Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #49 - Scars of Mirrodin - Part 2

Episode Date: August 30, 2013

Mark dives into Scars of Mirrodin with his second discussion about the set.

Okay, I'm pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so last week I started talking about the design of Scars of Mirrodin. And this week I thought I would continue that talk since I did not finish. Okay, before I jump in, I made a mistake last week that I want to correct this week. I was talking about how in trying to get percentages for the sets, we wanted to start the first set having the Phyrexians be as low a percentage as possible

yet still feel their presence. And I said last week off the top of my head that it was 10%, but I was wrong. It was 20%. So what we had done was the first set was 80% Myridin, 20% Phyrexian, the middle set was 50-50, and the last set was 90% Phyrexian with 80% Myridin, 20% Phyrexian, the middle set was 50-50, and the last set was 90% Phyrexian with 10% Myridin.

Now, by the way, if you do the numbers, you do the math, because the first set was a large set and the other two sets were small sets, those numbers made the Myridin and Phyrexian sides basically have the same amount of cards in the block. Which, by the way, was interesting, because the whole schtick was, you didn't know whether it was new Phyrexia or mirrored and pure,

but there were people that did the numbers and figured out that, you know, if the Phyrexians won, that they'd have enough numbers to balance it out, which was completely true. So, it's funny that there's a lot of little clues, if you understand our structure, to figure out where we were going. And there were plenty of people that did figure it out.

Okay, let me talk a little bit about that 20%. I mentioned watermarks last week, and I want to talk a little more about how we use the watermarks, because it was interesting. Because we were trying to demonstrate the idea that there was a Phyrexian presence. interesting, because we were trying to demonstrate the idea that there was a Phyrexian presence, and so I'd wanted 80-20 in the first set, and then I wanted 50-50 in the second set, and then the third set

obviously would have been mostly Phyrexian, just enough Mirrodin to show a little resistance and give the Mirrodin fans just a few cards. But the question is, how do I show you 20%? And that's where the watermarks came in. And so what happened in the first set was,

we had strict rules of what made you a Phyrexian mechanically. Let's see if I can remember these. I always do so well when I remember things off the top of my head. You know, next week. Last week, I said. Okay, so number one, if you had any of the Phyrexian mechanics, so the two Phyrexian mechanics were considered to be infect and proliferate.

I will get to proliferate momentarily, talk about where proliferate came from. So if you had either of those mechanics, you were considered Phyrexian. If you made use of minus one, minus one counters, that was considered a Phyrexian thing. And if you... Anything else?

I mean, if you interacted with poison in any way, if you interacted with minus one minus counters in any way... Oh, also, and this one's a little more subtle, death triggers were given to the Phyrexians. So if you...

When you died, if you had a trigger, that was a Phyrexian thing. And that the Myrddin all had enter the battlefield triggers, and the Phyrexians all had death triggers. And that, oh, and, if you sacrifice something,

the Phyrexians, anything that required sacrifice, that was on the Phyrexian side. In fact, we'll get to it, there was actually a, for a while, a little bit of a sacrifice theme going on.

Anyway, I will get there. Okay. So, let's see. Okay, so where we left off yesterday. Oh, okay. So, I basically had a little bit of a crisis where I got a little lost. This is probably the set where I might have gotten the most lost, where

I was trying to make new Phyrexian, just I was swimming in things of Phyrexian, and I was getting an identity for the Phyrexians, but I didn't understand what the block was about. It's like, here's Phyrexians and more Phyrexians. I didn't have an identity. And then I got a little pep talk from Bill, and, okay.

I realized that, you know, I needed to sort of follow my passion, and I said, okay, we're telling the wrong story, you know. We were telling the story where it ended, and I'm like, it's an interesting story. I thought, like, Mirrodin falling into the Frexians was a very neat story, and we were like, you know, it's like, and scene, you know, and Dorothy gets back to Kansas. Now we begin our story. I'm like, well, that's not where you begin the story. That's the end of the story.

And the point is, if we have other stories to tell with Frexians, we can do that later, but I feel like there was an awesome story we wanted to tell. And once I framed it that way, it became a lot clearer what was going on. I had a much better understanding of what we wanted. Because once we said, okay, this block is about the conflict between the Phyrexians and the Myridans.

For example, for Scars of Myridan, they said, okay, I want to revisit Myridan. So that was one of the goals. We're going back to Myridan. 80% of the set is Myridan. I want to show off Myridan. Meanwhile, I need to introduce the Phyrexians and concentrate what they're doing, but you want to get the essence of the Phyrexians right away.

