Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #317 - Lessons Learned: Theros

Episode Date: March 25, 2016

Mark examines the lessons he learned from designing Theros.

I'm pulling away from the curb. We all know that means it's time for another drive to work. And I'm going to drop my daughter off at the bus stop. Okay, so today is another episode of my Lessons Learned series, where I talk about a set that I led and all the lessons I learned from it. So today is Lessons Learned Theros. I'm going to talk all about the lessons of designing Theros. Okay, so for starters, when I started, so I had done Innistrad two years earlier.

And Innistrad was really the first truly top-down set I had done. I had worked on some development teams. Like, I was on the development team for Champions of Kamigawa. But as far as leading a design, the first time I had led a design and really was on a design team that was totally top-down was Innistrad. So when I got to Theros, my attitude was like, oh, okay, I got this. I did Innistrad. Okay, I'm doing top-down. I got it. And so I started doing Theros the same way I had begun doing Innistrad, the same sort of techniques.

But what I found was it didn't work the same. And this is when I made a very important discovery. I mean, this took a... I didn't understand this right away. It took me a while to understand this. But Innistrad was horror, gothic horror. So I was borrowing from a lot of pop culture, which meant that, you know,

people had a real sense of how vampires acted and how zombies acted and how werewolves acted. They had a sense of what would you expect a bunch of vampires or zombies to do. And people had answers because you've just seen a lot of things. So when I got to Greek mythology, which is obviously what Theros was, what I found was while there was a little bit of pop culture, it was a lot more sort of people had studied it or read about it. You know, the knowledge

of Greek mythology was less based on pop culture and more based on schooling and books and stuff. And what I realized was you have less idea how things act when your source material is a book. For example, if I said, how does a vampire act? You've watched a lot of TV shows and movies with vampires in them. So you have some idea how you think of vampire acts. But if I said, how does a centaur act? Well, you've read some stories about centaurs, but you haven't really seen centaurs. You know, that one of the ways that people have a better understanding of sort of how things function is observing them. And that reading them, you kind of, you know, you don't quite have, A, each person's interpretation is different from the other, so there's not a consistent interpretation, and just in general,

it's not quite the same way you think. And so what happened was, what I found worked so easily in Innistrad was sort of capturing the feel of things. It was a lot harder in Theros, because, of things, it was a lot harder in Theros because, like, for example, we were doing Minotaur Tribal. Okay, well, how do you expect a Minotaur to act? It wasn't so clear cut. It wasn't as obvious as it was with Innistrad. So the first big lesson I learned was it's very easy to sort of do something and say, oh, I've done something like it. It'll be just like that. And the answer was it was nothing

like that. It was very different. I'm not saying there wasn't some overlap. There definitely was. And there definitely was some tricks that I'd used during Innistrad that helped during Theros. I definitely did a lot with having the creative rep on the team make a lot of titles that were flavorful and designing cards to titles. So there's some tricks we did learn from Innistrad that we repeated in Theros. But so first lesson, it was just a different animal. And the other thing I learned is the difference between top-down that are what I'll call genre-based versus top-down that are culture-based. So genre-based means we're doing something that you know from pop culture and it's a kind of genre. Horror, obviously, in the case of Innistrad.

Where Greek mythology is not really as much a genre. I mean, I guess you could argue there is some sort of Greek mythology in pop culture, and we did borrow from it. I mean, there's a Kraken in the set, not because there were Krakens in Greek mythology, but because there were Krakens in Clash of the Titans, which was a pretty famous movie as Greek mythology goes, and that there's this expectation of stuff from pop culture.

