Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #288 - Dragons of Tarkir, Part 1

Episode Date: December 18, 2015

Mark begins a six-part series on the design of Dragons of Tarkir.

I'm pulling my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today we are going to talk about design. So it's time to talk about the design of Dragons of Tarkir. So recently I talked about the design of Khans of Tarkir and of Fate Reforged. So this is the third companion piece to those two series. Thane Reforge. So this is the third companion piece to those two series. So a bunch of what I'm going to talk about now, I talked a little bit about this

in the previous ones, but let's start from the beginning of Dragons of Tarkir. So, those that know about Khans of Tarkir know that we began with the idea of drafting large small large, with the small set drafting with each large set, but the large set's not being drafted together. From that, we

got the idea of doing a time travel story. From the time travel story, we went to Creative Team and said we wanted two worlds. They came back with Sarkin's home world, in which it would be human warlords, or warlords, not all human, I guess. Warlords that had wiped out the

dragons, and then Sarkin would go back in time and have some event and end up saving Ugin, and then Sarkim would go back in time and have some event, ended up saving Ugin, and then there would be dragons. So we knew, coming into the design for Dragon's Tarkir, that it was the dragon set.

The dragon-y of dragon sets! So once upon a time, we made a set called, what was it called? Scourge. The lead designer was Brian Tinsman. And Brian likes dragons, so he put a little tiny dragon theme in it. It wasn't really a major issue, just a little tiny theme.

And the development really pounced on that and decided that this was going to be the dragon set. And so they added a few more dragon things, and marketing was sold as the dragon set. Here's the problem. It wasn't really a dragon set. I mean, it was, I'd say it was some dragon flavoring maybe, but I mean, it wasn't what you would expect for a dragon set. Just the amount of dragons in it was pitifully low for a set being billed as the dragon set. Meanwhile, we did a set, I don't a set many years later called Dragon's Maze. Now, Dragon's Maze was supposed to be, the dragon was Nismithit, and it was his maze,

and so it wasn't supposed to be about dragons or anything, it just had the word dragon in the title, and that was all it took for people to go, dragon in the title must be a dragon set! And they were even more disappointed because there were no dragons in it. I think there was one card that made things into dragons, but I mean, there was no, not even a creature-type

dragon in Dragon's Maze. Although, once again, it wasn't dragons and a maze, it was a Dragon's Maze. Although, even that dragon wasn't in the set. He was in the previous set. Okay. So, we knew knew coming in here, we had had some false leads. Some of our own

doing, some poor titling. But anyway, we knew this time like, okay, if we're going to do a dragon set, we're going to do a dragon set. We're going to sell this as a dragon set. That meant lots of dragons. So the thing to remember is large sets get

a year of design where small sets get currently they got at the time they got four months we're trying to actually give more time to small sets but anyway so what that meant was

that the design for Dragon's Tarkir actually began before the design for Fate Reforged in fact about six months into the design of Conjuring Tarkir because the set comes out In fact, about six months into the design of Cons of Tarkir, because the set comes out, I don't know, six months later or so,

we started the design for Dragons of Tarkir. Okay, so the big thing was, here's what we knew going into Dragons of Tarkir. Originally, the plan was, we wanted to make sure that we shifted between the first world and the third world. The idea was, you know, someone goes back in time and makes major changes.

So the original plan was, okay, human warlord world, or whatever, humanoid warlord world, transition into a dragon warlord world. We had that. So we knew we were going to have dragons. The idea that I had played with originally was

we were going to go, once we knew that the first set was going to be Wedge, which we didn't know immediately, but we knew that a couple months in that we were making a Wedge set, I liked the idea of going from three-color to two-color. And the first choice for Dragons that Are Cared was going to be enemy-color because we just haven't made as many enemy-color

cards as we've made ally-colored cards. And I'm like, oh, a cycle of enemy-colored dragons, that would be pretty cool. And anyway, I'm like, okay, a cycle of enemy colored dragons, that would be pretty cool. And anyway, I'm like, okay, it's just a theme we haven't done much with. And, oh, dragons,

