Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #81 - Theros, Part 2

Episode Date: December 20, 2013

This is the second part of an epic eight-part series on the design of Theros

Okay, I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so last time I started talking about the design of Theros, and I was nowhere near completed, so we got some more Theros to talk about. Okay, so when last we left, by the way, if you haven't listened to the previous podcast, you want to know it's part one, this is part two. If you haven't listened to the previous podcast, you want to know it's part one. This is part two. Okay, so when last we left, I talked about how I'd figured out we wanted gods. And like I said, I knew for sure that the gods would have an influence, meaning that I knew that the people of the world would believe in gods. The question was whether or not we represented the gods.

And eventually I said, okay, how do you not have gods? Like, if ever you're going to have cards representing gods, the question was whether or not we represented the gods. And eventually I said, okay, how do you, how do you not have God? Like, if ever you're going to have cards representing gods, like Greek mythology was the one to do it. Now, the interesting thing was that we didn't quite know how to make the gods at first. So, before I get to the gods, I need to talk devotion. Dun-da-da! Okay. So, back in, long ago, during Fifth Dawn. So, Fifth Dawn was the third set in the original Mirrodin block. I had an idea, or maybe Randy had an idea, or maybe Randy and I together had an idea, and that was Aaron Forsythe ran the website. So several years earlier, I had been tasked by Bill

to sort of restart the website. The website really didn't have, wasn't very organized, and we decided that we wanted to make it, you know, have a real presence on the web. So the brand team tasked Bill with doing it, and Bill tasked me with doing it, since I was a communication major. And so Bill said, okay, we're going to do a website, make an awesome website. And I knew part of making the website is I needed someone to run the website.

And so I came out with, I had three candidates who I thought could do it. Interestingly, one of them would be Scott Johns who would later run it, but at the time Scott had a pass. And the other person, who I guess I won't name right now, also had a pass. So, the only person that was interested in doing it that I really thought could do the job

was Aaron Forsythe. And if you listen to my Duelist podcast, or not my Duelist podcast, sorry, my MatchAtTheGathering.com podcast, I talked about sort of getting Aaron, it was a big struggle but anyway, eventually things all worked out, Aaron was running the website

and Rand and I came up with this cool idea of letting Aaron be on a design team and we thought if nothing else, we'd get out of it a pretty cool article or series of articles about sort of being on the inside and what it's like to be on a design team, and we thought if nothing else, we'd get out of it a pretty cool article or series of articles about sort of, you know, being on the inside and what it's like to be on a design team. And, I mean, Aaron was a pro player, and we thought, you know, we thought he could contribute.

But the motivation, interestingly enough, was that we thought it would be an entertaining, it would be something that would create some good content. Interestingly, by the way, 5th Dawn was also a design team. The design team was me and Randy and Aaron and then a guy named Greg Merckx, who, when I get to 5th Dawn, I'll tell the Greg Merckx story,

but Greg Merckx didn't work for the company at the time. He would later work for the company, but he didn't work for the company at the time. And so it is sort of someone plucked from... It's a good start, but that's really a 5th Dawn story. Okay, so during 5th Dawn, Aaron turned in, I think, two cards.

One of which was... What was it called? Something like... Something about butterflies. Something with butterflies. And what it did was it looked at the number of white mana symbols at something. It looked at, like, on creatures or something, and it made these little butterflies token creatures

based on how many white mana symbols you had. And I said to Aaron that I thought this was such a cool idea that we shouldn't be doing one or two cards, that we really should wait to do it correctly. And I liked the idea of counting mana symbols. I thought it was very cool. So, come future Scythe, which was many years down the road, I was making mechanics from the future.

And so one of the things I did is I had a bunch of different mechanics that I knew we wanted to do someday. So I decided a few of them I would tease in future site. So one of the things was I knew I wanted to do this count mana symbols. I thought it was pretty cool. So I put it in future Sight on a card. Phosphorus Feast, if I remember correctly. Anyway, a year later, I'm working on Eventide.

