Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #273 - Fate Reforged, Part 1

Episode Date: October 23, 2015

Mark begins a five-part series on the design of Fate Reforged.

I'm pulling my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today is the first day of the design of Fate Reforged. I'm going to talk all about, so I already did a series podcast, seven of them, on Constant Archer. So today I'm going to start doing my podcast, multiple podcasts I assume, on Fate Reforged. So we're into the middle block of the Constant Archer,ir, or sorry, the middle set of the Kansa Tarkir block. So let's jump in. Okay, so when I talked about Kansa Tarkir, we knew going in that the entire point of the block was we started with a drafting method. We knew that we were going to do large, small, large, and something that I'd always wanted to try

was the idea of having the middle block be drafted with both the first and the last sets. Little did I know that this was going to be the last reset block, so I got in my desire right under the wire to try something. Okay, so once we knew that, we then spent some time, we did Exploratory Design, the first, one of the first ever, in fact, the first ever, and we came up with the idea

of a time travel set. So what that meant was the middle set was the past. We were going to go back to the past to discover what, so the idea essentially was our main character comes to the present day, things are bad, he finds a way to go back to the past, and then he fundamentally needs

to change something to change his world. So the story we needed to tell was a story in which our main character, happens to be Sarkin Vaal, goes back into the past to try to change something. Well, what does he want to change? Well, Sarkhan loves dragons. He's revered dragons. That's always been a big thing of Sarkhan. His world has no dragons. They've been killed off.

So what if Sarkhan went back in time and changed it so the dragons weren't killed off? That's the story. So there were a whole bunch of things that needed to get figured out. On our end, the design end, we knew what we had been doing for Kansi Tarkir that had already been designed. In fact, by the way, actually, this is an important thing to understand.

We started designing Dragons of Tarkir before we started Fate Reforged. And so understand why is a large set has a year design, a year's worth of design. Small sets used to have four months. We're shifting it now to where it's closer to six months. But regardless, in order to get... Dragons of Tarkir came out, had to finish, gets released, I don't know, three to four months after Fate Reforged, which means it needs to be done roughly the same equivalent of time. But because we had longer to work on it, we actually started first.

So Fate Reforged was in a really tricky place, because what we wanted to do was we wanted to have the middle set mean one thing with the first large set, and a different thing with the second large set. And so, we were in this weird place where we needed to sort of give it an identity, but an identity that could sort of evolve as the things around it evolved. Okay, so real quick, I don't talk too much about the team anymore. Ken Nago was the person I put in charge of the set. He was the lead designer. Also on the set was Jennifer Clark-Wilts, Ethan Fleischer, Dave Humphreys, Gavin Verhey, and myself.

So we had a big challenge. By the way, Dave Humphries was not only on the design team, he was the lead developer. Dave likes to do that. Dave likes to be on the design teams that he's lead developing so that he gets a really good sense of what's going on. He's the only developer I know that does that. So I actually think it's interesting. It gives him an insight that I think a lot of other

lead developers don't have. But anyway. Okay, so the big trick we needed to figure out was how... So we knew on one side we had Concert Archeer. Concert Archeer is a wedge set

about clans. Okay, so we needed to support a set. When you draft for that set, it was all about three-color play and playing clans. Okay, on the other side, we knew that we had an ally-color dragon set. I've talked about this before.

Originally, dragons were going to be enemy-colored. It turned out drafting was too similar. It played too much the same way. So we ended up having to shift it. Now, once again, we had started Dragon's Ceremonies. We knew it was an ally set. We knew it was an ally dragon set. So the question was, okay,

this set on one side had a play with a three-color wedge set. On the other side had a play with an ally dragon set. How do you do that? What do you need to do? So that was the first big challenge. Speaking of things, or challenges, I realized I have no gas. So I have not actually filled up my gas tank on the show. I did it once, I think. So this is the second time. So you guys get my drive to work means you get what I get to do when I drive to work, and today I got to get gas. So if you hear outside noise, that is because I'm getting gas, because that is something I have to do.

But anyway, I will continue to podcast while I get gas, because nothing shall stop this podcast. Okay, so how do we on one side show a three-color set and on the other side show a two-color set? How do we do that? That was the big challenge. Okay, so here was the thing. We knew that we couldn't have three-color gold cards in the set

because three-color gold cards wouldn't make any sense in the second card. With the third set, with Dragon's Dark here. So we knew that we needed to have stuff that played with three-color but itself wasn't three-color. So the question is, how do you do that? I mean, that's a very tricky animal of how to do. So the question is, how does one pull that off? Meanwhile, we have the problem of,

we have dragons in the second set, and we're back in the past in which dragons are still alive. So how do we acknowledge that it's the past, but at the same time set up dragons in the past in which dragons were still alive. So how do we acknowledge that it's the past, but at the same time set up dragons for the next set? For anyone who's ever read my State of Design for 2015, we erred in some ways, but I'll get there.

