5/17/13 Episode 34: Future Sight Part III

All podcast content by Mark Rosewater

Okay, I’m pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means! It’s time for another Drive to Work.

Okay, well the last two weeks, I’ve been talking about Future Sight. And so today, I will continue. Because there is a lot to talk about. One of the themes there is that Future Sight has a lot packed into it.

Okay, so last week I had special guest star Matt Cavotta, and he and I went through most of the new mechanics, and I—for those that may or may not remember, or who didn’t listen, I put all of them—I was talking about them, and then I had three different baskets I could put them in.

So basket number one was “I believe we’ll do it again.” We have to find the right place for it, but I believe we’ll do it. Note that that could take a time—that could take a while. Sometimes finding the right spot for something can take a long time. So just because it’s in bucket one doesn’t mean you’re going to see it soon, but I believe that we can do it. It’s just a matter of time until we find the place for it.

Bucket number two means that—there’s something about the mechanic I like, but it has some problem that has to get solved. It might be a design problem, it might be a developmental problem, but it has some problem that like, until that problem is solved it’s probably not going to see the light of day. But that problem could get solved, and in the past we’ve solved problems, so two means it could—it could come out but it’s a little—the chances of it happening is less.

Bucket three is, I highly doubt it’s coming out. It’s—it’s doing something that I just don’t think we want to do. And so there’s not a lot in bucket three, there’s more in bucket two than three, in that a lot of stuff I think we won’t do, it’s like “Well, maybe we’ll solve the problem,” but three is where I just—I have no faith we’re going to solve the problem. I think it’s just something that we’re not going to do. There’s not a lot of threes.

Okay. So, when last we left, next in line—delve. Okay. So, delve is clearly bucket one. Not only is delve bucket one, I have tried to stick it in multiple sets so far. For example, it was in Innistrad for a while, and in fact where I came up with it was I knew when we did Future Sight that we were going to go.

I knew we were going to do Horror World, that I knew was going to have a strong graveyard component. That was already a known factor. I mean, Odyssey was a thing that spawned the idea for doing the horror set, which was I made a graveyard set that didn’t have the theme that matched, and Brady and I discussed “Oh, it would be awesome to have a graveyard set that had a horror theme.” I loved the idea, I sort of scheduled it out, so I knew at the time we did Future Sight that we were going to do that. So I knew we needed graveyard mechanics, so delve was me coming up with a graveyard mechanic.

Now interestingly, having now tried it in a graveyard set, I have now come to realize that delve doesn’t work in a graveyard set. The reason being, in a graveyard set, you want to have things matter in the graveyard, and things that have relevance in the graveyard. Stuff like flashback, for example. But delve just eats your whole graveyard. So when delve is in play, there is no graveyard. So it doesn’t work well in a set where you want nuance in the graveyard, because “chomp chomp chomp” it just eats it all. So.

But. For delve fans, I like delve. I want to find a home for delve. It’s  a tricky mechanic, in the sense that it doesn’t fit in a graveyard set, but it does require some support, you know, because you want to be able to get cards in your graveyard, although natural gameplay gets them in to a certain extent. So anyway, I’m on the lookout, when I find the right place, I mean delve is clearly something I’ve been looking to put in somewhere. And it will happen one day. So—bucket one.

Okay. Next, we got poisonous. Okay, so once again I knew when we did Future Sight that I wanted—that I was planning to do poison. And so I made the best guess at how we would keyword poison. And poisonous really was just me sort of saying “Well, here’s how we’ve done poison in the past, let me just keyword it.” So, you know, the set where we do poison, we’d have a keyworded thing. And, for a while, when I started Scars of Mirrodin, poisonous was in Scars of Mirrodin.

I’m not sure when I did Future Sight if I knew—I think we knew we were going back to Mirrodin, and that the Phyrexians had taken over Mirrodin, because Sarcomite Myr showed that, we knew that, but I don’t know if I yet had figured out that I wanted the Phyrexians to be tied to poison. I might have known that, although maybe I would have hinted at that more if I knew that. I’m not sure what I knew at that point. I did know that I wanted to do poison, I did know the Phyrexians were coming back, I don’t know if I’d figured that out yet. And, poisonous was an honest attempt to figure it out.

