Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #34 - Future Sight - Part 3

Episode Date: May 17, 2013

Mark Rosewater wraps up his series about Future Sight with Part 3.

Okay, I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, well the last two weeks I've been talking about FutureSight. And so today I will continue because there's a lot to talk about. One of the themes here is that FutureSight has a lot packed into it. Okay, so last week I had a special guest star, Matt Cavada, and he and I went through most of the new mechanics. And I, for those that may or may not remember, or who didn't listen, I put all of them, I was talking about them, and then I had three different baskets I could put them in. So basket number one was, I believe we'll do it again.

We have to find the right place for it, but I believe we'll do it. Note that that could take a time, you know, that could take a while. Sometimes finding the right spot for something can take a long time. So just because it's in bucket one doesn't mean you're going to see it soon, but I believe that we can do it. It's just a matter of time until we find the place for it. Bucket number two means that I, there's something about the mechanic I like, but it has some problem that has to get solved. It might be a design problem, it might be a developmental problem, but it has some problem that, like, until that problem is solved, it's probably not

going to see the light of day. But, that problem could get solved, and in the past we've solved problems, and so two means it could come out, but it's a little, the chance of it happening is less. Bucket three is, I highly doubt it's coming out. It's doing something that I just don't think

we want to do. And so it's not a lot in bucket three. There's more in bucket two than three in that a lot of stuff I think we won't do. It's like, well, maybe we'll solve the problem. But three is where I just, I have no faith we're going to solve the problem. I think it's just something that we're not going to do. There's not a lot of threes. Okay. So when last we left, There's not a lot of 3s. Okay. So, when last we left. Next in line, Delve.

Okay, so, Delve is clearly bucket one. Not only is Delve bucket one, I've tried to stick it in multiple sets so far. For example, it was in Innistrad for a while. And in fact, where I came up with it was I knew when we did Future Sight that we were going to go, I knew we were going to do Horror World, and I knew it was going to have a strong graveyard component.

That was already a known factor. I mean, Odyssey was the thing that spawned the idea for doing the horror set, which was I made a graveyard set that didn't have a theme that matched, and Brady and I discussed, oh, it would be awesome to have a graveyard set that had a horror theme. I loved the idea. I sort of scheduled it out.

So I knew at the time we'd do Future Sight, we were going to do that. So I knew we needed graveyard mechanics. So Delve was me coming up with the graveyard mechanic. Now, interestingly, having now tried it in the graveyard set, I've now come to realize that Delve doesn't work in the graveyard set. The reason being, in the graveyard set, you want to have things matter in the graveyard and things that have relevance in the graveyard. You know, stuff like flashback, for example.

But Delve just eats your whole graveyard. So when Delve is in play, there is no graveyard. And so it doesn't work well in a set in which you want nuance in the graveyard because chomp, chomp, chomp, it just eats it all. But for Delve fans, I like Delve. I want to find a home for Delve. It's a tricky mechanic in the sense that

it doesn't fit in a graveyard set, but it does require some support, you know, because you want to be able to get cards in your graveyard, although natural gameplay gets them in to a certain extent. So anyway,

I'm on the lookout when I find the right place. I mean, Delve is clearly something I've been looking to put in somewhere, and it'll happen one day. So bucket one. Okay, next we got poisonous. Okay, so once again, I knew when we did Future Sight that I wanted, that I was planning to do poison.

And so I made the best guess at how we would keyword poison. And poisonous really was me just sort of saying, well, here's how we've done poison in the past. Let me just keyword it. So, you know, the set where we do poison, we'd have a keyworded thing. And for a while, when I started Scars of Mirrodin, poisonous was in Scars of Mirrodin.

Like, I'm not sure when I did Future Sight if I knew. I think we knew we were going back to Mirrodin and that the Frex needs to take over Mirrodin because Suckermite Mir showed that. We knew that. But I don't know if I yet had figured out that I wanted the Phyrexians to be tied to poison. I might have known that, although maybe I would have hinted at that more if I knew that. I'm not sure what I knew at that point.

