Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #48 - Scars of Mirrodin - Part 1

Episode Date: August 23, 2013

Mark dives into Scars of Mirrodin with the first in a series about the set and the block.

Okay, I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today is Design Story Day. Today I'm going to talk about the design of Scars of Mirrodin. So, there's many stories to tell. Let me first start by talking about the design team. So the design team, this is going to seem like a long list. I'll explain in a second why the list is so long. So I led it. It had Mark Gottlieb, Alexis Jansen, Eric Lauer, Matt Place, Mark Globus, and Nate Heiss. Now, most of those names should be familiar. Mark Gottlieb currently is the design manager, and he was formerly the rules manager.

And before that, actually, he was an editor for Magic in the very beginning. Mark and I have a long relationship. It's funny because when he was the rules manager, one of the running jokes is that the head designer and the rules manager are mortal enemies. Because it's the job of the head designer to do things we've never done before. And it's the job of the rules manager to make everything work just like we've always done it before. So, definitely, it's the kind of thing like Door to Nothing, for example, I really

wanted to destroy a target player. That was the effect. And he's like, no, no, we haven't, you know, it's target player loses the game. And I'm like, well, that's, yeah, yeah, yeah, I understand that's how we write it, but it would be much more exciting if it was destroy target player. And like, kind of the, it's that conflict that we always had of, he's trying to figure out how to take things and word them as we've always done,

and I'm always trying to find ways to make things seem exciting and different. And so I want to try things a little differently than we've done before. But anyway, regardless of the fact that we had the little ongoing joke of, we actually get along pretty well. And he became my design manager a little over a year ago, I think. So the way it works is, we have a six-person design team.

I'm no longer in charge of managing the team. That's Mark's job. I'm in charge of overseeing their technical skills, and I'm in charge of overseeing design. But the idea is that by having a manager, then I have to do less management, and I can focus and spend more time on doing design, because I'm a better designer than I am a manager. And the problem is that there's so much going on that just having to spend time

to do all the management stuff just kept me away from doing design stuff. And so I now have a manager who does the management stuff, which is Mark Daly. And Mark is an awesome designer. He has led a couple sets. He's leading a set right now. And he and I worked together. He and I co-led Geek Crash.

Alexa Jansen, winner of the first great designer search, just led her first set with Dragon's Maze. She's been on a lot of teams. She's very good. Obviously, she's a great designer. But she doesn't work in R&D.

She's one of the people we have on loan. She actually works in digital, working on Magic Online and all sorts of stuff there. But we borrow her from time to time. Eric Lauer is currently the head developer. Well, the equivalent. I'm the head designer. He's the equivalent for development. And at the time, though, he did not yet have the position because this was a while back. And Matt Place was also a developer.

And like I said, Matt's one of my favorite developers of all time, although he currently does not work at Wizards. And then Mark Lobis is another person who came from the first grade designer search. He came in fourth, I believe. And he is the producer for Magic, which means that we have a lot of balls in the air. There's a lot of moving parts. And he's the one that just makes sure everything is running smoothly. And he oversees that. And it's a very complex job.

There's a lot going on. And Globus is kind of Aaron's right-hand man to make sure that everything's running smoothly. And then, Nate Heiss no longer works at Wizards, but he was very involved with

digital games. I remember Gleemax, a thing we tried for a while to make a social gaming thing that didn't quite work out. But anyway, he was one of the designers. He he wasn't a magic designer, I mean he didn't work specifically on magic, but he played magic and he was a long time magic player. And so we had him on. So what happened was, the reason this is so large is we actually had one team and then in the middle we switched off some stuff.

So I think what happened is like the team originally was me and Alexis and Gottlieb and Matt. And then halfway through, and Nate, and Nate, I think. And then halfway through, Matt got swapped out for Eric. And Nate got swapped out for Globus. And so I'll explain as I get into my story why we swapped halfway through. Because that's something I don't think I've ever explained so to really talk about where this set came from we have to go back

go back in the time machine to Mirrodin okay so actually farther than that so I talked about how there's a story that I at least started the ball rolling called the Weatherlight Saga called the Weatherlight Saga.

