Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #84 - Theros, Part 4

Episode Date: January 4, 2014

Mark returns to his Theros series with Part 4.

Okay, I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, the last couple podcasts, I've been talking about the design of Theros. So today, I'm going to start talking about some of the individual cards and some stories about the cards. But before I can do that, I realized I never introduced my design team. Bad morrow, bad morrow! One of the things I always like to do is talk about the design team. Bad morrow, bad morrow. One of the things I always like to do is talk about the design team. Part of the point of my podcast is a little historical context and hey, who are the people that made this set? I do want to talk about that a little bit. So first up, Ethan Fleischer. So Ethan was the winner of the Great Designer 2 search.

And at the time this started, he was an intern. He hadn't yet been hired full time. But I wanted him on the set. And in fact, I had given him an assignment, as I talked about previously, to do research. Because research was something he was very good at. And I said, okay, let's do some research on Wigan Ruin Mythology. I wanted some experts. I had one other

expert I'll get to in a second. And Ethan, obviously the way it works at Wizards is we don't tend to hire people right away, we tend to give them an internship, and then we use that internship to sort of give us six months to gauge, you know, how we feel they're doing.

And this allows us to sort of, it gives us time to pick the right people, you know, that we don't have to, you know, we're not sort of just guessing without knowing that we have someone who we can actually spend some time with. So Ethan, during the six-month period, was trying very, very hard. He wanted to stay at Wizards, and I wanted him to stay at Wizards. I thought he was very good. I had seen a lot of his potential during the Great Designer search, but I wanted to make sure that the potential I saw became realized,

so that other people could see it as well. And so I thought this would be a very good project for him. He was very passionate about Greek and Roman mythology. He was very excited. Like, what happens is, when you come to Wizards, we fill you in. You learn all the stuff, all the sets in between, you know, that we've done that are done,

but you don't know yet. And then you learn stuff that's upcoming that we're going to work on. And when Ethan found out we were doing Greek and Roman mythology, he was very excited. So I said, okay, I'm going to tap into this. Ethan, so one of the things that I do in my designs is I have what I call a strong second,

which is I have somebody so one of the things that I do in my designs is I have what I call a strong second, which is, um, I have somebody take care of the file. Um, now I do this for two reasons. One is I'm very busy and sort of inputting the file is a lot of work. Um, it's something that for many, many, many sets I did. Uh, normally the lead designer does it and it's a very valuable tool for a lead designer because just being able to constantly put things in looking at the file

helps you sort of figure out where you want things to be but I've done a lot of sets and what I learned is that having somebody else be in charge of inputting everything gives them a much better chance to see this the same reason the head designer

the lead designer wants to see a set it allowed my strong second to do that and so A it freed me up a little bit because I'm busy. And B, it was a good teaching tool. And so the reason I have a strong second on all my sets is it's a very, very valuable way to teach. Because the person's there, they see all the changes, they walk through the things they want to do, and they're the ones constantly monitoring the set, of watching what's going on. And I'm the only person that does that because most lead designers

still want to sort of control their file, or monitor their file, I guess I control my file, but want to monitor their file. And I've done it long enough that, you know, I don't need to be so close to sort of get a sense of where it's at. Anyway, Ethan was my strong second.

He did a very good job. Another reason Ethan was on the team was we were planning to have Ethan lead his very first set, which was going to be Journey into Nyx, which was the third set in the block. And so I wanted Ethan on the first and second set. So by the time he got there, he was well-versed on every set in the block.

Okay, next. Ken Nagel. So Ken Nagel, he was the runner-up for the first great designer search. Alexis Jansen won. Both Alexis and Ken got internships, and then Ken ended up turning his internship into a full-time job. Alexis also turned into a full-time job, but not in R&D. She's very, very involved in the digital side of things,

in Magic Online. So, Ken was in charge of Born of the Gods, which was the next set. And so, usually on the large team, we always have the person leading the next set on the team so they can observe

what's going on. We don't always have the third person on the first team. team so they can observe what's going on. We don't always have the third person on the first team. Sometimes they're on the second team. I just need them to be familiar before they get there. But since Ethan was new and it was his first set, I wanted him to be involved for the whole block. Also, I double things up in that. I get a second that I'm teaching with.