So, the thing we want to figure out is three-color set on one side, two-color set on the other side, that meant we couldn't have gold cards. We experimented with gold cards, we thought about gold cards, but the problem we ran into was the gold cards so made you want to play three color that when you drafted them with the ally color set, it still pushed you toward three color, but the set didn't really enable that. So we would have cards that would trick you into doing something that wouldn't pay off. So the answer was, okay, we couldn't specifically have three color gold cards. The solution of all places came from a mechanic from Ravnica of all places,

a gold set, was hybrid. Hybrid has this nice thing where you can, if I have a mono color card with a hybrid cost, and the hybrid are the two other cards in the clan, then I still... It feels like a three-color card in the sense that it requires... It can require all three colors to use, but it technically also is playable in a two-color. So the idea is if I have... Let's say I'm doing Abzan, and I have a green card that has white and black

as its activation cost. Well, green-white is ally, so if I play that in dragons, I can just treat it like a green-white card. But if I play it with cons, I can treat it like an obzon card, a green-white-black card. And so the trick there was hybrid allowed us, but hybrid wasn't the only answer.

Hybrid was the first answer. We needed to have a couple different answers to make it work. Okay, the next thing that we needed to do was find out other ways to make it work. Okay, the next thing that we needed to do was find out other ways to make cards relevant and feel like three color while only being actually two color. The other trick we did is we took cards that cared about permanence that were of a certain color. So imagine you had a green card that said, I want a white or black permanent in play. Once again, in an Abzan deck, it's great. It is green, it referenced white, it referenced black,

it feels like three-color, but once you get it to a two-color environment, that card only really needs to have, you know, you can play a green-white deck, as long as it gets white, it does what it needs to do. So between caring about permanence and hybrid, we managed to start making the kind of card we needed, which was a card that felt like a clan, felt three-color, but it wasn't. I mean, but was playable in a

two-color deck, a two-color ally deck specifically. The other thing to keep in mind was the general premise we had of the set was we were in the past, and so the idea was the clans existed, but they were sort of proto-clans. They were the early version of clans. So if you ever looked at the watermarks in the set, what the creative team did, did pretty well, was the watermarks exist, and there still are clans, but they're sort of proto-versions of the clans.

The watermarks, it's clear that the eye is the eye for Jeskai, but the style is slightly different. It's a little simpler, and so it's important to sort of build that in to make that make sense. For those wondering, it is taking a long time to podcast today. I don't know. My thing is going very slowly. So we knew that we wanted to have factions.

We knew we wanted to have the clans, the proto-clans were there. The things that would become ultimately the clans of Khan Zahraqir had to exist. But that wasn't the only thing. We also had to have dragons. So one of the big debates we had, and like I said, I think we aired a little off on this one, but we

were back in a world of dragons. It's very important, and the creative team really stressed this, that we were back in the time when dragons existed. If Sarkhan, if there weren't dragons everywhere, well then, that's the promise of the set. The promise of the set was,

we are, you know, Sarkin returned to a time of dragons. So one of the big things to figure out was how to get that sense of dragons in a way that would pay that off. So what we ended up doing was, we ended up having, let's not give my receipt.

Well, I guess I will have to pass on my receipt. Okay. Back in the car. Um, so one of the things we had to figure out was, sorry about that. One of the hard things about doing, uh, I don't normally get gas while I do this is I have to keep track of multiple things at once. And so I apologize that I'm a little more distracted when I'm doing a second thing. But you have my full attention again. We're back to recording. Okay, so where was I? We were trying to figure out how to have dragons.

So here's the challenge. The set that came after us was the dragon set. We were sort of paying off dragons in a big, big, splashy way. So it was important that we don't out-dragon the dragon set. But at the same set, it was important to establish the path, and the defining quality of the path was we were at a crossroads in time in which the dragons still existed. And if Sark had kept the dragons alive,

we know we were going to a world where the dragons were the masters of the clans, if you will. So one of the things to figure out was how many dragons was the right number of dragons. The other thing was we knew we needed to introduce the dragons that would become the clan lords. So we knew for sure, for sure,

there was going to be a cycle of dragons, legendary dragons, that we would see here as younger versions and then see in the Dragon's Ark here as the Dragonlord. So we knew we were doing those. There was a big fight of whether or not we were supposed to have just those, and I really wanted just those only because I did not want to step on the dragon set. I knew that, and what we ended up doing was, in order to feel like there was enough dragons that was a pass, we made a cycle of monocolor dragons that we stuck at uncommon, I believe.