And the Weatherlight Saga ended up in the Invasion block. At this point, I wasn't very involved in the story anymore. So Invasion, for those that do not know, and there are people at R&D who have claimed they do not know, it was about an invasion by the Phyrexians on Dominaria. And thanks to lots of planning by Urza and all sorts of stuff, the Phyrexians are defeated. Utterly defeated. They are destroyed.

Finally, the curse of the Phyrexians has been wiped from the multiverse. Now, for those who know anything about good storytelling, you don't just completely kill off villains as good as the Phyrexians. And let me be clear, I love the Phyrexians. They are my favorite villains. Of all of magic, as far as I'm concerned, I consider them the Lex Luthor to magic Superman. Now, there's

others that would argue maybe that's Nicol Bolas. He's the other big bad guy. But, to me, the Phyrexians have always been, I mean, literally since the early days of magic, have been one of the most awesome villains. And the reason I love the Phyrexians, I've talked about this before, is they're what I call environmental villains. Which is, magic does a good job of showing you an environment. And the Phyrexians are not just a singular thing.

They are themselves an environment. It's very easy to show Phyrexia, because they get to show up in lots of cards. Because what they do is they infect the environment. And that's very visible. And I enjoy that. I also enjoyed the Phyrexians for other reasons. I mean, they were my favorites before this happened, but also the Phyrexians were my means to bring back poison to the game.

I'll talk about this briefly, which is, when I first started playing Magic, way, way back when, well, I started in Alpha, but when I picked up Legends, Legends introduced the concept of poison. I think it was on a couple cards. And I thought the idea was awesome. Like, I poison my opponent, and then just, no matter what, he gets 10 poison, dead.

I thought that I spent so much time building poison decks, and poison for a long time was something that Magic kind of did in dribs and drabs, and it was never at a high power level. But I loved it, nonetheless. I mean, I'm a Johnny, so I love trying to win with weird ways. And so trying to win with a poison deck back in the day was quite the challenge. But anyway, and then around the time of... Oh, what happened was Tempest was going to have a poison theme. In fact, Bogavadi, which is the codename for Tempest was going to have a poison theme. In fact, Bogavadi, which is the codename for Tempest,

was named after a land of poison snakes, an Indian land of poison snakes. Because originally, Tempest was a poison set with lots of poison in it. And it was decided at the time of Tempest that we didn't want to be in the poison game, that enough people, not me obviously, thought that poison wasn't right for magic. And so poison went away.

And I made it my goal, one of my goals. I really wanted to bring poison back. And during Unglue 2, I tried to bring poison back, and Unglue 2 never actually solved it the other day. And I kind of knew I wanted to bring Poison back, and Unglue 2 never actually saw the light of day. And I kind of knew I wanted to bring it back, but I was just waiting for the right time and the right place. Because one of the things I've learned is

I play Magic from a long game. Meaning if I have a good design, I wait for the right place to put it. Because the worst thing you can do is put a design in the wrong place and try to force it, because A, not only will it usually not end up in the set, but then people think very badly of it, and they think of it as being this bad mechanic. One of the things that I'm constantly doing as a head designer is making people understand that

just because a mechanic doesn't work doesn't make it a bad mechanic. It just means it's not right for this set. And a lot of times, you'll try something and it'll fail, and that doesn't mean mechanic is a failure. It means it doesn't support what you need right now. And so, I wanted to make sure, because Poison already had a lot going against it. I didn't want to sort of try to make Poison work until I knew I could do it correctly. Okay, so now, now let's go to Mirrodin. In Mirrodin, Brady Domrath got a pretty cool idea. He said, the Phyrexians are a cool villain. We don't want to forever flush the Phyrexians away.

