Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #5 - Ravnica

Episode Date: October 29, 2012

Mark Rosewater talks about the Ravnica set.

Okay, I'm leaving my garage, so we know what that means. It's another episode of Drive to Work. Okay, it's about time. It's time I finally talked about the design of Ravnica. Seems only apropos. Okay, so, let us go back to the time of Ravnica. So remember, I had just become head designer in the middle of the Kamigawa block and so

I mean I didn't have any control of the Kamigawa block it was a train in motion and I just tried to do the best I could to finish it but Ragnarok was the first set that not only was I lead designer but also I was the head designer so it's the first block I really had total control over

and a big thing of mine one of my big missions when was the head designer, so it's the first block I really had total control over. And a big thing of mine, one of my big missions when I became head designer, was what I called block planning, which is to think about all the sets in a block as a cohesive whole, rather than just do something, do some more, do some more maybe with a twist. It's kind of our old school way of doing things. And I wanted to do a little more planning. So, let's see how it played out. So we knew

going in that it was going to be a multicolor set. Invasion had gone over very well, and we knew of all our themes, the one that we'd revisit the quickest was going to be multicolor, because both it's a very widespread design. I mean, as design goes, it's pretty open-ended, you know, there's a lot of options.

I mean, there's some restrictions designed in Gold Cards, which hopefully I'll talk to you about today, but as themes go, it's a pretty open-ended theme. But the trick was, I wanted to do something different from how we had done it in Invasion. So, Invasion, as I talked about on my previous blog, or a few blogs ago, was about trying to let you play as many colors as you could. You know, we really, I mean, Domain, and it was like, play three colors, play four colors, play five colors. It really pushed you to play a lot of colors. And so, I said, going into Ravnica, I said, okay, well, how do I make a difference in Invasion? Well, let's go the opposite direction.

Now, it's go the opposite direction. Now, it's multicolor, so you had to have at least two colors. I'm like, well, what if we just push two color? We don't push three, we don't push four, we don't push five. The theme is two color. And I thought that was an interesting idea. And the idea was that we take the two color pairs, there are ten of them, obviously,

and that we treat them all equally. This set wouldn't be about allied or enemy, like Invasion had been. It would just be, there's ten two-color pairs. So I went to Brady, Donmermuth, currently the creative director, but at the time, still in charge of the world building, and I pitched him my idea.

And so Brady went off to try to figure out how to make that work. Meanwhile, I was saying, okay, well, what do I do? And I stumbled upon the idea of hybrid. I think the idea I liked was that traditionally multicolor cards were and, and I came up with the idea of what if they were or. Instead of being a red and green card, what if it was a red or green card? And I was very fascinated by that concept, the or concept, meaning that this thing was multicolored,

but in a very different way than you traditionally think of multicolor. It was because of the options, not because it forced your hand on both. And I thought that was cool because I thought in a multicolor set, it would give you some flexibility. So I put together a design test, and the idea was it would have all two color combinations in traditional and with hybrid. So, we had that play test. Now, understand, R&D is full of people who are like pro-tour caliber players.

I mean, many of them, a few of them are in the Hall of Fame. A lot of them have, you know, one or more top eights to their credit. So, this is a serious experience group. This is not, you know, this is people who know how to play Magic. So anyway, I played with them, and their brains all exploded. Like, the notes I got from them is, hurts, this hurts. Because we had, the way it would play out is, there were ten two-color combinations, there was ten hybrid combinations, plus there was mono-color combinations. There was 10 hybrid combinations.

Plus there was mono-color. Plus there was artifacts and land. So you were making like 27 piles. 27 piles. That was just too much. I mean, and by the way, if R&D has trouble with it, obviously it's going to be way, way too much for the average player. So I had a problem.

