought tribal would be cool. But OnFlight, interestingly enough, did not at all remotely start with a tribal aspect. That was not...

Morph wasn't there. You know, OnFlight started from a very different place, and we kind of realized it wasn't working. I don't remember exactly what Mike jumped off from. I mean, he had some mechanics, but I don't remember, unfortunately. But it's a good example of we started in one place and ended in a very different place. Okay, Odyssey. Odyssey, I knew going in that I was interested in graveyard mechanics.

We were definitely getting more into themes. The previous year had been Invasion. That clearly had a multicolored theme. I've always loved the graveyard. I think the graveyard is very cool. And so I was inspired by doing graveyard things. And so we started by doing a lot of experimentation

in the graveyard. And we ended up getting Flashback and Threshold, which were the two key mechanics. Back in the day, and we ended up getting flashback and threshold, which were the two key mechanics. Back in the day, we tended to build around two key mechanics. That's how design was done back in the day. There was like two high-profile mechanics in each block. And I wanted to do a graveyard

set, so I made my two big mechanics both revolve around the graveyard. One of them is something that was worked out of the graveyard, which was flashback, and one of which used what I was worked out of the graveyard, which was flashback, and one of which used what I call graveyard's barometer, which is looking at the graveyard and cared about the graveyard. That was threshold.

If you had seven more cards in your graveyard, then it turned on certain cards that had threshold. Odyssey, as I explained many times, the fact that the creative didn't match up with what we were doing, meaning there wasn't a huge graveyard sort of flavor going along with it, which is where Brady got the idea of doing gothic horror, which would later lead to Innistrad. But the mechanics of the graveyard came through.

I mean, I overdid it a little bit. My initial design, I had a little more zone changing. I didn't just have things going to the graveyard, but I had things coming from the graveyard. I had a lot more going on. It was a little more complex. But the whole design, though, was inspired by a fascination with trying to make the graveyard matter more. Okay, Invasion. So Invasion was the start.

I believe Invasion was the first set. Well, it's funny. It's both the first set that Bill was the head designer for and he was the lead designer on it. The idea of Invasion was, I really, I'd been pushing a lot for us for making things a little more thematic and Bill was on the same page and so he and I both knew that doing a multi-color set made a block made a lot of sense. It was a very popular theme and that would be the first big theme we'd play up.

There was a set made by a guy named Barry Reich, who was one of the early playdefters, and he made a set called Spectral Chaos, which was very multicolor oriented. And so Bill's idea was he wanted to do a multicolor set. He knew there were some ideas we could take from Spectral Chaos. The domain

mechanic, aka the Barry mechanic based after Barry Reich, came from that. And so we really went to town figuring out how to make a theme play. And the funny thing was, originally it was just all ten color pairs, and then I and Henry Stern independently

each came up with the idea of holding back the enemy. This is one of the earliest cases of actual block planning, where we said, hey, maybe it would be cool if the last set was about enemy colors. We didn't do enemy colors in the first two sets. And people go, where are the enemy colors? And then, ha-ha, we have a set all about the enemy colors. So Apocalypse became the enemy color set.

And that was really popular. That's one of the most popular third sets we've ever done. And it really made me realize the importance of just planning a little farther ahead. And later down the road, Invasion would be kind of the thing that would lead me to, when I became head designer, I was very, very inspired by Invasion Block, of how it really had a plan, and people could see the plan, and they were excited when it happened. And a lot of my Ravnica Block planning came from trying to follow what Invasion had done.

Okay, Mercadian Masks. So Mercadian Masks came about, we were in the middle of telling a story. So what had happened way back in Tempest is I had come to, a guy named Mike Ryan and I had come to the brand team and said, you know what, we really should have a story. You know, our story, we could kind of bounce around. Let's have a big story with major characters and tell a story through the cards.