And to be fair, if you send any story, I talk about the Phyrexians as being the plague archetype, like zombies and the Borg and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The idea is we come, we will make you part of us, you know, like we will grow and then you will become us. And that's very scary, you know. And the idea is every person who falls, they're stronger, right? It makes it very hard army to fight against. But if you ever watch the end of any one of those films, especially like in the 50s or 60s, you know, it's like

the curse is, we've beaten them, and then there's always some shot of some little guy that got away, and it's like, the end? Question mark? So like, we kind of are hard to knew. I mean, being that the Frexids literally go down to a drop of oil, they are a hard enemy to truly eradicate.

And so Brady came up with this neat idea that Karn had gotten tainted when he had visited Phyrexian, somewhere during the Urza's Cider storyline, I believe. But he was a planeswalker, and the spark kept the infection from happening, or kept it at bay. And the idea was that Karn would inadvertently spread the plague. And so, in the Mirrodin book, when we came up with the idea of Mirrodin,

Brady had the idea and we put it into Mirrodin that the Phyrexians had got a little tiny handhold. And in fact, if you look, there's lots of little subtle clues about the fact that the Phyrexians are there. And the idea was that we were going to come back years later and, in fact, here's how we were originally going to do it, was we were going to, that was going to be new Phyrexia.

And like, oh my God, the Phyrexians, they're not dead. What happened? Look who they are. And the big kind of like, you know, the big, you know, the big turn with the musical sting at the end of the block was, oh my big, you know, the big turn with the musical sting at the end of the block was, oh my gosh, it's Mirrodin! You know, kind of like, I don't want to ruin Planet of the Apes, but if you know, if you've ever seen Planet of the Apes, you know the scene I'm talking about, where you're like,

oh my god! And so we wanted to have that moment. But there were a couple problems. One is that, so when I started, I was supposed to be designing new Phyrexia. That was what I started when the whole thing began. I was designing new Phyrexia. But here's the problem that I ran into was, the Phyrexians are all about, like, you know, infecting and overtaking worlds.

That's their thing. And we started after their thing. Like, okay, they're here. Now they're fighting each other because they have no one else left to fight. And what we found was it was a very hard story to tell. Like, for starters,

the Phyrexians hadn't been in a set for a long time. Like, who are the Phyrexians? And we realized that we kind of had to reintroduce the Phyrexians hadn't been in the set for a long time. Like, who are the Phyrexians? And we realized that we kind of had to reintroduce the Phyrexians. And so the first half of the design, I was, like, just trying to understand and figure out, like, what the block was about. And I was very confused because, you know, it was kind of the story. Like, there's a story I wanted to tell, and members of my team kept prepping in and saying, And it kind of the story, like, there's a story I wanted to tell.

And members of my team kept prepping in saying, hey, you know, shouldn't we tell, like, isn't it more exciting to tell about them invading? And I said, yeah, but we're supposed to do new Phyrexia. And finally, finally, like, and so the reason, by the way, we switched teams was just I was kind of stuck. And I actually got called in for Bill. And Bill's like, what's going on? You seem to be spinning your wheels. And I explained what was going on and Bill said, okay, we're going to change up the team a little bit. I'm going to change a few people out. And, uh, he gave me this pep talk and, and so kind of what happened was I said, okay, okay, let's stop. Cause I, I spent a lot of the early time of the design trying to understand who the Phyrexians were. Because one of my new goals is, and by the time we got to Skarsgården,

I was doing something different with design, something that I do now, which is I'd like to think of the idea that the game mechanics are an aspect of the flavor. That if you want to get the flavor of an environment, you know, you have the art, you have the names, you have the flavor text, but you also have mechanics. And I want the mechanics to represent the story so that as you play,

you feel the story through the play. That's very important to me. I'm very big on the emotional sort of... I want the gameplay itself to have an emotional, flavorful component. And in some ways, Scars of Mirrodin might have been the first set where I was really trying to do this so hard. I mean, Innistrad would come later, and that's where I sort of like... Anyway, I feel like Scars of Mirrodin...

