Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #255 - Khans of Tarkir, Part 2

Episode Date: August 21, 2015

Mark continues with part 2 of his seven-part series on the design of Khans of Tarkir.

I'm pulling out of the parking lot. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. And I had to take my daughter to camp again. Okay, so last time we talked, I started talking about the design of Khans of Tarkir. Well, today, I'm going to continue that story. I'm going to be continuing that for a bunch of podcasts. A lot of story to tell. Okay, so last we left, we had come up with the clans. We had figured out they were tied to dragon attributes, and we knew they were wedges. So last we left, we had come up with the clans. We had figured out they were tied to dragon attributes.

And we knew they were wedges, but we had left off there. That's what we knew. Okay, a few things to recap that I forgot to mention last time. First off, my design team. So I was the lead of the team. I had Mark Gottlieb, Zach Hill, Adam Lee, Sean Main, Billy Marano, and Ken Nagel. So Adam Lee was our representative from the creative team. Zach Hill was representative from the development team. And at some point, Zach became Billy.

Zach left and Billy took over. So Zach and Billy were the respective development team members. Zach ended up leaving Wizards. And so when he did, Billy took over. And then Gottlieb and Sean and Nagel are all on my design team. I mean, our designers. The development team was

Eric Lauer, lead, Doug Byer, Dave Humphries, Tom Lepilli, Sean Main, who was the overlap, Adam Prozac, and Adam Prozac. So, usually we have one person who's on both the design team and the development team. In this this particular case that was Sean and then there

is also a designer on the development team, in this case also Sean, Sean served both roles anyway and Doug Byer would have been the creative rep on the development team so the set was codated Huey, Huey, Dewey and Louie, which by the way

turned out to be horrible, horrible code names for two reasons. One is they rhyme, which makes them hard to remember for people. And second is, although there is an actual order, like if you actually watch Donald Duck and his nephew in cartoons, they always refer to them in the same order, but a lot of people didn't know that order. So people were constantly confusing what order. Was it Huey, Louie, Dewey, Louie, Huey, Dewey?

Huey, Dewey, Louie. So a lot of people eventually Huey, Louie, and Dewey. I just messed it up. Huey, Louie, and Dewey. The way people remember them is the middle one was L and the last one was D for lunch and dinner is how people tend to remember it. So Huey, Louie,

and Dewey. The other interesting thing about Huey, Louie, and Dewey. The other interesting thing about Huey, Louie, and Dewey is they're all spelled differently. That Huey is H-U-E-Y, Louie is L-O-U-I-E, and Dewey is D-E-W-E-Y. So they're all spelled differently even though they rhyme. Anyway, a disaster. The funny thing is we thought, okay, we're not going to have rhyming names again, and then Locke and Stock and Tears and Fears both have rhyming names. So once we're done with those, no more rhyming names, but we still have a few rhyming names left in the system.

So the set had 269 cards, 101 commons, 80 uncommons, 53 uncommons, and 15 mythic rares. I'm sorry, 53 rares. 101 commons, 80 uncommons, 53 rares, 15 mythic rares, 20 basic lands. And the set came out on September 26, 2014. Okay, so let's get back to the story. Okay, so we knew we had five clans that were wedge-based. We knew we had morph. So one of the things that we wanted to do was,

I was really interested, I always talk about trying to get the right feel for the set. Well, I knew we were doing warlords, right? We were doing constant fighting. I really wanted to get the mindset of, I'm in constant battle, that I'm in this sort of war-torn environment. So I wanted a lot of sort of stress to the system, and I wanted it to be very combat-centric. That, you know, if you were a warlord, you're constantly fighting. It's like no end to the fighting. It's just ongoing.

And I was trying to recreate that. I wanted to get that warlord sort of sense. The sense of just constantly fighting. Okay, so the first mechanic we came up with actually didn't happen during design. It happened during exploratory design. So once we knew we were doing morph, I asked the team, or I mean, I asked Ethan and Sean, the team, I asked the exploratory design team. Actually, that's a little unfair. I started with Ethan and Sean.