So Eventide, Shadowmourne Eventide were a mini block and a larger Lorwyn and Mourningtide were the other mini blocks. And the idea, I want to get to Lorwyn, is each of the mini blocks had its own theme. The mini block of Shadowmourne Eventide was hybrid mana, about half the cards had hybrid mana. And so when I was trying to find a mechanic for Eventide, it dawned on me that one of the themes of the mini block was color matters, because hybrid plays well into color matter strategy.

And I'm like, oh, well, you know, there's lots of hybrid symbols, more so than normal, because when there's two color hybrid, you can support more color mana symbols. I'm like, oh, this would be a good place to try out this mechanic. So we ended up calling it Chroma, and we put it into Eventide. And, well, Eventide, when I did my Rosewater Rumble, where I took my 16th sets and had them fight against each other, I think even Tide was my 16th seed.

It was not my shining moment as a lead designer. The set went over not so great, and Chroma probably was in the can if they got the best great, and Chroma probably was the mechanic that got the best reception, and even then it was kind of like, oh, okay. You know, it was fair, right? It wasn't well-received. It wasn't poorly received. It just was like, eh.

But in my heart of hearts, I had belief. I believed Chroma actually had a lot of potential. And I felt like Chroma was... It's one of the mechanics that I felt was most kind of missed. Like, that I really think had potential that didn't quite connect with the audience. So anyway, flash forward. We're now working on the design for Atheros. And we were looking at one of the things that Bill Rose, a couple years back, or at this point, many years back, five years back,

decreed that we should try to repeat a mechanic every year. And I agreed with him. One of the things about magic is the biggest threat to design is that there's this pressure to constantly do new things. And we want some new things. Every set should have new things. But what we realized is a lot of what we need to do is make use of the resources we have. And that what we discovered is

when we bring back mechanics people like, hey, they're happy. They're excited to see the mechanics they like. And that newer players who haven't played with them are excited because they're good mechanics. And that we should be bringing back mechanics more. And I was completely on board with Bill.

So we made an effort every year to bring back at least one mechanic, sometimes more than one, as in the case with Theros. So we were talking about made an effort every year to bring back at least one mechanic, sometimes more than one, as in the case with Theros. So we were talking about what mechanic we might want to bring back. And Zach Hill,

one of the team members, Zach was on the development team, but he was a dev rep for this design team, suggested Chroma. And the funny thing is I had been thinking about Chroma as well in the back of my head.

And when Zach said that, I was like, yeah, that... So here's the thing that I liked about it was we knew that we needed some way to represent the connection between the people and the gods. And I didn't know whether that was going to be a new mechanic or an old mechanic. But when Zach brought up Chroma, I was like, you know what? Chroma does a pretty good job.

Like, if you have gods of the five colors, that's your gods in the set, they're five monocolor gods, that, oh, well, it seems like, oh, how do I show that I have allegiance to the red god? Well, Red Madness, that's pretty good. But the key was we had to figure out how to sort of, I knew we had to rebrand Chroma. I knew that Chroma, first off, the word was super generic. I mean, Chroma is just a Latin root for color. And I knew that we needed to sort of give it a facelift. So for starters, I knew it needed a new word. Also, while we were giving a new word, I thought maybe we could tighten it up a little bit.

So Chroma, the way Chroma worked is Chroma was, I'm an ability word. I will tell you where to look, and I will tell you of the place to look to count up mana symbols. So it could be in hand. It could be in the graveyard. You know, it was a bunch of different places. But I was like, okay, what I want here is to show your allegiance to the god. Well, who cares what's in your hand or in your graveyard? What do you have in play? You know, and I felt like that was a good place to sort of represent how I feel.

What do I got in play? And so I decided to, well, narrow it down. Instead of being all over the place, for people that don't understand the difference between a key word and an ability word, the biggest way I describe it is this, is if you take the ability word off the card, it just works. The ability word doesn't do anything to make the card work. It's just a way to group it, you know, thematically. And so, but a keyword is something in which it needs to be on the card. Now, you can't reference ability words, but you can reference keywords. you can't reference ability words, but you can reference keywords. So, for example, if I wanted things to reference this ability,

I needed it to be a keyword, not an ability word, because ability words can't be referenced. So, for example, you could not make a card that said, look at the battlefield, and if your Chrome account is searching, something happens. Because Chroma is not a keyword. It's an ability word. Now, for the end user of the game player, it doesn't matter too much in the sense that

keywords, ability words, I think people think of them pretty similarly. But from a mechanic's side point, they actually work a little bit differently. The fact that you can't reference them is pretty important. So I knew in my head that we wanted things to key off of it, so I knew we needed to keyword it. I also was looking for something that, like I said, had a little more flavor to it. And so I came up with the idea of devotion.