One of my goals was I wanted you to get a sense of the Phyrexians. I really wanted mechanically to define them in a way that made you sort of afraid of them. And I knew in the back of my head that poison was a very good fit for the Phyrexians. The Phyrexians were all about taking things over and then, you know, polluting them, essentially. And so, like, okay, look, the Phyrexians taint you and take you over. So, you know, poison felt like a neat way to represent that. So one of the things that we talked a lot about was, I said to my team, I said, you know,

let's metaphorically figure out what the Frexians were. And so after thinking about a lot of it, I finally realized that they were a disease. You know, that they were, you know, they were a bad guy, but they were a bad guy in a metaphorical way that sort of like, the way disease is so scary is that it comes and slowly infects you and it takes over your cells and it starts turning your body against itself, you know, and that I liked that idea of these guys being a disease. So what I did was I came up with four adjectives to represent them. See if I can remember my four adjectives. I wanted them to be relentless. I wanted

them to be toxic. I wanted them to be adaptive. And I wanted them to be... What was the last one? One more. And really what I did is I said I wanted to get different mechanics to sort of represent that state. You know.

And so, what was the other one? Well, so anyway, the toxic part I knew poison made a lot of sense. And so very early on we were messing with poison. We started with poisonous, which I used in Future Sight. So the idea of poisonous was the way most of the poison creatures worked in the early days was I hit you,

and then I did poison to you. Now some of them replaced the damage with the poison, meaning some of them instead of dealing damage to you, did poison. Some of them weren't blocked, did poison. But the thing that was important was,

I like the idea that these things are, you know, they're, you don't want them to hit you. They're scary to you. But poisonous wasn't getting the job done. And that, the problem with poisonous was, okay, so if I'm poisonous two, that means when I hit you, I do two poison.

So there were a couple problems. One was that there were just times where I would beat you with damage before I beat you with poison. Especially if I was mixing together poison and non-poison creatures. But the bigger problem was that it wasn't... So, for example, let's say I have a poisonous 2 creature.

Okay, so I attack you. You're now 2 poison. Okay, so now I attack you again. You're at 4 poison. So now I attack you again. You have 4 poison. You're not scared of this guy yet. You're like, whatever, I have 4 poison. Fine, I'll take 2 more poison. Like, the poison guys didn't get scary

until you were like... Until the lethal hit would get you take two more poisons. Like, he, the poison guys didn't get scary until, um, you were, like, until the lethal hit would get you, they weren't scary. And what I wanted to do was I needed a little more uncertainty. Like, I didn't, because what happened with the poison creatures, the

poisonous was, like, they weren't kind of scary until the absolute positive end. And I wanted to find a way to say, hey, maybe you want to block these guys, you know, because the flavor,

the flavor was never block a poison creature, you know, unless you're going to die to damage or die to poison. Otherwise, whatever. Not a big deal. And there wasn't any real,

you know, like, they weren't scary to block. They weren't that scary to hit you. Like I said, one of the things I wanted is, I wanted to bring the Phyrexians back. I thought they were the most awesome villains we had.

I wanted you afraid of them. I wanted you to go, oh my god, the Phyrexians. Oh my god, the Phyrexians. Oh, I'm scared. The Phyrexians are here. And I thought poison could do that, but it wasn't getting the job done. And so, one of the things that came up was,

we came up with the idea of, so Wither is a mechanic from Shadowmoor, which, interesting, Nate Heiss, who was also on this set, Nate Heiss, oh, no, no, no, I'm sorry. I came up with Wither. Nate Heiss came up with Persist. But anyway, Nate Heiss, um, oh, no, no, no, I'm sorry, I came up with Wither. Nate Heiss came up with Persist, so, um, but anyway, Nate Heiss was part of, actually, he was on Lorwyn

design, and he came up with it. In early Lorwyn design, we were thinking of using minus one minus counters to represent things not being as deadly, but it ended up making them seem deadlier. I'll, I'll get there on the Lorwyn, uh Anyway, so Wither was a mechanic that... Actually, I'd come up with Wither. During Shadowmoor, to represent the idea of something that had a permanence to its damage. Because normally in Magic,