I gave them assignments. And then Ethan and Sean quickly figured out that it was beneficial to get other people involved. So what happened was they would ask other designers or other people in R&D to aid them. And those people would sort of rotate through, but they'd get other people to help them. And so even though Ethan and Sean were the ones that would meet with me, they had other help doing stuff. And that idea of having a rotating cast actually influenced how we now do exploratory design. But anyway, Ethan and Sean, I gave them the assignment.

I said, okay, we know we want to do Morph. Give me some mechanics that play well with Morph. So one of the things we realized is one of the fun things about Morph is there's a certain bluffing aspect where I attack my Tutu creature. I have mana, so maybe my Tutu creature could be something. But you don't know and one of the things

is we wanted to give you reasons why you would attack with your creatures even though it wasn't necessarily beneficial for you to do so and what I mean by that is that one of the fun things about morph is you can bluff with them like I could have a creature that I

even though I have mana I can't turn it into anything that's going to cause problems for you, but you don't know that. Like, one of the things that's very funny is a lot of people argue about how morph creatures, if you take a morph creature and take it out of a color that can un-morph it, that is just a gray ogre. It's just a three mana 2-2. And my argument is, no, it's more than that, because your opponent doesn't know what the potential is. So it's a 2-2 creature with a threat. And even if that threat is something you know isn't real, your opponent doesn't know it's not real.

So when I splash an off-color morph, for example, and I put it on the battlefield, even though to me it's only a 2-2, I get benefit out of it beyond it just being a 2-2, because my opponent treats it as a mysterious thing that could be something more. Anyway, what that means is, one of the fun things is, we wanted to give you motivation to attack for it, to give a rationale why you might attack where it might not be what it would be.

And so they came up with the idea of Raid. So Raid was a mechanic, in fact it was called Raid in Exploratory Design, was a mechanic that said I reward you for attacking. So Raid is kind of like in the morbid school of mechanics which says something happens, provided

this turn you've already done something. Did something die? Did something attack? Something must have happened. I have a bonus if something's already happened this turn. And so the nice thing about that is it encourages you to attack. And what it means is sometimes you're attacking not because it's beneficial to attack, but because you're trying to trigger a raid. And so it created this neat dynamic with Morph where I would attack with a Morph creature,

and you're like, oh, is that something for me to be afraid of? Or are you just throwing it away to trigger Raid? I didn't know. And it created interesting things. So we knew we had Raid. We had played with Raid. We liked Raid. So once we had ironed down all the... Remember, we had five clans tied to the dragon aspects.

So we had... Oh, I didn't talk about which one was which. Let me talk about that for a sec. Okay, so I had the wedges. And the question is, which wedges should go with which attribute? So remember, the attributes we were going for were speed, strength, I'm sorry, speed, well, we would later change these words. At the time, it was speed, strength, intelligence, endurance, and majesty. And then later on, as I explained last time,

strength would become savagery, intelligence would become cunning, and majesty would become ruthlessness. But okay, so we had these five different things. Who wanted to go where? So we knew that the red, black, white wanted to be pretty aggressive because red and white are the two most aggressive colors. And black is number three. You know, as far as attacking quickly.

So I'm like, okay, well these are the three colors that are the most aggressive in how quickly they attack. Especially red and white. So like, okay, this wants to be the aggressive color. So okay, that makes sense to make it the speed color. Red, white, black will be the speed color. Oh, and another thing that went on is... colors. Okay, that makes sense to make it the speed color. Red, white, black will be the speed color. Oh, and another thing that went on is we had to figure out where to center the color. And this story has layers upon layers.

So one of the things that happened is I had planned for the third set to be enemy colors. I love the idea of enemy dragons. It's a world in chaos. Why not enemy colors. I love the idea of enemy dragons, like, you know, it's a world in chaos, why not enemy colors working together? But then Eric Lauer came to me and explained the problem. So it turns out the way you draft a wedge set is you first draft enemy colors. The reason you do that is that you leave yourself open to possible clans. For example, if I draft red and blue, okay, I could still draft white and go to Jeskai, or I could draft green

and go to Teemer. But if I draft blue-white, well, the only clan that is blue and white in it is Jeskai. I mean, if I draft blue-white, I have only one option to me. So the correct way to draft a Wedge set is to draft enemy colors. And so what that meant is

what, um, because the development team wants to make sure there's always 10 archetypes that you can draft, in a wedge set, the backup would be the enemy color things. So the idea is that we would have five wedges and then five enemy colors, and that if you can't, you know,

we would give you some enemy color support because that can go in two different wedges, and if you get in trouble, well, maybe you just stay with the enemy color, you don't pick a third color. But the problem was, it meant that the set wanted to have enemy color stuff in it, and wanted to have a focus with enemy color. If the third set was all about drafting enemy color,

