8/23/13 Episode 48: Scars of Mirrodin, Part I

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. So today… it’s design story day! Today I’m going to talk about the design of Scars of Mirrodin. So, (???) stories to tell. Let me first start by talking about the design team. So the design team—this is going to seem like a long list, I’ll explain in a second why it was so long. So I led it, it had Mark Gottlieb, Alexis Janson, Erik Lauer, Matt Place, Mark Globus, and Nate Heiss.

Now, most of those names should be familiar. Mark Gottlieb currently is the Design Manager, and he was formerly the Rules Manager. And before that, actually, he was an editor for Magic in the very beginning. Yeah, Mark and I have a long relationship. It’s funny, because when he was the Rules Manager, one of the running jokes is that the Head Designer and the Rules Manager, you know, are mortal enemies.

Because it’s the job of the—of the Head Designer to do things we’ve never done before! And it’s the job of the Rules Manager to make everything work just like we’ve always done it before! So definitely it’s—it’s the kind of thing, like—Door to Nothingness, for examples, I really wanted “Destroy target player.” That was the effect. And he’s like “No, no, we have,” you know, “It’s ‘target player loses the game.”

And I’m like “Well, that’s—yeah yeah yeah yeah, I understand that’s how we write it, but it would be much more exciting if it’s ‘destroy target player.” And like, kind of the—it’s that conflict that we always had of, he’s trying to figure out how to take things and word them as we’ve always done, and I’m always trying to find ways to make things seem exciting and different. And so I want to try things a little differently than we’ve done before. But anyway, regardless of the fact that we had the little ongoing joke of—we actually get along pretty well, and he became my Design Manager a little over a year ago, I think.

So the way it works is, we have a six-person design team. I’m no longer in charge of managing the team. That’s Mark’s job. I’m in charge of overseeing the technical skills, and I’m in charge of overseeing design, but the idea is that by having  a manager, that I have to do less management and I can focus and spend more time on doing design. Because I am a better designer than I am a manager. And it just—the problem is that there’s so much going on that just—I—having to spend time to do all the management stuff just kept me away from doing design stuff. And so I now have a manager who does the management stuff. Which is Mark Gottlieb. And Mark is an awesome designer, he has led a couple sets, and he’s leading a set right now, so he—he’s—and he and I worked on it together. He and I co-led Gatecrash. So.

Alexis Janson, winner of the first Great Designer Search, just led her first set with Dragon’s Maze. She has been on a lot of teams, she’s very good, obviously, great designer, and—but she doesn’t work in R&D. She’s one of the people we have on loan. She actually works in Digital working on Magic Online and all sorts of stuff there. But we borrow her from time to time.

Erik Lauer is currently the Head Developer—well, the equivalent of—I’m the Head Designer, he’s the equivalent for Development. And—at the time, though, he wasn’t—he was not yet—did not yet have the position because this is a while back. And Matt Place was also a developer, and like I said, Matt’s one of my favorite developers of all time, although he currently does not work at Wizards.

And then Nate Heiss—Mark Globus is another person who came from the first Great Designer Search, he came in fourth I believe, and he is the producer for Magic, which means that we have a lot of balls in the air, you know, there’s a lot of moving parts, and he’s the one that just makes sure everything is running smoothly. And he oversees that. And it’s—it’s a very complex job. There’s a lot going on. And Globus is kind of Aaron’s right-hand man to make sure that everything’s running smoothly.

And then Nate Heiss no longer works at Wizards, but he was very involved with digital games and—remember Gleemax, a thing we tried for a while, to make a social gaming thing that didn’t quite work out. But anyway, he was one of the designers, and he wasn’t a Magic designer, I mean he didn’t work specifically on Magic, but he played Magic and—I mean, he was a long-time Magic player. And so we had him on.

So what happened was, the reason it’s so large is we actually had one team, and then in the middle we switched up some stuff. So I think what happened is like the team originally was me and Alexis and Gottlieb and Matt, and then halfway through—and Nate. And Nate, I think. And then halfway through, I swapped—Matt got swapped out for Erik, and Nate got swapped out for Globus, and so—I’ll explain as I get into my story why we swapped halfway through, because that’s something I don’t think I’ve ever explained.

So. To really talk about where the set came from, we have to go back. Go back in the—in the time machine to Mirrodin. Ooooo!

Okay, so. Actually, farther than that. So I talk about how there’s a story that I at least started the ball rolling for the Weatherlight Saga. And the Weatherlight Saga ended up in the Invasion block. At this point I wasn’t very involved in the story anymore, but—

So Invasion, for those that do not know, and there are people at R&D who have claimed they do not know, it was about an invasion. By the Phyrexians on Dominaria. And, thanks to lots of planning by Urza and all sorts of stuff, the Phyrexians are defeated. Utterly defeated! They are destroyed. Finally! The curse of the Phyrexians have been wiped from the multiverse.

Now. For those that know anything about good storytelling. You don’t just completely kill off villains as good as the Phyrexians. And let me be clear. I love the Phyrexians. They are my favorite villain. Of all Magic—like, as far as I’m concerned, I consider them the Lex Luthor to Magic’s Superman. Now, there’s an argument that can be made that it’s Nicol Bolas, I mean he’s the other big bad guy. But to me the Phyrexians have always been—literally, since the early days of Magic, have been one of the most awesome villains.

And the reason I love the Phyrexians, I’ve talked about this before, is, they’re what I call “environmental villains.” Which is Magic does a good job of showing you an environment. And the Phyrexians are not just a singular thing, they are themselves an environment. It’s very easy to show Phyrexia because they get to show up in lots of cards. Because what they do is they infect the environment. And that’s very visible. And I enjoy that.