Now, what happened during Scars of Mirrodin design, was poisonous turned out to be not interactive enough. There wasn’t much you could do—I mean, you could make them unblockable, but there wasn’t a dynamic interaction. The thing I liked about infect, which is what got us to infect was, that infect—it cared about things that affected power. So stuff like Giant Growth and things—it had a little more dynamism to it. It also made it a little scarier, because when you have a Poisonous 2 creature, well, you know, if you aren’t going to die to two poison, hey, all it’s going to do is deal you two poison. There’s never any suspense, like “Should I block it? Shouldn’t I block it?”

But with infect, it had this nice quality that I liked to it, where let’s say that I—I’ve only taken four poison. So I can take six. Well a creature that normally only deals two poison, you know a two-power creature, I might want to be nervous about that. You might have a trick up your sleeve. You might do something. And I have to think about blocking, you know, way before I know it would kill me. Because a lot of the problem with poison before was, that this was a known quantity. Anyway. I’ll save this for the Scars of Mirrodin podcast.

Poisonous—I’m not sure whether to call it a two or a three. I think I would… I think it’s probably a three in the sense that I think we figured out a better way to do poison. I think in fact, it’s just strictly better than poisonous, that the gameplay of poisonous was just nowhere near as good as the gameplay of infect. And so I feel like if I did poison again, I’m much more likely to just go to infect than go to poisonous. So I don’t—I don’t right now foresee us doing poisonous as poisonous. That’s not to say we wouldn’t do poison in a different way, other than infect, that’s possible, but I feel like if I’m going to do poisonous, infect is just better and I would do infect, so I think poisonous is bucket three.

Aura swap! Aura swap is a mechanic where it goes on auras, and then you can swap it—you pay a mana cost, or you pay a mana, and then you can swap it with an aura in your hand. So the idea is that a creature that has an aura could turn into anything. I’ve—I don’t know. Bucket two, I guess, in the sense that I’m not in love with it, it requires you playing a lot of auras so I need an environment where like, just, you’re going to play a lot of auras in your deck and that’s tricky to make happen.

So—I wouldn’t say three, there’s nothing about it that we couldn’t do, it’s just—it’s the kind of thing that I just need the absolute positively like—somehow I have Aura World, and just already I have auras matter in a way that’s interesting and then I go “Oh, maybe do aura swap!” I mean, it’s—but it really, really needs just the absolute like perfect world to work because it’s a tricky mechanic to make really feel native in the set, so I’d say bucket two.

And finally—oh no, two more. We have typecasting, or typecycling. So in the set there is wizardcycling and slivercycling. That was us riffing off of basic landcycling. So what happened was, Brian Tinsman in Scourge had come up with a mechanic where you could trade cards for basic lands of a particular type. You know, red card would become a mountain. And the idea is, “Oh, well if you don’t really need this red card, maybe it’s expensive, you could trade it in for a mountain if you really need it.” And already in the block we had cycling, and it dawned on me that it was very similar to cycling. Like you were paying some mana, discarding a card in your hand, and—except instead of drawing a card you were going through your library, but I felt it was close. And so I convinced him to turn it into a cycling variant. And so we made, you know, mountaincycling, forestcycling, etc.

Then in… the middle set of Alara—why am I blanking on the name? The middle set. See, this—when you drive, this is one of my problems. Here’s what you guys learned about me, when you get me in my podcast, rather than writing. Like if I’m writing this, I just look it up. And then hey, I know… but the reality is, you’re learning the truth here, I’m horrible at—I am horrible with names. And the worst part about this is I know it’s like a six-letter word starting with C. That’s how my brain works. Uh… Conflux. Conflux. So in Conflux, Bill came up with the idea of sort of taking that and doing basic landcycling. Where you could get any basic land rather than just getting a particular one.

So the idea was, I talked about how Future Sight’s a lot of extrapolative design. So the idea was, “Well, if you could search for a land, maybe you could search for other things.” So we—like, you search for wizards, you search for slivers and stuff. The—I’m not sure whether this is bucket two or bucket three. The problem this has is a lot of the problem that transfigure has, which is mechanics that tutor have a lot of repetitive gameplay issues.