Because I was planning to go full press with hybrid. That was the thing I was planning to do is that hybrid was going to be the big thing. And then I had to regroup. Meanwhile, Brady was off thinking about what to do. And the story he likes to tell is Brady at the time was jogging. And so he was working out on a treadmill and somewhere around the fourth or fifth mile, he had this epiphany of, and by the way, awesome ideas always seem so simple in retrospect, in hindsight. You know, the paperclip seems such an obvious thing. But getting there, it requires, you know, getting to the elegant solution can take a

lot. And Brady came up with the idea of, well, what if we just had actual guilds? You know, he came up with the idea of, there were 10 groups representing these combinations that embody the flavor of the colors, and then he said, oh, where does this make sense, and he came up with the idea of a city world, I think he had thought of maybe doing a city world, and that, this made sense, there were guilds and a city world, and it all came together. So anyway, meanwhile, I was scrambling, I'm like, oh, my all-hybrid idea, you know, this, it just is too much, it's not going to work.

And then I realized, in general, the following problem, which is multicolor, while beloved, is just frustratingly hard. Because, you know, in a normal magic game, you have your five colors, you know, and a lot of times people separate them between spells and creatures, and you have your artifacts and your land, and there's a lot of times people separate them between spells and creatures and you have your artifacts and your land and there's a lot going on. Multicolor just takes that and throws it in a blender. There's all sorts of extra things added. And I've tried to figure out how to do multicolor in a way that made it a little easier on people.

And then Brady came up with the guild idea matching my two-color plan and I loved it. I mean, the second I heard it, I saw the paperclip for what it was. I was like, this is awesome. Okay, okay, that's what we're going to build around. We're going to build around the guilds.

And so, now remember, let me introduce my team real quick because I'll get into it. So, my design team was Aaron Forsythe. Now, remember back in the time, this was before Aaron Forsythe became director of R&D. Back in the day, Aaron was my disciple. Aaron was going to be the next big designer, and he had shown a lot of promise, and so he reported to me, and, you know, he was sort of the designer that I was grooming, and not that I was going anywhere, but to be the next big designer. And what happened was

other things. And Aaron ended up becoming the head developer, then ended up becoming the director. I mean, it all happened in a very short period of time. But back in the day, back at this point, that's what Aaron was. Aaron was sort of my disciple at the time. Mike Elliott was on the team. I've talked about Mike Elliott before.

Mike Elliott is a very strong designer, but Mike is also a bit stubborn. We'll get to that in a second. Tyler Beilman. I think I've talked about Tyler before. Tyler had originally been on the brand team. In fact, Tyler started pitching ads to Wizards. He and his partner made ads.

They were copy men. And they first started by making ads for Wizards, and then, they were copy men, and they first started by working, making ads for Wizards, and eventually they ended up getting jobs at Wizards, and Tyler became a brand manager for Magic. And then, eventually, Tyler ended up coming to R&D, where he started working, he ran the creative team. And Tyler and I had worked very closely together on Mirrodin.

Anyway, he was on the Ravnica team. And the last member of the team is a little-known designer named Richard Garfield. So the way it always works with Richard is Richard obviously loves games. I mean, I've never met somebody that loves games more than Richard. And he loves all games.

And so what happens is, Richard, his mind just goes to different areas at different times. He's fascinated by some element of games and he goes and designs that kind of game. But every once in a while the magic bug will get him back. He'll just like, you know, he'll go to a magic event or something and he'll just go

you know what, I miss designing magic cards. And so he will then say to me, Mark, I would love to be on a design team, which is a secret code in my head for the next design team I run will be with Richard. The reason he's always on my design teams is he and I have worked together a long time. We understand each other's functions.

I think Richard likes coming in in a known quantity, and he and I have worked so much together. So usually he works on my design team just because there's a good synergy between us. He was wonderful on this team. I'll talk about some of the stuff he did in a minute. But anyway, I'm always happy to have Richard on the team. Okay, so we put this team together.

