Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #82 - Theros, Part 3

Episode Date: December 28, 2013

This is the third part of the epic eight-part series about designing Theros

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so the last two podcasts have been about the design of Theros. But I was not yet done, so I shall continue. Okay, when last we left, I had talked about, we were up to talking about the heroic mechanic. Okay, so this point, we knew that we had gods, we knew that we had an enchantment theme that represented the touch of the gods, we knew that meant we'd have a lot of auras,

we knew that the gods themselves would be enchantment creatures, we knew that we wanted to have devotion, which was going to be a reworked chroma, and we knew that we wanted the monsters with a monstrous mechanic. That's what we knew. So now we were trying to figure out what the heroes would be. So the key to understanding the

heroic mechanic is twofold. First off, the parameters. What were we looking for? Okay, well I knew that I wanted to capture the sense of adventure that to me was key of a lot of the Greek mythologies. That I love the idea that people would

build things and that people would build things and that there would be this game as your hero leveled up, essentially, that it would get bigger and bigger, and eventually it would be able to take on the giant monsters that it had to fight, which, by the way, also had their own little level-up track. Okay, so that brings the question to mind, why not the level-up mechanic? And the reason for that is the level-up mechanic has a lot of complexity to it,

and we just, we needed to put our points in other places. Also, the level-up mechanic, when it was done in Rise of the Eldrazi, got a lukewarm reception. We were already, I was already trying to redo Chroma, which, like, was already a mechanic that didn't hit really strongly the first time we did it, and I was trying to sort of, you know, give it a second chance. And so, A, I'd already had a returning mechanic that I was trying to sort of, you know, that had a lukewarm response originally, and I was trying to do something with it.

And there's a lot of complexity that comes with the frame. I mean, I'm not saying in the right environment maybe we wouldn't do it but this just didn't really feel like the right environment. Plus I wanted, auras were going to be an important part of what I was doing. I wanted the build up to have the touch of the gods with them. That if I had a level

up guy that just leveled himself up, you didn't get any sense that the touch of the gods mattered. That just kind of on his own, he's motivated and does his own thing. I needed really, I wanted some interaction. So I loved the aura things. I knew we had the aura things, so level up didn't quite work. I wanted to use auras.

I mean, obviously, monsters had monstrosity, so there was a whole way for the monsters to build up. monstrosity, so there's only one for the monsters to build up. So, the parameters is I knew I wanted the heroes to start small and to build with time. I knew I wanted the auras to be involved,

so I wanted them to play well with auras. So I was looking for something that kind of like encouraged interesting gameplay and worked with auras. That was my general goal. Okay, so let's flashback.

Flashback, my friends, to Invasion Block. Okay, so Invasion Block was a set that I had done with Bill Rose and Mike Elliott. And it was the beginning of what I had dubbed the, I have dubbed

the Third Age of Design, where we started doing themes in our blocks. Invasion was really the first set to have a cohesive mechanical theme, which was multicolor. So while we were messing around with multicolor, I was trying to find different ways to make multicolor matter. So one of the

mechanics I came up with was a mechanic that said there were cards that cared, like a giant growth that would make any creature plus two plus two, but a green creature plus four plus four. And the idea being that the spell kind of cared about what you were targeted with. And it sort of, you know, it had a color preference, if you will. Like, this spell is good for anybody, but really good if used on green creatures. And I liked that mechanic. Invasion ended up not needing it.

We were doing other things. We had a spell mechanic with Kicker. So it ended up not fitting in Invasion. And so later on, I'm trying to think what set this was, maybe it was during Shadowmoor, because Shadowmoor also had a Color Matters theme. I tried flip-flopping it, so instead of a spell that cared about what it targeted,

they were creatures that cared about if they were targeted by a certain color. And so I messed around a little with that, like, oh, I like being targeted by green spells. If a green spell targets me, some good thing happens. And so I messed around in that space. It was a little bit narrow. You know, things don't get targeted all that much, and then subdividing the colors, it just was a little bit too narrow. But in the back of my head, it was definitely an area,

and this is very common in magic design, where I will mess around with something. The thing I mess around with doesn't quite work, but I know in my head that there's potential. Like, I'm messing around an interesting space. And the key is finding, you know, just trying to find how to use that space somewhere. And so one of the things that I've done over the years, and this advantage of doing this for a long time, is I've built up a repertoire of just interesting ideas of things that, eh, didn't work out,

but I know maybe could work out. And so every once in a while when I'm trying to solve a problem, I have this inventory of, you know, spells that didn't quite work. Now be aware, this is another very important thing to understand.