And that—I like tutors, so the tutors I like are ones that we—there’s decks that we call—what do we call them? Toolbox. Toolbox decks. Where the idea is, the tutor, you put lots of one-ofs in your deck, and the tutor allows you to customize what you need when you need it. That is awesome. I love that. You know, I love the that, like, you know, it’s always different because I—it allows me to play cards that are too narrow but it allows me to have access to them so I’m playing cards in my deck I normally don’t play. And it makes a lot of variety because there’s lots of good choices of what you do.

What I don’t like is a tutor that’s just like, “Every game I do the same thing” and it’s just, it just takes the variety that makes Magic so strong, and just lessens it by making the gameplay happen the same thing every game. And so, my worry a little bit is that typecycling would be the latter rather than the former. If there’s a way to make the former work, I’d be tempted. I guess (???) two, we would need to find the right place and the right thing you’re looking for in a way where this wouldn’t be repetitive gameplay and so I guess that’s possible. Bucket two.

Next is chroma, which is interesting in that it’s the only new mechanic in Future Sight that we’ve done. I think. I mean, they introduced lifelink, deathtouch, shroud, and reach. But that doesn’t really count. That’s just us using Future Sight as a chance to show some new terms. I mean we introduced them in the future, but we knew we were doing them.

Okay, so chroma—chroma’s one of those mechanics that I felt never—I think chroma’s a much—has much more potential than Eventide showed it off to be. I—I mean, once again this doesn’t really have a bucket, it’s one because it was in the set. I like chroma. I feel like chroma didn’t—I ended up putting it in a place that felt natural because it—there were a lot of expansion symbols in a hybrid set.

But in some ways it didn’t—it didn’t quite live up to the potential. Like if you ask me for example of—(???) top five mechanics that, like, never lived up to their potential, where like I thought they were going to be a really neat mechanic and they did really cool things, and they first time out we just didn’t really capture the essence of them quite as well. Chroma is in that camp.

Chroma is a mechanic that deserves to come back because I think it is a very neat mechanic, it does very cool things, it makes you think about cards in just—a very different way. Like I love the idea that with chroma in your deck, GG is different than 1G. You know, GG is better for you than 1G. And that’s really interesting, like the idea that you care about how much colored mana you have—I love mechanics that do that. That just take an aspect of the game you never think about and say “Oh, now you do have to care about this!” and it just makes you think about things very differently.

So I—I like chroma, I’m glad we introduced it in Future Sight, and I—it’ll be back. I have to find the right place for it, my caveat for all of these, but I do feel one day I will find the right place for it and then I think it will shine. I hope it will shine.

Okay, so now I’ve talked about all--I mean, there’s lots of other mechanics that were in the set, real quickly—other mechanics that were in the set other than basic keyword mechanics. You know, evergreen mechanics. Flanking, buyback, shadow, echo, cycling, kicker, madness, morph, scry, bloodthirst, convoke, dredge, futurecost—futurecast. Sorry, forecast. Graft. Hellbent. Transmute. Suspend, split second, vanishing, and flash. We introduced flash in that block. Now flash is evergreen.

So anyway, there are a lot of keywords! Forty-eight keywords in the block—in the set. But wait! That was not all the set did. Showing you the future? Yep. Eight thousand million keywords? Yep. But wait! There were also some cycles in the set. So I want to talk about the cycles.

Now one of the things that was interesting about this set—normally when you use cycles, cycles are used to show consistency. That it’s a lot of cards in the set that work the same way. So usually when you use the cycle, it shrinks the mindspace of the set, because five cards are working the same, and so it’s easier to grok it. But one of the things that happened in Future Sight was I used cycles a lot of the time to show variety. So sometimes instead of shrinking mindspace, it grew mindspace.

Meaning—mindspace is how much mental energy it takes to sort of absorb what you’re watching. So what—in game design, one of the things about mindspace is you have to be wary about how much mindspace you’re borrowing from the new player. Or actually any player. The more advanced the player, the more mindspace they can handle because the more they’ve already embedded certain stuff in that it’s easier for them to pick up because they’ve already sort of learned it if you will. Okay, so. These are in no particular order. Just the order they come to mind, I guess.

So one of the most high-profile—I’ve talked about a couple cycles in my first week. The first podcast. So, real quick get those out of the way. The pact cycle, which are the ones in which you cast them now and pay in the future. I already talked about those. The “legends heir” cycle. Which were the legends with grandeur that all represented, you know, ancestors of characters that you already knew. And there was a vertical morph cycle I talked about last week that was a common, uncommon and a rare that were all permanent types that had never had morph before. A land, an enchantment, and an artifact.