I did know that I wanted to use poison. I did know that the Phyrexians were coming back. I don't know if I had figured that out yet. And poisonous was an honest attempt to try to figure it out. Now, what happened during Scarves of Mirrodin design was Poisonous turned to be not interactive enough. There wasn't much you could do. I mean, you could make them unblockable,

but there wasn't a dynamic interaction. The thing I liked about Infect, which is what got us to Infect, was that Infect, it cared about things that affected power. So stuff like giant growth. It had a little more dynamism to it. It also made it a little scarier because when you have a poisonous two creature, well, if you aren't going to die to two poison, hey, all it's going to do is do you two poison.

There's never any suspense. Should I block it? Shouldn't I block it? But in fact, it had this nice quality of daylight to it where, let's say I've only taken four poisons, so I can take six. Well, a creature that normally deals two poisons, a two-powered creature, I might want to be nervous about that. You might have a trick up your sleeve. You might do something. And I have to think about blocking

way before I know it would kill me. Because a lot of the problems with poison before was there just was a known quantity. Anyway, I'll save this for the Scars and Mirrors podcast. Poisonous, I'm not sure whether to call it a two or a three. I think I would, I think it's probably a three in the sense that I think we figured out a better way to do poison.

I think infect is just strictly better than poisonous. That the gameplay of poison is just nowhere near as good as the gameplay of Poisonous was just nowhere near as good as the gameplay of Infect. And so I feel like if I did Poison again, I'm much more likely just to go to Infect than go to Poisonous. So I don't... I don't right now foresee us doing Poisonous as Poisonous. That's not to say we wouldn't do Poison in a different way other than Infect.

That's possible. But I feel like if I'm going to do Poisonous, Infect is just better than I would do Infect. So I think Poisonous is bucket three. Aura Swap. Aura Swap is a mechanic where it goes into auras, and then you can swap it, you pay a mana cost, or you pay a mana, and then you can swap it with an aura in your hand.

So the idea is a creature that has aura could turn into anything. I don't know. Bucket two, I guess, in the sense that I'm not in love with it. It requires you playing a lot of auras, so I need an environment where you're going to play a lot of auras in your deck, and that's tricky to make happen. So, I wouldn't say three.

There's nothing about it that we couldn't do, but it's just... It's the kind of thing where I just need the absolute positivity, like somehow I have aura world, and it's just already I have auras matter in a way that's interesting, and then I go, oh, maybe do aura swap. I mean, but it really, really needs like the absolute, like perfect world to work, because it's a tricky mechanic to really make feel native in a set. So I say bucket two.

And finally, oh no, two more. We have typecasting or type cycling. So in the set there is wizard cycling and sliver cycling. That was us riffing off of basic land cycling. So what happened was Brian Tinsman in Scourge had come up with a mechanic where you could trade cards for basic land of a particular type. You know, a red card would become a mountain.

And the idea is, oh, well, if you don't really need this red card, it may be expensive, you can trade it for a mountain if you really need it. And already in the block we had cycling, and it dawned on me that it was very similar to cycling. Like you were paying some mana discarding a card in your hand and instead of drawing a card you were going through your library but I felt it was close

and so I convinced him to turn it into a cycling variant and so we made mountain cycling forest cycling, etc then in the middle set of Alara I'm blanking on the name the middle set The Middle Set of Alara. Why am I blanking on the name? The Middle Set.

See, when you drive, this is one of my problems. This is what you guys learn about me when you get me in my podcast rather than writing. Like, if I'm writing this, I just look it up and then, hey, I know. But the reality, you're learning the truth here, is I'm horrible. I am horrible with names. And the worst part about this is I know it's like a six-letter word starting with C. That's how my brain works. Conflux. Conflux.

So in Conflux, Bill came up with the idea of sort of taking that and adapting it to basic land cycling, where you can get any basic land rather than just getting a particular one. So the idea was, I was talking about how Future Sight's a lot of extrapolated design. So the idea was, well, if you could search for a land, maybe you could search for other things. So like you can search for wizards, search for slivers and such. I'm not sure whether this is bucket two or bucket three. The problem this has is a lot of the problem that Trent's figure has, which is

mechanics that tutor have a lot of repetitive gameplay issues and that... I like tutors, so the tutors I like are ones that we... There's decks that we call... What do they call them? Toolbox. Toolbox decks. Where the idea is, the tutor,

you put lots of one-ofs in your deck, and the tutor allows you to customize what you need when you need it. That is awesome. I love that. You know, I love the idea that, like, you know, it's always different because it allows me to play cards that are too narrow, but it allows me to have access to them. So I'm playing cards in my deck I normally don't play. And it makes a lot of variety because there's lots of different choices of what you do.