it's chaotic, enemies, thematically it felt right. Eric Lauer explained to me that the problem was the way you drafted a wedge set was you first drafted the enemy colors and then you opted into

which wedge you wanted to go to. The reason you did that is an enemy color gave you two options for drafting where an ally color gave you one. And that way, in order to support the drafting, we needed to put enemy colored cards into Conjure Tarkir. Well, the problem was

that we wanted the last set to draft differently than the first set. That's the whole idea. That's the whole point behind it. wanted the last set to draft differently than the first set. That's the whole idea. That's the whole point behind it. So, what that meant was, we ended up having to shift to allied color because we wanted to be different.

And I know a lot of people were sad when they heard that. They go, that would be awesome. You should have just kept it. But the problem was, it would have required us to have too many similarities between the two large sets. And the whole point of the structure was to make them

very different, to do different things with them. It wasn't to say, hey, draft this way and then, yeah, draft very similarly to that. We didn't want that. And if you had enemy-colored dragons, the default is draft two colors, which are enemy, and then draft three colors, which are wedge. And the first set was

draft three colors, which are wedge, fall back, draft two colors, which are enemy. Not different enough. We will one day do an enemy-based set. That is something people want. It is something I'm sure we'll find a place to do. That's not off the table. That is something that we can do. It just didn't work out for here. Okay. The other thing we knew coming in is we knew we wanted the flavor of present day past alternate present day. And so we were trying to figure out mechanically how do we represent that. So we knew we were going to have the factions. We knew that the first set introduced the factions, and the factions all had an attribute

that they cared about the dragon. So let's see if it went through quickly. So we had the white-based one was Abzan, which was white, green, and black. It was about endurance. Um, the, uh, Jeskai was blue, uh, blue-based with white and red. It was about cunning. Um, the black-based one was Soltai. It was also green and blue.

And it was about, um, ruthlessness. Uh, the red-based one also had, um, was about speed and also had white and black. It was M ruthlessness. The red base one also had, was about speed and also had white and black. It was Mardu. And the green base one was Timur, which also had red and green. And it was about savagery. So we knew we were going to carry through those attributes all the way through. That what we wanted for the whole thing is to have these factions that change, but were continuous the whole thing is to have these factions that change, but we're continuous on the whole way through. Um, originally the plan was we were going to drop to allied color. Um, but once we

figured out that we couldn't do that, once we figured out that, um, we needed to go to ally color that restricted, because when we were going to enemy color, we had two options because you start with wedge. So let's just take Jeskai. Well, Jeskai is blue, white, red. Well, if you go to enemy color, you have the option of going blue, red, or you have the option of going white, red. But, if you go to ally colors, the only ally combination in Jeskai would be white, blue. There's only one possible combination. So, what that meant was, when we figured out we went to ally

that dictated where we were going so that means we were going to start the cunning clan would start in blue, white, and red and end up in blue and white so that meant we couldn't center the clan in the enemy color because when we got to the third set

the enemy colors would disappear so if we had made Jeskai a base red thing, well, we couldn't do that because we wanted the base color to go all the way through. I've talked about this a little bit, but that's why the colors were off-center for the wedges. Obviously, you would center the enemy color if no other factors were in play. So the idea was, we did want the cunning to go all the way through. And the idea was, in Khans, they were remembering the dragons that are now dead, and in the old set, you get to see the dragons that are alive,

and you get to meet Ojitai for the first time. And then, when you get to the third set, the cunning clan now is white-blue. The original plan we had was actually to use the names, that Jeskai was going to be Jeskai all the way through, and the idea was in the timeline, Jeskai went to three-color one way, and another timeline went to two-color.

What we found, though, is people so badly wanted names for the three-color that we were going to get ourselves in trouble, that we wanted you to associate Jeskai with blue-red-black, I've got blue-red, white for naming conventions. But then if Jeskai also meant white, blue, we thought we'd confuse the thing.