We had tried the hybrid stuff. And then we got to guilds. So I said, okay, we're doubling down on the guilds. I really liked the idea of guilds. Like I said, I was an instant convert. I knew the direction I wanted to go, and Brady had found a great creative way to capture that. And it was clear. We had something. I knew about it right away. So I said, okay, if the guilds are a thing, then we are building around the guilds. It's going to be about the guilds. And I was trying to solve the problem of, you know, gold is so hard for people to build. So that's when I said,

okay, how do I make the guilds shine? And I said, well, if I put 10 guilds in the first set and the same 10 guilds in the second set and the same 10 guilds in the third set, they're not going to shine. They're not going to have a chance to shine. I said, okay, what I need to do is separate them. Now, be aware, this was kind of a crazy idea at the time, because what I was saying was, we're going to take four of the 10 car pairs. They go in the first set. They don't go in the second set. They don't go in the third set. They go in the first set. Three more of them go in the second set. Not the first set, not the third set, the second set. Obviously, the same with the third set. Now, that meant, let's say you liked

Is It, because, you know, that's awesome. Well, the first set come out, that meant, let's say you liked Is It? Because, yeah, that's awesome. Well, the first set come out, and there's nothing for you. I mean, there's mono blue and mono red cards, but there's no blue red cards. Zero. Nothing. Nothing for you. And then the second set comes in, all sorts of stuff for you. And the third set, nothing for you again.

So, one of the things about my job is I try to sort of peer in the future and try to come of peer in the future and try to come up with neat ideas. But when I do so, I'm looking at stuff that's never been done before, and it is intimidating to look at something that is so different from what you've done. So when I first pitched this, the response from the pit was kind of like, well, what do you mean? I mean, there's no, you know, couldn't it be a few? They're like, well, maybe mostly it's these four, but, you know, we have a little bit of the other ones.

I'm like, no, no, no. You can't, the whole point is it's these four, nothing else. The first one is just four. You know, you like one of the other six? It's coming, you know. And one of my contentions had been, look, as much as players will identify with one, I think players enjoy many of the different guilds.

You know, for example, let's say you love a particular color. Well, there's four guilds that have that color in it. Or if you just like a certain feel, a certain Johnny sensibility or Timmy sensibility, multiple guilds will do that. And so, I mean, each guild kind of has different fans, but I knew that it's not like everybody only loves one guild. Maybe they identify mostly with one guild, but they enjoy playing with multiple guilds. So anyway, I set up this 433.

There was a bit of resistance. And funny, one of the most resistant people was Mike Elliott, who didn't, he really didn't like it, and he was on the team. And so he was one of the ones that I had the most trouble with. But I sort of put my foot down. I said, look, this is what we're doing. This is how the structure is going to work.

Like I said, I had just become head designer. I'm like, this is what a block plan is. You know, that when you see the first set, you start to understand what the second and third set are. There's a reason that the second set is unique from the first set, and the third set is unique. Anyway, I said this is what we're doing. So there was a lot of resistance at first. Anyway, I said this is what we're doing. So there's a lot of resistance at first.

Eventually they realized that this is what we're doing. And then they tried to argue with me that we should put five in the first set and not four. There's a lot of worry about drafting. See, another thing,

hindsight is fun. So now players are like, that was one of the best drafting environments of all time. It's very, very popular. But when we went into it, you know, I mean, one of the big questions was, will it work? Will this even work? You have four guilds and then three different guilds and three different guilds.

How do you draft that, you know? And it ended up, which is funny, is the draft environment was a lot more outside of just Ravnica, Ravnica, Ravnica, was a lot more about three colors than it was two. And that came up, they're saying, well, if it's all aboutavnica, was a lot more about three colors than it was two. And that came up, they're saying, well, if it's all about guilds, why are you drafting three colors? And I said, well, you know, you still have guild identities. I mean, the thing, by the way, that I love about Return to Ravnica, not really talking about Return to Ravnica too much,

but is the idea that you can draft a guild. One of my sadnesses from the original Ravnica was, unless you were in the first four guilds, it was hard to draft just that guild. But, I do feel like it created an interesting dynamic, I enjoyed how the thing went. A lot of people were skeptical, but my attitude is always, let's try it. Like, if it seems interesting, let's try it. Let's not do it because it seems like maybe it won't work. You know, it is so easy to sort of logically

assume things, and that I found time and time again if you need interesting ideas that there are answers, there's solutions, there's ways to sort of carve out what you're doing, you know. So anyway, finally we're all on board, we're doing the guilds. So what happened was I sort of said to the team we really wanted, I said this set's going to live or die by the guilds. If each guild is flavorful and does its thing, I think that that's what will make it work. Now, in order to do this, we had to give a mechanic to each guild.