But there wasn't a lot of that. There weren't a lot of crack-ins of like, oh, people expect to see this in pop culture. I better put that in. What we did find also that was different about Theros is because you were basing it more on actual sort of literature, there was a wider range of what was known from what was not known. For example, the Hundred-Handed One,

which has a fancier name in Greek mythology, was an actual thing. It's an actual thing from Greek mythology. And what had happened was, Ethan, who had been my strong second on the set, I had him do a whole bunch of research, and he produced a document talking about all the kind of things we can do. Basically, he said, here's all the cool Greek mythology things, here's things we traditionally do in magic, here's the overlap, and then here's some things that magic doesn't normally do, but it could do. And one of them was a hundred-handed one. And the lesson we had learned, this actually was a lesson

learned from Champions of Kamigawa, but I was able to apply it here, was the idea of making sure, understanding what is well-known and what is not well-known. And what you want to do is, take the most popular sort of whatever trope space you're

exploring, you want to take the stuff that most people will recognize and know. And so we're talking Greek mythology, so you want you know, you want Gorgons, you want Pegasus, you want Minotaurs. There's things that people just expect from Greek culture, from Greek mythology, that is really well known. That if you just

stop a person on the street and go, name ten things about Greek mythology that is really well known. That if you just stop a person on the street and go, name ten things about Greek mythology, you want those things in common. And then the things like the hundred-handed one, which are true, they're real, that's actually a Greek mythology thing, but it's just not really well known. You're like, okay, let's put out higher rarities

so the people that enjoy it will get to see it, but it's not your first exposure to it. What we want you to do is we want you to get comfortable, and we want you to sort of see the things you expect to see. And that's another big lesson. I mean, I think I learned it in Innistrad, but because Innistrad was more genre-based, it was a little more misleading in that there was so much more resonant stuff. That's another big lesson to learn, too, is because genre-based stuff is based on pop culture, people have just been exposed to more pop culture. You know, Greek mythology was a little more based on school and reading,

and it's just people had less exposure to it. That I think if I stopped a person on the street and said, okay, name everything you can think of that, I say the horror genre, name everything, I would just get a longer list. People just run out of things quicker on Greek mythology. Now, every once in a while, you run into a fan of Greek mythology. The funny thing is, like, as a kid, I loved Greek mythology. So I knew more than the average person

just because I really enjoyed reading Greek mythology when I was younger. But that's not true of everybody. And so one of the things that we had to figure out in the set was how to kind of balance... Like, everyone was excited when we did Greek mythology, but the trick is

we have to make sure to deliver. Meaning, we had... Like, Champions of Amagawa was sort of... This is a lesson learned from that set, which was Brady Donovan and his creative team did a really good job of capturing something that

was really tied to actual Japanese mythology. But unfortunately, he connected to something that wasn't a particularly well-known aspect of Japanese mythology. I mean, if you watch some of Japanese anime, maybe you know some of this, but it definitely

a lot of people didn't go, oh, Japanese anime, maybe you know some of this, but it definitely, a lot of people didn't go, oh, Japanese culture, because it was, well, true, well, true to the culture, it didn't hit the widest area of knowledge. And one of the things about being resonant is you want to hit a lot of things that people know. Now, obviously, there's a balance. We want to make sure that we create a fleshed out world that makes sense. And I mean, the key to heading resonance is making sure that your world feels real, but then having enough of things that people expect that it sort of, it reads what you need to do. And that the problem is, if you're accurate, but you're doing something that not enough people know, then it doesn't read as resonance because the majority of your audience isn't familiar with what you're talking about.

And it's a delicate balance. Okay, The next big thing I learned about Theros was, and this one took me probably the whole block to learn. I mean, I, one of the things is I wanted to do Greek mythology. It was about top-down Greek mythology. And Brady had brought up the idea that maybe there's some way to tie enchantments into it. And then I ended up using enchantments as a representation of the gods. That the gods themselves and all the things the gods made were enchantments.