Eric's complaint was, it was too similar. You would start from the same place. You would draft enemy colors. So Eric convinced me that I needed to go ally color. I was sad. I really wanted to do enemy color, but his logic was very solid. Eric's logic usually is very solid, of which

we weren't really changing things. We were keeping things too much of the same. So once we shifted to ally, I had a little problem. So if you, one of the things, the obvious place to center a wedge is in the enemy color. If you go back and look at the shards from Shards of Alara, we centered it in, you know, the color that had two allies. So Bant was centered in white. Esper was centered in blue.

The problem here was, one of the things we wanted to do was we wanted to keep the aspect of the dragon all the way through. In fact, early on, the idea was the clans were just going to be the clans. So that, for example, we'd have Mardu, that Mardu would exist all the way through, just what Mardu meant would change. So Mardu, when it first comes out, is white, black, red, and then when Mardu came out in the last set, it would just be red-black. The problem was we didn't have official names for the wedges, and one of the reasons we wanted to do wedges was to give them names so people had names for them.

But we were then concerned that if we went to two-color and we had something that was the names people would use for three-color, being two-color is going to cause confusion. And we really did want the names associated with the three color concept. So we ended up not doing that. So originally, the original idea, by the way, was Mardu was going to go all the way through. It's going to be the dragging of the aspects of speed, and it's going to be the symbol of the wings. So the idea was we wanted consistency all the way through. The problem was, if we went to ally colors,

we had to take out the enemy. So for example, if Mardu was going to be in the first set and Mardu was going to be in the third set, the thing Mardu was going to lose was going to be white. And white is the enemy color. White is enemy of red and enemy of black. So we couldn't center the clans in their enemy color

because then when we went to the end of the... The idea was there was consistency. This clan might change, might not be taken over by dragons, but it was still about speed. It still had a central identity to it. And we knew we had to remove the enemy color to do that which meant we can't we couldn't center the clan in the enemy color now when the first came out people asked me about that because it's the obvious thing to do and people are like why aren't you doing it but i didn't want you to know where we were going with dragons of tarkir so i just could sort of say well okay there's a reason you got to trust me there's a reason

um and the problem in general is people knowing the reason. So people don't want to hear that there's a reason to come, but we can't tell you yet. So anyway, that was the major reason. There's some other smaller supporting reasons, but the major reason was we knew we were pulling that piece out, and we couldn't center it on and then pull it out. Okay, so we knew red, black, white was speed.

That made the most sense. Next, we were trying to figure out where to stick cunning. Well, cunning, the two colors that made the most sense for cunning were blue and white. And if we wanted to put in blue and white, then just guy was the only place. And we're like, oh, well, it does have a trickery aspect to it. Red is the color of trickery. Red and blue are trickery. So like, okay, you have the plotting and planning colors and the tricky colors. Okay, that makes sense. So red, blue, white, that can be cunning.

We then looked at endurance. And we're like, well, endurance has to be in white. White is the most enduring color. And green is probably number two as far as toughness. I mean, blue has some defensive qualities to it. But we'd already done Jeskai, which was blue, white, red. And there was no other blue, white. That was the only blue, white combination.

So like, okay, we can't have blue and white. Well, white's more defensive than blue. And probably next is green. And then we're like, looking at the last one, like, well, if we,

if you went white, green, the only choice then is to go with black. Like, well, black has some defensive qualities. Okay. So we decided endurance would be white, black, white-green, the only choice then is to go with black. Like, well, black has some defensive qualities. Okay, so we decided endurance would be white-green-black. Okay, that left ruthlessness, and it left savagery. So ruthlessness, well, clearly that wanted to be centered in black,

and it turned out that the place they wanted to center it was in the jungle, kind of the themes they were playing off of was these opulent golden palaces in the jungle. So it kind of wanted this green quality to it. I'm like, okay. They also were pretty sneaky. So like, black-blue made some sense. They definitely were, of all the clans, they had the most, you know, sneakiest

quality to them. And they were manipulators. So like, okay, we'll make it black-blue-green. So that left, the last one, strength for red-green-blue. Green being center of it black, blue, green. So that left, the last one, strength for red, green, blue. Green being center of it made a lot of sense because green really is about sort of might makes right to a certain extent. And red made a decent amount of sense.