So Ethan kind of doubled up both in the strong second role and the fact that he could watch the upcoming sets because he was working on the third set. Ken Nagel is interesting. Ken is my most experienced designer now. I mean, I said it myself, obviously. And it's funny because I remember when Ken had his internship and, you know, but five years have gone by and Ken has made a lot of sets and Ken has become a very, very good designer.

So it is fun watching your little ones grow up. So, yeah, I mean, Ken has really come to shine, and you'll see with Born of the Gods, he did an excellent job. But anyway, Ken was here to sort of, I mean, hey, Ken's just a good designer. I mean, one of the things you want to make sure on every design team is just have enough good designers that you know you'll get a lot of cards, and Ken is a card machine.

So having Ken around is always useful. And like I said, he gives good insight, makes great cards. And Ken has been, you know, really coming along as an excellent designer. So it is fun to watch Ken's growth over the last five years. Next, we have Zach Hill. Okay, so I talk about how we always have a developer on the team, what we call the development representative or the dev rep. Zach has been on a number of different design teams.

I really enjoyed having Zach on my team. He was a developer that actually did a decent amount of design. The dev rep can vary. Some developers do a little bit of design. Some do a lot of design. Most developers can do some design. They understand the basics. Some of which, and there's a variance of design. Most developers can do some design. They understand the basics. Some of which, and there's a variance of sort of how much design I did. Zach was in the

middle. He was a developer that could do design. He wasn't quite a designer in a traditional sense, but he was a developer that contributed very, very much to the design process. And I loved working with Zach. I say past tense because Zach has since moved on to other things. He's no longer at Wizards. But I really, really enjoyed having Zach. And another thing Zach did on this set is we have a design team

and then we have a development team. And we always have a person that's on both. The crossover. Somebody who, on the development team, can speak the vision and the ideas the design team had. And so it's not always the dev rep. Sometimes it's somebody else.

But in this particular set, it was Zach. So Zach was very, very involved in this set because he was on both the design team and the development team. Next we have Jenna Helen. So Jenna is from the creative team. So one of the things that I like to do is there's something called card concepting. What card concepting is, is for a set, somebody has to sit down and look at what the cards mechanically do and figure out what is the art going to be about? What's the concept of the art? And the idea of card concepting

is saying, well, I need to get an image that I think will both portray what this card is doing and capture the flavor of the world we're doing. I have a few examples later on of some interesting places how they concepted. Anyway, I like having, we always have a creative team member on the large set. We try to have creative team members on all sets if we can, but for sure, for sure on the large set. I like having the person in charge of concepting be my creative person, and Jenna was, because it allows the person who's doing the concepting to really understand what matters.

So Jenna, by the way, was the other expert on Greek and Roman mythology. She also did a lot of research, and they needed to do a lot of research to be able to do the background, because the trick about creative was we're doing a world inspired by Greek and Roman mythology, which means it has a lot of elements of Greek mythology.

And once again, we didn't do Roman mythology, we did Greek mythology. It had a lot of elements of Greece, ancient Greece and Greek mythology. But it was very important in them that we make our own world. Like one of the things is,

early magic, take us out like Arabian Nights, it was just really trying to copy Arabian Nights. It was trying to, like, what would Arabian Nights look like? Nowadays, we more want to carve our own world, and so Theros has its own cosmology and its own, you know,

there's cities and people and monsters, but it has its own history to it, and now it's very much borrowed from Greek mythology in the sense that that is the source of inspiration, but it's its own history to it and now it's very much borrowed from Greek mythology in the sense that that is the source of inspiration but it's its own thing. Like one of the things that came up from time to time is we'll add a few things that are our own tweaks on things. I know the Lenin are the ones that got the most attention

and the idea was, look, mostly we are doing Greek mythology but we're trying to have a little bit be a magics version of it and so we add a few things that are our own. We take a lot of things that were doing Greek mythology, but we're trying to have a little bit be a magic's version of it. And so we had a few things that are our own. We take a lot of things that were in Greek mythology. But we also, for example, a very, very common thing is in Greek mythology, most monsters there was one of. You know, there was one Minotaur.