And so that created... It allowed us to use a part of the game to create this feel. The problem was, I didn't recognize... People really, really wanted an enchantment set. to create this feel. The problem was, I didn't recognize, people really, really wanted an enchantment set. And we hadn't, I mean, Urza Saga

technically was an enchantment set in the sense that there was a higher aspen of enchantments and enchantments mattered more. But due to a bunch of things, mainly, I mean, it was called

the Artifact Cycle, for example, and it was about Urza and there was a lot of broken artifacts in mean it was called the artifact cycle for example and it was about urza and there was a lot of broken artifacts in it that for all the it was about enchantments that was actually true in the the design itself um it didn't come through in the end product nearly as loudly especially constructed um and so the one time we kind of made an enchantment set it didn't really get perceived as that so there was a lot of built up desire for an enchantment set and the problem was I wasn't making an enchantment

set I was making a Greek mythology set that was using enchantments as a component but what happened was when I said oh it's an enchantment set a lot of players like went to the thing that they wanted which was an enchantment set, a lot of players went to the thing that they wanted, which was an enchantment matter set. Because when we had done artifacts for the first time,

well, when we had blown out artifacts as a full theme in Mirrodin, we really played into the artifacts matter. And even in Asper when we did artifacts, we did artifacts matter. People just were expecting sort of the lowest hanging fruit, which was enchantments matter. And I knew that. I knew, which was Enchantments Matter. And I knew that. I knew that people wanted Enchantments Matter. And so at the time, I said, okay, here's what I'm going to do.

I don't want to pull focus from Greek mythology. What I'll do is we'll hold it off. We'll put it in the third set in Journey into Nyx. And, like, before the block is done, I'll give people some of that so they can have this thing. But I needed to focus on the Greek mythology. The problem is... Hold on one second. Sorry. The problem was

that people so badly wanted the Enchantment Matters that as soon as they heard that was a component of the set, they just jumped to the lowest hanging fruit and they really wanted the lowest hanging that was a component of the set, they just jumped to the lowest hanging fruit, and they really wanted the lowest hanging fruit. And one of the things I've learned is you have to understand audience expectations. So, like, one of my truisms that I talk about all the time is you can't fight human nature.

And on some level, if enough of your people believe something to be true, you have some obligation if you can. The problem here was I got myself in a bind because I wasn't making an enchantment matter set that had some Greek mythology elements to it. I was making a Greek mythology set that had some enchantment elements to it.

And so because Greek mythology led the way it dictated a bunch of things I needed to do with enchantments. And so I wasn't really able to deliver on the enchantments. And so, I wasn't really able to deliver on the enchantment mat. I mean, I didn't, to be fair. I wasn't even trying to deliver on it in Theros.

I later would try to deliver on it in Journey into Nyx. But anyway, that went over poorly. And the other thing is, I tried really hard through all my explaining what was coming. Like, I understood people thought it was going to be something. And I tried my hardest to sort of, as I introduced the set and demoed the set and explained the set,

I've just hit the theme again and again and again that enchantments were just a byproduct, an element of the set. It wasn't an enchantment set. But it didn't matter. People wanted it. That's the big lesson is, if people really want something, it just doesn't matter how People wanted it. That's the big lesson is if people really want something, it just doesn't matter how much you tell them that's not what it is. And one of the problems, by the way, in general is sometimes people want something that's hard for you to deliver. And anyway, it's tricky. I don't know how, I mean, maybe I didn't use enchantments as a component of that set,

although I like how I use enchantments. I guess what I really wish had happened is I had found a way earlier to give people their enchantment matter set just so when I got to this, I could just use enchantments as a cool way. Like, I feel like artifacts would have gotten that out of people's system. Like, if I want to use artifacts in a set to do something cool with that's not all about artifact matters, I can. Because you know what want to use artifacts in a set to do something cool with that's not all about Artifact Matters, I can, because you know what? We made the Artifact Matters set.

In fact, we made, I mean, we made Mirrodin, which was all Artifact Matters, and we made Shards of Alara that had, like, a subset that was Artifact Matters. So, I feel like that, we've sort of got that out of the system. We've done it, but we haven't really done that with Enchantment. So, one of these days, I have to make an Enchantment Matters set so the people that really want an Enchantment Matters set can

have it. I know Constellation gave a little bit of that, but not enough, I think, for what people wanted. Okay, the other thing I learned was... So one of the things in the set that was going on was I wanted enchantments to matter more than normal. It wasn't a full-on enchantment matters in the sense that... When I say enchantment matters, what I mean by that is it's a theme in which

the more enchantments, the better. And so it encourages you to build sort of enchantment-heavy decks, much like Artifact Matters made to build decks of mostly artifacts. My goal was I wanted enough enchantments in your deck because we did have things that cared about enchantment. But

in order to do that, I needed to have a certain amount. And one of my mistakes I made, I figured this out, this was a lesson I learned during it,

was, you need, if you need enough of an Asphalt of something, if it's not in creatures and limited, it's really hard to get your Asphalt up.