Blue was a little bit tricky, but we said, you know what? Blue is about perfection. Normally we talk about mental perfection, but it's also about physical perfection. It's about making yourself the best you can be. These creatures are trying to survive in the harsh wilderness. Okay, they have a certain physical perfection quality.

Not mental perfection, but a physical perfection. We don't play that aspect up in Blue enough, but okay, it makes sense. So we had our connections, and what we did is we centered them where it made sense. Speed got centered in red. So Mardu was centered in red. Cunning got centered in blue.

That made a lot of sense. So Jeskai was in blue. Ruthlessness got centered in black. So Mardu was centered in red. Cunning got centered in blue. That made a lot of sense. So Jeskai was in blue. Ruthlessness got centered in black. That was Soltai. So that got centered in black. Endurance got centered in white. So Abzan was in white. Made sense.

And then Strength was centered in green. So Timur was in green. That all made sense. Okay, now that we had those, we needed to figure out the mechanics. Sorry, I go back and forth. There's a lot. One of the things about telling stories like this is there's

so many little layers to it that I start telling one part and I want to tell another part and I've got to explain this first, so stick with me. Okay, so we liked Raid. Raid made perfect, perfect sense in Mardu. So we stuck it there. It's like,

we knew that Mardu was going to be tied, sort of the mongrel flavor of just, uh, creatures on horseback with archers constantly attacking, and anyway, we liked that as the speed plan. Okay, we're going to give them raids. Um, okay, the next mechanic we came up with, um, I think was, I should remember the order of this. Um, well, early on we, okay, maybe Delve was next. So we knew remember the order of this. Well, early on, we... Okay, maybe Delve was next. So we knew we were doing Ruthlessness.

So Delve had been made during Future Sight. I made it as a mechanic that was just... I was trying to explore different things we would do. I knew we would do other graveyard sets. So I'm like, oh, I'll tease a graveyard mechanic. We made three Delve cards. They were pretty powerful. So people really liked Delve.

There was just enough of it that people could sort of connect to it. And so Delve was probably the mechanic we were getting the most requests for. I tried to put it in Innistrad, but what I learned is Delve doesn't work in a graveyard set because it eats up all the graveyard,

and in the graveyard set, you want the graveyard run to do cool things with. in the graveyard set, you want the graveyard run to do cool things with. But it turned out that the salt eye messed around the graveyard and had zombies, and there was definitely a death aspect to them. It made a lot of sense in black. So I'm like, okay. Delve, the first time around, was in black and blue. Okay, so why don't we, what if we made Delve? so we went and talked to the creative team they thought that Delve is a good fit

I'm like okay we'll do Delve so Delve got added in Delve is an interesting place where in general we tend to do when we do clans like this we tend to do newer mechanics we already were bringing back Morph so I didn't need to bring back a mechanic

but I feel the future site mechanics aren't really bringing them back. I mean, obviously the public's seen them, but we've given you three Delve cards in the existence of Delve. It's not a lot of cards. I'm like, well, in some level we're really giving it to you for the first time. I mean, I understand we gave you a sampling of it before, but never in great volume. You know, it was hard to make a Delve deck with three cards. And now we're giving you more.

Plus, we're also extending it in green because we're in salt time. So anyway, we bring Delve back. Next, I think... I think next was Prowess. So Prowess originally... We were trying to find a mechanic that was sneaky. We liked the idea. Remember, one of the things in general that we were trying to do

was get as much combat-oriented stuff as we could. Raid, obviously combat-oriented. Delve was not necessarily combat-oriented, although we made a bunch of cards that could be used in combat. So we were trying to figure out... I wanted... So Jeskai was based on the Saltai

monks, the, you know, monks, you know, the Kung Fu monks up in the temples and, you know, learning the ancient ways and this and that. And so we were trying to figure out a way to make them sneaky but have a combat element to them.