Just because a mechanic doesn't work does not mean it's a bad mechanic. A lot of times what you're trying to do is when you're building a set, you have a very specific need in mind. And you try mechanics, and those mechanics might not meet that need, but that does not mean they're not good mechanics.

It just means, oh, they don't fit right here. And so when you discard of things, anything that we try that I feel has any potential, I keep on to. I hold on to. I mean, most of it's in my head. I know we keep talking about having a database potential, I keep on to. I hold on. I mean, most of it's in my head. I know we keep talking about having a database, and I know we're starting to work on that. In fact, I think there is a database. But anyway, there's a database in my head, which is where I keep most of my stuff. And we've tried a lot of things over the years. And the thing that people don't realize is we try a lot of different things. When you see something,

when you see some mechanics, let's say you see four mechanics in the set. We might have tried 20 mechanics. Sometimes we've tried 50 mechanics. I do know, for example, in Zendikar, Landfall was probably the 20th mechanic we tried for the land mechanics. I know Dredge in Ravnica was more than 20. We tried so many mechanics for the original Golgari mechanic. Sometimes you just try a lot of mechanics.

You know, sometimes you hit it out of the park right away. Monstrous was pretty much our first attempt at it, and we liked it. So anyway, in my head, I liked the idea of things that liked being targeted. And the reason that this came up was, oh, Aura's target. Now, there is a problem inherent there, is that knowing Aura's target requires a little bit of rules knowledge. We actually talked about rewriting the Aura rules, the reminder text, to remind you that they target,

or maybe even putting target on the card. We ended up not doing that, but... Anyway, it is one... The fact that Auras target, and one of the few things that don't say they target is a thorn in the side of some people. But anyway, I like the fact that auras were targeted, but it also meant that it wasn't just an aura

mechanic. There are other ways to target your things. You can target them with, you know, instants and sorceries. The reason creatures don't work, by the way, real quickly, is we did not want abilities to target. And the reason when I did Heroic, originally we did not have abilities to target is that's just, it's too easy to break it. It is too easy to target something again and again and again. So we restricted targeting to spells, which meant the creatures, if they have a come into play ability,

that's a triggered ability. That's an ability. It's not a spell. And so there was no way for creatures to trigger it, or not in a way that we naturally make creatures. Anyway, so I like the idea of having creatures that when targeted got a bonus. So the original design, when I first pitched it,

what I pitched was, whenever this is the target of a spell, it gets a plus one, plus one counter. I just pitched that as the ability. And then what we realized was that my original version was a little too tight. We could loosen it up a little bit. That what we needed was, okay, I want to be targeted, and when I'm targeted, something positive happens.

We liked plus one, plus one counters, but we decided we would divvy it up. So let me talk about this, because this will be a big part of today's topic, which is once you figure out what you want your mechanics to be, So let me talk about this, because this will be a big part of today's topic, which is once you figure out what you want your mechanics to be, one of the important things is figuring out who does it best and where to put it. Every mechanic is not always supposed to be in every color. Now, in Theros, because I was trying to do Greek mythology, I did in fact want gods and heroes and monsters showing up in all the colors, but that didn't mean they needed to be in equal amounts. So for

example, with heroic, what we decided was, let's divvy up how heroic gets used. And we decided that certain colors would be better in heroic. So what we chose was that white and blue would be the best two heroic colors. And what that meant was development was costing... There's two things to do when you want to push something. There's quantity and quality. So quantity is just you want more of them. And the reason that's important is

if I'm drafting, well, I'll just see more of them. I have more opportunity in these colors to do this. So we decided that heroic, we wanted to be blue-white. That just meant that blue and white got a little bit more heroic.