That meant four mechanics. Now, we... I'm actually going to give five and turn around, because we're willing to do this. But at the time, four was a bit much. We tended to do two with some minor things at the time. So doing four was stretching a little bit. I mean, I think we're more willing to keyword things than we were back then.

Also, the other thing was they weren't big keywords. They were small keywords or medium keywords. We were used to making things in which we would make 40 to 50 cards during the course of the block. And a guild keyword needs 12 to 15. It needed a smaller subset. And what that meant was it opened up a whole different amount of mechanics. Because what you need to do to support 40 to 50 cards is very different than what you need to support 12 to 15.

So anyway, we set out to make it. So let me walk through them. I don't remember the order that it happened. So Richard came up with Convoke. Although Richard pitched Convoke for Boros. I'm not sure his rationale, but I remember what I said to Richard is, I love this mechanic, it just is not a Boros mechanic, it's a Celesny mechanic. I think he was thinking Boros maybe because it felt like there's an army coming together, maybe that's where he came from, But I knew Selesnya was going to be the hippie commune of

the good of the group supersedes all. And so I really liked the idea of some mechanic that said, hey, having a lot of creatures, you're rewarded for having a lot of creatures. And so we ended up putting, I switched it over to White-Green, and we ended up putting him Selesnya.

And Convoke, I think, is my favorite mechanic out of Ravnica. I mean, I have a soft spot for Dredge, but I mean, as a designer, like Convoke is the better mechanic. Okay, then Radiance was designed by Mike Elliott.

I think the thing I liked about it at the time, I mean, is it sort of allowed you to do tricks with your guild. It turned out to be trickier than we thought. Depending on what you hit, it kind of ricocheted more than we thought. The idea of Radiance was that it allowed you to do neat team tricks with your team because you had an army. I will admit, in retrospect, Radiance is my least favorite

of the mechanics in Ravnica. It's not that I dislike... I mean, Radiance could... It's not that I dislike Radiance as a mechanic. I think it has potential. I just think it didn't make a lot of sense in Boros.

I think we kind of forced it in and it really is a mechanic that at least feels like its guild. Of all ten, the whole block, it's the one, in my mind, that least sort of had the fit it needed. I do like the mechanic as a mechanic that at least feels like it's Guild. Of all ten, the whole block, it's the one, in my mind, that least sort of had the fit it needed. I do like the mechanic as a mechanic. I mean, it has some complication factors

and maybe I would do it a little differently if we were doing it again. But it wasn't really boros. That's my biggest strike. Transmute was made by Aaron Forsythe. I think the idea was we really had the sense that Demir was the most library-centric, that they're the ones that valued information and wanted to know things that others didn't know

and sort of knowledge as a commodity, but secrecy was important. And so Aaron came up with Transmute. I think the idea was that the mirror was supposed to beat you such that when the dust settled and you lost, you're like, how did I lose? I don't get how I lost. That's kind of how Black Blue beats you. Like, it cart-a-venges you to death

by nibbling you around the edges so that, like, if you don't quite understand how it works, you don't quite understand how you lost. Transmute problem, in retrospect, I mean, I think it was fun, is tutors are problematic. One of the things that we look at for these days is what we call, we don't want you to have the same replayability. That every time you play a card, if you always do the same thing with it, it becomes much more boring.

And I think the idea of Transmute was, oh, well this time you get card A and that time you get card B. But what we found is tutoring tens, especially constructed, to sort of lead to very similar play patterns that you tend to get the same thing. And so it didn't have as much of the variety. I mean, we're hoping for what we call a tool belt approach,

meaning that it's fun sometimes to have decks in which you have lots of one-offs and then you can go choose what to get. It didn't really play out quite that much. I do like the mechanic. I do feel it's very demure. I do like the demureness of it. I just, we tend to shy away in modern days from sort of tutoring mechanics. Finally, Dredge.