And then we had one common dragon, which was, it sort of, you attacked with it and then went back to your hand. So it, it was, actually, I think you sacrificed it. But the idea was, it felt more like a direct damage spell than an actual dragon, although it was put in the style of a dragon, so it definitely would feel like a dragon. Okay, so... That ended up making 11 dragons. So it turns out that having 11 dragons,

having one common, five uncommon, and five rares... The reason we made the legendary ones rare was we knew we wanted space to have mythic rare because we wanted them to be more grandiose in their dragon lord fan. So we put them at rare to give ourselves some space. But anyway, what that ended up doing was we had a higher as-fan of dragons

than any set in the history of magic. Which really wasn't... I mean, looking back in retrospect, I feel like we needed to find a way. Now, the other thing you'll notice about dragons in Tarkir is dragons show up all the time in the background of the art. And that's also true in dragons in Tarkir. In fact, even more true in dragons in Tarkir.

But the real question going back was, could we have conveyed dragon-ness in a way that didn't require so many actual creature-type dragons? And that was one of the things sometimes that you get torn in design is that what you want for design and what you want for the creative are slightly different. Like, I was, I mean, from a purely design standpoint, all we needed was the legendary dragons that would turn into the dragon lords.

That's all we really needed to have design-wise. But flavor-wise, did we really sell the idea that Sarkhan went back in time and now it's a world where dragons are alive if you just didn't have any dragons? And I'm torn. I guess I wish we could have found, like, maybe if we found a solution like the common. First of all, the common shouldn't have been there. The common should have been, like, I'm frustrated that Dragon's Arc here didn't end up with

the common dragon. We tried and designed, but it ended up not being there. If that, for sure, for sure, the common should have been in Dragon's Arc here. That's easy. I think what I would have done is maybe try to see if there was a way to do something like the common and uncommon. So there's some cards in which

dragons appear, there are dragon tokens or something So there's some cards in which dragons appear, there are dragon tokens or something, where there's some dragon-ness to it, but just have the Ascent of Dragons be a lot lower. I think that was my biggest problem, was it's really, really hard to have the dragon-iest dragon set of all dragon times when the set before it is the most dragon set ever

up to that time. That made things hard. Okay, so the set, by the way, I glossed over a few important little points. the most dragon set ever up to that time that made things hard. Okay. So the set, by the way, I glossed over a few important little points. Set came on January 23, 2015. Had 185 cards. So 70 common, 60 uncommon,

35 rare, 10 mythic rare. So at the time, there's a time where Magic large sets had, I'm sorry, small sets had 60 uncommons. We eventually shifted up to 80 uncommons. This was part of the transition of us getting there. I think small sets now all have 80. And part of changing over to the two-block system required us having some more cards that's small. We wanted to start drafting the small set first

and have two packs of it. We'll get there. That's the future. Anyway, so this one had 70, which was a little more than we normally did, but not as much as we eventually would get to. We also did this cool thing with the basic lands where the tap lands from... Basically, you had a chance of getting...

With new art, the tap lands, or with old art, the fetch lands, were in the land slots in a rarity of equal value to sort of how rare they were. But there was this extra bonus sort of land thing you could get. So you were able to get some of the dual lands from Conjured Arc here. The tap lands that you got mana

that came in tap, but you got mana. Not mana. You got a life from them. Those had new art, and the fetch lands were the same art that they were in Conjured Arc here. Okay. So, now comes the bigger structure. So, we use hybrid

as a trick to sort of let you play three-collar and also play two-collar. But there was a much bigger structural thing we had to figure out, and that was, okay, so we're in, the dynamic of the set was, we started and we were in present day, present day Tarkir. We go back in the past, we're in past Tarkir,

we come back, we're in alternate reality present Tarkir. We go back in the past, we're in past Tarkir. We come back, we're in alternate reality present Tarkir. You know, Sarkin has saved Ugin. Oh, let me talk a little bit about that. So that was a big question. So one of the things that we do when we build a block is we go to the creative team with our needs. So for example, we had created an archetype. We were telling a time travel story. But here's all we needed. We needed a world that was in peril. We needed a hero that went back in the past and changed some fundamental thing.

And then the new world was the shift of the fundamental thing. So we had gone to the creative team and said to them, okay, what's the world in peril? What's the world that we end up with? And they had given us the idea of Sarkhan's home world, of a clan, an Asian-based clan world, warlord world, where the clans were all fighting, and then it turned into a dragon world. And they liked the idea of it being Tarkir which was what's his name? Sarkinval. Sarkinval's home plane. Because we knew that he came from

a plane in which he revered dragons but the dragons had been killed off. So this seemed like a cool place to return. We knew it was a war world sort of place and that you had a fusion of different Asian sort of cultures and it was dragonless. But it allowed us the opportunity to go back in the past and change that