Okay. So those are the cycles I’ve already talked about. Now let’s get into some cycles I haven’t talked about. So the dual land cycle. I was very proud of this. So normally, dual lands, you have a cycle that you cycle them and all five are the same. But I was trying to show the future! So we had a future-shifted cycle of lands in which each—so they were allies, so five allied lands, and each one showed a different—came from a different future cycle. And so the idea was that we could hint on where we could go with dual lands.

As it turns out, one of them—(???) Grove of the Burnwillows? Is that right? The red/green one—was it the red/green one? Ended up in Shadowmoor. Which was the one with the hybrid—you know, you can tap it—anyway. You can tap certain colors to get other colors based on hybrid. And then the other four we haven’t done yet. Some of them we will do, some of them we might not do.

The one I really loved that Development cut was, I think the blue/black one was originally a poison dual-land, where you tap for black or tap for blue, but you got a poison every time you tap the land. And I forget whether it tapped for colorless without poison. I think it didn’t. I think no matter what you got poisoned.

And I thought this thing was really cool, but Development gets very scared of poison as a cost, meaning taking poison as a cost, because in environments that don’t have any poison—there’s no threat of being poisond—it’s just this resource that it’s kind of free. Potentially—you know, the first dual land’s “just a dual land,” and the second one—I mean, I’m not sure how many before it becomes a problem. Anyway, I’m fascinated by it, I liked the card a lot, but it scared Development so it changed.

Next we have the keyword land cycle, in which it was a land that I think came into play tapped, it tapped for one of the five colors, it tapped for c in R&D lingo, but each one had a keyword on it. From the past. And that was fun, I mean you know it was kind of neat figuring out “Oh, what would green have? What would blue have?”

You know, blue had—I think blue was transfigure and green was graft and—anyway, I think it was kind of neat. You know. To explore, kind of like—I mean I did mix and match, I talked about that week one. This is kind of mix and match with land in the sense of “Here’s a land, and now we’ll mix it with this keyword.” In that it was fun finding five keywords that would go on a land.

Then we had a repeating suspend cycle. And this one—this is one of the ones that works the same. The idea here was it was kind of a tweak on suspend. The idea was, the spells would go off, and then they would resuspend themselves. So every third turn, the spell would go off. And the reason I liked that in Future Sight was, it was like “You know the spell now, and you know the future. In three turns, this will happen again.” And so—it forced you to change your play because you had knowledge of the future.

Another cycle was the augur cycle, which were creatures, and all of them had a sac effect, but you could only sac during your upkeep, that had a decent-sized effect. And the idea was, I was trying to figure out the right time to use it, but my—my—my—everyone knows, in the future this creature could turn into this thing. And I can’t use them at a moment’s notice, so I sort of have to risk a—do I think I can make it to the next turn? And I thought that also matched the future well in that it sort of—well, what do I think is going to happen in the future? Will this guy survive? Or—No, he’d die before I’d sac him, I’d better sac him now. And so the augur cycle was definitely sort of looking to the future and trying to figure out what, you know, what held.

There was a vanilla cycle which was—we were trying to find a way to make some of the—the futureshifted cards were so complex. That we decided to try to find a way to lower them a little—I mean, not that we lowered them that much. So one of the ideas was, what if we did a vanilla cycle, we put it into the future frames, and then had the frame be different? We had a full-art, a full-art vanilla.

Now one of the things, by the way, people always ask me and go “That was awesome. Can you do more full art vanillas?” I agree. I like the idea. I believe it’s—we will do full-art vanillas at some point. It seems too obviously and too good not for us to revisit. So, I mean, I do think it was a cool idea that we could revisit. Once again, finding the right place and such. But I—I kind of liked them. And I also was happy that we came up with some—you know, future-shifted cards that were simple. That was one of the biggest challenges. I mean, it was also true for the Un-sets, as it is for Future Sight. My hard-to-make sets.

And the reason is that part of what you want to do is, in your commons especially, you want to make nice simple things. But when the rule is, “It’s from the future, you’ve never done it before,” or in silver-border it’s like “It’s something that can’t be done in black-border!” You know. In those kind of environments, you know, making simple things is a lot harder. It’s a lot harder. And so I was happy to have the vanilla cycle.