what Richard would come up with is... I mean, basically what Richard wanted is he wanted as simple a system as possible for damage. And so what he said is, look, creature's getting in a fight, something mean, basically what Richard wanted is, he wanted a simple system as possible for damage. And so what he said is, look, creature's getting in a fight, something happens, and then whatever, you heal. And the major reason Richard did that was, he just didn't want to track it. You know, oh, I remember this one has one damage on it, this one has two damage. In a video game, whatever, it can be tracked. But in a paper game, it just was a lot of bookkeeping. And Richard's like, whatever, you kill it, you don't kill it,

it gets better. And so the idea of Wither was kind, whatever, you kill it, you don't kill it, it gets better. And so the idea of Wither was kind of like, oh, well, no, no, no, these things don't get better. These things, you know, if they bite you, you are damaged and you are not healing. And so what happened was I ended up putting Wither on some guys. So I liked the idea of Wither

felt like, oh, these guys are scary, they're poisonous. You know, hey creatures, you kind of don't want to be poisoned by these things. So we put Wither on it. And so Wither, what we had done with Wither was, originally when we made Wither, it was, if you blocked, you got so many minus one, minus one counters. But what we ended up doing was we tied Wither to damage, which said it dealt its damage to creatures in the form of minus one, minus one counters. And that just played a lot better, because otherwise there was a lot of math that went on. It's like, no, this is clean. It does

two damage to you, fine. You get two counters. And so what it did was it replaced its damage with minus one, minus one counters. So what happened was, in Scarves of Mirrodin, I started putting Wither on these guys, because I wanted your creatures to be afraid of them. And one day, I don't know, one day this neon light, I just remember, like, you know, something just gleaming obvious, and then one day, just, like, you see it. Because we had Wither on a lot of creatures, and Wither dealt damage in the form of minus one, minus one counters. And then one day, it's just like, why doesn't poison deal damage in the form of poison counters? That's exactly what we want.

And the reason that that was so awesome was that it had the thing I'm missing, which is, let's say I have four poison and you attack with this 2-2 creature. Well, you might be able to make the creature bigger. You can giant growth it or something, meaning I don't know how much poison I might be taking. I have to be careful.

And so, you know, it definitely said, the fact that magic gives you variables on power, tying it to power, had all this dynamic stuff. Also, what it meant is, all of a sudden, things mattered. For example, we were in Mirrored. Mirrored wanted a lot of equipment because we're back on Mirrored.

Well, hey, you know, the second that Infect dealt on damage, any equipment that boosted power was now much more interesting, you know, playing with Afrexian, playing with Infect. I mean, it made Giant Ghosts more interesting, it made damage prevention more interesting. Anything that interacted

with damage, and Magic has a bunch of things that interact with damage, all of a sudden became much more interesting. You know, Trample became more interesting. You know, it definitely did the thing where it said, oh, this is neat. Okay, now Magic plays around with damage, this now carries across damage. And so, for a while, we had

both Wither and we started calling Infect. And so, for a while, we had both Wither and we started calling Infect. And then one day, we were just like, why are we... Most of the cards had Infect and Wither. And I'm like, why are we bothering to write Wither on these cards? What if Infect just had Wither built in? Look, I'm poisonous,

I hit you, I give you damage to poison counters, creatures I give damage to minus one minus counters, and it all just came together it was a beautiful package but meanwhile, while we were slowly solving the problem of how to make the Phyrexian scary we had a bigger problem, which was

what was the block about? so one of the things I talk about in block design is it's very important when designing a block that there's some... that each set in the block has to have its own identity. That's one of the big things about block design. That what we've discovered is that blocks do the best when each block is about something, you know?