and then make it a world of dragons. Okay, so we had all that. So when we went in, what we said as a creative team was, look, okay, we know we're starting in Sarkin's war-torn home, and we know we're ending up with dragon worlds. Okay, so something has to happen. Sarkin has to go back in the past and somehow save the dragons. But how you save the dragons, why you save the, all that, well, why we knew. Why? Because he loves dragons. But how does he do it? So there are a bunch of different

things. Something that they latched on very, very early was the idea of... Oh, no, actually, the first thing they talked about was that... I'm trying to remember that. Oh, so another thing that we had done during exploratory design was I wanted a through line, mechanical through line through the set,

meaning I wanted... I knew that each of the factions were going to get their own flavoring and their own mechanic, but I wanted to have something that ran through everything that I could show the evolution of past present, past

alternate present. And so we ended up doing that with face down cards. So morph was the mechanic in the first set. We wanted to have a proto version in the second set, and then we wanted to have a tweaked version in the second set, and then we wanted to have a tweaked version of it in the third set. So once we knew we were doing that, the creative team started playing around with the idea of dragon magic.

That maybe in the past, the dragons had created magic, and the humans had somehow subverted it over time. And maybe even they used that magic as a means to subvert the dragons. That by using the dragon magic, the humans' version of it sort of used it to hide their identity so the dragons couldn't recognize them and then were able to kill them. That was the original idea.

So what that meant is, okay, why exactly did the dragons die off? And so the creative team had to figure out, okay, well what happened that the dragons died off? And then they liked the idea that there was something that was preventing new dragons from being born. And that since new dragons weren't being born, that allowed the clans, as they killed off the dragons, there's no new dragons. And that once that happened, so the quick question is

okay, how could we make a singular event in which that was true? And for a while, they played around with the idea that it was the passing of the dragon magic that was important, and that there was this I can't remember the story. There was an emperor who was

I think a human emperor, who got the dragon magic There was an emperor who was, I think, a human emperor who got the dragon magic and was able to negotiate and get the human magic and pass it on to the humans. And so the original version was they had to kill the emperor. That was like the original, go back in time and kill the emperor.

And then the creative team decided two things. One, they didn't like the idea that Sarkhan was going to change things by killing things. It felt like we were trying to save the dragons, so we should save something, not kill something. That it felt weird, like, how you save the dragons is by killing a thing. That felt sort of fighting itself. So eventually they said, okay, let's have him save somebody.

And then they realized that they had worked something into Sarkin's backstory that made perfect sense, which was Sarkin had been hearing voices. So for those who don't know the story, Sarkin got sent to Zendikar by Nicole Bullis, I believe. And Sarkin had started hearing voices while he was on Zendikar. If you remember Sarkin the Mad, he was going mad. And at a time, the question was, what were the voices? And we said, you know what? Those voices, what of those voices were from Ugin? And we know Ugin had been on Zendikar because Ugin was one of the three planeswalkers that had trapped the Eldrazi. And so we liked this idea of

we didn't originally know where Ugin was from. We had never defined where Ugin was from. Well, what if Ugin was from Tarkir, the world of dragons? Ugin's a dragon. What if he was from this world? And then, they came up with the idea of, what if Ugin is his death was the reason the dragons died off? What if his death had something to do with prevention of making more dragons? And so they had come up with this thing called the dragon tempest,

which was on Tarkir, dragons weren't born sort of the normal way, that there were these natural things called tempests that were formed, and dragons got formed out of the tempest. And what if there was a person who, their embodiment sort of safeguarded these Tempests, and that person was Ugin. Now, the other

cool thing, if you go back in time, I think it was in a comic, there was something with Nicol Bolas where someone asked him about Ugin, and Nicol Bolas makes a comment about how he left him in the ground. The implication that he had killed Ugin. Now, we knew at the time

that Nicol Bolas is a very unreliable source. That Nicol could say he did something, but did he? Who knows. But we liked the idea there's this thread that Nicol Bolas had claimed he had killed Ugin. And we're like, oh, okay. We need Sarkin to save Ugin.

There's this unresolved thread of Bolas maybe has killed Ugin. What if that was what went on? So what if they go back in time and they manage to save... Sarkhan saves Ugin after his fight with the cold Bolas. All the pieces kind of came together. Now this is one of those things where I think that there's a lot of times when you have a lot of threads, they kind of lead in a direction.

And this was something where it kind of naturally came together. It's possible maybe even when they got, the seeds got planted originally, they were going in this direction and just we picked up on that. But anyway, it made for a pretty cool story of, okay, Sarka's going back in time.