Okay, we have the spell—the spellshaper cycle. So the spellshaper cycle was all cards that tapped and sacced—sacced  a card, or discard a card to the spellshaper, to make a token. But rather than make a normal token, each one made a token of an existing card. And the idea was, you know, that—and then for fun, four of them made existing cards, and one of them made a card you had never seen before, that would later turn up in the very next set—we put it in Shadowmoor.

It was kind of fun—the cycle both sort of had a nostalgia aspect to it, because four of the five were cards  you knew, it was kind of fun to make tokens of existing cards, and it was new technology, something we hadn’t done before and really haven’t done since. I mean, cards that make tokens of themselves, but it’s very rare that cards make tokens of other cards. Especially cards that aren’t in play. I mean, usually when they make tokens of other cards, it’s like “I clone something.” But here it’s just like “No, no, no, it just makes a card, this card doesn’t exist.” I mean it exists in Magic but it doesn’t exist on the board.

And so anyway, and like I said, that was a cross between us—A. it was nostalgia so it fit in the block, B. it showed a new way to do something so it fit in the future aspect. And it had one of the cards that actually showed something—hinted at a card that didn’t exist yet. So it had that future aspect.

Next was the sliver cycle. So one of the ways we thought might be fun was to take slivers and put on—future abilities on to them. Because it’s like—we wanted to show new abilities, and so one of the things we came up with was “Well, why not make a cycle of slivers that all have new abilities?” Because in the future, you know we think slivers will come back, slivers are very popular, and oh look! Here’s different abilities that they would have in the future.

And anyway, it was a clever way to do it I thought, and people liked slivers, and slivers were a theme in the Time Spiral block, so it allowed us to do sort of a future set of slivers that I thought was kind of neat. You know, we had done slivers sort of earlier in the block that showed other aspects of time, if you will, and this was us doing slivers that were showing the future.

Okay. Those, I think, were all the cycles. I might have forgotten one. So one of the things I want to point out here is, in the last three weeks I have talked about the timeshifted sheet, in which every card was unique and different and weird. We had mix and match, in which we took mechanics from throughout time and mixed them in weird ways. You know, we introduced new mechanics and old mechanics, forty-eight mechanics in all, you know, we had a lot of mechanics that messed around with knowing the future, with the pacts and different things.

You know—when people sort of say “I love this set,” I think what they’re saying is “I”—there has never been a set so dense. That so much is going on. And as a designer, and this is why it’s my art house film, I appreciate filling every nook and cranny. You know what I’m saying? I appreciated that every timeshifted card was a different future, and, you know, mix and match were finding all sorts of unique ways to take all these mechanics and mix them and match them, and that it kind of was a set of indulgence, if you will, in that I had a chance to—it kind of was my no-stop set.

It’s just like, “I’m going to make a set, there is no limits.” And that was fun. I really, really enjoyed making the set. I really, really liked playing the set. You know. I—even now, like before I did this podcast, I went back and I looked at the set. Just, you know, to refresh my memory and—and, like, it was so much fun to look at. There is so much going on.

And I get—I get that if you can appreciate all the nuance, of course it’s a fun set. It is packed to the gills. I mean, there is probably no other Magic set other than maybe the Un sets that have this much just packed into them. You know. That just—literally oozing from its pores. It is oozing, like just if you love Magic, there is like bits and nooks and crannies of every little bit in that set is full of stuff. And, you know, if you get it, that is awesome. It is fun and it is great, and I take pride in the fact that I made, in some level, the most dense set that Magic will probably ever have. I do.

But, to the fans of Future Sight, please understand that—imagine for (???) try to put in the minds of non-advanced players, is imagine going to a movie in which there’s a sequel that just says—imagine it’s number ten in the series. And it goes, “Eh, we’re not explaining anything. We’re just going to assume you’ve seen the first nine movies. We’re not going to bother explaining anything.” You would be kind of lost. You know. Because they are making references left and right to all this stuff, and like normally what happens in the sequel is they spend some amount of time—there’s a new character, somebody somewhere has to explain something, so they sort of catch you up to date with what’s going on.