And from time to time, it's clear when we don't get, like, for example, I think in Innistrad, one of my regrets about Dark Ascension was we didn't give it enough of its own identity, that it just was kind of like more Innistrad. And what it needed to be was something where it had, like, I think we excel best, especially with the middle set, when the middle set is,

it represents something. And so I liked a lot the idea of, instead of starting with the end, eventually what happened was, Bill gave me this pep talk, and I walked into Bill's office, like, I don't know, a couple weeks later,

because what Bill said to me, Bill said something very nice, which was, I was kind of stuck. And Bill basically gave me a pep talk and said, look, Mark, you're good. You're very good. And he goes, I think what's happening is you are trying to deliver what you think other people want rather than what you want.

And he said, stop trying to, you know, stop trying to, because for some reason I was in this mindset of, I don't even know why. I mean, that's a longer issue, but I, Bill really sort of slapped me out of it and said, look, make something that you think is awesome. And, you know, that's where you shine. Don't, don't try to make something awesome. And this is an awesome lesson, by the way. Lesson Bill gave me is an awesome lesson, which is, if you want to make something awesome, you have to make something awesome that you, the designer, believe is awesome, that follows your heart. And the reality is, design of any kind, any kind of creative design, is

built on passion. If you, the creator, are not passionate, it will not have passion in it and it will not excel. If you want to make something that is truly awesome, that is truly something that stands out, it has to believe because you, the creator, have put some of yourself in it. In order to do that, you have to believe in it with all your heart. If you don't believe in all your heart, when you try to make something for somebody else, you will ultimately fail. I mean, I'm not saying you can't make something for somebody else, but it will not be, if you want to hit it out of the ballpark, you have to make it something that is you, that belongs to you.

And I think for some reason, I got stuck up on this project. I'm not sure why. I was excited by the Phyrexians. I was excited to sort of show what they could do. I was excited to poison. But I kind of, when we started, we started this parameter of, you know, hey, we're on new Phyrexia. And what I realized was the whole reveal, the whole like, you know, oh my God, I can't believe this is Mirrodin. That works great in a movie. In a movie, you have a focused moment where everybody's watching, and you get an end, and the music has a sting, and like, oh my God. But that doesn't happen in a trading card game. It's hard for you to have that moment.

And we do this sometimes. We have this awesome cinematic moment, and then we forget we're not a movie. We don't have that moment. And what I realize is magic stories that excel are magic stories that can be told in a way that magic excels at. And what does magic do really well? Telling what I call environmental stories. Watching an environment change. That's why I can notice so often, you know, dramatic events happen.

The world is like, the world has to change. It's the nature of what makes magic magic. Because if we're going to show you something, we can't show you tiny, nuanced little things. You know, we have to show you, here's a world. Here's a different world or change world or something that says, hey, things are fundamentally different. That's how we show things. Because that's the paintbrush we use. And so I sort of walked away.

In my heart of hearts, I knew this. And my team had been saying this. And I finally walked into Bill and said, OK, Bill, we're telling the wrong story. I said, you want to tell the story. The awesome story we have to tell here is the Phyrexians take over Mirrodin. That's the story.

And so I said, look, we're starting with the end. And you don't want to, we're starting with the end. You don't want to start with the end, they've won. No, this is an amazing story of watching the Miridans, one of the badasses of all time, you know, being taken over by the Phyrexians. Really what this was, was we were putting a stake in the ground and saying, the Phyrexians are back, and they're bad. They took down bad and very good. And they took down the Myridons who were this potent

force. The whole point of this block was to put the Phyrexians back on the map. Of saying, remember these guys? These are some of the these are one of the best magic villains you've ever seen. And so I said, we're telling the wrong story. And then Bill said, you know, but Bill came up with the idea of,

well, could we make it dramatic who wins? And I said to Bill, I go, well, the problem is we're going to announce the name of the third set. That's going to give it away. So I'm not sure if we can, you know, keep it secret. And then Bill said, well, wait, what if we don't announce the name? And I was like, no, we have, you know,

we have to send out, like, in order for people to order stuff, we have to send things out. And Bill says, oh, okay, what if we give two names? And Bill suggested

the idea of, well, what if we didn't let people know how the block ended? You know, that we started the story and then we gave them two outcomes

and we could actually, you know, when people were ordering the product, we could actually not even tell them the name. It's one of these two names. And that's what we did, by the way, which, by the story, and then we gave them two outcomes, and we could actually, you know, people were ordering the product. We could actually not even tell them the name. It's one of these two names. And that's what we did, by the way, which, by the way, one of the things I love about doing magic is that we're a game about breaking rules.