What is he going to do? He is going to save Ugin. How is he going to save Ugin? From the fight against Nicol Boas. Now, there were a whole bunch of problems that had to get solved, which was that one of the big things that we wanted to do is made sure

that the changing of the times affected Tarkir, but didn't affect a lot of other things. And so the idea was they wanted Ugin to be saved, but didn't affect a lot of other things. And so the idea was, they wanted Ugin to be saved, but basically wake up present day, not be saved back in the past. Not have Ugin be alive to go do... So we decided, I guess, when they were trying to figure out how much time

made sense for the dragon to be killed off, it was like 1,300 years. So they didn't want Ugin alive and prancing around the multiverse for 1,300 years. Obviously, he would do Ugin alive and prancing around the multiverse for 1,300 years. Obviously he would do things that would change things. So the idea was, and they wanted Bolas to still believe that

Ugin was dead. They didn't want to, like, in the middle of the fight, save Ugin. So the idea was, Nicol Bolas kills Ugin, or mortally wounds Ugin. Ugin is dying. So Ugin puts himself in a cocoon and sends out a message to the future,

which ends up coming to someone else from his world, which is Sarkhan Val. And the beacon gets him back to this time. And it's through the magic of Ugin that he's able to traverse through time. And he comes back to save him. But by saving him, what he does is... I'm trying to think of the next one.

He basically gets him in this healing cocoon so that he won't die. That he's in the process of dying and that Serkan comes back. He gets to see the fight. Bolas leaves. And then he goes and he mends Ugin and helps set him up in this cocoon so that Ugin will later heal. And so Ugin takes his 1300 years to

heal so that when we see him in the modern day storyline, he's just come out of his cocoon. So he interacts, obviously, he's in the storyline for Battle for Zendikar. In fact, I think what happens is Sarkhan had come trying to find Ugin because he knew on Zendikar the Eldrazi had gotten out, and he knew they needed to do something about it. So he was trying to find him. And so if you see him in the original storyline, he shows up in the original story, and then what happens is Sarcan goes back in time, changes things, notches a dragon set, and then Sarcan shows up

in the alternate timeline, and Ugin is there for him to find. So that's one example of the story. And then the fact that Ugin is there, we wanted to make sure

that the outcome of the story mattered for magic going forward, but didn't completely rewrite the story thus far. Okay, anyway, my deviation into the story. Okay, so now we knew we had the following, which is we wanted to have this mechanic that was running through, which was a face down. So what happened there was we had come up, in Exploratory Design, we had come to the realization that what we wanted was a proto-version of Morph, meaning something that felt like would one day evolve into Morph. And we came up with a mechanic, at the time we called Recruit, you guys now know it as Manifest, and the idea was it just took cards and made them face down to two creatures. The original version didn't have

built into the ability to turn up if you were a creature. That came later. And the idea was, I'm just, on some level I'm making tokens, but if the token was a face down card that had a morph, well it could turn up. And one of the cool things was

with morph, there's no surprise when I play a face down creature. You surprise when I play a face-down creature. You know when I play a face-down creature that it's a Morph creature. There's no suspense there. You don't know what Morph creature. The suspense has to do with what it is, but not the fact that it's an unknown thing. But with Manifest, I now got a 2-2 face-down

creature in play that you didn't know whether it was a Morph or not. And there's a lot of debate, by the way. We had this in playtest. We knew it was a complicated mechanic. We knew that... But it was during Divine that Dave Humphreys, like I said, who was on the design team,

came up with a suggestion of what if built into it was if it was a creature that could turn itself face-up. Because it was a little too dependent on morph. And that way, it allowed you to play it in a deck that didn't even have morph creatures, and it was more than... Like, originally, if you didn't have morph creatures, it mostly was just a token-making mechanic,

a slightly complicated token-making mechanic. That Threadmorph, I mean, even if you didn't have morph, I always talk about this, your opponent doesn't know whether or not in the limited environment you have morph. So it was more than just a 2-2 creature. A 2-2 creature at least had the threat of being a morph creature. But if you didn't actually have morph, there wasn't a lot you could do. So Dave's suggestion was to sort of allow you to turn it face up.

Anyway, we liked it. It played well. Our big concern was there was a lot going on. I'm going to get to the mechanics in a second. There's a lot of moving pieces. And having a mechanic that was on some ways trickier than Morph, it had more going on than Morph, we were worried about. But we playtested. We left it in design. We left it for development. And development played it. And they felt the same way design did, which really was fun. It was a fun mechanic, but we knew it was a bit complex.

We said, okay, we're going to do it, but we tried really hard to make sure that the stuff around it was not quite as complex. I think morph being, the face-down mechanic being this whole block really made us sort of make everything around it a little simpler. But anyway, we did it,

and I'm glad we did. The audience really liked it, but it definitely did add an extra layer of complication because Manifest I mean luckily if you know Morph Manifest isn't super confusing if you know Morph

but if you're unfamiliar with Morph it's a pretty complex mechanic because it is in some ways everything Morph is but more but more complicated originally when we played around with it, I think it all came off the top of your library

and then we decided that we could branch off a little bit. Mostly it came off the top of your library, but it came from a few other places as well. Okay, so we had Manifest. So now, how do we feel like we're the junction point, the crossway point, between two different things?