So the idea was, okay, we'll name them after the dragon lords when it gets there. So that's how it became Ojitai. Real quickly, by the way, I forgot some of the basics. I should... So Dragon Shark here, DTK,

it's a three-letter code, and it was Louie, because it was Huey, Dewey, and Louie, which were the three nephews of Donald Duck. Turns out having rhyming names, as I've talked about, is a horrible thing. Everyone got them out of order. But anyway,

this set was led by Mark Gottlieb. The design team included, along with Mark, Dan Emmons, Graham Hopkins, Colin Kawakami, myself, and Sam Stoddard. Colin was the design, I was the creative representative, Sam was the development representative. The development team had two different leads that changed over the course of the thing. It started with Tom Lepilli, and then it moved to Dave Humphries. And the development team had

Tim Aden, Colin Kawakami, Eric Lauer, Ken Nagel, Sam Stoddard, and Jerry Thompson. The release, it was released on March 27, 2015, and it had 264 cards. 101 commons, 80 uncommons, 53 rares, 15 mythic rares. It also had 15 lands. The reason we did basic lands in this set that were not the same is

whenever we sort of changed things up, for example, this set was an alternate reality. It was an alternate present. Not an alternate reality. It was a different timeline of the present. And so one of the things they did is they did a lot of the scenes you had seen before but now changed because the dragons hadn't been wiped out.

And so, in fact, I think some of the basic lands are literally the same scene, but with the convention of, okay, what does it look like now that it is dragon-filled? Okay, so once again, there were five factions. The factions followed the same thing. So, for example, the white face faction, which was an endurance thing, was Dromica, which

is the name of the Dragonlord. So what we had done is we introduced the Dragonlords as legendary creatures at rare, gold cards, in Fate Reforged, and then they became mythic cards here, and they became the Dragonlords, which was much more powerful. So we made them, they exist in Faerforge, powered down quite a bit, because they were

younger, 13 years younger, 1300 years younger. But now these became the big things, they moved to mythic and they become more powerful. So, green-white was Dromoka. It was still the Endurance Clan. It had the bolster mechanic.

We'll get to the mechanics in a second. The blue base one, which was the Cunning Clan, which used to be Jeskai, now is Ojitai. Note that one of the things the creative team did was, they did try to make sure that the dragon name was similar to the clan name. And the idea being that the clan was inspired by this dragon in the first case, so that sort of a name had some similarity. Anyway, Ojutai, Rebound was the mechanic. We'll get to all the

mechanics in a second. Blue-Black was Silumgar. Exploit was the mechanic. It was still black-based, still ruthless. The Black-Red was red-based. It was still The black-red was red-based. It was still about speed.

It had the dash mechanic. And Kolakon was its dragon lord. And then red-green had a Tarka. It was still green-based, still about savagery. It had formidable as its keyword. And then the one other keyword in the set was Megamorph. So we will get to Megamorph in a second. Okay, so

let's talk about the mechanics. We'll start with megamorph and we'll talk about the mechanics from the clans. So what happened was, we knew going in that the first set was going to have just morph. The second set was going to have a variant, which ended up being manifest.

And the third set wanted to be morph with a shift. Like, okay, morph's here, but we went through some... Manifest was morph-related, but not morphed. But we wanted the third one because it was the same, the present, but alternate,

alternate timeline. We wanted morph with a twist. We wanted morph. It was morph, but some different kind of morph. So we had tried a bunch of different kinds of things. So what happened was, in exploratory design, they had come up with a thing called aura morph. So what aura morph was, is they were morph cards that instead of having creatures on the back, had auras on the back. Creature auras. the back, creature auras, enchant creatures. So the idea was when you would reveal it, when you'd unmorph it, it would then jump onto a creature.