Of, okay, how do you know that you care about it? You're devoted to it. And then the idea with devoted was we can add the color. So it's not just devotion, but it's devotion to something. You know, I can be devotion to blue, to white, and such. And so I started trying that on our cards. One of the things that's very common to do in playtests is

like I said, I'm a big believer I just talk about this all the time, but I'm a big believer in words. I'm a big believer that language shapes opinions. And so I try very hard in my playtests to figure out where the words are going to matter, and then I try out words.

I try out to see how things are going. And devotion to color, I had a good thought of, but I wanted to try it. And what I discovered was it just felt very natural. You know, if you're devotion to blue, it's such and such. You know, it had a nice ring to it. Devotion was also nice in that it fits thematically and has a flavor sense here, but it is broad enough.

For example, my classic example is Bushido, where we had an ability in the Champions of Kamigawa block that said if this creature is blocking or blocked, it gets plus one, plus one. In combat, it gets plus one, plus one. In combat, it gets plus one, plus one. Is that what it is? It might just be when blocked. Anyway, it gets plus one, plus one. And Bushido means the way of the sword.

So we put it on samurai. Well, the problem was, for example, we had a card called Chub Toad back in Ice Age that essentially had the Bushido ability. But we didn't retroactively through Oracle put Bushido on it. I think we since have, but at the time we didn't because we're like, why would a frog have Bushido? It's the way of the sword.

What about the frog means he's trained in sword play? It just didn't fit. The name didn't fit. The nice thing about Devotion is it's a step back. We've learned to do this with our keywords, which is it has some flavor, but it's a little looser. Devotion just means I have some attachment to this. It doesn't necessarily mean a religious devotion. You know, obviously in Theros, it's tied to the gods, but I believe we could use it other places and that devotion is a pretty generic enough concept that we can make it work in other environments. And we've been trying hard to do that.

Okay, so now we have devotion. So, and like I said, I knew that we wanted to show the people's connection to the gods. Like I said, once I divided the setup into gods, heroes, and monsters, it meant figuring out what each of those meant. So the god part meant a couple things. A, I had to have the gods. B, I needed the creations of the gods, and I needed the touch of the gods.

That's another important thing. I knew the gods were going to be mythic rare creatures. So there's only so much interaction one gets with mythic rare creatures. Hopefully players will get one, maybe get multiples. But still, just in a limited game, the chance of you opening up a god in a limited game is not that high and even in constructed, I mean, you know, depending on how many cards you buy, there's a good chance you don't open up a god

that we needed the gods the feel of the gods to be everywhere so one of my maxims, I say this all the time is, if your theme's not in common it's not your theme. Well I wanted Greek mythology and I wanted the gods to have a presence, so I knew I needed to figure out how to make the gods' presence felt. So, the thing that I liked about enchantments is, I liked the idea of tying the gods to enchantments. You know, the gods

have this ethereal quality to them. I feel like things made by the gods would have this ethereal quality. Also, as a side note, one of the things we were trying to do, when you look at Greek mythology, one of the staple stories of Greek mythology is the idea of mortals interacting with gods, and by being touched by the gods, the gods send them on quests, or the gods tell them they must do things.

And I thought that was pretty cool, that the interaction between our heroes and our gods might be that the gods bless the heroes, or curse the heroes. And that I like the idea of auras. That auras had a very nice feel of the touch of the gods, I do something. Okay, which brings up an important point, which is you'll notice in Theros there are no global enchantments. Zero. Now, originally, we did have some,

but then we realized as we were putting together the block that it was stepping on the toes of something we wanted to do. So, by the way, this is the downside of me doing a podcast about something that's not completely done yet, is I can't talk openly about it because there's things to come. If I'd done this podcast in two years, I could just explain everything. I'm trying something new to see how you guys want

something that's a little more contemporary. But the downside is I can't tell you everything because I'd like to keep some surprises. But anyway, if you're wondering why there is no global enchantments, it is not. We are well aware there are none. It is not a mistake.