So as fan, let me describe the term for those who might not know it. As fan is a term that R&D uses to talk about what percentage will you see this thing as opened in a pack. Because remember, when you look at a file, that is different. So let's say, for example, 10% of the cards in the file do something. Well, it depends what rarity they are. If they're all common, yeah, you'll see that a lot. But if they're all rare, mythic rare, you might barely

see that in a pack. So what we care about a lot of times is the as-van means, okay, when I open up an average pack, average pack meaning I'm going to have 10 commons, 3 uncommons, and a rare 7 eighths of the time, and a mythic rare 1 eighth of the time, how often will I see this thing? And we actually have a little calculator program that Dave Guskin wrote where we're like, you say, okay, I have this many things in common, this many things in uncommon, this many rares, this many mythic rares. What's my as-van? How often will I see it? And if it's something that we want to matter, the as, I mean, it depends on what it is because

some things you need to have more volume than others. Some things, for example, let's say you need something to show up. You need seven or eight of something to be viable. Well, you need a higher as-fen than if you need three or four. Usually, if we want the as-fen to matter, the low end is probably 1% if something really matters. And the high end can be 2%, 2.5%, depending on what the thing is. In fact, certain things, if they blend nicely with the set, can be even higher. For example, when I was doing Shadowmore, Hybrid had an As-Fan of about 50%.

But Hybrid does not, you know, does not get in the way of what people draft. It's not super linear. So, I mean, certain things can be higher. Gold will be higher. The As-Fan of gold sometimes will be higher in sets that are very focused on gold. But it's important for us to understand when you open it what you will see. So that's one thing. The second thing is quality, which is when development is pricing cards, if they know

that certain colors have certain strategies, they just make those things better in those colors. So, Heroic not only shows up more in white and blue, but at lower rarities, especially for Limited, the Heroic stuff is a little bit better in white and blue. You're more likely to want to play it. So if you're drafting Theros, it's not that you can't make Heroic decks of other colors, and obviously we decided to make white and red a little more aggressive. So what we did is, white and blue, we decided would be the best heroic colors.

We decided red would be sort of number three. We decided to give green. So white and green we gave the plus one, plus one counters. The way we divvied it up was white tended to get one plus one counter and sometimes another ability to your creature, where green just tended to get a lot of plus one, plus one counters. That's why green has two plus one counters and three plus one counters. And then blue and red more often got spell effects.

Rather than getting bigger, rather than increasing the creature, they tended to affect the board. And then black was kind of the middle. We gave black a little of each. Now, in a lot of sets, you don't necessarily put all the mechanics and all the colors. I know players grumble when we do that, but one of the ways to give an identity to things

is not put them everywhere. So remember, let me... I say this from time to time, but let me give you an example here. So the color pie is the most important thing, not just for design, but also for development. And the reason is that if every

color can do everything as well as every other color, or even if every color can do everything, it makes less reason to branch out and do different things. And one of the things that makes the game so much fun is there's variety. There's different things. There's different decks you can build. If every color has access to the same thing, then it gets monotonous, meaning all the decks start drifting toward the same strategy. But if you make Heroic really good in one blue, but make Devotion really good in other colors, then

oh, well maybe there's not a white Devotion deck. Now I know in Constructed there's a blue Devotion deck, but I will stress that they're both mythic rare cards. That is a Constructed thing only. In Limited it's very, very, very, very hard to do Blue Devotion. I mean, maybe you get the God, maybe you get Master Waves, but, you know, it's not something that's a major part of Blue's game in Theros Limited.

You know, so anyway, we definitely tried to mix it up. This set was interesting in that because I was trying to do top-down and I wanted the key components to show up, I made sure that every color had a little bit of access to it. For example, every color needed a little bit of devotion because of the gods.

There was one other mythic rare blue card so that if you wanted to build a devotion deck, obviously it turned out to be pretty good. But we wanted to make sure that there was tools. What we do for limited, what we do for constructed are not always the same thing. Sometimes they overlap. Sometimes it goes a little bit different.