So one was we wanted to have elements of Kahn's Atarkir in the design. We wanted elements of Dragnatar Kir. So the idea was you would see stuff that some of it would drift to be one set and the other would drift to be the other set. So the idea we came up with is we had five clans. We knew we still were going to keep the proto clans. What if only some of the clans had the mechanics that you saw in cons what if a few of the clans had mechanics that you saw in dragons so one of the things we did in dragons once again remember dragon started first was in dragons we made mechanics for each of the five clans, if you will. Remember, they shift into ally-car clans in Dragons. And we gave a mechanic that would play nicely

with the mechanic that went through. So originally, by the way, the original idea was that we would have the clans and they would have names, and those names would go all the way through the block. That the Jeskai were red, white, blue, and then you go back to the past, and they were more white and blue with a little bit of red, and then you go to the alternate present, and it was white-blue. There was no more red in it.

The problem was we had never given names to the wedges, and we knew that people would so badly want to use those names for the wedges that we were afraid we would confuse people, you know, that if Jeskai was in the third set, but in that set Jeskai didn't mean red, white, blue, it meant white, blue, it'd be confusing. So we ended up calling the clans in the dragon set after the dragons that were the dragon lords. So Ojitai became sort of the clan, if you will, just named after the dragon. sort of the clan, if you will, just named after the dragon.

So what that meant, though, was there was a through line that, like, once again, the reason that I centered the color not in the enemy color was each clan did have a, even though the name changed, there was an identity that went all the way through. So there was a blue-based cunning clan that started as Jeskai and would turn into Ojitai. It would start as red-white-blue, it would become white-blue with a little bit of red, and it would end up being

white-blue. And what we wanted to do is make sure that whatever mechanic we gave to that clan in the first set, in the second set, or sorry, in Dragons, it would play nicely. Because we knew either in Favorforge, when you play with Favorfor set, or sorry, in Dragons, it would play nicely. Because we knew either in Cons of Tarkir, or sorry, either in Favour Forge, when you play with Favour Forge, or when you play Favour Forge with Dragons of Tarkir,

you would have them overlap. And we ended up doing a split of three and two, because we knew we were introducing Manifest, and because we'd have two mechanics, it meant we'd have two other new mechanics introduced in Favour Forge, and the three remaining ones would be in Dragons of Tarkir. So the idea was we set up the system where three-color version of the clan had a mechanic, two-color version of the clan had a mechanic,

and there were synergies between those mechanics. Now, Fate World Forge didn't figure out those mechanics, the dragon ones. Dragons of Tarkir figured those out. So what had happened was, we knew the following, is we knew that we wanted to carry over Delve, that Delve had come back, and we knew we had more to do with Delve.

We knew we didn't want to do Outlast, because, Outlast, right, the Abzett mechanic, I think it's Outlast, because there wasn't a lot of design space. So we knew we wanted to change that. So we knew the white-green mechanic in Dragons would have to change.

We knew the black-blue wouldn't change. I'm sorry. We knew the black-blue... I mean, anything was going to change in Dragons, but we knew that it wouldn't change in Fate Reforged. We went for the mechanics. So Raid had a lot of space left, so we were happy to do Raid.

Outlast didn't, so we didn't want to do Outlast. Delve did, so we wanted to do Delve. And we knew people had been looking forward for Delve for so long. Ferocious, we knew there was more design space, but we were more than happy to give it up. We knew it was going to be probably the least favored mechanic.

It ended up being the least favored mechanic. Oh, and prowess. We really liked prowess. We wanted to keep doing prowess. We didn't at the time know it was going to become evergreen, so we saw a lot more design space in it. Turns out there's tons of design space, that's why it went evergreen. So we knew for sure we wanted to delve in prowess. We knew we didn't want it to last.

So the question was, would red-green be the second one with the new mechanic, or would black-red with the new mechanic? So it turns out in Dryden's Archer, we ended up making a mechanic called Dash that played really nicely, and we decided we really

had enough design space that we'd bring it back. So even though we liked Raid, we decided to bring Dash back. We went back and forth between um... No, no, no, I guess once we did that, we knew the white-green mechanic would have it back, so we knew that we were going to bring Dash back. We went back and forth between um, no, no, no, I guess once we did that, we knew the white-green mechanic would have it back, so we knew that we were going to bring Ferocious forward. Um, uh, and so, uh, and then

we'd end up making Formidable for Dragonstark here. Um, okay, so, once we figured that out, then, okay, we knew the two new mechanics, black-red would be Dash, Dash was the mechanic where you could play the card and for the Dash cost, you could play it and get haste. But if you did that, then it came back to your turn to end a turn. And that mechanic seemed real simple, and it was nice in that you could put it on a creature and literally just be cheaper so you could attack quicker.