It is done with purpose. And once you see the whole block, I can explain why we were up to that. But anyway, I liked a lot the idea of auras, and I liked the idea of auras being the touch of the gods. So we had enchantment creatures that would be the creation of the gods, and we have enchantments that would be

the touch of the gods. Now, mind youchantments that would be the touch of the gods. Now, mind you, by the way, enchantment creatures, or at least bestowed, do not exist yet. So in the beginning, there were five enchantment creatures in Theros. The five enchantment creatures were the five gods. And I was not planning to introduce enchantment creatures

until Born of the Gods, the second set. So let me tell that story. Okay, so and I actually, I'm writing an article about this but I think this will come up, I think this podcast comes up before you go read this article.

Not 100% sure on this timing. So let me talk a little bit about something called Advanced Planning. So, what happened was, Ethan Fleischer won the Great Designer Search 2, and we also gave an internship to Sean Main, who came in second. And the two of them, one of the things that I had done in the second Great Designer Search, a little different from the first Great Designer Search, was I realized at one point, Bill

and I were talking, and we realized that there's many different components to design. So one of them is what we call vision design, which is kind of coming up with big picture and, you know, starting with a blank page and sort of crafting how something will be made. And we realized that we're just kind of low on that. It's something where I happen to be very good at it, but one of the things that's very important is, you know, if tomorrow I'm hit by a bus, somehow that is the defining thing that's going to take me out. You ever notice that? It's a bus. Somehow I know, like, late in life, hopefully late, hopefully late in life, that a bus will do me in. Ah, they're going to get the bus! I always talk about being hit by a bus. Anyway, if for some reason I was gone, not that I'm planning to go anywhere,

but things happen, I wanted to make sure that magic would continue and that meant I needed to sort of work on creating more people that were good at vision design. So, in the second grade designer search, that was one of my criteria. In fact, if you notice,

one of the things we did in the second grade designer search is made them build worlds. Why? Because I was looking for this exact skill. And Sean and Ethan had it. Or they had potential, I guess I should say. And so what happened was, when I hired them for the internship,

I needed to figure out whether or not they had this skill because we wanted to figure out whether or not we wanted to keep them around. The internship was a testing thing. A very common thing now for design development, especially development, is you don't just get hired at Wizards most of the time. Usually you get an internship, which is six months

long, to sort of demonstrate your worth. And almost every single developer we have right now was an intern first. In fact, most of the designers were an intern first as well. So most of R&D started as an intern. And I needed to figure out what they were capable of. So I came up with this idea

that said, okay, at the time we were working on Friends, or we were about to start Friends. In fact, I talked about how Ethan built the... I had about a month ago before the design started, and Ethan, who was there, I had him write the little booklet about magic and Greek mythology. So anyway, cut forward a month or two, we had started Theros, and so I started this project with Ethan and Sean in which we started working on Huey Block,

which was the following year. And the reason we did that was, I just needed something they could work on that, you know, let's say, for example, nothing came to fruition. Well, then I'd still have all my design time to design it. I felt like I was goofing around in an area where I had time. So we worked ahead. And the idea was, I just wanted to let them goof around.

But what happened was, as we started creating a process by which to let them do that, I figured out that we had this amazing new tool, which we now call advanced design, which was before we start design, I have a different set of people that work on advanced design. And it's a place for me to sort of experiment. I don't do the work. Basically, the way it works is I give assignments to the team. They try things, and then once a week they come

and they play Tets with me and I give notes on what's going on. And so essentially, I'm sort of steering them, but I'm not doing the work. They're doing the work. Anyway, obviously, Sean and Ethan worked out.