So let me talk about the Phyrexians before we get to the Mirrodins. So what happened was the Phyrexians... Oh, so yesterday, I don't think to finish. I said that in the beginning of the design, I wrote down four adjectives for the Phyrexians, and the idea was that I wanted the Phyrexians to capture these four qualities. Now notice, I did this at a time in which

everything was Phyrexian, so I was trying to come up with, I wanted four mechanics for the Phyrexians, because at the time, it was all Phyrexian, and so I came up with four words that I was hoping would inspire us to make four keywords. And I talked about three of them yesterday. I couldn't remember the fourth one.

But I looked it up. Okay, so number one was they were toxic. And poison was going to represent that. They were relentless. And we toyed around with a mechanic not that far away from undying, what would later get used in Dark Ascension. It wasn't exactly that mechanic, but it was the idea of allowing them to come back. And then there was Adaptive.

I don't remember what Adaptive was. We had early mechanics for all this stuff. Anyway, the fourth one was Viral. The Phyrexians were To, adaptive, relentless, and viral. And plays right into the disease theme, like I said. I really thought thematically that the Phyrexians are like a disease.

And that, you know, the thing that to me is interesting about them, and will make some great villains, is that they really are scary. They really are scary. Like, you know, the idea is the last thing you want to see is a little Frexian oil in your neighborhood because things are going to go

bad. And I was trying to capture that. But once we realized, okay, so I knew I wanted the sense of spreading. And the other thing I wanted was I wanted to make sure that poison counters were a little different. Let me talk about this for a second. It's an important point. So I didn't want poison to just be another life total. You know, I wanted to have some qualities that were a little bit different. So the first quality is that you got it through infect creatures, which meant that, you know, if you wanted to play this game,

you had a subset of things you could consider. It wasn't like I was open and free. It's like, okay, I have these guys, and these guys keyed off of damage, which meant that I could interact with different things. But, once again, normal life does that. So there was a couple key things that I had done. Number one is, one of the things to make poison scarier in my mind is to sort of change up how,

like, if you want it to be scary, I feel like if you just can easily get rid of poison, it's less intimidating. But a poison was just a permanent thing. That when you got one poison, you always had one poison. That one poison never went away. I felt like that really upped the ante.

You know, it really made it have a little more like, okay, you gotta, you know, just take one poison, you gotta be careful, because that one poison, you know, it's never going away. And one of the things interesting is, Homelands had a card called Leeches. And Leeches wasn't a great card, and the cost of getting things off was pretty expensive. But I never liked Leeches

because I kind of felt like part of what I always thought was interesting about Poison was the fact that it made it so much scarier when you couldn't get rid of it. And so I made the call not to get rid of poison. I said, okay, one of the qualities of poison that makes it scary is you can't get rid of it. And I laid down the law and said, look, we're not getting rid of poison. By the way, we did toy around with some mechanics that worked against poison. We ended up not using them,

but they're interesting stuff in our bag of tricks next time we meet the Phyrexians, and that we did have some more tools against poison. We ended up not using them because we were a little worried that it wouldn't be good enough. It's funny, obviously, it's gone on to prove itself okay, but we were worried that if we had too much stuff to stop

in there, that wouldn't be scary, and so we held back a little bit on the things to fight poison with. Although, once again, none of them removed poison held back a little bit on the things to fight poison with. Although, once again, none of them removed poison. There's a lot of neat ways to fight poison without actually taking it away. But maybe that's for the poison discussion. Okay, the second thing that I thought was very interesting

was the idea that there was some way that once you got poisoned, that you could fan the poison. And that's where proliferate came from originally. So at one point, we had Infect. Infect put minus one, minus one counters on creatures. It put poison counters on players. And so one of the ideas I came up with is, I made a card.

It was just a singular card. And it was like spreading the plague or something. And what it did was, I think it was an enchantment that sat in play and just said, at the beginning of your turn, if you have a minus one, minus one, you get another one. If you have a poison counter,

you get another one. And the idea was, it made things sicker with the flavor. And so we played with it. And it was pretty powerful, because it happened every turn. And we were like, oh, well, let's tone it down a little bit. And so I said, okay, let's just try a spell in which it does that. And it was interesting,

and what I found was it actually did kind of cool stuff. It kind of, like, it helped, like I said, once you start doing stuff, this will fan it along. And so I showed it to the team, and Mark Globus' comment was, well, why, because I spelled up particularly, it increased poison counters and minus one minus counters, because I was trying to say, oh, it's fanning the plague. And then Globus had a really good comment. He's like, but why couldn't it just be any counter?