And then I came up with the idea of, well we'll get to this in a second. I thought, it came to me, what if we did a mechanic that just wanted you to play spells? That every time you played a spell, the creature got a little boost.

And so the idea originally was, okay, this creature gets plus one, plus one whenever you play a spell. And we tried that, and it was a little too strong. So then we came up with the idea originally was, okay, this creature gets plus one, plus one whenever you play a spell. And we tried that, and it was a little too strong. So then we came up with the idea of, because originally the idea was we were going to do five mirrored mechanics in Dragon's Dark here. We would do five mechanics, and then those mechanics would be mirrored in some way. So there would be a tie between them. So the speed mechanic of the first set and the speed mechanic of the third set would have a mechanic that was sort of connected between them. That's the original

idea. We would later realize that it was too close, that what we wanted to do was two mechanics that were synergistic with each other, but not that were directly tied because we wanted to feel Dragon's Seal different. But anyway, we broke it up into two parts. One was

plus one plus one whenever you cast a creature, and plus one, plus one whenever it was a non-creature. Um, and I decided I wanted to start with a non-creature, um, and we saved the creature one for dragons that ended up getting dropped, never done. Um, and we played with it, and it was, it was really, it played really fun. It's one of those mechanics that on the surface

seemed like it wouldn't matter that much, and when you started playing it, really fun it's one of those mechanics on the surface seemed like it wouldn't matter that much and when you started playing it like it matters quite a bit it's actually a pretty good mechanic um and so what happened was we're playing this mechanic so one day we're having a play test and john lokes was uh was working at the wizards at the time um in our digital department at r&d uh and he had play tested or he looked at the file or something and he said, oh, I'm so excited that you used and he named

some name of the mechanic. And I go, oh. It turns out that in The Great Designer Search 2, John had turned in a mechanic that was similar to Prowess, very similar to Prowess. And I had given him a note

saying, because he had a much bigger reward. And my note was, you know, it could just be plus one plus one. That would be fine. And so obviously it was implanted in my brain.

When I saw an opportunity, I made use of it and then forgot that's where I got it from. And so he's like, hey, you used my mechanic. I'm like, yes, we did. So the John Lux Special Prowess. And by the way, we had such fun with Prowess. Prowess proved to be such a cool mechanic through design and through development

that it became clear that it was solving a bigger meta problem. One of the things in Magix that we always try and solve is, blue has lacked having a creature combat mechanic. Blue in general has always been shy of creature mechanic. It doesn't have an overlap with red, and it needs something that's creature

oriented. And Prowse is like, works in blue, in fact makes a lot of sense in blue. Blue's the spell card, being rewarded for spells is good. It's a combat mechanic, we've been looking for a combat mechanic for blue, and it's one that's really flavorful and makes sense in blue. And blue and red don't have an

overlap and makes a lot of sense to stick this in red, so like Prowse was the perfect answer. Now we figured this out before I mean long before you guys saw it a lot of said, but what happens Prowse was the perfect answer. Now, we figured this out before, I mean, long before you guys saw it. A lot of said, but what happens if it had come out and we didn't like it?

The audience didn't like it. I'm like, well, we have a lot of faith. If we play something and we really like it, we have a good sense that, you know, we're Magic players too. So we thought it was going to be a big hit. And in fact, Prowse is interesting. So we do two market research on our sets.

We do two different ones each set. One that kind of comes out and one a little bit later. And when we did the test for the first set, when it first came out, Prowse was five out of five of keyboard mechanics of the clan mechanics. And we're like, uh-oh. We knew we had already advanced this.

And then the next one, it was I don't know, number two, maybe? And then once we got to Faber Forge, it was the number one clan mechanic. So it was, like, definitely when time really grew with people. Once people, the first impression, if one of those mechanics, the first impression is like, eh, that doesn't seem anything special. And you play with it, and you're just, you're really wowed by all the cool things it does. It's really a neat mechanic.