What I don't like is a tutor that's just like, every game I do the same thing. It just takes the variety that makes magic so strong and just lessens it by making the gameplay happen the same game after game. And so my worry a little bit is that type cycling would be the latter rather than the former. If there's a way to make the former work, I'd be tempted. I guess type cycling is two. We would need to find the right place and the former. If there's a way to make the former work, I'd be tempted. I guess I feel like it's two. We would need to find the right place

and the right thing you're looking for in a way where it just wouldn't be repetitive gameplay. So I guess that's possible. Buck a two. Next is Chroma, which is interesting in that it's the only new mechanic in Future Sight that we've done, I think. I mean, they introduced

Lifelink, DeathTouch, Shroud, and Reach, but that doesn't really count. That was just us using FutureSight as a chance to show some new terms. I mean, we introduced them in the future, but we knew we were doing them. Okay, so Chroma. Chroma is one of those mechanics

that I felt never, like, I think Chroma has much more potential than Eventide showed it off to be. I mean, once again, this doesn't really have a bucket. I mean, it's one, because it was in the set. I like Chroma. I feel like Chroma didn't... I ended up putting it in a place that felt natural, because there was a lot of expansion symbols in a hybrid set. But in some ways, it didn't...

It didn't quite live up to the potential. Like, if you ask me, for example, of... I mean, maybe it's the podcast. You know, top five mechanics that, like, never lived up to their potential. Where, like, I thought they were a really neat mechanic and they did really cool things. And, like, eh, the first time out,

we just didn't really capture the essence of them quite as well. Chroma is in that camp. Chroma is a mechanic that deserves to come back because I think it's a very neat mechanic. It does very cool things. It makes you think about cards in just a very different way. Like, I love the idea that with Chroma in your deck, like, you know, GG is different than 1G.

You know, GG is better for you than 1G. And, like, that's really interesting, the idea that you care about how much colored man you are. I love mechanics that do that. That just take an aspect of the game you never think about and say, oh, now you do have to care about this. And it just makes you think about things very differently. So, I like Chroma.

I'm glad it introduced it to FutureSight. And I... It'll be back. I mean, I have to find the right place for it. And my caveat to all of these. But I do feel one day I will find the right place for it, and my caveat to all of these, but I do feel one day I will find the right place for it, and then I think it will shine. I hope it will shine.

Okay, so now, I've talked about all, I mean, there's lots of other mechanics that were in the sets, real quickly. Other mechanics that were in the set, other than keyword, you know, basic keyword mechanics, you know, evergreen mechanics. Flanking, buyback, shadow, echo, cycling, kicker, madness, morph, scry, bloodthirst,

convoke, dredge, future cast, sorry, forecast, graft, hellbent, transmute, suspense, split second, vanishing, and flash. We introduced flash in that block. Now flash is evergreen. So anyway, there were a lot of keywords, 48 keywords in the set. But wait, that was not all the set did. Showing you the future? Yep. 8,000 million keywords? Yep.

But wait, there were also some cycles in the set, so I want to talk about the cycles. Now, one of the things that was interesting about this set, normally when you use cycles, cycles are used to show consistency. It's a lot of cards in the set that work the same way. So usually when you use a cycle, it shrinks the mind space of a set because five cards are working the same and so it's easier to grok it. But one of the things that happened in Future Sight was I used cycles a lot of the time to show variety. So sometimes instead of shrinking mind space, it grew mind space, meaning

mind space is how much mental energy it takes to sort of absorb what you're watching. And in game design, one of the things about mind space is you have to be aware of how much mind space you're borrowing from the new player. Actually, from any player. The more advanced the player, the more mind space they can

handle, because the more they've already embedded certain stuff in that, it's easier for them to pick up because they've already sort of learned it, if more mind space they can handle, because the more they've already embedded certain stuff in that, it's easier for them to pick up, because they've already sort of learned it, if you will. Okay, so, these are in no particular order, just the order that come to mind, I guess. Okay, so, one of the most high-profile... I talked about a couple cycles in my first week, the first podcast, so real quick, get those away. The Pact Cycle, which are the ones in which you cast them now and pay in the future. Remember we talked about those.