They both got hired. Advanced planning became a thing. So sometime during Friends, we were in the middle of doing Huey when we realized that Friends could use a little love. So I took my advanced planning team and I stuck them on Theros block. Now, Theros was mostly along the way. So they more or less had born the gods and journey to next.

So one of the things I said to them was I was trying to figure out how best to use enchantment creatures. And one of the team, a guy named Billy Moreno, who is no longer with us, but he was with us for a while. He was a developer, very good, a former Pro Tour player. Billy came up with the idea of the Bastille mechanic. And the idea of the Bastille mechanic was that they were enchantment creatures,

but essentially they were auras. And the idea was that you could stick them on a creature, you could play them as creatures, or you could stick them on a creature, and if you stick them on a creature, when the creature died, then you got the creature. And that way, the idea was to sort of take away card disadvantage from auras, and tie them away so you have a choice between a creature and an aura. Although the nice thing about Billy's design was, if you use the aura, you always got the creature. Anyway, we designed that. I liked it a lot. I signed off on it and said,

okay, born of the gods, we're doing that. And the reason I saved it for born of the gods originally had to do with the story I was trying to do. Like I said, it deviated a little bit from there. Okay, so we had that all set up. Let's go back to Theros. Okay, so in Theros, we up. Let's go back to Theros. Okay, so in Theros, we had figured out we wanted gods, we'd figured out we wanted devotion.

The next thing that happened was I had said that we wanted heroes and we wanted monsters. So we had figured out that we wanted auras, and I'd figured out at the time that I wanted the enchantment theme to be the touch of the gods. I figured out auras were the important part of that. So the next thing is we were trying to figure out heroes. Well, actually, sorry, sorry. Monsters came next. Heroes took us a little longer to figure out.

Monster story is not the most exciting story, but I will tell it. So what happened was I said, okay, guys, we want monsters. Magic has monsters. All we want, I said, there's going to be two things different about our monsters than theirs, other than normal magic monsters. Number one is we're going to have more monsters, just because it's more of a theme.

And number two, I want our monsters to be a little bit bigger. Not tons bigger, but just a little bit bigger. And so, we decided that we would try to make our monsters just have a little more you know, what's the correct size, a little more girthed, if you will. Okay, so I said to the team, really what I want is I want something cool to put on monsters

that just says, I'm a monster. And so I sent the team off, and the next week, all the team came back with different ideas. And normally in design, the way this works is, all I really need them to do is to give me one idea, one card to represent the idea. You know, if you give me one card, I get the gist of what it is, and I've done this long enough. I can understand how to extrapolate. So usually it's like, and sometimes people give me a couple cards, you know, if they

come up with a couple, but usually it's like, give me a sample of your mechanic and give me one card that does it. A couple cards if you really are dying they come up a couple, but usually it's like, give me a sample of a mechanic and give me one card that does it. A couple cards if you really are dying, show me a couple cards. Or if sometimes mechanics have a couple different ways they can be executed, you'll show me a couple cards. So, a whole bunch of players brought stuff in, we had a lot of really cool stuff. I believe Ken Nagel is the one that brought in what became Monstrous. So Ken Nagel's original version were just abilities that could be used once per turn.

Not once per turn, sorry. Once per game. The idea was, here's this awesome monster ability that can be used once per game. And what Ken had done was, because it had a memory issue, which is right, have I used this or haven't I? He did a very common thing,

which was, okay, we're going to market. How do we market? Well, we want these to be monsters. What if we just put plus and plus one counters on it? Okay, cool, you use it, it'll get bigger, which was, okay, we're going to market. How do we market? Well, we want these to be monsters. What if we just put plus one, plus one counters on it? Okay, cool. You use it, it'll get bigger, which is neat. And now you've marked it, you know it's being used. Now, a little side note. One of the things I got when we first introduced monstrous

is, you know, because the plus one, plus one counters don't, it's not the plus one, plus one counters that make it monstrous. They're just the thing to remind you that monstrous has happened. And a lot of people, I remember, or not a lot of people, a few people complained when we first showed monstrous that, well, what if something removes the counters and then something else puts counters on?