And the reason is, most people play, so it's a 40-card deck, they play about 16 creatures and 7 spells. I mean, people can shift a little from there. The problem is, with 7 spells, even if every single spell they play, a player plays that's not a creature, is the thing you care about, even then you run into trouble, ass fan-wise. And that's just not going to happen.

I mean, people need kill spells, and there are certain things they need to put in those slots that can't always be your subset. And so if you really want to make your theme matter on a larger scale, you have to find a way to involve creatures in it. And what happened was, Bestow was originally not going to be in Theros. Bestow was created by Billy Moreno

when I was doing advanced design, advanced work for Born of the Gods, exploratory design. And after talking with Eric, and Eric was explaining to me the Aspham problem, I realized that I had no choice. I really had to use Bestow. Eric and I independently kind of came to the

same conclusion of the only real answer was to somehow get enchantments onto creatures. Now, interesting looking back, I was really resistant at the time to make vanilla enchantment creatures. I allowed

us to make vanilla enchantment tokens. That was kind of my compromise. But my issue at the time was, and this was like the design purist thing, was I wanted the enchantments to feel like enchantments. So for example, the reason artifact creatures are fine is they have a generic mana cost. Normal colored cards don't do that. Only artifacts do that. So there's something about an artifact creature that does in fact feel artifact-y.

My problem with having enchantment creatures that literally were just vanilla is I was worried that I just wouldn't feel enchantment-y enough. Like, oh, because we made one in a future site, and my problem with it was what about that thing was lucid limited? What about it was an enchantment? I mean, originally it had a global

static effect on it, and that's why it was an enchantment creature. But the problem was, A, creatures have static abilities on it. And that's why it was an enchantment creature. But the problem was, A, creatures have static abilities on them. So it didn't do a lot to make it feel more enchantment-y, which is why they cut it in Future Sight. And it's one of those things that

maybe the answer was to find a flavor answer, not a mechanical answer. Making all the enchantment creatures have to be bestow or gods, it just definitely made things a bit more complicated um i did like bestow the other thing we did with bestow that i i'm not sure was the wrong answer but it caused confusion is we were trying to make bestow better and so one of

the problems that auras have in general is that when you cast an aura on a creature if your opponent gets rid of the creature, the aura goes away. So a lot of players, but what we didn't want to happen is, I have bestow, I use it as an aura, and then my opponent gets rid of the creature and then it goes away. So we said, you know what?

Let's think of it this way. Normally you cast an aura, you kill the creature, the aura has nowhere to go. It just has nowhere to go, so it has to go to the graveyard. But I'm like, a bestow creature is still a creature, so if it tries to be an aura and it fails,

well, it just becomes a creature and it stays in play. And that thought process made a lot of sense to me, and it made sense to me, and it made a better card. The problem was some players were so used to the sort of fizzling of enchantments, if you will, that the rules as was was counterproductive. Even though it was better for everybody involved, it was a little bit counterproductive.

Looking back on that, I guess it's still the right call, meaning I don't want to make the mechanics just worse to play because there's a weird... I don't know. I guess my lesson from this one is I think it caused some problems, but I don't think I would prefer to do it the other way. I like them being a little bit better and just making them still more playable. Um, the other lesson I learned, or one of the other lessons I learned was I was very into the idea of a pantheon of gods. And so I came up with the idea

of doing 15 gods, 5 monocolor gods and 10 two-color gods. I think I pushed the gods a little too hard. One of two things is true. Either I should have just had a single five gods that were monocolor,