So it was a very different feel because, like, let's say, for example, I'm attacking with a 2-2 creature and a 2-2 morph creature. And you're trying to figure out what to block. Well, in that case, you know that the, let's say, let's say you're attacking with a 3-3 creature and a 2-2 morph creature. It's not a 2-2, just to be confusing. So there's a 3-3 and a morph.

You know that the 3-3 in morph world is a 3-3. I mean, barring the morph... There's a few morphs that come up and change the power toughness of other creatures, barring the one or two that do that. You know that the 3-3 is always going to be a 3-3, and the 2-2 has the ability to change. But in aura morph world, what happened was

the reverse was true. That the you knew that the morph creature was irrelevant. It was a 2-2 if it didn't change, and if it did change it would go away. And you knew that the 3-3 was going to become something else. And at least becoming a 4-4, or at least

a 3-4. All the... I think all the Auramorphs... Well, I'm not sure I should take that back. I don't know if all of them enhanced the creature's power and toughness. A lot did. But anyway, you knew that the 3-3 was going to change. So it really changed that dynamic.

The problem was, we liked it in exploratory design, but when we got to design, and we started playing it some more, it started showing some creaks and cracks, which was the gameplay was a little too similar. Which was, if someone was attacking with a morph creature, why block the morph creature? The morph creature can only be a 2-2, whereas if you block the morph creature, you give incentive to turn it into something, and then that's way more dangerous. So it just became this, oh, I love the 2-2, whereas if you block the Morph Preacher, you give incentive to turn it into something, and then that's way more dangerous. So, like, it just became this, oh, let the 2-2 through. Why worry about it? I mean, maybe your opponent

would un-morph it, but then if they did, then the 2-2 would, you know, like, there's no value in blocking the 2-2. It only incentivizes them to un-morph it. And if you let it through, then probably the 2-2 is less dangerous than whatever the Oramorph was. So it ended up not having

quite the gameplay we hoped. So we went back and tried to figure out what to do. One of the things that we had done that I liked a lot was a ability called Smorph.

So what Smorph was is it said, okay, when you play this creature, you've got to play it face down and put a 1-1. You paid 4 mana for it. And you've got to play it face down and put a 1-1. You paid 4 mana for it, and you've got to put it face down with a plus 1, plus 1 counter on it.

So the default was that instead of playing a 3-mana 2-2, you were playing a 4-mana 3-3. And what I loved about that was it was radically different. It's just a different animal. You know, when Morph turns into a 4-mana 3-3, that is different than a 3-mana 2-2. Just, it makes the base creatures different, it makes the kind of creatures

you can make underneath it different, you have a higher range to get under. One of the things about Morph is, Morph at 3-mana becomes a 2-2. So, you can make 1 and 2 drops on some Morph creatures, but just doing a Smorph allowed you to also make three drops um it just gave you more things you can make that would go underneath it

um the other neat thing was it wasn't just a four mana three three the plus one plus one counter maintained so when you when you turned it over there was a continuity of it and i thought that was really cool and that it mattered that you unmorphed the creature. Even if you had the mana, even if you could just play it face-up normally, there's a reason you wanted to play it face-down and unmorph it. It made it bigger.

There's an extra advantage to doing that. The problem that Smurf had was that you knew it wasn't a normal morph creature. You knew it wasn't... Well, it manifests you already knew, but you knew it wasn't a normal morph creature. You knew it wasn't, well, manifest you already knew, but you knew it wasn't a normal morph creature. And one of the things they wanted is, like, the idea that the morph variant could be mixed in with morphs, and that when you played it,

hey, you didn't, is this a morph, is this a morph variant? You have no idea. My argument was, I felt that the novelty and the play difference of Smurf was so interesting that, you know what, fine, so it's a separate thing. You already knew Manifest was different, and Manifest had the surprise of maybe it's a morph, but Manifest was different. I'm like, okay, so they know that it's a Smurf card

and not a morph card. I felt like that was acceptable. But there's other people that really didn't agree there, and so we decided to keep looking for other things. In the end, the funny thing is, Megamorph itself, I suggested during design, but it actually ended up getting made the way it was during development.