And I was like, you are correct. You are correct. And the reason that was so awesome was one of the themes of the Mierans was I was trying to play on a lot of themes that we had done the first time we had been to Mierdan, and one of those was charge counters. So when I did the very first Mirrodin,

I played around a lot with the idea of, because there's a lot of artifacts in, obviously, Mirrodin. I like the idea of serrated arrows, of so many uses. A lot of things, if you go to objects and other games and things, that you can't use an infinite number

of times. I mean, some things like a sword you can. But like arrows, like you have so many arrows. And when you're out of arrows, then you have no more arrows. And I played around with charge counters in Mirrodin, and I liked that. And I said, okay, well we're going to use more charge counters in Scars of Mirrodin, because we're going to try to

capture a lot of what I've tried with Mirrodin, so I'll get to that in a second, is capture what happened in Mirrodin, because we're going to try to capture a lot of what I've tried to do with Mirrodin, so I'll get to that in a second, is capture what happened in Mirrodin to feel like the Mirrodin part felt like Mirrodin. And so, I knew we'd have charge counters, and by making proliferate affect all counters, it affected charge counters. And I really liked that, because one of the things that I was very worried about

in my design was even though there was a war, and there were two sides, and the two sides were designed to fight each other, I wanted to make sure that you can mix and match between them. And, like I said, some of this work got undone, unfortunately, during development. So one of the things that proliferate was

important to me was, we decided to base proliferate in blue. So we decided what well, what I wanted to do was, in fact, because the whole block, I wanted to show evolution, what I decided was we were going to take the elements that were Frexian, start them small and locate it in the first set, and then watch them grow. So, for example, in fact, the idea was, well, what are the two colors that made most sense for infect? Black and green. Those are the two colors that pretty much had poison in the past. And the reason is, those are the two colors that have creatures that carry poison. And, you know, the idea was, if the Phyrexians were going to infect anybody,

I felt like black and green is where they get their foothold. You know, black and green play right into the Phyrexian sort of feel. I mean, in a lot of ways, the Phyrexians have a lot of, I don't know, black-green qualities to them. In fact, disease has a lot of black-green qualities to it. In fact, disease is kind of like, you know, it has the growth of green, but the destruction is black, and kind of mixing those together. So anyway, we decided to put infect into black and green. So proliferate, I also wanted to be there.

And I said, well, what, what colors make the most sense for proliferate? And there were two colors that were the clearest, which was blue and green. Um, those are the counters and those are the cards that mechanically do what proliferate does, the ones that expand on counters and things. Um, and the thing is green had done infects. I'm like, okay, why don't we give it to blue in the first set? And then what I knew was that I knew that proliferate would have use both in infect decks, but also would have use in artifacts with lots of charge counter decks.

And so what I did was I put proliferate pretty heavy in common blue. In fact, what's the name of the bird? The little bird that hits you, and every time it hits you, it proliferates. That was the common card originally. Frumming bird? That was the common card originally, for example. And so one of the things that I had done was I pushed proliferate pretty strong. So for limited, that blue really became this interesting swing color, and that blue played with black

and green and played with white and red. Now I also done a bunch of other things to interact, you know, that you could pick one of the infect colors, and then, for example, there was a lot of power pumping that went on at the time in white and red that interacted with Infact. Anyway, there were a bunch of... I did a lot of cross synergies. Like, there was a whole theme I made of sacrificing

that red sacrificed artifacts and black sacrificed creatures. Oh, by the way, the Phyrexian was the sacrificed creatures part, not the sacrificed artifacts part. That was Mirrodin. But you can mix it together. You can take the artifact sacrificing of Mirrodin. But you can mix it together. You can take the Artifact Sacrificing of Mirrodin and the Creature Sacrificing of Phyrexian, and there's a deck.

I made some cards that cared about things sacrificed and that allowed you to draft a red-black deck. That also got tuned down a bit during development, but in design it was a big part of a reason you would play black and red together. So anyway, Polypherate, I liked a lot that it was something that linked to the, it could link to the mirrors and do something cool.