The Legends Air Cycle, which were the legends with grandeur that all represented ancestors of characters you already knew. And there was a Vertical Morph Cycle I talked about last week that was a common,

uncommon, and a rare that were all permanent types that had never had morph before. A land, an enchantment, and an artifact. Okay. So those are the cycles I've already talked about. Now let's get to some of the cycles I haven't talked about. So the dual land cycle. I was very proud of this. So normally

dual lands, you have a dual land that you cycle and all five are the same. But I was trying to show the future! So we had a future-shifted cycle of lands in which each, so they're allied, so five allied lands, but each one showed a different, came from a different future cycle.

And so the idea was that we could hint on where we could go with dual lands. And as it turns out, one of them my name's not Grover the Burnwillows, is that right? The red green one. One of them

ended up in Shadowmoor which was the one with the hybrid. You could tap it and you could tap certain colors to get other colors based on hybrid. And then the other four we haven't done yet. Some of them

we will do. Some of them we might not do. The one I really loved that development cut was, I think the blue-black one was originally Poison Duel Land, where you tap for black or tap for blue, but you got a poison every time you tap for land.

And I forget whether to tap for colors without poison. I think it didn't. No matter what, you got poison. And I thought the thing was really cool, but development gets very scared of poison as a cost, meaning taking poison as a cost, because in environments that don't have any

poison, there's no threat of being poisoned. It's just this resource that's kind of free. So essentially, the first dual land is just a dual land. And the second one, I mean, I'm not sure how many before it becomes a problem. But anyway, I'm fascinated by it. I like the card a lot. It's scared development, so it changed. Next, we have the keyword land cycle,

in which it was a land that I think came in play tapped. It tapped for one of the five colors a tap for c and r and d lingo uh but then each one had a keyword on it from the past um and that was fun I mean you know it was kind of neat figuring out like oh what would green have what would blue have and you know blue had I think blue was transfigured and green was graphed and anyway I think it was kind of neat to explore kind of like... I mean, I did mix and match with that week one.

This was kind of mix and match with land in the sense of here's land and now I'm going to mix it with this keyword. It was fun finding five keywords that would go on a land. Then we had a repeating suspend cycle. And this is one of the ones

that worked the same. The idea here was it was a tweak on suspend. The idea was the spells would go off and they would re-suspend themselves. So every third turn the spell would go off. And the reason I liked that in Future Sight was it was like, you know the spell now

and you know the future. In three turns this will happen again. And so it forced you to change your play because you had knowledge of the future. In three turns, this will happen again. And so it forced you to change your play because you had knowledge of the future. Another cycle was the auger cycle, which were creatures, and all of them had a sac effect that you could only sac during your upkeep

that had a decent-sized effect. And the idea was, I was trying to figure out the right time to use it, but everyone knows that in the future, this creature could turn into this thing. Now I can't use it at a moment's notice, so I have to sort of risk of, do I think I can make it to the next turn? And I thought that also matched the future well, and that is sort of like, well, what do I think is going to happen in the future? Will this guy

survive? Or, no, he'd die before I could sack him, I'd better sack him now. And so the auger cycle was definitely sort of, you know, looking into the future and trying to figure out what held. There was a vanilla cycle, which was we were trying to find a way to make some of the... The future shifted cards are so complex that we decided to try to find a way to just lower them a little. I mean, not that we lowered them that much. So one of the ideas was, what if we did a vanilla cycle, we put it into the future frames, and then had the frame be different.

We had a full-art vanilla. Now, one of the things, by the way, people always ask me, they go, that was awesome. Can you do more full-art vanillas? I agree. I like the idea. I believe we will do full-art vanillas at some point. I mean, it seems too obviously and too good not for us to revisit. So, I mean, I do think it was a cool idea that we can revisit.