And the reason was, there was some uncertainty in design whether or not Megamorph... Oh, so we came up with the idea of Megamorph. Megamorph was... Essentially, Megamorph was the Smorph mechanic minus the

plus one plus counter up front. So instead of it being four mana for a 2-2 plus one plus one counter, it just was three for 2-2 like normal Morph, but when you turn it face up, it got a counter. So it took the second half of Morph. morph now I liked that part I do like megamorph

and I do think megamorph was actually a fine mechanic my issue was we had sort of set the bar with manifest the manifest was different enough from morph that I think the audience expected a little bit more of a shift and I think this morph was more of a shift

but it had some issues. The other thing with Megamorph is we named it Megamorph, and because we wanted to convey it's a morph creature, it plays like a morph creature, but it's big. The name stuck. It turned out to be a name that people

didn't really like. I mean, the mechanic needed to have morph in its name so you understood that it was the Morph mechanic, but with a twist. Maybe there's a better name than Megamorph? I don't know. I do believe Megamorph

got a raw deal in that the name and the lack of differentness about it made people sour on it, when it actually wasn't a very good mechanic. I actually like the gameplay

of the mechanic. I think it's a fun mechanic. It did take one of the elements I really did like about Smorph, in which it gave you a reason why to put things that are even bigger, that you had the mana for, face down and then turn them face up. Megamorf also saw a bunch of play in tournaments, so it actually, for as much poo-pooing as it got, it was a very viable mechanic. I think there's some naming issues and some expectation issues, but I do think the mechanic itself is a viable mechanic. I think there's some naming issues and some expectation issues,

but I do think the mechanic itself is a solid mechanic. Okay, so let's talk about the five mechanics of the clans. Okay, so the thing that was going on was

we wanted to have a structure. We knew that there was clan continuity, meaning I wanted to have something that ran the whole way through. So the idea was there were five clans

that cared about a dragon attribute. That was true the entire time. That they had a style five clans that cared about a dragon attribute. That was true the entire time. That they had a style of attitude that they cared about. The actual gameplay changed a little bit. The other thing that we wanted to do was we knew that Fate Reforged was going to be in the middle. And so we knew that we decided that some of the mechanics from the alternate timeline were going to be introduced into Fate Reforged.

So the idea was, we ended up doing three mechanics from cons and two mechanics from dragons in Fate Reforged. So what that did is it gave you a little sneak peek of sort of, like, we wanted Fate to be like, you know, this world could end up in either of these two worlds.

And so we liked the idea of having mechanics from both worlds. So like, oh, well, Khans is shifted this way and these two mechanics stick around. Dragons is shifted this way and these two mechanics stick around. I talked about in State how we ended up deciding what mechanics to put in. So we ended up putting in Dash and Bolster.

Those are both very good mechanics. Dash... Real quickly, this is because we're doing Dragons of Decreer. Both Dragons of Decreer and Bolster were designed by the Dragons design team. Dash, real quickly, just because we're doing Dragon's Intercare, both Dragon's Intercare and Bolster were designed by the Dragon's design team.

Dash was designed independently by me and Sam Stoddard in, I think, our very first homework assignment. We were told to do different mechanics

for the things. The very first thing I turned in and Sam turned in unaware of the other one doing it was Dash. And Dash ended up being one of those things that we thought there was design. And Dash ended up being one of those things

that we thought there was design space, and there ended up being more design space. Dash was a pretty robust mechanic, and so I was very happy with how it played out. Definitely one of the reasons we pushed it back to Paper Forge was it had a lot of design space. Bolster, interestingly, was the last mechanic. So Dash was the first mechanic we designed.