And that changed, and proliferate went on, by the way, to be a really popular in fact, ranked the best in the God Book studies, but right behind, in fact, was proliferate. You know, one of the things I've talked about this before, I talked about my state of design. One of the things, I've talked about this before. I talked about my state of design.

One of the things I feel bad on is I think I gave the two most exciting mechanics to the Phyrexians, which, once again, if you kind of watch where we were going, I was trying to have Phyrexia, you know, plant their stake to say, we're back, you know, we're the bad guys to watch. And so I think I ended up giving them the more dynamic and more exciting mechanics because maybe in my heart of hearts I really wanted you to like the Phyrexians because a lot of what this block was about sort of having them reclaim their villain status. Okay, let's talk about the Mirrens. So the Phyrexians was very established.

I had Poison. In fact, I had Proliferate. Both were awesome. They were playing well. Okay. And once again, remember, I spent a lot more time working on Phyrexia because for the first three or four months of design, all it was was about Phyrexia. Okay, but once we realized we're going back to Myrden, I said, okay.

My guideline for my team was, okay, I want the Myrden half to feel like Myrden. Now, things can evolve. I'm not saying it has to be Myrden as Myrden was, but it had to feel like this felt like an evolution of Myrden. Like, we came back to Myrden, oh, like, what I said to my team is, imagine there was no Phyrexians here. We were just going back to Mirrodin. All the Mirrodin part of the set has to have that feel, like we're going back to Mirrodin. And by the way, the other thing that I loved is it gave Scars and Mirrodin a really nice feel, because a lot of Scars and Mirrodin was just,

hey, we're going back to Mirrodin. I mean, there was a whole Phyrexian threat that took up 20% of the set, but 80% of the set was just, hey, we're back in Mirrodin. Okay, so what that meant was I needed to use mechanics that either were from the Mirrodin block or had the right feel. Okay, so the problem was when you looked at the mechanics, for starters, you have stuff like modular and sunburst, but in order to make infect work, I needed to use minus one, minus one counters. And one of our rules is that we do not use minus one, minus one, and plus one, plus one counters in the same block. I mean, Lorwyn, Shadamore, which were two mini blocks, did each, for contrast purposes, use the opposite ones. But they never played together in Unlimited.

So if you're ever going to play a format together in Unlimited, we do not mix them. And the reason is a pretty simple reason, which is if I look across the table and your guy has two counters on it, I should be able to know what that guy is. And some people often ask, well, if that's true, why did you make the plus one, plus one, minus one, minus one counter

implosion rule? And the reason is just to simplify the board. If a creature both has plus one, plus one, and minus one, minus one, look, it cancels each other out. Let's just cancel them out. It's funny because with any roll, it's done some quirky things, especially with, like, persist and undying.

But, you know, I do think it's a nice clean roll. Yeah, people always ask me, I'll go in this, because they always say like is that really important? is it so important? can't people just use red counters for plus one plus one and blue counters for minus one minus one

or pennies and nickels or whatever and my answer is that one of the things that we've learned over the years is that magic requires concentration.

So think of it this way. There's so much energy you have to concentrate, and at some point your brain redlines. And when your brain redlines, what it means is more than your brain can handle. You can't handle it. And what happens, when your brain redlines, you just stop thinking of everything.

Your brain goes, well, what's important? And it just stops thinking of things. And one of the things that magic got to a place where the board, once you got a few turns in, would just start redlining. There were so many things to keep track of and so many things that mattered. And here's the worst thing is, sometimes we had something that only mattered 1% of the time, but we made you track it 100% of the time.

I mean, Matterburn was in this camp, where it's just like, yeah, it mattered. When it mattered, it did matter, but it mattered so infrequently that making you take a brain space to monitor something that's just going to happen so infrequently means we're just constantly redlining you.

And for example, something you'll notice, for example, when you play, especially in Sealed, and you draw a vanilla card, that sometimes you go, oh, a vanilla card. And the reason you're doing that is your brain's like, love of God, thank you, thank you, I can rest. This card doesn't make me go, what? What's going on? And that I think it's very easy when people look at things, they look in isolation. They go, okay, forgetting everything else, and I'm just looking at this card. And people go, oh, that's a minor thing. And what people forget is there's an aggregate of what goes on.

And this is true of any game, which is when you're looking at complexity, it is not just a matter of large complexity issues. It's a matter of all your tiny complexity issues add up. And if your tiny complexity issues add up into a major complexity issues, it's a matter of all your tiny complexity issues add up. And if your tiny complexity issues add up into a major complexity issue, then even though each case is a tiny small thing, it becomes a big thing. And

you know, magic is more fun because you have the brain power to focus on the decisions that matter, not that I'm like paralyzed because so much is going on, like, ah, whatever. You know? Everyone has had this moment.