Once again, finding the right place and such. But I kind of liked it. And I also was happy that we came up with some future-shifted cards that were simple. That was one of the biggest challenges. I mean, it's also true for the unsets as it is for Future Sight, my hard to make sets. And the reason is, is that part of what you want to do is, in your comments especially, you want to make nice simple things. But when the rule is, it's from the future, you've never done before,

or in Silver Borders, like, it's something that can't be done in Black Border, you know. In those kind of environments, you know, making simple things is a lot harder. It's a lot harder. And so, I was happy to have the Vanilla Cycle. Okay, we have the Spellshipper Cycle. So, the Spellshipper Cycle was all cards

that tapped and sacked a card, you know, discarded a card, to make a token. But rather than make a normal token, each one made a token of an existing card. And the idea was, you know, that... And then for fun, for fun, four of them made existing cards,

and one of them made a card you had never seen before that would later turn up in the very next set, we put it in Shadowmoor. So it was kind of fun. The Psycho both sort of had a nostalgia aspect to it because four of the five were cards you knew. It was kind of fun to make tokens of existing cards. And it was new technology, something we hadn't done before

and really haven't done since. Cards will make tokens of themselves, but it's very rare that cards make tokens of other cards. Especially cards that aren't in play. Usually when they make tokens of other cards, especially cards that aren't in play. Usually when they make tokens of other cards, it's like, I cloned something. But here it's like, no, no, no, just mix a card.

This card doesn't exist. I mean, exists in Magic, but doesn't exist on the board. And so anyway, like I said, that was a cross between us. A, it was nostalgic, so it fit in the block. B, it showed a new way to do something, so it fit in the future aspect. And it had one of the cards that actually showed something, hinted at a card that didn't even exist yet,

so it had that future aspect. Next was the sliver cycle. So one of the ways we thought it might be fun was to take slivers and put future abilities onto them because it's like we wanted to show new abilities, and so one of the things we came up with is, well, why not make a cycle of slivers that all have new abilities?

Because in the future, you know, we think slivers will come back, and slivers are very popular, and, oh, look, here's different abilities that they would have in the future. And anyway, it was a clever way to do what I thought and people like slivers and slivers were a theme in the time spiral block so it allowed us to do sort of a future set of slivers that I thought was kind of neat we had done slivers earlier in the block that showed other aspects of time

and these were us doing slivers that were shown in the future okay those I think were all the cycles. I might have forgot one. So one of the things I want to point out here is in the last three weeks, I've talked about

the time-shifted sheet in which every card was unique and different and weird. We had mix and match in which we took mechanics from throughout time and mixed them in weird ways.

We introduced new mechanics and had old mechanics, 48 mechanics in all. We had a lot of mechanics that messed around with knowing the future, the packs and different things. When people sort of say, I love this set, I think what they're saying is, there has never been a set so dense that so much is going on.

And as a designer, and this is why it's my arthouse film, I appreciated filling every nook and cranny. You know what I'm saying? I appreciated that every time shift of card was a different future, and, you know, mix and match. We're finding all sorts of unique ways

to take all these mechanics and mix them and match them. And that, it kind of was a set of indulgence, if you will, in that I had a chance to—it kind of was my no-stop set. It's just like, I'm going to make a set. There is no limits. And that was fun. I really, really enjoyed making the set. I really, really enjoyed playing the set. I really, really enjoyed playing the set.

You know, even now, before I did this podcast, I went back and I looked at the set, just to refresh my memory. And, like, it was so much fun to look at. There is so much going on. And I get that if you can appreciate all the nuance, of course it's a fun set. You know, it is packed to the gills. I mean, there's probably no other magic set

other than maybe the unsets that have this much just packed into them, you know, that's just literally oozing from its pores. It is oozing. Like, it's just, if you love magic, there is, like, bits and nooks and crannies of every little bit in that set is full of stuff. And, you know,

if you get it, that is awesome. It is fun and it is great and I take pride in the fact that I made, in some level, the most dense set that Magic will probably ever have. I do.

But, to the fans of Future Sight, please understand that imagine, for example, I'll try to make you put it in the minds of non-advanced players, is imagine going to a movie in which there's a sequel that just says,

imagine it's number 10 in the series, and it goes, eh, we're not explaining anything. We're just going to assume you've seen the first nine movies. We're not going to bother explaining anything. You would be kind of lost.

You know, because they would be making references left and right and all this stuff, and like, normally what happens in a sequel is, they spend some amount of time, there's a new character, somebody somewhere has to explain something, so they sort of catch you up to date with what's going on. And I feel like Future Sight was like this, yeah, tenth movie in the

series where we're like, screw it! No explaining anything, you know. And that the people who had really invested and really had, you know, watched the first nine movies, of course it was the most awesome thing ever, because it was just like, it didn't waste their time explaining anything. It just was like, let's get to it.