Constructed only needs a couple good cards to make something work, where limited needs a lot more to guarantee draft strategy and stuff that things will happen. Okay, so we tried Heroic. We realized that we wanted to branch out from just plus and plus one counters. We started giving identities to colors. That was

playing pretty well. Okay, now we come to the math problem. Okay, so, at the time, now to catch up today here, we had enchantments with lots of auras, and we had the gods. We had devotion. We had monstrous. We had heroic. Or monstrosity,, and we had the gods, we had devotion, we had monstrous,

we had heroic, or monstrosity, sorry, we called it monstrous in design. And, but one of the problems was that heroic, for example, said, hey, I need to have a bunch of non-creature spells in my deck, because creatures aren't going to trigger heroic. So if I have heroic creatures, I need to have some things that would trigger them. And, you know, the, I mean, devotion was fine with creatures because devotion just cares about permanence in play, and auras worked well with devotion,

so devotion was working fine. Monsters was working on its own. But the aura and heroic theme, which is an important, important theme, we really wanted a theme of building up. So once again, let me stress this. That one of the things that I've tried to do ever since beginning of fifth stage of design is say, what emotion do I want this game, this particular set to evoke?

When you play it, how are you supposed to feel? And I was trying to capture the Greek influence on storytelling and that, because one of the things I learned, I don't know if I've told the story yet. So when I was doing Innistrad, one of the things I realized was I was able to focus on the monsters because it's like, oh, I've seen a lot of different horror films and TV shows and things on zombies. I know how zombies are supposed to act. Ooh, I can make a tribal zombie deck. I know what zombies are supposed to do. I know what vampires are supposed to do. I know what werewolves are supposed to do. I had enough knowledge of how they function

that I could design something that would match expectations of the public. But when I started working on Theros, what I realized was people interact with Greek mythology in a very different way than interact with horror. The horror genre, and it's a genre for starters, it's very pop culture centric. Greek mythology very much influences Western culture, but it is not, if I say to you, how exactly does a centaur function? Well, maybe you know some of the tropes of centaurs, okay, they carry a crossbow. They're wise mages, maybe, you know. But, you know, there's not...

You know the sense of what a tribe of centaur would do. So what I realized is I didn't have some of that, the sense that I was building off of for Innistrad. So what I went to is I said, okay, the thing about Greek mythology is it influences how we tell stories in Western civilization, and that all the archetypes that Campbell had laid out, Joseph Campbell, I talked about him last time. Once again, if you ever listen to my podcast and it's part not one, you really got to listen to the previous parts. I just assume you've heard them. If this is the first one you're listening to, there's a part one

and a part two, please go listen to it. It'll make a lot of sense. Anyway, Joseph Campbell has outlined the different types of stories. Most of that is based off a Greek. The Greeks were the ones that did it the earliest. They were good storytellers. And so a lot of modern storytelling comes from that. And I like the sort of sense of adventure built into mythology and the sense of accomplishment. And so I decided that's the emotion I was going for, that I wanted you to sort of build up. And there's lots of ways to build up.

In fact, if you look at the mechanics and notice, the auras build up. Heroic builds up your creature. Devotion builds up over time because you get more permanence in play. Monsters build up. Everything in the set, it builds up. It creates larger things.

Because I wanted a sense of, I start small and I build a mighty hero or I build a mighty monster or I call forth a mighty god. That I'm always building towards something and that's a big part of what this set was doing. Okay, so in order for that to be true, I needed to have you build up. That meant I needed auras and I needed heroic. The stuff I needed to have you build up. But the problem was, and this was the math problem, okay, in the limited deck you have 40 cards.

Usually you have about 40% land, that's like 17 land. That leaves you 23 cards. Now normally you want about 16 creatures, so that leaves you with about 7 spells. And those 7 spells have to do your creature removal, they have a lot of function to do things you need to do. So there just wasn't a lot of room to get in the auras and to get in the cards that are going to trigger the heroic. And that was a problem.

So we needed to figure out how to crack this. Meanwhile, I explained this last time, the advanced planning team had made the bestow mechanic. I had that in my back pocket. That was for Born of the Gods. So one of the things that I realized, and a very funny thing that happened, Eric

Lauer is the head developer, my equivalent on development. He was going to be the lead for, or was the lead for Theros. So one of the things that's interesting is Eric is very math-based. And so Eric had recognized this problem and sort of crunched through the numbers to figure out the solution. Meanwhile, I had the same problem and I intuitively understood it was a math problem, but I never solve things through math. That's not true. I sometimes solve things through math.