or if we did have the two-color gods, they shouldn't have all been mythic. One of our problems was we kind of crowded up mythic. Like, we made gods, they were all tied together, they had a mechanical sort of connection to them, which really limited our hands

on what we could do with them. And they just crowded up mythics. It's hard to make a lot of multicolor mythics. It just developmentally causes lots of problems. And so, anyway, I'm not sure whether the correct answer was to do the 10

dual color at rare or just do 5. But something was done wrong there. And that was something that came up within Theros. So I counted it as lessons learned of Theros. Part of my lessons learned today is Theros block, since I was also in charge of the whole block, obviously. But,

okay, so what else? Oh, Devotion. So Devotion was an interesting experiment, which was, I really believed that when I made Chroma, so Chroma was based on, Aaron Forsythe had made a card in Future Sight, in fact, he made a couple cards, and I liked

the mechanic, or not Future Sight, In fact, we had a couple cards. And I liked the mechanic. Oh, not Future Sight. He made it in Fifth Dawn. I liked the mechanic, but I knew we didn't have space for it. It didn't fit in Fifth Dawn. And so I knew one day we were going to do it. In Future Sight, we hinted at it. We made a card that hinted at it.

And then in Eventide, I finally did it. But I didn't do it right. I made a mistake. The name wasn't particularly flavorful. We really didn't push any cards in it. It was done more open-ended, so it felt less cohesive as a mechanic. And anyway, I felt I'd failed. And when we were looking for a repeat mechanic for Theros,

Zach Hill had brought up the idea of maybe we could bring back Defotion. And I really liked it because it did two things. One is I wanted something to represent the faith of the people and their gods, and devotion did a good job, especially with the name change. And it allowed us to do something with the gods that allowed them to sort of turn on, which was pretty cool. That I wanted the gods to be really powerful but not super expensive. So this allowed us to sort of play the god. It wasn't too expensive, but you still had to do something

to sort of click on the final piece of the god to get the god to come down to you. And devotion's a really good example of how we can do things wrong, that it's very easy to look at something, to see the player reaction, and to go, oh, they didn't like it. Oh, well, I guess that's no good.

One of the lessons here is sometimes you do something that doesn't go over well that you have belief in. You're like, no, I know this was a good thing. And you have to be willing to sort of, you can't, you have to be willing to go back and sort of find things that you truly believe have potential. Now, that doesn't mean that everything has potential. One of the things that people ask all the time is,

hey, you did something, it was a horrible disaster, prove you can do it right. You've got better technology, prove you can do it right. Good design is not taking something that's inherently bad and trying to prove you can do it. Good design is finding spaces that you have faith and believe in and executing on them. My lesson here is that just because something fails once doesn't necessarily mean that it doesn't have potential. Now, not everything that fails has potential. I don't believe that any idea, no matter what,

there's always an execution that can save it. There's ideas that executions can't save. But there are ideas that executions can. And it was very interesting watching Chroma become Devotion of how it went from being a really lackluster, know-nothing mechanic to being one of the favorites of the set. That people really like Devotion.

Now, as Eric pointed out, when I asked Eric why people didn't like Chroma, he's like, because all the cards sucked. And Eric definitely went out of his way to make sure there's some aggressively costed Devotion cards. And Devotion really did show up in Constructed. So that's a big part of it.

It helped with that. But I also believe like the creative, Chroma is just like a nothing name. You know, Chroma is just like Latin for color.

So, and it was just so, like go look somewhere and you'll get some number. And Devotion is just like, I'm looking in play. Everything's looking at the same place. It just is cleaner and clearer.

So it is a good example of how you can improve a mechanic and really bring it back and do something new and special with it, which I really appreciate it. Okay, let's talk a little bit about heroic. Heroic was a mechanic that when I first pitched was not really well received. Everybody was kind of lukewarm on it. And I really had a big faith on it.

One of the things that I like playing around with, and it's one of those things that I keep coming back to, is I like triggers that are targeting triggers, where it's sort of like I want to target something and something happens because I'm targeting it. I played around that space. I actually really enjoyed Heroic and Heroic ended up actually being very popular with the players.