There was one Pegasus. I think there were three Gorgons. You know, there was not a lot of certain monsters. But for us, we're like, no, we need a whole bunch of monsters. So in our world, they're races. They're not, you know, individual singular things.

Jenna, by the way, the creative team, like the dev team, is there's a mix of how much design they can do. Jenna always surprises me with her design. She is, she always is, it's very funny. Jenna is very, the person who goes, oh, I don't know.

I'm not sure if I can do this. And then like turn stuff in and it's good funny. Jenna is the person who goes, oh, I don't know. I'm not sure if I can do this and then like turn stuff in and it's good, you know. And I've had Jenna on a bunch of teams. She also was on Innistrad. So I've had Jenna on both my top-down designs

and she's been very, very helpful. One of the things we used to do is Jenna would make a list of names and bring them in. And we did a lot of top-downs from the names. We'll get to some of those where she would just come up with a cool name and then we would design to it. And we did a lot of top-downs from the names. We'll get to some of those, where she would just come up

with a cool name, and then we would design to it. And there's some very, very cool stuff we made that was based just on names that we had. Finally, this last person, Billy Moreno, wasn't actually on the Theros design team. He, in fact, was on

the advanced planning team, but he was the guy who made Bestow. And so, one of my big beliefs in design is I'm a big believer in design credit. I want to make sure that whoever designed things gets credit for what they do. And so I gave him credit as being on the design team, although technically he was on the design team. But he did contribute to Bestow, which is a huge part of the design, so he gets credit for the design. Billy, like Zach, is no longer with us. We've had a little bit of churn in our development.

Interesting, by the way, both Zach and Billy left with their own accord. Both of them had reasons they needed to leave. Both loved Wizards, but both had other opportunities. We enjoyed having both of them there, and both of them will be missed. Billy, by the way, is more of a... I mean, he's a little more developer than designer,

but he definitely is a developer-designer hybrid in that Billy is a pretty strong designer. If Billy had focused his energies, I could have used Billy on my design team. His thought process is a little more development than design, but he was a very strong designer, and Bestow, I think, is an excellent design to give an example of what Billy's capable of. Well, finally, of course, I was on the design team.

If that's not obvious, I was leading the design team. One of the things that happened is Aaron Forsythe, the director of Magic R&D, Aaron and I decided that for the near future, that I'm just going to leave all the fall sets. I've led four out of the five last fall sets, so this is not a giant departure. I did not leave Return to Ravnica. Instead,

I did Gatecrash. But before that, I'd done Zendikar and Scars of Mirrodin and Innistrad. So I'd mostly been doing the fall sets. We just sort of solidified it. There's a lot going on in the small sets. I'm sorry, in the large sets, the fall sets.

And as head designer, a lot of my structure in the block, it helps for me to be the person doing the first set. Anyway, it just, for a lot of reasons, it makes a lot of sense for me to do it. So I, for the foreseeable future, am doing the fall sets. I did next year's fall set. I'm currently working on the fall set after that. So I did Huey and then working on Blood. So, okay, let's talk some magic cards. Okay, so we'll talk, start with the Akron horse. So one of the things that we did early on is we wrote on the board, we had a

brainstorming session, is what magic cards would you expect to see? If you know we're doing Greek-inspired world, what would you expect to see? So one of the things we stuck on the board was Trojan horse. Okay, so for those that don't know the story, I'll do a very abbreviated version. Homer wrote a book called The Iliad and The Odyssey, two books. The Iliad was about a war, the Trojan War.

And Odysseus, the main character, who's a king, a lot of kings in Greek mythology, he travels to Troy to participate in this war. Anyway, the wars start because he takes Helen. Anyway, there's a war. I guess that's all you need to know. And one of the things is the city of Troy is well defended. They have like a giant wall

and they're having trouble fighting against Troy. So one of the things they do in the story is they make a giant wooden horse as a gift and they leave the wooden horse, like a giant statue, basically, out in front of the city. And the city goes, oh,

how nice, a gift. Maybe they don't want to fight anymore. And to show this, they are giving us this gift. And so they wheel this giant horse into their city. And, of course, inside the horse are a bunch of the soldiers from the other side. And at night, when it's dark, they sneak out of the horse, let their fellow people in, and sack Troy.