More often than not, I kind of go through a gut. I'm more intuitive in the way I function. But anyway, I'd come to the conclusion that we had to use Bestow. Eric mathematically came to the conclusion that we had to use Bestow. Eric mathematically came to the conclusion that we had to use Bestow. And Eric actually came to me and said, look, I've done the math,

you have to use Bestow. And my response was, I know, yeah, Eric, it's already in the set. So basically what happened was I needed to find a way to get some of your creatures to trigger,

to help build up your stuff. And in order to, one of the things that allowed me to both have creature slots that allowed me to help heroic, and a creature slot that allowed me to start building my creatures up with auras, the Bastille mechanic did exactly that. And so we had to change around our story a little bit. I mean, they always were going to be creations of the gods

the original story they were a little different but the idea was they were god created things so it worked we brought them forward so one of the things we did with the heroic creatures is we did a couple things I tried to keep them very simple they were all in cycles

because I didn't want to take up too much mind space with them because obviously later in the block they played important roles and I wanted to sort of leave space. So what I did is we instituted the rule that all the still creatures had to have a plus X plus Y where X was its power and Y was its toughness, which meant that every single creature had to at least give you some toughness pumping because you had to have toughness to survive as a creature.

In theory, you could be 0-1, 0-2, 0-3, 0-4. That could work. And whatever ability the creature granted, the creature had to naturally have. So if I give lifelink, then I have to have lifelink. What we decided was, because I wanted to cycle them, I decided to avoid the vanillas. I wanted to keep them as clean and simple as possible,

so I had them all grant the same stats. And let me explain the reason for that. One of the things that's important to understand is the concept... I've used it for a bunch of tries, so let me explain it. I call it mind share. And what that means is, let's think of the human brain as a computer. And it has so much processing information. It can process so much information.

So one of the things is, I mean, I talk about this a lot of times, how the brain functions. It's a brain that if you have 10 pieces of times, how the brain functions. The brain... If you have ten pieces of information, the brain could have trouble with it. But if you take those ten pieces of information and you consolidate it into chunks, I've talked about chunking before, that makes it easier for the brain.

And so one of the things that we found is if I make... Let's say I take my misto cycle and the common... This one's plus two, plus four, this one's plus one, plus two, this one, and I have them all different. Then what happens is, when I see them, I have to go, oh, okay, it's common Bestow. Oh, which one's this one? And it just requires your brain to have to process more.

Whereas, if I make them all the same, they're all plus two, plus two, or plus one, plus one, and I just have an even same, they're all plus two plus two or plus one plus one, just have an even stat, a few things. One, when you see bestow, especially if you see common bestow, you go, oh, I know it's stat boost. And then I go, what color is it? And then luckily, the creature abilities are pretty tied to color. So I just got to learn which creature ability, but it's much, much quicker. So rather than, oh, this one's plus what, plus what, plus what, you know, does this one grant ability or not grant one grant ability, it's like, oh, I know exactly what it is, I know the stats, and I know what ability it is because I know the color. Also, I did square stats because square stats are just another easier thing to process.

You know, that if I have a creature and I have to add plus one, plus one, or plus two, plus two, I can do that way faster than I can do plus one plus four. Now, people all the time, whenever I talk about simplifying things for math, they're like, whatever, learn math. It's a learn math. And the reality is, look, there's a lot to process in the game of magic. You know, use my little computer analogy. There's a lot to process. And then if you overload, the brain will just start shutting down or will start skipping things. And what we've been trying to do is just make it easier for things to process. And we as designers

and developers can build things in so they're easier to process. Now, some of the games should be harder to process and Magic is not shy of things you have to process. But the reality is, save those things. Think of you have so many cars you get to make people process. Use

those wisely. And the reality is having bestow all linked up just makes it easier to process. There's no great value right here for making it different. And we have a block of which we need other bestow things. Let's save some of that stuff for other sets. Okay, so the choice was to limit how much we do bestow. Essentially what we decided was enough bestow to do what we needed to do. Enough to get the job done and no more. And that's a common thing, by the way. One of the things, when I became head designer,

what I did not realize when I took the job is that one of the two things I probably do more than anything else when I'm looking at other people's designs is saying, don't waste and follow the color pie. Because one of the things that happens is it's very easy when you're trying to design to just use as many resources as you can because you're trying to do the best design you can. And it's my job as sort of the head designer to say, okay, guys, guys, guys, this is a resource we've got to be careful with. And for a couple of reasons.