This is how you can tell you've redlined. Where you have a board state and there's so many creatures and you're like, screw it, I'm attacking. You're like, I can't do the math, I'm attacking. You know? Magic should not be like that the majority of the time. I'm not saying magic should never redline you, and it does.

I mean, that's the other thing that I find hilarious, is this idea that if we take out complexity, that, like, magic has no complexity. And we're like, no, no, no, no. The reason we're trying to lower complexity is because there's so much complexity, and there's so much to track, and there's so much you have to sort of just, you know...

I mean, I know, for example, that, you know, if you play Magic, you go into a tournament, and you play at the end of the day, you're just exhausted. You're exhausted, because Magic requires immense amount of concentration. Anyway, that is why plus one, minus one, minus one counters do not coexist. And reasoning from many other things that we do. Okay, so I could not use Sunbursts, I could not use modulars. Go back to the conversation. In the mind of Mark as I drift around to things.

So we're talking about I wanted to use a mirrored in mechanic. Okay. Modular sunbursts were out. So, okay, so the four mechanics

in mirrored in was equipment, entwine, affinity, and imprint. And then I had indestructible and modular in the second set, and the third set had sunburst and scry. So here was my problem. I couldn't use modular and sunburst.

Those were off the table. Both equipment and indestructible had become evergreen, meaning every set had them. So I couldn't define mirrored. I mean, obviously we had dark steel things that are indestructible. We had lots of equipment. Those would be there, but those no longer felt like I'm mirrored unto themselves. I mean, we made sure they were there because they were mirrored, but they didn't give us the feel of Mirrodin. Okay, so, the problem with both Entwine and Scry is,

they're fine mechanics, they're both good mechanics. We brought Scry back. I'm sure we'll bring Entwine back one day. They're both fine mechanics. You know, but, but, and this is the important thing, they didn't have anything particular to do with the feel of Mirrodin. I mean, they're nostalgic in the sense that they were there in Mirrodin, but they don't really evoke a real sense of Mirrodin.

Okay, so that leaves us with Affinity and Imprint, both of which me, felt very Mirrodin. So the mechanics that I said, okay, we want to feel like Mirrodin, well, no brainer. Affinity. So we started making affinity cards. And what I did was I took the colors

and I started branching affinity out. So green was affinity for creatures, for example. I think blue and white were still Affinity for artifacts. And black and red or maybe red and green were Affinity for creatures and black was Affinity for

creatures and grave. Anyway, I came up with a couple different ways to do Affinity and spread them out through the colors. So the idea was okay, the Mirrodins have advanced a little bit. It made it a little bit safer. Um, so we had less cards that were affinity from artifacts. Um, but obviously, I mean, for those that don't know, the original Mirrodin block, um, was very popular. The first set was one of the best selling sets of all time for a long time. Um, was the best selling for a long

time. And, but, uh time. But the environment broke. We just made lots of broken cards. We didn't really put in a mana system to separate them, so they all sort of globbed together. We called it the blob, and it broke magic. I mean, eventually we fixed it, but it drove a lot of people away because when magic's not fun, people stop playing. And so one of our roles,

you know, at development especially, is keep magic fun. And there's two times in magic where I feel like development really fell down and magic degenerated into really unfun play.

One was during Urza's Saga, we call it Combo Winter. Well, maybe that's the third one. There also was Necro Summer, which wasn't particularly awesome either. And then Mirrodin was the other one. Which never got a name. There's like Necro Summer and Combo Winter.

We didn't have like Phyrexian Fall or something. Although, not Phyrexian, Mirrodin. Mirrodin, I don't know. So, when I came up with Affinity, I felt like there was nothing more definitive of Mirrodin than Affinity.

And not only that, I wanted the Mirrodins to seem like badasses. I wanted the Mirrodins to go, okay, the Phyrexians are here, but these are the Mirrodins. I didn't wantidans to go, okay, you know, like, the Frexians are here, but these are the Miridans, you know. I didn't want it to feel like,

like, once we establish that we're going to set up this conflict, I'm like, I want you to go, okay, the Miridans have a real good shot. They're not some pushovers,

you know. This is Miridans, you know. They broke standard, okay. This is Miridans. And so I liked Affinity because I felt like

it came back with them on a strong suit. And so what happened was I, my team designed for Affinity because I felt like it came back with them on a strong suit. And so what happened was my team designed for Affinity. And then I turned it over and showed development. So I talked to them and I said to them, do you guys think you can develop Affinity in a way that's safe? And all the developers said, yeah, we think we can. So I proceeded.