Or removes the counters and it's monstrous, but you don't know. And I'm like, for starters, we made sure that it was very hard to add or remove counters in Theros. So if you saw counters, odds are that's how it got there. And even in Constructors, there's not that many ways to remove them. And you know what? It's a giant ability. It's very memorable. You should probably remember whether or not you did it. And 99% of the time, there'll be counters on it.

So we thought it was fine. My one sadness in the way it evolved was when it got templated, they took off once per game. And this is tying into something I said earlier with the power of words. One of the things that attracted me to the mechanic was the actual phrase once per game because it felt super special.

We've never, I mean, we've done things that functionally are once per game, but we've never done things that literally spell it out once per game because it felt super special. We've never, I mean, we've done things that functionally are once per game, but we've never done things that literally spell it out once per game. And I was really enamored with it. And like I said, it's one of the reasons I picked it. And when we get to templating, they decided they wanted this, you know, if it's monstrous and

I don't know. I mean, I understand why they did it and I'm not saying it's the wrong choice, but it saddened me a little bit because I really liked the oomph once per game. I did talk to him. It wasn't like the issue didn't come up. For those that care, the way it works is usually in design, we do what we call a rough template.

We'll go to the rules manager, which is Matt Tabak, and he'll do a rough version. It's not the final version, but it's good enough that we can play with it. I mean, the one concern you have to worry about early in design is whether or not the mechanic, A, can be written out, and B, how wordy it is. Suspend I'll use as the poster child for, it was this pretty simple concept, right? I'm trading, you know, time for mana. It's like, oh, well, it costs less, but it takes more time. So, you know, time for mana. Like, oh, well, it costs less, but

it takes more time. So, you know, I get three mana less, but it takes me three turns, you know. But the actual writing that out, the logistics, what it entailed was so burdensome that it became hard for people to understand what was happening. And, like, Suspend got sunk because even though the idea was elegant, the execution wasn't. And so we've learned in design that we have to at least get a good understanding of the execution, even just for a simple elegance, and for complexity as well. And so what happens is design will have a rough version. Usually during development, early development, we'll try to get a more finalized version.

One of the things about when you're a designer is you watch as once you hand off your file, you are not done as a designer. Your job as the lead designer is to keep tabs on the file. That means just kind of poke your head in once in a while, see what they're doing.

I have a very good rapport with Eric Lauer, who is not only the head developer, but normally the lead developer of the fall sets, usually the ones I run. So most of the time, Eric's the one I'm dealing with. And Eric is very, very good about coming to me. Whenever he makes any change of any substantial, he'll come talk to me and make sure that I'm not doing something that fundamentally violates something that I care about. And, you know, whatever.

The vast, vast, vast majority of the time, what Eric's doing is fine. Usually I lay out, when I hand off my file, what I want. Eric's trying to follow, you know, my vision. Every once in a while, he's missing something,

or he'll do something like, oh, this has a ramification you might not see. But it's infrequent. So anyway, that was Monstrous. We came up with it. We used it. It's one of those, sometimes it's a longquent. So anyway, that was Monstrous. We came up with it. We used it. It's one of those,

sometimes it's a long, drawn out, we have to evolve the mechanic and sometimes it's like, oh, that's good. I mean, we spent a lot of time figuring out what we wanted

to be Monstrous and as I'll explain later on in the podcast, probably not today, but tomorrow, I'll talk a little bit about how we divvy up colors. That's another important part of how we do design.

Not every mechanic is in every color, or not necessarily the same weight in every color. Okay, so now we get to heroic. Okay, so, where are we? Okay, we know gods exist. We know gods have an enchantment impact. Their feel in the world is enchantments mostly through auras.

And we know we have devotion that represents the people's affinity for their gods. Okay, next. So we had some stuff for the gods, we had some stuff for the monsters, time for the heroes. So for starters, we knew that the auras were good. We wanted the heroes

to have auras. And for example, let me talk about the ordeals. It's a good example of where we're going. So the ordeals was we wanted a cycle and the idea of the god sends you on a quest. Because one of the themes, now it's interesting. If you look at actual Greek mythology, actual Greek mythology, the people that are being sent on quests were kind of born, you know, like they were demigods or they were like kings or, you know, unimportant people didn't end up going on quests. It wasn't like a random, random, you know, farmer ended up going on a quest. farmer ended up going on a quest.