It was something that at first blush seemed like, oh, this is going to be a lot of work to make happen, but it did a lot of neat and cool things. And I was happy I stuck by it. The lesson there is sort of stick to your guns in that one, which is it definitely was a mechanic that I had listened to the majority,

and went, eh, maybe we can do something better. But I really had faith in it, and it's one of those mechanics that really did come through that it took people a little while to warm up. The first impression when people read it is the same that I think people had in R&D, which is it kind of reads like, wow, there's a lot of hoops to jump through. But when you actually play it, it actually is a lot easier to do and it's a lot more satisfying than people realize. Okay, let's talk Monstrous. So I really like Monstrous. The only thing about Monstrous that I was sad about is the original Monstrous said it

had an activated ability and said you can only use this once per game. Now, it still put some impossible counters on the creature, as a reminder, but I really, really like the, I don't know, the terminology of you may only use this once per game. The reason they changed it was if I unsummon a creature and then replay it, even if I've already used that ability, it's a new thing and I can use it again. And they were confused that if a card said once per game that players wouldn't realize that zone changes

reset that. And so that's why they cut that out. I mean, I get it. I just felt, one of the things in design, you're always looking for the sexiest way to do something. And the idea of this mechanic so, you know, once per game feels pretty cool. So I was sad that we weren't able to work that in. The other big mistake of Monstrous is we didn't, we did Tribute in the middle set and took Monstrous out. And if I had my druthers, I would have kept

Tribute in, not Tribute, I would have kept Monstrous in the whole time. I mean, Tribute underperformed, but that's not really my major issue. My major issue is I think people liked Monstrous. I think there was design space for Monstrous, and I feel like we... One of the things you need to do is when players like something, and there's more design space,

you don't need to go to new mechanics when old mechanics can do the job. You know, one of the things that we have to be careful of, and like I said, I have some issues with the gatewatch in this regard, too. You'll see it when I get to my State of the Union later this year, is that I really like the idea

of making sure that you use the mechanics that you started with. Obviously, every set wants to introduce some new mechanics, but I think you've got to be careful not to toss up mechanics when really there's some interesting use back in them in the block, and that one of the ways you make things more complicated is just by having more different things go on. And Monstrous had plenty of design space left, and it was super flavorful to the set.

And we actually brought it back in Journey to Nick. So we did figure that out partway through, but it would have been nice if I had figured it out earlier than that. Another big lesson I learned is my two favorite cards in the set were Chain to the Rocks and Journey to the Underworld.

And the reason that both of those were made in meetings, I think they were both made to the title, I believe. Oh, was it Journey to the Underworld? Rescue from the Underworld? Maybe it was Rescue from the Underworld. One was a design name, one was a finish name, I think. Anyway, those two cards, the reason I liked them was that they were really flavorful,

the mechanic tied nicely into what was going on, Those two cards, the reason I liked them was that they were really flavorful, the mechanic tied nicely into what was going on, and neither card was a card we would make in a vacuum. One of the things that I'm more and more conscious of as I design more sets, and just as head designer, is there is a finite amount of design space. It is not this endless, infinite void that some people want to think it is. And that we need to be careful. And that one of the things I definitely push my people to do, all the designers, is when you are making a set,

I would rather see cards that could only go in that set than cards that could go anywhere. And the reason is, if you make a card that can go anywhere, hey, eventually we'll find a place where that's a perfect fit. But if it goes here, and you're edging out a card that couldn't go anywhere, then there's just one less card we can make. And that's an important thing to think about, is trying to maximize card creation, is that if you make a card that's a cool card, and this is where it belongs, make sure you make that card. Because that other card that can go anywhere can go anywhere. And maybe there's a set in which not only can it go anywhere, but it's more perfect there. You know, like, there's a lot of designs sometimes that get made that's like,

and if hacking this is a cool card, but does it add anything to this design? And the answer is, I mean, it adds it and it's a cool card, but it doesn't do anything special for this design. And one of the things I've learned more and more is, I mean, I've talked about this in my podcast and in my columns and stuff, is you want to maximize the set you are making. You want to maximize the creative thing you are doing. And so being good in a vacuum is not, is not unto itself good enough. You want to make sure you make things that play up into what you're doing. I'm not saying you can't have cool independent cards. We do have those.