Dredge was my mechanic, although, so what happened was, I think every time we've done a guild set, there's always one guild that's just problematic. It's never the same guild, interestingly. But the one that really was the problem for Ravnica was Golgari. Now, we knew Golgari was going to be grave-centric. Black and green are the two colors that care about the graveyard. The whole thematic of life and death intertwining is very graveyard-oriented.

So we knew we wanted to use a graveyard in some way, and we tried, I mean, I'm not exaggerating, but I think Dredge might have been the 40th attempt at trying to get up with a Golgari mechanic. So the basic idea of Dredge originally was, instead of drawing a card, you could choose to draw this card out of the graveyard. And the idea was, it was over-costed. So, like, you know, it was like a six mana 3-3. It was like, well, do I want to spend six mana for a 3-3?

Uh, not necessarily. But there's times where, like, I really want a 3-3. I'll pay six mana for it. And so we were trying to balance in that they were very much over-costed, but the fact that you could choose when you drew them, you know, we thought that flexibility, that utility would make them worthwhile. So the handoff that I gave to Brian Schneider, who was the lead developer, was that. That, you know, the card just played, and you could choose to draw it on your graveyard

instead of whenever you draw a card, you could draw that. Brian was concerned on that, so Brian added in, on his team, the whole, you had to mill cards when you did it, as a side effect of the cost. And I think the idea was it fed into itself. That's the funny thing. I'm not sure if they thought my version was too weak. Anyway, so, I mean, I like,

design-wise, I like the synergy of what they did. I like the idea that it fed into itself. Ironically, I think what they did made it more broken. So, I mean, it's interesting. Like I said, I kind of like Dredge. I like what Dredge is doing. Dredge, like Transmute, has the same problem, though, of you don't want the game to play too much the same way every time. And you have to be careful how you do dredge cards, because if the dredge cards are too easy,

then, yeah, you just keep dredging the same cards again and again. And the gameplay is too much. It's too repetitive. Repetitive gameplay is what we call it. I mentioned it earlier. So, also, by the way, there are other things that came up. Richard Garfield had come up with an idea called structures. I talked about this during our planeswalker during the planeswalker talk I did.

So structures were just this idea of buildings that you could attack and they had a toughness and they tended to have a globally enchantment-y effect and the idea is you had to sort of break down the building. I thought they were pretty cool. We just ran out of space.

In fact, by the way, I actually took hybrid out of the set at one point. The idea being, oh, maybe there's too much going on. And I said, okay, I was going to do a hybrid in Time Spiral as kind of the side effect of time ungluing was made in this new kind of mana. That was the idea we were going to go with. But then Brian said that they realized after the dust had settled that they wanted one more new thing, and that hybrids seemed to make a lot of sense.

So they would do hybrid, but in just very small numbers, so that it wouldn't have all these piles. You'd only have a couple hybrid cards. I think we did a vertical cycle, One common, one uncommon, one rare. So there's a little bit of hybrid. Introduced it, had a little flavoring to it. I mean, obviously, Shadowmore would go and blow that out of the water. But the idea was to just introduce this new concept.

I was very proud of hybrid, so I was kind of happy to see it in Ravnica. What else did Ravnica have going for it? So Richard had made the hunting cycle, where you got the creature, then your opponent got some creatures. That Richard had done. Richard also had done, there was a cycle of auras with ETP effects,

enter the battlefield effects. That was also a Richard thing. I mean, another big thing we did, probably one of the things, my big thing was, I really pushed hard on the guilds and so I made sure, I was big on cycles I love cycles but I also felt cycles were very important in Ravnica because

part of the way to differentiate between 10 things is to show those 10 things doing the same thing but in their own way and so I pushed hard for the guild mages and a lot of the different stuff that sort of helped identify. I was also a big fan of having the leaders and the champions. I mean, the set has a lot of cycles on purpose because I really felt that,

A, here's another interesting thing. I wanted, when you saw the first set, here's a neat thing. I wanted you to see Ravnica and say, Oh, I have some expectations for what Guild Pack and Ascension will do. Now, I didn't want you to see Ravnica and say, oh, I have some expectations for what Guild Pack and Ascension will do. Now, I didn't want you to know everything. That's why, for example, you know, the hunting stuff, you know, was just in Ravnica. I wanted to have different stuff in different sets,

just a little bit of variety. But I also wanted you to say, oh, I love Guild X that I haven't seen yet. I love Izzet. And oh, well, Izzet's going to get a champion, and Izzet's going to get a guild leader, and Izzet's going to get, you know, a guild mage, and, you know, that you have some expectation for things you're going to see.