Anyway, it is a pretty iconic piece of the Iliad, of Greek mythology. So we're like, okay, we've got to do a Trojan horse. Now clearly, it couldn't be a Trojan horse because there's no Troy. So it's an Acheron horse because we have Acheros. Acheros, by the way, is the there are three cities, and Acheros was the Sparta-inspired city. One of the cities was inspired by I don't know, I just remember

off the top of my head, by Athens, and was a more philosophical-based. Athens was more about the philosophers, and they were more, they were the thinkers.

And then you had Sparta, and they were the fighters. And so we had our two cities. One was based on Athens. One was based on, I did not write down the name of the city. It's Akros,

it's the Sparta city. I'm not good at names. It's out of my head riding in my car. And the third one was based on Amazon. For those who know Wonder Woman, she is from Amazonia or Paradise Island or Themyscira. And the idea is it's where the Amazons lived. And this was, The third city is kind of based on that. And so one of the things that the creative team wanted is the idea of cities surrounded by wilderness, super Greek, and the idea that there's culture and there's people who live in the cities, but they're surrounded by wild animals and wild beasts. Very, very Greek.

They wanted to do that to play that off. They wanted to play with the different city-states. So the key to the Trojan horse was trying to find a way to capture the flavor of a Trojan horse, but also make a card that plays well. One of the big things that can happen is when you are making top-down cards, here's a common mistake, is you make a card that's really, really top-down. It matches. Oh my gosh, that's exactly what it is. It matches exactly. But it doesn't play well. And the problem is, we're not going to make magic cards that don't play well, or at least

we don't want to. Maybe we occasionally make them. But we don't try to make them. We want our cards to play well. And so the key was trying to find out... The goal of making a top-down card is not to make it as matching the flavor as possible. It is not, actually.

The goal of a top-down card like this is to, once again, I talk about thresholds, hit the threshold where it makes sense and it's flavorful, but then have a good gameplay. So what you want on a top-down card is a marrying of good gameplay with matching what is going on, but the goal is not to match as closely as possible. The goal is to match it enough that it feels right and then make sure it plays well. And this Kronen horse was made by, I believe, Ken Nagel. And so basically the idea is you gift the horse to your opponent, but then you get a token every turn.

So a bunch of people have said, wait, wait, shouldn't it have been like one dumping of tokens because, you know, they hide in and they jump out at night and what we found was that just the gameplay of slowly getting things

we felt matched close enough and just was better gameplay. And so we like the idea that if I get this out the longer I keep it out. Because one of the things we wanted is, we wanted your opponent to go,

oh, oh no, the horse, I got to get rid of the horse and they have to do something with the horse. You know, that they want to stop you getting the people, they've got to stop the horse, and that would be just better gameplay. Okay, we move on to Arena Athlete. So yeah, by the way, when I do this card by card, a lot of the cards I'm talking about, I talked about in my article on cards, mostly because the best stories I had, I wrote about. I will try to add new information here, so you'll learn some stuff you didn't know

from the article. And I'm also trying to pick some cards I didn't talk about, or read an athlete doing one of them. But there's going to be a lot of duplication of my article. Pretty much, by the way, if you don't like hearing things I say in my articles,

I mean, I try to make sure my podcast adds extra value, but there's going to be some repeat of content. That's just the nature of I have so many stories to tell and so many mediums to tell them in. So Arena Athlete is a good example of how we wanted to, how we take heroic and craft what we do. So one of the things that's very interesting is, one of the things that design will do during design is, and this is something that development

had been doing and we just started doing in design so that like, by the time it gets to development, design's already spent some time

and energy on it. Something Eric was very big on and started, I think, with Innistrad. The first step that Eric had led for me,

Eric had asked for something which is, he goes, can you define for me the 10 two-color pairs in draft, what you expect to do if you're drafting

those colors? And so in my document I handed off to him, I spelled out what those ten things were. And he used that as inspiration to how to develop his set. A few of them he changed. Sometimes he'll come to me and go, oh, you said this, and that's not working out. What do you think of that? And he and I will talk it through. So one of the things was we wanted to figure out how to use heroic, meaning where was it valuable.