And that was what ended up becoming the Weatherlight Saga. So Invasion was actually the end of the Weatherlight Saga, but the set was never really inspired by that. It was played into that, meaning the final invasion does happen in Invasion, for those wondering why it was called Invasion. But Mercadian Mask's inspiration, a lot of it came from... We started with this idea of going to this sort of market world. And I know that this was a Mike Elliott set. Uh, and I know that Mike was, um,

I know that Mike was inspired by trying to get some sense of the world. He made mercenaries and rebels because the world had a little bit of a, of a, um, a flavor of the people rebelling. I know that some of this was... Actually, I don't know how much of it was. It's quite possible because back in the day, the story was there. I don't know if the story inspired Mike, now that I think about it. I think Mike had mechanics that he liked. I think he had spellship.

I think it was mechanic-based. Mike had a bunch of different mechanics he thought were cool. And I think that's where Mike's inspiration for Mercadian Mass came from. It ended up block structure-wise following the story because it jumps around. It's one of the few blocks in which different sets take place in different worlds. Mercadian Mass takes place in Mercadia. Nemesis takes place on Wrath. And then Prophecy takes place on Dominaria.

So the block structure itself was more based on story. and processes take place on Dominaria. So the block structure itself was more based on story. I think the mechanics of it were more based on just mechanic ideas than Mike had. Urza's saga. So one of the things was there was a big switch in the story. When Mike and I pitched the story, it didn't involve Urza at all. And then the story got taken away from us, and the story turned out to be a podcast.

And the team that was in charge decided they wanted to involve Urza and decided that we were going to take a year off from the modern part of the story and go back in the past and learn about the story from the past. And so we went back to see the saga of Urza, and the idea was, I think the block was trying to follow Urza. The problem was, and this is where there's a big disconnect, mechanically, we were making the set a lot more about enchantments. That Urza was really the first set where there's a pretty strong theme weaved in.

There was an enchantment theme weaved in. If you go back and look, there's a lot of enchantments, and it's something that's hard. Because of the story, they ended up calling it the Artifact Cycle block. And because it was Urza, there were a bunch of artifacts, and we happened to make some broken cards, and a lot of them were artifacts, and very few were enchantments. So the enchantment theme got overshadowed by story, by broken cards.

Urza Saga was a broken environment. So all these things kind of overshadowed what we were doing mechanically. But the block originally had been sort of planned to be more of an enchantment theme, and that got overridden by the story. Tempest. Okay, so Tempest was, in fact, planned to tell a story. Tempest was a set that I was, Mike and I were in charge of the story, I was in charge of Tempest, I very much, I was inspired, the design itself was inspired by cool mechanics, but I didn't work early on. Mike and I worked to make sure that the cool mechanics we have, that we crafted a story out of them. So the slivers were part of the story. You know,

the shadow was part of the story, that everything we were telling, the mechanics weren't just add-ons, we really wove them in. Now what happened there was I more figured out what mechanics we needed and then Mike and I worked really hard to make the story take those components and build it into them. And so the block structure was around telling the story, but I was very, it was very driven by making sure we had mechanics and then because I was doing the story, I was working closely to make sure that mechanics were inspiration for making a story. So we told the story

off the mechanics. And we went a little of both directions although there were more, there was more making the story make sense of mechanics, mechanics make sense of story. Okay, now we get to the Mirage. Okay, so Mirage and Ice Age, which are our last two, actually are very, Tempest was done what we call

in-house. I worked at the time... I was working in R&D. I was... led the design team for Tempest. That was all done internally. Both Mirage and Ice Age were done externally, although they were done by some people that would later become R&D people. So what happened was,

when Richard first did all the playtesting and Magic was going to be made, Richard said, okay, someday we're going to need some more sets. In Richard's mind, it wasn't going to happen quite as fast as it happened. Richard didn't see the explosion that the game would have. I mean, no one really could. But he had some people working. He, in fact, had three different sets being worked on.

One was Spectral Chaos that Barry was working on, Barry Reich was working on. One was Mirage that was worked on by Bill Rose, Joel Mick, Charlie Cattino, Don Felice, Elliot Siegel, Harold Kallenberg. That was a group that Richard had met through Bridge, his Bridge Club.