But the more they thought about it, what they said is, we think we can. So I proceeded. But the more they thought about it, what they said is, we think we can, but there's some chance we can't. And you know what? You know what's the worst thing? You know, is to make the same mistake twice. And not only that, people, like a lot of people who left during Mirrodin who would come back to the game,

like having another broken Mirrodin block, their concern was it just was too big a risk. You know, that the risk was not that big, that they thought they could do it, but there's some percent chance, 5% chance, there's some percent chance they'd mess up, and then that would be disastrous.

And so what they said is, we really think it's too dangerous to mess around with Infinity, only because if we're off, the public's just going to react quickly and strongly, and it just seemed too dangerous. So I fought for Infinity. I actually fought pretty hard for Infinity. We had come up with a lot of very cool cards. But in the end, I mean, I was outvoted. Like I said, I fought hard for it. But in the end, it was decided. I mean, one of the things that's important to understand is whenever we have a big issue,

what we do is everybody sort of makes their case. And usually in the end, Aaron is the one who will make the call. Usually the group comes to a consensus, and Aaron tends to go with the group consensus. Not always, but he tends to. And so it's pretty clear that affinity was dangerous and it wasn't worth the risk. So, okay, I needed to come up with something like affinity. Meanwhile, Entwine now is the, not Entwine, Imprint was now the only mirrored and filled mechanic that I could use. And I liked Imprint and I felt like it was a fun mechanic that we could do some more with. It turns out that Imprint is tricky, that it's not easy to make a lot

of Imprint cards. And so the philosophy I had with Imprint is we are under no obligation to make any particular number. Make good ones. As many good ones as we come up with, that way we'll print. We decided to keep it out of common, that it's just a little too complex for common in a new world order. so imprint became an uncommon, rare, mythic rare thing. And we made some fun imprint cards, but we didn't go, we like kind of,

like we didn't stretch ourselves in the sense that we made ones we knew were good, and we didn't try to go beyond that. Like imprint's back, it's not a high-ass fan, but it's a good-ass fan. And the cards you see are awesome,

and they're fun, and they're inventive, and you can have fun with them. Okay, but that meant now we needed to find a replacement for Affinity. So what happened was, from time to time, well, one of the ways that people who want to do design, because if you're a designer and you want to do magic design, what happens is you always come and you say, I want to do magic design.

Okay. And you start with whole filling, and if you prove yourself, you get on teams. And if you prove yourself on teams, eventually you'll be like a second on a team, and one day you get to lead a team. And so what happened was Mark Lobis had gone to Bill and said to Bill, I want to get better at design. Help me. And so Bill said, okay, here's what we're going to do.

We're going to design a set. You're going to design your own set. And you're going to make pieces of it, and I'm going to give you notes. And so as, more as a project just to learn, there wasn't any intent that this set was going to be published. It was just something for Mark to work on. And in it, he...

Mark had this... His set was about angels versus demons. It had kind of a little bit of a... You know, a little bit of a religious undertone. But definitely kind of the forces of good and forces of evil. You know, forces of absolute good and forces of absolute evil. But anyway, in it, he had a mechanic he called presence

and presence was you needed to have a certain number of permanents on the battlefield and I remember at the time I thought there was potential to it it's a little complicated because there's a lot of permanents on the board and I said to him because I had seen it and I made a note that maybe you wanted to narrow it down

rather than look at everything on the board, look at a subset. And so we were talking about artifact matter stuff. I remembered Presence, and I said to Mark, okay, what if you narrowed it down to artifacts? What if you just looked at artifacts? If you have enough artifacts, these things turn on. And presence is what we call a threshold mechanic based on the mechanical threshold, which means I need something to happen,

but once that happens, bam, I get better. If I'm a spell, I do more. If I'm a creature, I get improved. And so the idea is we took presence and we said, okay, presence just means you have a certain number of artifacts. And I think we started with three, interestingly enough. And then we tried a couple other ones, but three always worked the best. And so we played with it, and I liked it.