And so what we came up with was there were three decks that we thought could use heroic. And once again, when I'm talking about archetypes we're laying out, that doesn't mean there aren't other things you can do. It just means there's certain directions we point you in to say, here's some guidance in these color combinations. That doesn't tie your hands. That doesn't mean that there's not other things you can do, but it does mean we are trying to guide you in a certain direction. So with heroic, we realized there were three different styles of play. There was a white-blue heroic deck, there was a white-green heroic deck, and there was a white-red heroic deck. You could do other combinations, but those were the colors that we had spelled it out that sort of had a strategy to it. And white-blue, because they were heroic colors, allowed you to have

the most heroic creatures, and allowed you to make a deck that just, you would stock your deck full of things that were heroic enablers, like the, as I'll get to, the spells that target two of your things and such. White-green was a building up, was more mid-range. White and green are the ones that have plus one, plus one counters on them. So white and green was definitely building up, so that was not quite as fast. White-red was the more aggressive aggro strategy, as we call it. White and red is the most aggro color combination. If you notice, most of the time, if you're playing white and red in draft,

you are playing a more aggressive deck. By the way, people always ask me that, like, how come in this set, white and red doesn't do something different? Why are they always the aggro? And I'm like, well, there's some consistency to magic. You know, the nature of what white does and what red does, and white is weenies and red has an aggressive strategy, that they lend themselves together to doing something.

And so every once in a while, we'll have a set where maybe they go a little bit in another direction, but really the point is, white-red is the most aggressive color. They're going to be doing an aggressive thing. You're playing white-red, you're playing an aggressive strategy, usually. And so, each set will have different things that we're doing, but it will be...

I mean, there's different ways to play the aggro deck, but just like there's always a giant growth every set. You know, we give a different, we'll twist it a little bit and do different things with it. Magic is magic because there's always a giant growth. Magic is magic because there's a white-red aggressive strategy in draft. That's kind of what white-red is about. So when picking heroic abilities for white and red,

now be aware, white, for example, had a bunch of different strategies. So it's heroic creatures. We knew that not every heroic creature would fit in a white-red deck. But we made some that overlapped. You know, some of the smaller ones that get plus one, plus one counters are good in white-green and white-blue and white-red. Anyway,

red heroic was a little more focused on white-red because that's the number one strategy we expect heroic to be played with in limited, mind you. We did a lot of stuff for constructive that's a little different. And this is a perfect example of what's an ability we can give a heroic creature that's really good in an aggressive-based strategy and can't block is very good. You know, in a slower control-type strategy, not very good. In a slower, control-the-strike strategy, not very good. But in a strategy where I'm just constantly hitting you and I'm trying to eke out every point of damage

because I'm trying to beat you as quick as I can, that's very valuable, and it's a good thing. So one of the things you'll find is when we are figuring out what heroic things to put on a creature, we are also very, very careful to think in our heads about how it plays into the strategy. It's not just like, what can we do in red? It's more so than that. It's like just like, what can we do in red? It's more so than that.

It's like, oh, what is red going to do here, and how can we maximize what we're doing? Okay, next is Ashiok. Now, Ashiok is very hard to talk about, only because not using pronouns is very tough. So I will say the word Ashiok a lot. Ashiok is very interesting, because I talked about how I had a story early on. Now, once again, let me phrase this.

I'm not in charge of the story. I'm in charge of doing design. But early on, I need to have some archetypal story for me to understand. And usually, I get creative to sign off on some base story that they then tweak once we get farther along. So for my purposes, I have a story so that I have an idea of what I'm doing, knowing that it's going to be changed a bit along the way. In my original story, I wanted to make a planeswalker, a new villainous planeswalker. And my planeswalker had the ability to bring dreams and nightmares to life.

That was his shtick. That was what he was good at. And like I said, originally it was Dark Jace was my idea. And some of what I was doing with enchantment creatures was messing around with the idea of bringing dreams to life. I mean, the gods were involved, but... Anyway, it was... I very much had a nightmare character that I had pitched in the early version of the story.