But that doesn't just mean breaking rules we've broken before. Sometimes it means breaking rules we've never broken before. And I remember, you know, we went to the sales team and said, guys, what do you think? We're going to try to sell a set, and we're not even going to tell people the name. It's like either A or B. It's one of the two. And what the sales people said is, oh, awesome, no problem. This is magic.

You know how we sell a magic set? We say, we're making another magic set. And he said it'd be awesome. In fact, it'd be something that they were excited by because it's something that was out of the ordinary that what they love

when they go to sell sexes to perk up you know the people buy a set you want to perk their interest a little bit go what's going on and go okay

it's a set that we don't even know you're not even going to know which set it is you know and the retailers and the distributors they really actually they got into it

it was fun because what they realized was look magic is magic they had a lot of trust in us they knew we were going to do a good job. And so they were like, hey, let's have some fun. And so once we took that idea and we ran with it, okay, so the idea was, okay, so now we clicked it and we said, okay, we're going to tell a story. We're going to tell a story. One of the rules about telling a story is figure out where you want to end and then go to the opposite side of the spectrum.

That's how you tell a good story. So for example, let's say you have a story about a guy who realizes how to be selfless, of how, you know, in the end he becomes someone who really learns to share with the world or whatever. Well, in the beginning of the story,

he better be a selfish guy. He's got to be selfish, because you need to have the room for him to grow. You know what I'm saying? That, I mean, like Jerry Maguire, like, Jerry Maguire has to start the way he starts, so that he has room to grow, you know? That, that, the part of, of any sort of story is, the main character is what's called an arc. And so you have to start in the opposite place. And it's not just with character, you know, that the beginning of the story is you're taking yourself in a different direction.

So we're like, okay, if we know, we knew we were ending with the Phyrexians, the new Phyrexian. Phyrexians have taken over, Redone Mirrodin, Mirrodin, as you know, is dead. It is now new Phyrexia, right? And so in order to do that, we're like, okay, we know we want to end with new Phyrexia. Right? And so, in order to do that, we're like, okay, we know we want to end with new Phyrexia.

So where do we start? So I'm like, okay, what we want to do is let's go back to the earliest point we can where the Phyrexians are the smallest threat they can feel. Like, they have to be enough of a presence that you know they're there, but like, mostly it's

mirrored it. Now, the other big thing that's allowed us to do is Phyrexia is pretty dark. You know, new Phyrexia is pretty dark. And I'm like, you know, I think we could do a set of new Phyrexia, but do we want to do a block of new Phyrexia? It's pretty dark. And

what I like the idea is, look, let's go back to Mirrodin. Like, by rolling back the thing, hey, we gotta revisit Mirrodin. We gotta see Mirrodin again. And I was kind of excited, look, let's go back to Mirrodin. Like, by rolling back the thing, hey, we get to revisit Mirrodin. We get to see Mirrodin again. And I was kind of excited, you know, before we turned Mirrodin into New Phyrexian, let's see Mirrodin again, you know? And I thought it was awesome.

For example, we had been back to Dominaria many times, but this was the first time we really said, hey, we've been to this world. We're going back to this world, you know? And Mirrodin, at the time, had been the best-selling set, and we knew people liked Artifact World. Now, the wheels fell off the bus a little bit in Mirrodin Black, and that

the tournament scene broke. We had some developmental issues, and we put on a lot of broken cards. And that caused all sorts of problems. But people liked Mirrodin World. Mirrodin sold real well. They liked Artifact World. I mean, that caused all sorts of problems. But people liked Mirrodin World. Mirrodin sold real well. They liked Artifact World.