And I feel like Future Sight was just like yeah, the tenth movie in this series where, like “Screw it! No explaining anything.” You know? And the people who were really invested and really had watched the first nine movies, of course it was the most awesome thing ever because it was just like, it didn’t waste their time explaining anything. It just was like “Let’s get to it.” You know. But, hey, you know, Magic is for—especially the expert expansions, Magic is for everybody.

Now, I will say this. One of the things I have learned from the Rosewater Rumble and watching Future Sight do it, is I’ve realized this. Which is something I hadn’t really hit before, which is “There is a group, there is—you know, of the invested players, that love sort of just pile it on. Pile it on, I got it, I know it, I’ve been playing forever, you know, and I show no fear. Just give it to me as much as much as you can.”

And it’s possible that in a niche product that we were making in which the role of the product is just to meet the needs of a smaller part of the audience, that maybe that would make sense. Maybe it’s possible that’s where we can do something like that. And, and, ironically, I think we kind of have. Modern Masters comes out this summer, and as someone who’s played Modern Masters limited, it is a lot like Future Sight in the sense that it is just chock to the gills with Magic’s past. Seriously.

And I feel like the people who will most appreciate the product are the ones who get the nuance of what’s going on. Because it is complicated if you don’t know what’s going on. It’s—there’s a lot of mechanics from Magic’s past that just “Well here they are,” and so I take away from sort of the latest resurgence of love for Future Sight, that—look, there is an audience that likes this. It’s not for everybody, it’s not something that’s general, it’s not meant for an expert expansion, you know.

When I talk about Future Sight being a failure, I don’t mean that it was a failure… like in a vacuum it wasn’t a failure. I think what it did was very good. I’m very proud of what I did. The players who like it love it, and that audience loves it. The problem was that wasn’t my aim. That wasn’t my audience. I was supposed to go much broader. You know.

And that just as if I made an expert expansion in which, you know, it was great for beginning players and the expert player goes, “Boring! There’s nothing here to do! I’d drafted two drafts and I don’t want to do the third draft!” Hey, that would be a problem. That’s not okay either. You know, all of the Magic sets we make have to be accessible from the less experienced players to the more experienced player. And I talk a lot about lenticular design and trying to sneak things in so that the beginning player doesn’t see it but the expert player understands and there’s all this stuff for them to think about, you know.

And I want to have every set to have the scope of “easy-to-grasp” to “complicated.” I just want the complicated stuff to be hidden so that the experienced player can see it but the beginning player can’t see it. That way it’s not intimidating for them. Future Sight was not that. It was not that at all. Future Sight was in your face. In your face. Here’s forty-eight mechanics you do not know. And here’s lots of wackiness going on. And all this nostalgia stuff that you probably don’t understand what we’re referencing, and, you know. Just overwhelming.

But, the good news is, I now think I understand better the idea of “Look, niche audience, we make niche products, maybe we can make a niche audience for this niche product.” And, by the way, I kind of think Modern Masters is—so I do believe that this audience is getting something. But, we could also do more stuff in the future.

And that’s a good takeaway. I mean, I didn’t know what I was going to take away from the Rosewater Rumble, to be honest, I did it more for fun, I mean I did it more as something that I thought would generate social media, I’m goofing around with doing more event stuff on social media. Anyway, my communication background is showing.

So—but what I did learn is that there is this much-beloved part of Magic and that Future Sight is the poster child of this. And that look, there is an audience for that material, and that’s a niche audience but it’s there. And that’s something we have to keep in mind, that’s something we have to respect. And—and every once in a while, we do sneak stuff in to you guys, you know, into our products, but it’s a little more hidden than it was in Future Sight where it was blatant in your face.

Anyway, I have just parked, and so only three episodes later, I have talked about Future Sight design. And it was fun. It was actually—it was really fun for me to go back and look at the set and sort of remember all the things I did, and I was surprised by how much I packed into it. I mean just the number of unique ideas and cycles and mix and match and ay yi yi. It was—I’m proud of the amount of material I’ve managed to get into it. And like I said, it didn’t quite live up to what’s some of its goals, but look, it did what it did very well, and as a designer it was a huge challenge, so I was very proud of it. And like I said, it’s my art house film, it will always have a soft place in my heart. It did something unique that I probably never will have a chance to do again, at least in an expert expansion.

So anyway, this is Future Sight, I hope you guys had fun listening to me, and Matt for one of them, talk about it, and so I guess it’s time to go make the Magic.