And I'm not saying at some volume those shouldn't exist. But what I'm saying is you shouldn't push out cool, fun cards that can't exist elsewhere because of that. And, like I said, my two favorite cards in the set, and I really think there were some things that helped define the set for people, is because they really sort of said, hey, like, for example, it's very easy for the creative to say, hey, we're in Greek world. Look, people are, there's Greek things and Greek monsters and Greek people wearing Greek clothing. There's a lot that you can do creatively to really bring up Greek mythology.

The trick is in design, what can we do that says, hey, because we're in Greek mythology, we can do some stuff we don't do somewhere else. And that's the thing that I, more and more as time goes on, I believe that design is a portion of the overall feel and theme of the set. And that it's not just the flavor elements. It's not just the name and the art and the flavor text. That if I want to tell you a story and I want to create a certain feel of the environment,

the play is a crucial part of that. And one of the things that we spent a lot of time, one of the things that my final lesson comes to work is it took me a while to figure out what the feel was I wanted out of Theros. I knew, for example, walking to Innistrad that you're watching a horror movie. I knew fear. Like, I know you're watching a horror movie.

What do you feel when you're watching a horror movie? You feel fear. So I knew that emotion out of the gate. That's what I wanted for Innistrad. I wanted you to be fearful. Theros was a lot harder because Theros, once again, wasn't pop culture-based, wasn't genre-based. It's like, well, what do you get when you read Greek mythology? What's the feeling you're trying to get?

And eventually I came across the idea of accomplishment. I read more about sort of the stories of Greek mythology. It's like, look, this person that starts from nothing goes on a journey. I mean, to be fair, not starts from nothing. They're a demigod or something. I mean, the one funny thing about Greek mythology is that

they didn't start from nothing. They really already had something special about them. But anyway, there is this idea of you go on this quest and you learn and get better and become a hero. And I really like the idea of becoming a hero. And so the idea of achievement is, okay, you can really, you know, this is where heroic, a lot of the idea came from. It's like, I start small, but I get better and better. Meanwhile, I love that the mantras upgrade. That's where mantras came from. That you got the mantras to upgrade. And then, just the idea of

using all the Greek stuff, all the enchantments to build up your creatures, that, you know, you can be blessed by the gods and be given wonderful things from the gods and become stronger and better. And so, the idea of achievement was something that, it took me a while to get to. I didn't start there.

And it's funny because because Innistrad, I started knowing so strongly what I wanted the field to be. A lot of Theros, early Theros was me being very sort of frustrated because I thought it would come easier to me that I didn't realize how much harder Greek mythology would be than horror. And so the early parts of it was like a lot of struggling to realize that things I assumed would come just as easily in a shrine didn't. And it required me to sort of think about it differently.

So probably the biggest takeaway is every set is its own set. It has its own problems. And that just because it's similar in some ways to another set doesn't mean it's the same thing. And that each set, you know, every time you do a top-down set, you're going to have a different thing you're coming from, and each one will have their own issues. Each one has their own strengths,

each has their own weaknesses, and so you have to face each design unto itself. Okay, guys? That is all I have to talk about, the learning of Theros. Theros was a very educational set for me. I learned a lot of stuff doing Theros. And I was very happy with

I mean, in general, I was happy with the set, but I think I learned a lot from it. It's one of those sets that if I had to do over, I would do significantly different than I did it. Like Innistrad, that's not true. I'm very happy that Innistrad came out, and now that I can look back and see Innistrad with hindsight, there are some things I would change. I made some

mistakes, but Theros is like, wow, in hindsight, I would change a lot more. Not that I wasn't happy with it, but there's a lot more things that I learned that I could have done differently. But anyway, anyway, I'm now in my parking space. So you all know what that means? It means it's the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you guys next time.