But you also could do a lot of things with the battlefield effects and leaves the battlefield. You could do a lot of tricks with it. So it ended up being a very fun mechanic. It was the first mechanic we made in Dragon's Dark here. Interestingly, Bolster, which was a mechanic that when you bolster, you put a plus one, plus one counter, Bolster N, you put N plus one, plus one counter on the creature with the lowest... What's power or toughness? I think it's power. But anyway, Bolster was the last mechanic we made,

so Dragons took its time figuring out. Meanwhile, Favorite Forge was bouncing around trying to figure out, like, what to do. And like I said, for a while we were thinking maybe instead of the black-red mechanic, the red-green mechanic would be the new mechanic. But once we settled on, okay, we knew white-green and black-red,

but we didn't know what the white-green mechanic was going to be. We figured out, once we knew we wanted to dogreen and black-red, but we didn't know what the white-green mechanic was going to be. We figured out, because once we knew we wanted to do dash and black-red, and we knew that we needed to do white-green, that mechanic took a while to find. We started Fate Reforged without knowing what the mechanic was, and that dragons kept changing it around, and then whenever dragons changed it around, Fate Reforged would change it around.

So it was definitely pretty tricky. For those wondering, by the way, I'm looking at my clock. There is, every traffic day, they're doing some, I don't know, there's something going on in Seattle today. I was warned there would be extra traffic. So it turns out there is extra traffic. So luckily, there's lots to talk about Favorite Forge. So I'm, no fear that I can't fill up this podcast. There's lots to talk about.

Okay, back to favorite parts. Okay, so we figured out eventually we want Bolster. We figured out Dash. So we knew that the new mechanics being introduced in the set would be Manifest, Dash, and Bolster, all of which are really fun mechanics. Bolster did take a while. We did go through a bunch of different things.

And the other thing that we wanted to make sure was even though we, so remember that the overlap between the three-collar clan mechanic and the two-collar clan mechanic had to be synergistic. So we knew some of those would overlap when Fate Reforged played Khans, and some would overlap when Fate Reforged played with dragons. And so we wanted to make sure that cards that enable those things were stuck in Fate Reforged played with dragons. And so we wanted to make sure that cards that enable those things were stuck in Fate Reforged to make sure whichever version you played were smooth. The other big thing we did is Fate Reforged needed a theme.

Obviously it needed a structure, but the theme, which was handed to it, was the idea of this was the focal point of history. This was the fulcrum. This was where choices were going to be made. So one of the things we wanted to make sure was we wanted to have this theme of choice and change, of the idea that you, the player, are making a decision, and that decision has an outcome.

So thematically, Sarkhan had to make a choice in the story. He had to go back. Now, I mean, obviously he was going to make it, that kind of thing. But from a story standpoint, Sarkhan has a big decision to make. He has to go back. He has to decide whether or not to save Ugin. Now, obviously he goes back. Obviously he does it.

But, I mean, it needed to be a true decision. It needed to be something he needed to figure out from a story standpoint. And so we like the idea of change, of choice as being a big part of the set. So one of the things we did is, and I'm going to talk about the cycles in a second, that we built in a bunch of different ways to have choice.

So in general, we like modal stuff. So this set was a little more modal than normal, meaning that modal is something that we usually describe saying you have a choice do you want to do A or do you want to do B interestingly Gavin Verhey was on the design team there was a lot of modal stuff that went on and Gavin felt like

the cards were looking a little busy so Gavin mocked up some cards using bullet points to demonstrate how we could do them with bullet points. And people so liked how it looked that we made the decision and started with Favourite Forge, we changed how we do modal spells. So now we do modals with those bullet points to say, choose one, bullet point A, bullet point B.

Sometimes we do modal that's more than two choices. For this set, it was two-choice modal was the theme. Okay, so as in every set, you want to do some cycles. So we had a bunch of choice cycles. The two highest-profile choice cycles, probably the highest, was what we call the sieges. So what the sieges were is you had a pick,

and they represented, it was two different, it was enchantment that had two different outcomes. So you could choose enchantment effect one, or enchantment, it's hard to say. Enchantment Effect 1 or Enchantment Effect 2. And the idea was

we flavored them so one was more con-like and one was more dragon-like. And we went through a lot of decisions of how to sort of flavor this because the idea was, are you going the con route or the dragon route? Meanwhile, by the way, we also made one other card,

Crux of Fate, which was a card that we had made pretty early on, which was we wanted to definitely play the idea of, are you choosing dragons or not choosing dragons? So we made a Wrath of God called Crux of Fate, like a Wrath of God, that either destroyed

all dragons or destroyed all dragons or destroyed all non-dragons. And we ended up putting the fight between Bolas and Ugin on it. And it was a pretty cool, cool card in that it really sort of, it's one of those cards that we made that we knew would be the first card

we'd show from the set. Because it just did a good job of explaining the Crux point in history, the decision Sarkhan had made, the idea of a set that is at the cross points. And so, I mean, not that obviously all the, like in the dragon future, it's not all dragons were killed.