And one of the things I talk a lot about, I mean, this is probably a recurring theme with me, is the importance of expectation in design. And as we do more and more block design, you know, I don't want expectation solely within the set. I also want between sets, between blocks. Like, one of the things, I mean. I also want between sets, between blocks. One of the things, I mean, I talked about Invasion. I talked about this in my podcast on Invasion. We kind of stumbled into Apocalypse. I mean, the idea at the time was just, oh, here's a neat thing,

and here's a way to give an identity to the third set. But what it also did, an important lesson for us was kind of withholding something so the players kind of want it and then giving it to them makes the players very happy. That part of sort of designing something is saying, oh, well, let's figure out expectation and then create what we're doing such that it feeds into the needs of the expectation and that

it is okay to leave your audience wanting something for a little while if you're going to deliver it. I mean, I admit, it's a bad idea to make them want something and not deliver it. And that's why, for example, I admit, you know, it's a bad idea to make them want something and not deliver it, you know. And that's why, for example, I don't mind having cycles that take more than one set to complete or take the block to complete. You know, I don't mind teasers that show up where they hint at something.

I think those are great. I think that that's, Magic is not a singular game in the sense that any one set is not what Magic is. Magic is everything in its entirety. And so, part of what we do is we try to make sure that it all hangs together. And one of the things we've been doing recently, you know, as we moved beyond block plan, we started doing interblock planning, where it's like thinking about,

well, what does block A do and what does block B do and trying to make sure there's interesting overlap so that there's something that, oh, when you put A with B, now A and B care about them, but in different ways. You know, that's something that we've, I mean, you guys want, now A and B care about them, but in different ways. You know, that's something that we've, I mean,

you guys want to see modern day, but a lot of what we're doing modern day is trying to create synergies between the blocks that make the blocks have different meaning based on what's next to them. So that when you shift from, you know, A leaves and C comes, B has a different context with A than it has with C. You know, they mean something different.

Anyway, so the funny thing about Ravnica was at the same time we were working on Ravnica, I was doing all the pre-work for Time Spiral and I really had in my head that Time Spiral

was going to be the bomb. That, like, Time Spiral was going to be, like, you know, go down as the pinnacle of sets of all time. And the funny thing is

it has with a very select group. But Ravnica just caught fire. I mean, I knew we had something with the guilds. I mean, I was proud of the set. I was very happy with it. But I'll be honest, it went off even more than I thought it would.

Like, I was kind of a little bit surprised. Like, I knew it was going to be popular in the sense that I knew the guild thing was going to work. But it exceeded my expectations which doesn't often happen you know and because I really thought like people would go that's nice oh my god time spiral

and it ended up actually being the reverse which surprised me at the time I mean I often talk about things where I correctly assumed ahead of time that's one of the ones where I had it a little bit backwards but anyway I'm coming up to work so I have to wrap for today where I correctly assumed ahead of time. That's one of the ones where I had it a little bit backwards. But anyway, I'm coming up to work, so I have to wrap for today.

Like I said, there's a lot of talk about Ravnica. It might be enough that maybe I come back and do another podcast at some point. But today was sort of the staples. It is, like I said, it was fun. It was fun working with the team. I mean, Richard's always fun to work with. I mean, Mike and Aaron and Tyler are all very good designers. And so, I mean, it's hard not to make an awesome set

when you have an amazing group of designers. Anyway, I'm finding my parking space. See, the longer it takes me to find my parking space, the more content for you. But anyway, that is all I got for today. I hope you guys had fun learning about Ravnica. And it's time to go, because it's time to make the magic cards.

Talk to you guys next time.