And the creative team, when I get to Elsbeth, I'll talk about this, really, really wanted Elsbeth to be the hero. And they had a much more Greek mythological story they wanted to tell, so they shifted a little bit away from where I started. But anyway, I find it interesting that there did end up being a planeswalker associated with nightmares and Celestia's dreams. And Ashiak is that planeswalker. I don't think Ashiak was what I was envisioning,

because Ashiak is more like I had the character I had made and it was always Dark Jace but I mean it was a villain a villain through and through up to no good Ashiok a little less clear what Ashiok is up to because Ashiok is a mysterious planeswalker

with mysterious motives one of the things that I enjoyed quite a bit, by the way, was it was always our intent that Ashiak was a mystery.

But what happened was when people, especially in the guidebook, what do we call that, the player's guide, they wanted to talk about all the planeswalkers

like they always do. And it is just very, very, very hard to talk about something for awalkers like they always do, and it is just very, very, very hard to talk about something for a long period of time and not use pronouns. And so the writer just decided, you know, Ashiok is undefined, but I will just

use he because it's easier to talk about. And a little bit that Doug was really, really wanted. I mean, part of Ashiok's... The unknownness of Ashiok is a very important part of Ashiok. And I'm very warmed how well Ashiok's been received. It was interesting how much people really latched on

and really took Ashiok to heart. So I'm very, very happy we made Ashiok. And like I said, the intent of the unknown was always a key part of the character. And so I think that the... Once again, if we know who the Planeswalkers are at the time,

we knew Elspeth, for example, we will design cards during design. But sometimes, Ashiok, what happened with Ashiak was, so the way the Planeswalkers work is, the creative team comes to us and says, here's the characters we need. Here's the Planeswalkers we need.

They're in the story, they're important, we need. And then they sit down, usually with Eric, and figure out, because normally we have five Planeswalkers in a block. And they will figure out who they need to have and then what colors those characters are and then they work with Eric to figure out what the gaps are because there needs to be a color balance in the planeswalkers because planeswalkers are very powerful

and we need to have a color balance so what will happen is so for example for this set they knew they needed Elspeth and they knew Elspeth was white they knew they needed Xenagos, and Xenagos was red-green. There are two other planeswalkers to come. I don't want to talk about them too much, but they definitely, some of them were to find.

And so the whole ended up being we needed a black planeswalker. And so the goal basically was we needed a black planeswalker. And so the goal basically was we needed a black planeswalker. And then I don't know who made Ashiok, but the idea was they wanted this mysterious character that showed up at times of peril and it made more sense as a blue black planeswalker. So they talked to Eric and the blue was okay. So they...

Anyway, Ashiok got made to fill a role, which was, they needed a black planeswalker and blue-black was okay. Anyway, so that's where Ashiok came to be.

Sometimes, like I said, planeswalkers start from, oh, we need this character, okay, they're this color, hey, make this planeswalker. And so the creative team always gets to start with a couple, but then development gets to come in and start to say, okay, well, now we need to balance them,

and then creative will make one just to fit that balance. Okay, I am pulling into work and looking at my chart. So here's, I mean, you can't see this, this is the lovely audio medium. So I have, I make, you can't see this since this is the lovely audio medium. So I have, I make a little list when I have stuff to do. And so I made a, I have a page full thing with a divider line, so two columns. I have one page full, second page full, third page, it's a little tiny bit on, but I have over two pages, two columns of cards to talk about. How far did I get?

I haven't left A yet. I haven't got out of A. So anyway, hopefully you guys like hearing about, uh, Pharos, because, uh, I got some stuff to talk about. But you know what? I'm going to keep talking about it, because, uh, from all I can tell, you guys like the podcast about podcast about the sets and about the car designs. And so I'm having fun talking about it. And I'm trying to, like I said, I'm trying to add up some new information and tell you some stuff you might not have heard, along with a few things maybe you have heard.

But anyway, I'm looking at the Wizards building right now. And I know that I have some work to do. So I enjoy talking to you guys all about Theros. It's fun. I had a great time making Theros. I had a lot of fun talking about Theros. It's fun. I had a great time making Theros. I had a lot of fun talking about Theros. But while talking about Theros is fun, the reason I get paid is for making magic.

I'll see you guys next time. Bye.