It's not literal, but it did a nice job of sort of, figuratively sort of showing the conflict at hand here. And the Crux of Fate is an awesome name. So the sieges and the Crux of Fate, we did something cool, by the way, which was there were special versions of them in foil that were lenticular

that showed you two different pictures on it, depending on how you looked at it. Oh, no, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, the picture didn't change. The picture stayed the same. The foil of the watermark would change. So if you looked at it one way, it looked like the clan watermark. If you looked at it the other way,

it looked like the dragon clan watermark. And so I talked about how they had made a proto version of the watermarks. They also made a version of the watermarks when they went to be the dragon clan, so that there was a little reminiscence of it. And the clans all the way through admired the same

thing. So if you were the clan of the eye of the dragon that stayed through the cunning, the cunning partans all the way through admired the same thing. So if you were the clan of the Eye of the Dragon that stayed through the cunning, the cunning part stayed all the way through, and the subtle sense of the Eye stayed all the way through. So anyway, there's a cool thing for those that didn't realize it. The other thing that we did was there was a cycle of commons. What were they called?

I don't know if they had names. And so what they did is when they came into play, you got to choose whether or not there was a counter a plus one plus one counter on it or whether or not there was an effect that happened so essentially they could be a little bit bigger or they could have a spell effect that came along with them you chose what you wanted

and so the idea was I think the flavor was you could kind of in one version of the world they got tough enough but in another version of the world they got toughened up, but in another version they were able to do their magic.

Once again, a lot of times when you get a motif, it's more important in the theme that you sort of, the idea is choice was important

and then we played up choice as a mechanical design thing. It's not that every choice was actually the choice Sarkin had made, but just the idea of the set about choices.

I think that was pretty important. So anyway, we put a whole bunch of different cycles in this. I'm almost to work, so I'm going to just talk about the cycles real quickly, and then I will wrap up for the day, and then starting next time, I'll talk about the cards. Okay, so the first thing that we did, there was a cycle of enemy color activations. So one of the ways to definitely get you to sort of play with other things was to have off-color activations.

Hybrid was nice because off-color hybrid activations allowed you to play a card and feel like you were part of a three-color tribe. But when you got to three-color tribe, but when you got to two-color worlds, it would work just as fine. We did allied-colored... We did allied-colored dragons. So we did a cycle of dragons that were legendary that would turn into the dragons that would become the dragon lords. We also did a cycle, I think at Uncommon, of monoochord dragons

just to convey the idea that we're in a world where dragons are alive again. We did the sieges, which I was talking about earlier, which was the enchantments where you made a choice. And we ended up having to choose

between dragons and cons. We spent a long time figuring out what were the words. But in the end, hey, what are you choosing between? Are the dragons going to rule or the cons going to rule? We had clan matter creatures,

and those were creatures where if you had the right color, that they were monocolored creatures, that if you had a permanent of one of the two colors in their clan, a three-color clan, then they gained an ability. We had a cycle of common manifest creatures. We had common enemy color instants. Oh, because we wanted you to draft and pick toward enemies for purposes of Kansa Tarkir,

it's something we did that we knew wouldn't get as much use when you drafted the other set, but would help you draft Kansa Tarkir when you drafted that. We made the modal creature I talked about. We can choose the plus and plus counter or the effect. We made rune marks, which were auras that cost

two and a C, so two and a colorless, I'm sorry, two and a colored mana. So two colorless and a white, blue, black, red, or green. And then it gave the creature

a plus two, plus two, and it gave an ability if you had a permanent of the correct type. So it was another thing that said, hey, I give you this, but if you have one of these two colors,

which wasn't the clan colors, the three-color wedge colors, then you got an extra ability. And then... Oh, then we made a manifest cycle just in Jeskai. But anyway. And then we printed the lands from Conjure Tarkir. Okay, so as you can see today

we did all sorts of things to put the set together I'm not quite done talking about the set but I'm going to get to the card part because A I spent a good 45 minutes talking to you so next time I'll start with the cards and as I do the card stories I'll get to a lot of other pieces about the set so anyway ah that was a long podcast

we had a lot of traffic and got some gas so that my friends in a good 45-minute wrap-up, is the beginning of my favorite Forge podcast. But I'm in my parking space, so we all know what that means. That means this is the end of my drive to work. Instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you guys soon.