And then the other group, we call it the East Coast Play Thefters, was Scaf Elias, Jim Lynn, Dave Petty, Chris Page. They're people that Richard had met through the University of Pennsylvania. And so each of these groups went and made their own set. So let's talk Mirage first because the group that made Mirage. Oh, because we're talking about Mirage.

So that was Bill Rose and Joel Michelet it. Charlie Coutinho, who works in was Bill Rose and Joel Mick led it. Charlie Katina, who works in R&D, also was on it. And there were a bunch of other people that never came to R&D. But they all worked together back in Pittsburgh. Or not Pittsburgh. Philadelphia?

He went to UPenn. I think UPenn is Philadelphia. If I'm wrong, I apologize to the Philadelphia people, or Pennsylvania people. I think UPenn is Philadelphia. If I'm wrong, I apologize to the Philadelphia people, or Pennsylvania people. I think UPenn is in Philadelphia. Anyway, so they had worked on, originally it was called Menagerie, and I think the inspiration was they were trying to tell a story. And what happened was, back in the day, there was no separate team. The team that made Mirage were the same people making the story.

And they were very enamored of, I think it was a three-sided war, that there were three different mages, and they each had a different faction, and there was a war between them, and I mean, the way the story changed a little bit, but

essentially there was a war waged and one of them one of the mages betrayed the other and imprisoned him in the Amber Prison, and the other mage figured out that there was a double crossing. Anyway, the story, a lot of what they were trying to do was, they had the mechanics of phasing and flanking. This is how we did things back then was you had two mechanics. So like Tempest had Shadow and Buyback

and Urza Saga had Echo and Cycling and Command and Master didn't really have main mechanics. But back in the day, that was the kind of thing. You had two mechanics. So Mirage, its main two mechanics, its named mechanics were phasing and flanking. Um, and, but they were really tied into the story they were trying to tell. I don't know if the story came after the mechanics, the mechanics came after the story.

Phasing made things come away and come back, and there was a, it's a fairy who was this planeswalker who was experimenting with time and had phased away part of the, part of the world. Um, the interesting thing was Mirage was made to just be two sets, a large and a small set. with time and had phased away part of the world. The interesting thing was Mirage was made to just be two sets, a large and a small set. The idea of blocks were very early back in the day that Mirage came together. Mirage was the first kind of modern block. Ice Age kind of was a stapled together block. We'll get to Ice Age in a second.

But Mirage, that team made Mirage and Visions. And then Weatherlight actually was the precursor to the Weatherlight saga. Weatherlight had very little to do with Mirage story-wise. We knew we were going to use the Weatherlight, so the Weatherlight got woven back into the story, so the Weatherlight shows up in the Mirage story just

enough that we can then bring some focus to it in the Weatherlight. Or in the Mirage story just enough that we can then bring some focus to it in the Weatherlight. Or maybe I take that back. Maybe it had already been part of the story, and that's the part Mike and I had pulled out to make our story around. I think that's what happened. Yeah, I think when we started the story,

we knew we had the flying ship Weatherlight. And Sissy might have already been the captain. I'm not 100% sure. Or maybe we made Sissy and then made her the captain. I forget. So anyway, Mirage's inspiration really was trying to tell a story and capture certain mechanics. Although it was more mechanic-based as far as structure.

Okay, finally we get back to Ice Age. So Ice Age really was meant to be a single one large set. And then when they went and made alliances there was a lot of pressure saying hey could alliances take place in the same world and the design team was like well we really just want to make some cool designs and they were like come on make it the same world

we're like okay but most of the connections between alliances and Ice Age were done in development. Design was just trying to make a cool new set. They weren't specifically trying to make another Ice Age set. And so there's a little bit of continuity. Development added a little more continuity

just to feel like it was the same world. And then the creative stayed on the same world, so the creative matched. And I think what happened was the original creative was made by, I think, the East Coast Playtafters. The idea, the Ice Age and all that, I think they're the ones that came up with that basic story idea. So once again, there wasn't really a set structure.