Okay, so we had prowess. Next, we messed around. We wanted something that dealt with things being big in Teemer. It was a strength clan. So we wanted to mess around with something that had to do with, okay, things are bigger. And so what we did was we said, okay, what if we just cared about you having something of a certain size? Naya, in the shard we did back in Shroud of Alara, Naya had a mechanic that kind of cared about having five-power creatures.

It wasn't a named thing. So we decided that we would do something, make it a little bit smaller, and name it. So originally it was three-power or greater. And then in development it turned out three was a little too easy, so it. So originally it was three power greater, and then in development it turned out three was a little too easy, so they changed it to four power. It ended up being called Ferocious. What did we call it?

We called it Power Up. The Outlast, which I'll get to in a second, was called Hunker Down, and this we called Power Up, I believe. Prowess, by the way, was called Kung Fu in design. Raidunker Down, and this was called Power Up, I believe. Prowess, by the way, was called Kung Fu in design. Raid was Raid, and Del was down, because Del was a returning mechanic. Okay.

And by the way, because we had Prowess called Kung Fu, we had a lot of silly Kung Fu names, like everyone's Kung Fu fighting and stuff like that. Okay, anyway. Okay, so Ferocious, is that right? Ferocious? Hold on. It was called Ferocious. Ferocious was fun just because it sort of said, hey, you need to just get a big creature in play

and we'll reward you. One of my favorite interactions, by the way, was there's the interaction where you could have Ferocious and Prowess. And if the Prowess creature was three power, and you cast a Ferocious spell, it would make it go to four in such

a time that when resolved, it would trigger the Ferocious. That was a great combo. Anyway, one of the things that's fun is when you make different factions is making sure that you create cards so the different factions work together. We'll get there eventually. Okay, so we got Ferocious. We played with that. The last mechanic was

we were trying to get for for Abzan was the Endurance mechanics. We wanted something that sort of said, okay, I'm playing from a long game. You know, I'm the slowest of the five decks of the Wedge decks. On the Endurance deck, I'm going to laugh at you, so I'm going to be the slowest of the five decks of the wedge decks I'm the endurance deck, I'm going to outlast you

so I'm going to be the slowest deck and so we liked the idea of something that got strength over time so the original version of outlast which was called hunker down was you could choose to not attack and if you chose to not attack or attack or block you could choose to not attack or And if you chose to not attack, or attack or block,

you could choose to not attack or block, and then you would get a plus one, plus one counter. Eventually, we made you tap it because it was confusing. It was confusing that it couldn't block. You had said it can't block, but then it still was untapped.

And eventually, tapping at the same time as attacking caused confusion because you thought it was attacking. block. You had said it can't block, but then it still was untapped. And eventually, tapping at the same time as attacking caused confusion, because you thought it was attacking. So then development, I think, ended up doing it at end of turn. And then it just turned into a tap. Like, anytime you want, you can

tap this. You obviously can't attack with it and do it. So, you know, functionally, this replaced tapping. And then the other thing that Eric really did was Outlast originally, there wasn't a lot of reason to play them together. In fact, there was a reason not to play them together

because most of them required mana to use the Outlast, and you only had so much mana. So, Eric, not Aaron, Eric was trying to figure out how to get people to play in Abzan to get more of a mechanic in it. And so he stumbled across the idea of making plus one, plus one counters matter.

So the Outlast gets plus one counters on your creatures and then they make it matter. So the reason you might want to play a lot of Outlast creatures is, well, this one says I get Outlast and I get a bonus, I get lifelink or something if I have Outlast. Oh, well, if I have a bunch of Outlast creatures

and upgrade all of them, then my bonuses will apply to each one of them. Um, okay, so, um, we messed around, uh, the, the team or mechanic we messed around a lot with, and we messed around a bit with the Abzan mechanic.

Um, now that I think of it, I'm not sure whether Outlast or Ferocious was 5th. One was 4th, one was 5th. I know we talked a lot with development. One of the things that we do now is we'll meet with development partway through and show the mechanics and just get general feedback.

Eric was concerned about the Outlast ones not linking with each other. Like I said, they got fixed in development. There were a bunch of other things. Eric also, I know with prowess, he thought that plus one plus one might not be enough. So they changed it to plus two plus two for a while in development.