You know. But, hey, you know, magic is for, especially the expert expansions, magic is for, especially the expert expansions, magic is for everybody. Now, I will say this. One of the things I have learned from the Rosewater Rumble and watching features I do is,

I realized this, which is something I hadn't really hit before, which is there is a group, you know, of invested players that love sort of just pile it on. Pile it on. I got it. I know it.

I've been playing forever, you know, and I show no fear. Just give it to me as much as you can. And it's possible that in a niche product that we are making in which the role of the product is to meet the needs of a smaller part of the audience, that maybe that would make sense. Maybe it's possible that's where we can do something like that.

And, ironically, I think we kind of have. Modern Masters comes out this summer, and as someone who's played Modern Masters Limited, it is a lot like Future Sight in the sense that it is just chalk to the gills with Magic's Pass. Seriously. And I feel like the people who most appreciate the product are the ones who get the nuance of what's going on.

Because it is complicated if you don't know what's going on. There's a lot of mechanics from Magic's Pass that just are like, well, here they are. And so I take away from sort of the latest resurgence of love for Future Sight that, look, there is an audience that likes this.

It's not for everybody. It's not something that likes this. It's not for everybody. It's not something that's general. It's not meant for an expert expansion. You know, when I talk about Future Sight being a failure, I don't mean that it was a failure... Like, in a vacuum, it wasn't a failure. I think what it did was very good. I'm very proud of what it did. The players who like it love it.

And that audience loves it. The problem was that wasn't my aim. That wasn't my audience. I was supposed to go much broader. You know, and that just if I made an expert expansion in which it was great for beginning players, and the expert player goes,

boring, there's nothing here to do, I cracked it in two drafts, and I don't want to do the third draft, hey, that would be a problem. That's not okay either. All of the magics that we make have to be accessible from the less experienced player to the more experienced player. And I talk a lot about lenticular design, where I try hard to sneak things in so that the beginner doesn't see it,

but the expert player understands, and there's all this stuff for them to think about. And I want to have every set to have the scope of easy to graph to complicated. I just want the complicated stuff to be hidden so that the experienced player can see it, but the beginning player can't see it. That way, it's not intimidating for them. Future Sight was not that. It was not

that at all. Future Sight was in your face. In your face. Here's 48 Mechanics you do not know, and here's lots of wackiness going on, and all this nostalgia stuff that you probably don't even understand what we're referencing. You know, just overwhelming. But, the good news is I now think I understand better the idea of, look, niche audience. We make niche products.

Maybe we can make a niche audience for this niche product. And, by the way, I kind of think Modern Masters is. So I do believe that this audience is getting something. But we could also do more stuff in the future. And I think that's a good takeaway. I mean, I didn't know what I was going to take away from the Rosewater Rumble. To be honest, I did it more for fun.

I mean, I did it more as something that I thought would generate social media. I'm goofing around with doing more event stuff on social media. Anyway, my communication background is showing. So, but what I did learn is that there is this much beloved part of magic, and that Future Sight is the poster child

of this, and that, look, there is an audience for that material, and that it's in its audience, but it's there. And that's something we have to keep in mind, it's something we have to respect, and every once in a while, we do sneak stuff in for you guys, you know, into our products, but it's a little more hidden than it is in Future Sight, where it was blatant in

your face. Anyway, I've just parked, and so only three episodes later, I've talked about Future Sight design, and it was fun. It was actually it was really fun for me to go back and look at the set and

sort of remember all the things I did, and I was surprised how much I packed into it. I mean, just the number of unique ideas and cycles and mix and match. It was, I'm proud. I'm proud of the amount of material I managed to get in it. Like I said, it didn't quite live up to some of its goals, but look, it did what it did very well, and as a designer, you know, it was a huge challenge, so I was very proud of it.

And like I said, it's my arthouse film. It will always have a soft place in my heart. It did something unique that I probably will never have a chance to do again at least in an

expert expansion. So, anyway, this is Future Sight. I hope you guys had fun listening to me and Matt for one of them talk about it

and so I guess it's time to go make the magic.