When they made Ice Age, they didn't even know they were going to make alliances. I mean, obviously, years and years later, we'd make a cult snap to sort of finish out the cycle, but that was us goofing around. So it wasn't actually found in a file cabinet. People haven't yet figured that out. so it wasn't actually found in a file cabinet you haven't yet figured that out so Ice Age was sort of retroactively kind of made into a block

Mirage was a block, we introduced it we introduced it as a block this was the first set in the Mirage block Ice Age didn't do any of that, I think Alliances might have said another set in the Ice Age block, maybe. I'm not even sure if the term block existed there. I count Ice Age only because, look, there were multiple sets.

In fact, now there's three sets that all take place there. So it does have elements of it. It is the earliest of the blocks. So I'm trying to wrap up here because I'm pulling into work. So one of the things that I'm... Oh, here's what I didn't do. Let me real quickly.

I talked about how Bill Rose was the lead designer from Invasion Forward. So before him was a man named Joel Mick. So most of the block era from Mirage Forward, he wasn't really...

I don't think he was in charge of Ice Age. Mirage Forward, which is really the block era, from Mirage forward, he wasn't really, I don't think he was in charge of Ice Age. Mirage forward, which is really the block era, Mirage was the first sort of official block, Ice Age was only pieced together in retrospect, was Joel Mick. And Joel would later go on to become the brand manager for Magic. So, but anyway, like I said, a lot of what these podcasts are

is to give some sense of where we came from and what we were trying to do one of the things you'll see over the years is what exactly blocks are and how we structured them became a lot more official as time went on like for example early on Ice Age

it's only almost in retrospect that they were connected. And Mirage was a little bit connected, and there's some story there, but it still was like, here's our two mechanics. And Tempest had its two mechanics, but it had a little more consciousness of trying to tie the story into the mechanics. And then Urza Saga

and Mercadian Masks and Invasion. Okay, there's a story going on. The block structure at least paid a wear of the story. It still was mechanically driven as far as what the sets were doing Odyssey and Onslaught, Invasion, Odyssey, Onslaught we started to do theme blocks where the block at least was about something thematically, mechanically

so Invasion, Odyssey, Onslaught, Mirrodin, Champions, all that was true through sort of Bill's reign and then when we started getting to my time as head designer I started really getting into the idea of block structure. That there's a structure to the block. And like I said, Ravnica was inspired a lot by kind of

what I'd seen during Invasion, which we kind of backed into. It wasn't something we'd started with and sort of stumbled across a neat idea. Oh, you know what I forgot to mention? Odyssey also experimented with doing a block stuff where we had a heavy black set in the middle

set in Torment, and then we reversed it and had green and white, the enemies of black that were low in that set were high in the last set in Judgment. So, you can see in Invasion, we started messing around with ideas of block plans. We don't quite execute them as cleanly. Once we went to Ravnica, I started the block by saying,

what are we doing in the whole block? What's our plan for the whole block? So that we structured the block out ahead of time and we knew what each thing was going to, what role it was going to take. So we start getting to Ravnica, the blocks start getting much more spelled out. So Ravnica, Time Spiral, Lorwyn, Shards of Alara,

they're much more what is going to happen is spelled out. So Zendikar, Scars of Mirrodin, maybe I say Scars of Mirrodin is where I start. I get really into the idea of having tone and mood and sort of having an emotional feel for the block. So that's where we started around there. Scars is really where we started hitting. That's where I consider sort of the fifth age of design starting.

And so you start seeing those last sets that the blocks are much more, we're trying to do an overall thing and get a tone to it, and story's being woven a lot more. You see in Zendikar and Innistrad, the big twist, story-driven to go to a new place. But anyway, hopefully these two

podcasts have shown you that there's a lot of evolution to how blocks have worked, and how they've been inspired has changed over time. So anyway, I hope you guys have shown you that, like, there's a lot of evolution to how blocks have worked and how they've been inspired has changed over time. So anyway, I hope you guys have enjoyed the story. But, as I'm in the parking space, we all know what that means. It means it's the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you guys next time.