Bolster was the last mechanic we designed. We had a lot of problems with Green and White. We knew we wanted to use plus one, plus one counters because Outlast, we knew Outlast wasn't going to last. There wasn't enough design space for Outlast to go into Fate Reforged. So we knew the Green and White mechanic

had to go to Fate Reforged. We wanted it playing around with plus one, plus one counters that somehow it granted plus one, plus one counters because part of Outlast was having a lot of cards that cared about plus one, plus one counters and we could keep that theme going through for the Endurance Clan. The Endurance Clan still could have a build-up plus one, plus one counters because part of Outlast was having a lot of cards that cared about plus one plus one counters and we could keep that theme going through

for the Endurance Clan. The Endurance Clan still could have a build up plus one plus one counter theme which made a lot of sense. So the question was how do we grant plus one plus one counters?

We eventually came into the idea of what if you could grant plus one plus one counters but your hand was forced? It wasn't, it didn't, normally when you put plus one plus one counters

you tend to put it on the thing that is most advantageous for you. Usually it's either the biggest thing or the most evasive thing. We like the idea of mechanics that did it, but sort of forced your hand where it went. It was kind of cool that it went to the smallest thing. You know, that it went on the thing that kind of most needed the counters. And that definitely made it a bit different. So anyway, I've talked a lot about Dash and Bolster

in my favorite Fords. I won't get too much into them. Other than Dash was first, Bolster was last. The second mechanic I believe we came up with was Rebound. So we were trying to find a mechanic that played nicely with Prowess from Jeskai and Kahn's. Prowess wanted non-creature spells, so we're like, okay, well, if thisrowess wanted non-creature spells, so we're like, okay,

well, if this mechanic went on non-creature spells, okay, that would have some synergy. And then we said, okay, really what Prowess wants is you'd be able to play a lot of non-creature spells. Was there a mechanic that lets you play non-creature spells? And there were a couple options. What we realized is spells that let you play multiples of it was the best.

So we looked at a bunch of ways we'd done it in the past. Was it replicate? Was it flashback? Was it rebound? Rebound ended up being the one that we liked the best, the idea that you sort of played it once and played it the next turn. So it boosted you, but not all in the same turn. It kind of boosted you over different turns. Flashback we'd used a bunch of times, and Flashback comes with a lot of baggage.

So we decided that Rebound would be a good reprint. We really hadn't brought back a lot of mechanics. Obviously, we brought back Morph in the first set. And, well, I'm not sure how you want to count Delve. We brought Delve back, although Delve only had three cards in existence. So bringing it back is a little bit of a... It had never really been explored, so...

But we had more from the first set, so we decided we could bring back one mechanic here, and Rebound made a lot of sense. We played with it, played really well. Rebound had been made in Rise of the Eldrazi, interestingly, because it... I think they were trying to figure out ways

to help the allies sort of fight the Eldrazi, and there was definitely a growth theme going on. And so I think it was made because Brian and his team were trying to find things that could keep coming, and so the idea of spells that happen multiple times felt cool. Brian also made Storm, so you can see a theme of Brian's mechanics. He likes spells that sort of happen more than once.

Okay, then the next thing we came up with was Exploit. We had messed around with Exploit before, during Lorwyn block, actually. I had made a mechanic where when a creature came into play, you could sacrifice a creature of that card type, of that creature type. So it would be a zombie that said, when it's in the battlefield, you could sacrifice a creature of that card type, of that creature type. So, like, it would be a zombie that said, when it's entered the battlefield, you could sacrifice, I think my mechanic was any number of zombies, and for each zombie you sacrifice, it

generated the effect. So the idea was that you could sacrifice this creature, it was a zombie, but you also could generate more, so it had a little more of a tribal feel, because A, it limited itself to a creature type, and you could do it multiple times. Exploit was that, but limited to just one time and any creature, rather than a specific tribal creature, because there wasn't a tribal theme here.