But what happened was, one of the things you'll find with the way literature works and stories works is the core idea of the story will stay, but as society evolves, the type of story will evolve. And so, at the time of the Greeks, it was a pretty,

we'll say the rich get richer sort of environment, where the people at the top were definitely, I mean, for example, if you were writing, you were already the elite, because only the elite learned how to write. And so a lot of the early stories very much played up the elites, because they were written by the elites. But as time went on, the idea that the myth of the epic hero,

the hero started from lower and lower stations. I mean, one of the things that is true now is in the modern day myth of the epic hero the person is important and they learn they're important but they don't know they're important when the story begins. They're not a king when the story begins. They are in fact a lowly moisture farmer.

Star Wars is the go-to example of man with two faces. By the way, which is very interesting when George Lucas wanted T. Star Wars is the go-to example of man-to-face. By the way, which is very interesting, when George Lucas wanted to make Star Wars, he literally sat down with Campbell's book, and there's like 40, you know, Joseph Campbell, what he does is he's a person who studied storytelling and anthropology and sort of how people learn stories. And what he did is he broke down about here's the common bonds of how all stories work. And he talked about the different types of stories. So one of them is called

The Myth of the Epic Hero. And he broke it down. And George Lucas literally said, there's like 40 steps or something to it. And he said, okay, I have to do step one. I have to do step two. And like, Star Wars step by step does every single one. Now the interesting thing is he also did the same thing with Willow.

Star Wars, crazy success. Willow, not so much. And both of them went through step-by-step and did Joseph Campbell's Myth of the Epic Hero. So it's interesting to say that execution is important. It's not just the details. How you do it is very important.

Anyway, so I knew that I wanted the flavor of things started small, you know, you're a moisture farmer, and that you evolve. The other reason I wanted you to start small is that it's just a better story if you start from, like,

one of the things about story, I'll give you one of the most important things I ever learned in any of my writing classes, right here, right now, which is figure out where your character has to end and then get them as far away, as far to the other end of the spectrum as you can, and you'll have yourself a good story. Meaning, you need to give yourself room to grow.

That's an important thing about storytelling. It's an important thing about game design. So I'll give you the corollary. Where do you want your game player to end? Well, get them to the other side. storytelling, it's a foreign thing about game design. So I'll give you the corollary. Where do you want your game player to end? Well, get them to the other side! Make getting there give them a journey. You want to give your character a journey? You want to give your game player

a journey. So, I knew that I'd figured out that I wanted to capture the sense of the mythic epic hero. I wanted to start with a lowly person to build them up into a big hero. And I love the idea, the reason that we had the ordeals was that the idea

that the god sends them on a mission, as they do the mission, as they attack, they get bigger. Now the original version of the ordeals, every time you attacked you got a plus one, plus one counter, and then once you had three plus one, plus one counters, you got a creature ability. The problem was that in our version we didn't shed off the plus had three plus one plus one counters you got a creature ability.

The problem was that in our version we didn't shed off the plus one plus one counters. Because it was very very wordy to say you get them until a certain point. And so what happened was you kept getting them and Eric's issue during Feldman, which is a fine issue, was that that was

gaining first strike? No. I just wanted to get more plus one plus one counters. And that in order to cost them for just want to get more plus one plus one counters and that in order to cost them for the ability of constantly getting plus one plus counters you know it was sort of overshadowing other things we wanted and so the development team came up with a nice solution which was it'll build up counters once it has three counters it falls off but you get to keep the counters and then it has a spell effect so that way you're working towards something the thing happens but then it has a spell effect. So that way, you're working towards something, the thing happens, but then once the thing happens,

you're no longer adding plus one to the counters anymore, and that way it balanced it from a card power. That's a perfect example, by the way, of how design had an image and had a thing it wanted. It explained in development. Development's like, oh, well, you're not quite executing on your vision. We can stay true to your vision, and they found a way to do exactly what we wanted, but in a way that just functions a little better. That is what development does oh, well, you're not quite executing on your vision. We can stay true to your vision, and they found a way to do exactly what we wanted,