And then they discovered how plus one plus one was much more potent than it seemed at first blush. Plus two plus two was kind of crazy. Okay, so how much does it work? So we had our mechanics um we oh the next thing we needed to do was we needed to figure out the flavor so one of the things we were doing was we were telling a time travel story so we wanted to make sure that our set uh played into the tropes of time travel what that meant was well it was, well, it was the present,

then it was the past, and then it was an alternate present. And so we wanted to make sure that as we were doing that, that we could make, there was a correlative thing that would be fun. Like we knew, for example, that if you're going present to the past,

well, you could do something and you could see it in the past. Now, originally when we were doing this, I think our scope of what the time difference between the present and the past was a little closer.

And then when the creative team figured it out, it ended up being over a thousand years. Like, oh, okay. But there's still things we could do.

You could have a fresh building that's, you know, in ruins. You could have, you know, a creature that lived a long time, like a tree folk or something, you know, in ruins. You could have a creature that lived a long time, like a tree folk or something, or a giant turtle.

So we came up with a whole bunch of different things that we thought would be connective tissue. And the connective tissue, some of it was, here's present-day things that go to the past with Favor Forge. Some of the things were, here's present-day that go to alternate reality, so you can see the author with Dragon's Atark here. Some of it was something that day to go to alternate reality so you can see the author with

Dragon's Dark here. Some of them were going all three so you could see the contrast between the three. But anyway, we implanted that stuff and we talked to the creative team and we brainstormed a whole bunch, they brainstormed a whole bunch, and so we included a bunch of that stuff.

The other thing that was really important was trying to figure out how to weave Morphin carefully. Some of it was choosing mechanics that made sense. Oh, let me talk about another important discovery of Morph. So one of the things that I talked about this was there was big discussion when we first, when Eric and I first sat down, of whether or not we wanted to change Morph. Should Morph be two mana? It would have to have a new name.

Wouldn't we call it Morph? We were calling it Borph, which wouldn't be the real name. Or whether or not it wanted to stay the same, three mana. And so Eric originally said three mana and then late in the process had second thoughts. And we were doing so well in design

that we said, you know what? Let's do an experiment. And we were doing so well in design that we said, you know what, let's do an experiment. So we spent, it's going to be a month, it ended up being about six weeks. We made a parallel file we called Fui. That's the fourth in the comics with Huey, Dewey, and Louie. Huey, Louie, and Dewey. See how hard it is?

Even I mess it up and I know them. Every once in a while, the artists would draw a fourth duck by mistake and it happened enough that they had an in-joke name for the fourth duck, which was Fooey. So anyway, what we did was we made a parallel version of the file, changed all

of the morph cards into borf cards, then adapted them to make sense for them being that, then changed all the file around it to match that, and then tried playing with that. And we learned a lot of things, and a lot of the things we learned got applied to the design.

But in the end, it became clear that the problem with Borf was it was so much more efficient that you just played every Borf creature you had, and most of the time, you were just smashing

Borf creatures into Borf creatures, and nobody was turning them face up. Like, the fun of Morph is you get it turned face up. What is it? Ah, it's this. And some of the time, it doesn't get them face up. Like, the fun of morph is you get to turn them face up. What is it? Ah, it's this. And some of the time it doesn't get turned face up, but the majority of the time, you get to see a lot of what the morph creatures are. In morph world, you almost never saw it.

It was just colorless 3-2-2s that people were smashing into each other. And it really was losing some of its specialness, in that it did make the cards a little more playable and constructed, but it was losing what made it special. And so part of any mechanic is trying to hold on to what makes the mechanic special. And so we wanted to make sure

that Morph was doing what Morph wanted to do. So we ended up not changing to Borf. But we did do the playtesting to figure it out. Anyway, so we had our five mechanics we knew we were playing with morph we knew um so we the next step and we'll talk about this next time is we had a lot of flavor to layer in we had a lot of stuff to work in um we had sort of our skeleton our mechanical skeleton and a lot of the pieces how it was going to come together um but this set had a lot of flavor in it and we had a lot of work to do

to sort of get there. So next time, I will talk about what we needed to do to start getting the flavor in the set. And probably by next time, I will start getting into the cards by cards. But anyway, I'm in my parking space.

We all know what that means. Means is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. See you guys next time.