Exploit felt really good for the ruthless, I mean, we were trying to, so, we wanted to play nice with Delve, Delve cared about getting cards in the graveyard, put cards in the graveyard, so we felt that was nice. And it also matched the sort of ruthless feel that we were going for. That was true for all of them, by the way. Not only do they have to match mechanically to play nice with

the mechanic that was in the same dragon attribute, but it also had to feel the flavor we were trying to get to. Well, Bolster, but it also had to feel the flavor we were trying to get to. Well, Bolster, you know, like, it's reinforcing the weak. Well, that's all about endurance, wants to reinforce, that's good. And Dash was about attacking quickly. Well, Dash was all about speed, that's good. And, um, uh, the, uh, Cunning was all about, you know, the Jet Sky slash, Oji Ojesai was all about cunning, and like, oh, getting to have your prowess things

trigger multiple times, and having spells that happen multiple times felt very cunning. And then exploit, right, felt very ruthless, which leads us to the last one, the red-green one, formidable. That's Tarka, so that is the savagery. So this was the one

that actually came second last. Both Dremoka and Atarka were the two clans that we were having the most trouble finding the new mechanic. We wanted to play nicely with Ferocious. So for starters, that meant, okay, probably the mechanic wanted to go on creatures and maybe just wanted to go on big creatures. So he just had big creatures.

But the problem we ran into was, I don't know, we had trouble finding mechanics that just went on big creatures, that we wanted to go on more than just big creatures. So we ended up coming up with Formidable, which really was kind of an extension of what Ferocious was, that said, we care about you having a lot of creatures,

but I want a slightly different route. Formidable was about the one single bigger creature, where Formidable was like, you just need massive creatures. So it allowed you to sort of have a reward that was a little bit different. Now, obviously, the deck that had four fours in it, or four power creatures in it, probably would add up to eight pretty soon. So, I mean, Formidable and Ferocious played together well, but it also allowed you to sort of

go a slightly different route the other thing we liked is that it was hard with Teemer you kind of had to play some big creatures and with Aturka

you still had that option but it also widened a little bit and let you play with lots of smaller creatures that was something you could do we went through a lot

of different things with Formidable in fact in fact I believe I don't remember what it was we had a different mechanic or that was something you could do. We went through a lot of different things with Formidable. In fact, I believe, I don't remember what it was. We had a different mechanic. I think we had a slightly different mechanic that got tweaked during Divine or Development that got turned into Formidable as we know it. I actually think the mechanic we had,

I don't remember off the top of my head, was a little bit different and Development definitely tweaked it a bit. Anyway, there were many cycles. This was one of those sets. Gold sets tend to have cycles in general. Also, sets with themes tend to have cycles, especially when the theme is cycled. And we decided we would cycle in dragons. One of the things we decided to do is, when we did the angel set in Absinthe Restored, we really kept angels in white.

Now, we pushed it. There was white-red, white-green, white-blue. There were angels in every non-black color because black was the demon color. So we made sure

that every color had access to angels, but it was always through the lens of also having white. There weren't a lot of angels that weren't white. With dragons,

we decided, you know what? Dragons are, whenever we do sort of studies with what, dragons are whenever we do sort of studies with players, dragons always are the number one creature type. People really, really like dragons. And so what we decided was, we're doing the dragon

set, we're going to blow dragons out. We have a long history of doing dragon cycles. We normally don't do them except when we like, when they are a major thing. And so we decided that of course we had to do cycles. We did a bunch of cycles because of the dragon set, which meant that all the colors had access to the dragons,

even mono color. So even green was going to get a flyer because everybody was going to get a dragon. Okay, so let's walk through the cycles. There was the dragon lord cycle. That was a mythic cycle that was obviously ally color and with legendary creatures. We had met them before in Fate Reforged.

Well, guess what? We met them again. It's 1,300 years later. Not tons of creatures existed 1,300 years later, but the dragons sure did. Dragons live a long, long time. Well over 1,300 years. So, we got to meet the dragons in Fate Reforged and then see them as

the dragon lords in the set. We also had rare gold dragons. These were other dragons that were the two color pairs that weren't the dragon lords and weren't legendary. We had the regents, which were rare monocolored dragons. So we wanted a bunch of different dragons. So we had the legendary mythic dragons. We had rare gold dragons. We had rare monocolored dragons.