but in a way that just functions a little better. That is what development does and does well, which is design sometimes will have a vision, and it doesn't quite, you know, development is the second set of eyes that will fix things. And that's a good example of how, you know, design had the ordeals in mind. Design wanted to represent, you know,

the gods sending the heroes on a quest. Anyway, that is that. Okay, so let's get to heroic. Where's the interesting, I'm close to work. So, I think what I'm going to do is hold off on heroic to part three, and I'm going to talk a little bit about one of the lessons of, so let me get up to where we are. I feel like the heroic speech, I'm a couple minutes from work,

and I know the heroic story is meaty enough that I don't want to sort of cut it off mid-story. So let me sort of recap where we were so that when I get to work, tomorrow I will pick up. Like I said, this is going to be a longer set of podcasts. I just, I've done a lot of, the one advantage, the disadvantage

of me doing a podcast close to when I did it was that I, uh, I can't tell you some stuff, but the good advantage is I remember everything. It was not that long ago. Okay. So, um, at this point in the design, um, we knew that we liked the enchantment elements for the gods. We knew that the gods

were going to be enchantment creatures. Early on, by the way, at this point, the gods, I forget exactly what they were, they were nothing special. I mean, we kind of made just whatever gods, knowing that we needed to fix and make them better. I mean, it was well aware that the gods were going to have a lot of focus. I mean, when you make a cycle of mythic rare gods, you know, in a Greek mythological set, you knew you were going to have a lot of focus. And we were spending some make a cycle of mythic rare gods, you know, in a Greek mythological set, you knew you were

going to have a lot of focus. And we were spending some time trying to figure out what we wanted them to do. The actually interesting thing about the gods, by the way, is, and I'll get to this later in the story, but we didn't quite solve it. We handed off the gods, having not quite solved what we wanted the gods to do. And in fact, in my handoff document, I had

said that, you know, we're willing to spend some more work to figure it out because we've been distracted with other stuff the one thing about rares and mythic rares is when development starts what they're trying to do is figure out the balance of the environment and so they start with a limited environment

and so mythic rares have very little impact on the balance of the limited environment so you have a little bit of wiggle time at the end to try to fix some stuff if you need to. But anyway, at this point, gods were nothing close to the version you guys know them as. We had added devotion in. I don't even think we had gotten

to the devotion for blue, for black, that tech yet. Although, I had made the decision to only count mana symbols on permanence on the battlefield. I'd made that decision already, but I think we later would get the text. With Monstrous, we had signed off for once per game, and we were trying to figure out

what kind of things we wanted. We figured out pretty quickly that at Common we just wanted to add counters, because we were trying to keep it the simplest version we could. So it's like, oh, these things you can pay, make them bigger. That's good enough. That's its own reward. And then a higher rarity is when other things are happening. And we figured that out. And we had started to do auras.

We had the ordeals. We had started to do auras that we were trying to get the sense of how would the gods impact things and how would things make better so I'm perfectly primed that that's where we are and it was us saying okay guys, it's time for us to make a mechanic for the heroes as you will see in our next podcast the origin of the heroic mechanic actually goes way back

as I talk about it next time you'll see that sometimes we come up with ideas and they sit for a long time as we try to figure out what to do with them. And the Heroic Mechanic is a perfect example of a mechanic that I have fiddled with for years and years. But I'm driving up to Wizards

so I can tell that it is time for me to wrap up the story. But obviously, we are not done. I have much more to tell you. I mean, today I introduced monstrosity, which was called, what was it called in design? I think it was just called monstrous in design. And I introduced devotion to you.

And we started down the path of the gods as enchantments. So next time I will talk about heroic. I need to still talk about how Scry got in the saddle. That happened in development. Am I missing anything else? There's a few other pieces I will tie into. And then as always, probably next time I will wrap up the story, and then after that I'll do some card stories.

I think that's how it's going to happen. But anyway, hopefully you're enjoying the story thus far. But as much as I love talking to you about magic design, I also like magic design. So guys, I've got a bid you do for today, because it's time for me to be making magic. Talk to you next time.