Here's why it's important. One, look, design resources are not infinite and wasting design resources is wasteful and something that's important. Number two is there's only so much appreciation. So my analogy I often give is I'm taking my kids to the candy store. Now, I could buy them one piece of candy, maybe two pieces of candy, or I could buy them 20 pieces of candy. Will they be happy with 20 pieces of candy? I don't know. Maybe initially, and only because I don't normally give them 20 pieces of candy. But the reality is, can they enjoy all that candy?

No, they can't enjoy all that candy. It's like, and they're probably going to stuff themselves and not be so happy. And then, next time I go to the store, I can't get them two candy anymore. Now they want 20 candy. And it just sets expectations badly. It's not something they can enjoy. If I give them two pieces of candy, they might be happy. No one's saying they're going to be happy with 20 pieces of candy. If they don't know 20 is an option, they might be just as give them two pieces of candy, they might be happy. No one's saying they're going to be happier with 20 pieces of candy.

If they don't know 20 is an option, they might be just as happy with two pieces of candy. Maybe happier in the end run. And that's the same is true with design, which is the goal of design is to make the audience happy. There's a threshold of happiness. This is an idea I talk about a lot. In design,

there's a threshold of happiness. The goal is not to see how high you can go. The goal is to cross the threshold. What that means is, I want to make our players happy. But once I make my players happy, I've done my job, and that once the players are happy, they're happy. I don't need qualities of how happy I can make them. They're happy.

Once they are happy, they are happy, you know? And it is not like they go, oh, you know, my integrative happiness is like, I'm happy, you know? And our goal is to essentially use as little resources we need to make a good gameplay that makes the players happy. And once they're happy, we're just wasting resources beyond that point. And a lot of times, like, I know we've stuffed sets in the past, but the players just

didn't get it all. Like, you know, like, four months went by, we came onto a new set, and they didn't even absorb everything we had. And, like, look, you want to let them enjoy every, every, every facet of your game, but, you know, you want to make sure that they're not missing things, so then you're just wasting things you can do later.

Now, I know, I know, whenever I talk about this, people don't want to hear that I'm not maximizing everything I can maximize, but, look, that is my job. My job is to make all of you happy and make sure that I can do it next time and the time after that and five years from now and ten years from now and twenty years from now. My goal is not to make you happy right now. My goal is to continue making you happy right now. My goal

is to continue to make you happy as long as we can. And to do that, I have to monitor my resources. Okay, so we got, um, we have all the mechanics in the set, uh, except one. So the last mechanic, this is not a very long story because it's not even a design story, is Eric was concerned during Divine, Divine's the period in between design and development, where design's still in the file but development's giving notes, that he wanted more ways to spend mana. And so I was trying with monsters and a few things to give him that. And ultimately what he realized was that the set was missing something, that we had a lot of pieces that were cool things, but the set needed a little grease

to help you make sure you got those pieces together. And he also wanted a little extra way to spend mana. And Scry kind of fulfilled that role. And so he, during early, early development, and once again, he came to me and talked to me. In fact, I remember what he said to me. He said he needed to add a mechanic to smooth things out.

And he says, well, was I okay with that? He wanted to bring back a mechanic. And I said to him, Eric, it just has to fit in Greek mythology. If it fits in Greek mythology, I'm fine with it. And so he said, how about Scry? And literally, like, how about Scry? My response was,

that is perfect. You know, for those in, Greek mythology is full of omens and soothsayers and prophecies, and it's very, very much a big part of Greek mythology. So Scry as a mechanic

fit really well, and so I was happy. And so that got added into development that wasn't even added in during design. Okay. So I think I have told most of the basics now

of the set so next time I'm going to talk about some card by card stories I've not told you everything about the set I think as I see cards to talk about I'll be able to sort of trigger some ideas and I'll fill some other stories in

but anyway hope you guys are enjoying this trip through Theros. It's always fun to share and talk about it. But, I'm now parked at Wizards. So guys, I have to stop talking about Theros and I have to start making magic. I'll talk to you guys next time.