We had uncommon monocolored dragons. And we had uncommon gold dragons. So we had a bunch of different dragons. We also had a cycle of Dragon Matters cards in Uncommon, things that cared about dragons.

And we had the Dragonlord Monuments, which are things that could turn into dragons at Uncommon. Those that cared about dragons, and we had the Dragonlord Monuments, which are things that could turn into dragons at Uncommon. Those were artifacts. They tapped for C or D, meaning they tapped for one of the two colors that the dragon was fun.

So if you were Ojita, you tapped for white or blue. And then I think for six mana, two of which were colored, they turned into the 4-4. I think permanently turned into the 4-4 Flying Dragon. Also, by the way, of other cycles, we had the command cycle that was tied to the dragons. It was in the ally colors, so we did ally commands.

We had talked about doing commands when we had done the wedges. They didn't quite work quite as well. They worked better. Did we have commands? Yeah, we did do commands. Did we do commands in the wedge? Ah, my problem of what...

We tried to do them. I think we did. I think we did. I think we had wedge commands. So I think that these were the ally commands. If I'm getting this wrong, it's because we made them and tried them and played with them

in my head and I remember having them. But I think at the end of the day, I think we did have commands. If we didn't, that's because my memory's faulty, so I apologize. We had the four more cons, which caused some controversy, because four of them were legendary creatures, and one was a planeswalker. Narset became a planeswalker.

It was a quirky cycle. A lot of people felt it was incomplete, because they wanted a legend in the white-blue slot, and they didn't have one, because instead that was a planeswalker. Anyway. It's very funny sometimes how you make a cycle, and people just,

because the cycle in some ways is, it's a good example of the aesthetics. The aesthetics didn't match. And we were trying to break the aesthetics on purpose to do something cool, that this one became a planeswalker, but I don't know. The four-in-one usually gets us in trouble.

We had a rare cycle of megamorphs. We had a cycle of uncommon colored hate spells. So, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven. I think there were eleven or twelve cycles. There were a bunch of cycles. Like I said, a lot of them were dragon cycles.

Some of them were multicolored cycles. I'm not actually, by the way, there were also some cycles of ally color cycles, loose cycles in the sense that they were, we try to balance out gold cards. We make cycles of them, but that doesn't mean they have to do anything

other than just be of that color combination. So I did list them here. But I mean, if you're real technical, there were some gold cycles that like, oh, each color gets list them here. But I mean, if you're real technical, there were some gold cycles that like, oh, each color gets a card here. But they weren't connected in any way other than that. So it's very loose. So I'm almost to work.

So what will happen is starting next time, I will start doing my card by card. There's many cards to talk about. But the final thing that I want to wrap up is to say that this was a very challenging set. We had definitely bit off, because one of the things

about it was we walked in having a lot of obligations to follow. I don't know if we've ever had a large set that had more obligations walking in the door.

I mean, when you return to worlds, there's some obligations, but this was sort of like we were a piece to a puzzle, and a lot of the puzzle had already been built out, and we had to finish the puzzle, so we kind of had a lot of obligated pieces we had to do,

and we had a very complex structure we were trying to meet. We were trying to do the, we were trying to play out the whole idea of the alternate timeline. So there was a lot going on. So as we go through the card by card,

I'll hit a lot of the separate issues. But it was a pretty complex design. Like I said, it took a year. As I talked about my state of the design, there's a few things in Dragons, Megamorph I've already talked about. There's a few things that I would change going back. And I'll talk about some of this as we go through it.

But, in general, I think we did a pretty good job of making a lot of dragons that make it very exciting. But anyway, we'll get into that in future podcasts. But, that's my first podcast number one. Oh, but dragons don't care. More to come.

But, I'm in my parking space. So, you all know that means this 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.