I mean, they liked a lot of what Mirrodin had to offer. And so the idea was, let's go back to Mirrodin. Let's make sure it's not broken this time. Oh, I mean, as you'll see next week, I did suggest some crazy stuff in that area. But anyway, so what happened was we rolled back, and I said, okay, how small could Phyrexia be? It has to be big enough that you notice it, but the smallest it could be that you notice it. And I finally said, okay.

We came up with 10%. We said, what if the Phyrexians are 10%? That's 1 in 10. That means every booster, the ass fan would be high enough that it showed up, that every booster you'd see a little bit of Phyrexia. And then, by the way, so the next problem that rolled into was

how we represented the Phyrexians. So that, I guess I'll get into that later, but that's where the watermarks came in. Because one of our concerns was that we wanted the first set to be 10%, and then we wanted it to grow. And the idea, by the way, was, okay, well, if we wanted it, we thought it would be neat that the middle set was about who wins. So what that meant is, okay, the middle set had to be a war, because then the outcome of the war would be the third set, right? And the

neat thing about Scars is something that we... One of the problems of... Storytelling has what's called three-act structure, in which usually Act 2 is the largest act, and Act 1 sets things up, and Act 2 is the main part of it. Act 3 is the wrap-up.

For those that read my article, Act 1 is comfort, Act 2 is surprise, Act 3 is completion. Anyway, so the problem we run into a lot of times is that we kind of set up the conflict and then like the third set, like this time we set up the conflict in the second set so the third set can answer it. Sometimes the conflict's in the third set and then it's hard for us to tell you

the answer. Even if it's in the set, it's hard to see. Where the nice thing about Scars of Mirrodin is there was a conflict. Who won? Everybody can tell you the answer. Even if it's in the set, it's hard to see. Where the nice thing about Scars of Mirrodin is, there was a conflict. Who won? Everybody can tell you who won. There's no mystery. You know, like the Odrazi ended up on Mirrodin.

What happened? Not a lot of people know the outcome of that. But, you know, new Phyrexian, like, okay, Mirrodin got invaded by the Phyrexians.

Who won? That's clear. The Phyrexians won. But we knew we wanted to set up a conflict. So, okay, that means the middle set, it has to go either way. Well, how do you represent either way? 50-50, right?

Half and half. And so in order to do that, we said, okay, well, the first set's going to go back as far as we can. We thought 10%. And then we used watermarks because how do you tell the set went from 10% to 50%? That's hard to tell. You know, can you look at a piece of art and go, oh, that's clearly Frexian art? Some people can, but it's murky, it's muddy.

It's not necessarily the easiest thing to do. So we use the watermarks to represent that. Okay, and I'm now pulling into my parking space. So clearly, part two is coming tomorrow. So basically, here's where we left. I'll leave the story to be continued. We figured out the block structure was we wanted to tell the war.

We wanted to show the corruption of Mirrodin. So we had a first set that introduced Mirrodin, and mostly as Mirrodin. Hey, we've got to revisit Mirrodin. We've got to learn this place. Before we take it over, we've got to meet it all over again. We had just enough Phyrexian

so you understand the threat is there. The second set would be half and half a war between the two sides. The third set would be the victor. And that was us getting to blow out new Phyrexia. Anyway, that's the setup. Tomorrow, I'll talk about how we made that all happen.

So anyway, thanks for joining me today. Not tomorrow. Next week. See, here's the secret. Whenever I do multiple podcasts, I have to talk about it tomorrow so I remember what I said today. So I'm going to record this tomorrow. But you guys actually are going to hear it next week.

So next week will be part two when I talk about all the mechanics and sort of how we took what, the framework that I set up and how we then fleshed it out to make the block of Scars of Mirrored. I'll talk more specifically about how we made

Scars of Mirrored in itself. That's what this podcast is about. Anyway, thank you very much for joining me today. It's time to go make the magic.