I thought it was very cool. And it did something I liked a lot, which said, if you're playing Mirrodin that you really, it said something that said hey I want to play some artifacts but 3 was nice in that it required you playing a certain amount of artifacts but it didn't require, like one of the things we had done first time in original Mirrodin

was we'd done a lot of artifact matter stuff and a lot of it pushed you to say why are you playing non-artifacts and like I wanted you to have space to play artifacts but space to play non-artifacts? And like, I wanted you to have space to play artifacts, but space to play non-artifacts, and I wanted a little less all or nothing. And so what I liked about Presence,

or it became Metalcraft, was that it said, hey, play some artifacts, make sure you have enough artifacts, but not that you couldn't play some non-artifacts. That it did a nice job of encouraging you to sort of raise your volume on artifacts, but didn't punish you for not going all out on artifacts.

And I feel that that played nicer. And so we tested it, and it tested pretty well. I mean, it's one of those things where... So one of the things in general that I've gotten pretty good at, I mean, coming into my 18th year here, is I'm very good at playtesting mechanic once, and getting a pretty good grasp of what I think the potential of the mechanic is. Now, most often, the first version that you playtest is not the correct version. You know, most

often, it is a lot of design, or let me do a little thing about game design. I believe that the best game design is an iterative process, which means that you come up with ideas, you talk them through, you write them down, you play test, you get concrete experience, you learn from that, and then you go back and you discuss what you've learned, and from those discussions, you make changes. And then you iterate, you do that process again and again. And what happens for Magic is,

I like the... Let's talk of the iterative process as the length. The beginning of it is you talking, and then the end is you playtest. And that iterative process, I like to shrink. So early on, for example, we might talk and build for a month in the beginning of the design,

and playtest a month in. But by the end of design, we're playtesting every week. Like, the iteration gets so fast that like, it becomes a week or less. You know, sometimes, for example, I'll even do playtest, learn things, change it quickly, playtest, learn things quickly within the context of one week. Then your iteration process

gets shorter and shorter as you go along. Mostly, and the reason for that, a little game design explanation here, is that as you get closer and closer to what you want, you need less and less iteration to matter. Early on, you're making wide swaths because you're making big changes.

But as you start understanding what you're doing, it's much more about little nuances and tiny changes. When you have a playtest, if you change 10 cards, it doesn't mean a lot early playtest because everything's kind of vague. But in the final playtest, when you're getting near the end,

it's like, no, no, no, each card is very particularly doing its thing. And so just changing a few cards really could matter. Anyway, we playtested with it. I was pretty happy. I mean, it required a little bit of figuring out how best to use Metalcraft, like any threshold mechanic.

The lesson we had learned from the original threshold was that you have to be careful. Obviously, there's a switch that gets put on. And so the thing about threshold mechanics is the board state changes quite a bit. Now, the thing that's interesting about...

that I liked a lot about Metalcraft was, you have a lot more control over moving artifacts than you do of getting things out of your opponent's graveyard. You know, you have to kind of dedicate cards to do that, where, in a block about artifacts, you're going to be having artifact destruction, so you know, you already have it in your deck,

and there's a lot of neat moments where your opponent was at Metalcraft, but you destroyed one of their artifacts, and so they were counting on something but you were able to shut it off and a lot of that played really cool okay so we had infect and

proliferate, we had metalcraft and imprint so we had our two sides so pretty much what I wanted to and imprint. So we had our two sides. So pretty much what I'd wanted to was I wanted to sort of get the essence of what they each represented. And I wanted to make sure that they

had tools to play against the other. And so anyway, I see work now. So we were in a good state. Things were pretty good. So I think next week, I'm not done yet. So next week I'm going to talk about, wrap up a good state. Things were pretty good. So I think next week, I'm not done yet, so next week I'm going to talk about, wrap up a little bit, and I want to talk about some card stories.

I think that I'm realizing more and more that part of the fun of looking at a set is just jumping in tongues from individual stories. So next week I will, I think I'm going to wrap up next week, and then I'm going to also share with you a bunch of card stories, because there's a lot of fun, a lot of fun scars in card stories, which I'd going to wrap up next week. And then I'm going to also share with you a bunch of card stories. Because there's a lot of fun.

A lot of fun scars are mirrored in card stories, which I'd like to tell you. So anyway, hopefully you had fun today. It was always fun to go back and examine a set. And I even had a little bit of traffic because of my kids' school. So you got an extra little bonus today. And anyway, thank you very much for joining me. It's time to go make the magic.