I also enjoy the Phyrexians for other reasons. I mean, they were my favorites before this happened, but also the Phyrexians were my means to bring back poison to the game. I’ll talk about this briefly, which is—when I first started playing Magic, way way back when—well, I started in Alpha, but when I picked up Legends, Legends introduced the concept of poison. I think it was on a couple cards.

And I thought the idea was awesome. Like, I poison my opponent, and then just, no matter what, he gets ten poison, dead! I thought that I—I spent so much time building poison decks, and--and poison for a long time was something that Magic kind of did in dribs and drabs, and it was never at a high power level, but I loved it nonetheless. I mean, I’m a Johnny, so I was just—I loved trying to win with weird ways. So trying to win with a poison deck back in the day was quite the challenge.

And—but anyway, around the time of—oh! What happened was, Tempest was going to have a poison theme. In fact, Bogavhati, which is the codename for Tempest, was named after a land of poison snakes. An Indian land of poison snakes. Because originally, Tempest was—was a poison set. Lots of poison in it. And it was decided at the time of Tempest that we didn’t want to be in the poison game. That enough people—not me, obviously—thought that poison wasn’t right for Magic. And so poison went away.

And I made it my goal—one of my goals. I really wanted to bring poison back. And I—during Unglued 2, I tried to bring poison back, and Unglued 2 never actually saw the light of day. And I kind of knew I wanted to bring it back, but I was just waiting for the right time and the right place. Because one of the things I’ve learned is, I play—I play Magic for the long game. Meaning if I have a good design, I wait for the right place to put it.

Because the worst thing you can do is put a design in the wrong place and try to force it, because A. not only will it usually not end up in the set, but then people think very badly of it, and they think of it as being a bad mechanic. You know, one of—one of the things that I’m constantly doing as Head Designer is making people understand that, you know, just because a mechanic doesn’t work doesn’t make it a bad mechanic, it just means it’s not right for this set. You know. And a lot of times, you try something and it will fail, and that doesn’t mean the mechanic is a failure, it means it doesn’t support what you need right now.And so I wanted to make sure—because poison already had a lot going against it. I didn’t want to sort of try to make poison work until I knew I could do it correctly.

Okay, so now. Now—now let’s go to Mirrodin. In Mirrodin, Brady Dommermuth got a pretty cool idea. He said “The Phyrexians are a cool villain. We don’t want to forever flush the Phyrexians away.” You know. And—and to be fair, you know, if you—(???) story, I talk about the Phyrexians as being the plague archetype. Like zombies and the Borg and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The idea is, we come, we will make you part of us. You know. We will—we will grow and then you will become us. And that’s very scary. You know. And the idea is, every person that falls, they’re stronger. Right? It makes it a very hard army to fight against.

But if you ever watch the end of any one of those films, especially like in the fifties or sixties, you know, like, “the curse is—we’ve—we’ve—we’ve beaten them!” And then there’s always some shot of like some little guy that got away, and it’s like “The end?”

So like, we kind of in our heart of hearts knew. I mean, being that the Phyrexians literally go down to a drop of oil, they are a hard enemy to truly eradicate. And so Brady came up with this neat idea that for—that Karn had gotten tainted when he had visited Phyrexia somewhere during the Urza’s Saga storyline, I believe. But he was a planeswalker, and the spark kept the infection from happening. And so—or kept it at bay. And the idea was that Karn would inadvertently spread the plague.

And so in the Mirrodin book, like  when we came up with the idea of Mirrodin, Brady had the idea and we put it in—into Mirrodin, that the Phyrexians had gotten a little tiny handhold. And in fact, if you look, there’s lots of little subtle clues about the fact that the Phyrexians are there.

And the idea was that we were going to come back years later and—in fact, in fact, here’s how we originally were going to do it was, we were going—the set was going to be “New Phyrexia!” And like “Oh, my God, the Phyrexians, they’re not dead! Well, what happened? Look, here they are!”

And the big, kind of like—you know, big, you know, the big turn with the musical sting at the end of the block was, “Oh my God, it’s Mirrodin!” You know. Kind of like—I don’t want to ruin Planet of the Apes. But if you know what—if you’ve ever seen Planet of the Apes, you know the scene I’m talking about. Where he’s like “Oh my God!” And so we wanted to have that moment.

The problem—well, there were a couple problems. One is that—so, when I started, I was supposed to be designing New Phyrexia. That was what I started, when the whole thing began. I was designing New Phyrexia. But here’s the problem that I ran into was, the Phyrexians are all about, like, you know, infecting and overtaking worlds, right? That’s their thing.

And like, we started after their thing. Like, “Okay,  they’re here. Now they’re fighting each other, because they have no one else left to fight,” and—and—what we found was, it was a very hard story to tell. Like, for starters, the Phyrexians hadn’t been in a set for a long time. Like, who are the Phyrexians? And we realized that we kind of had to reintroduce the Phyrexians.

And so—the first half of the design, I was just like trying to understand and figure out, like, what the block was about. And I was very confused, because, you know, it was—it—kind of the story, like—there’s a story I wanted to tell, and members of my team keep—kept (???) in and saying, “Hey,” you know, “Shouldn’t we tell—like, isn’t it more exciting to tell about them invading?”

And I said, “Yeah, but we’re supposed to be doing New Phyrexia,” and finally, finally, like—and so the reason, by the way, we switched teams, was I was—I was kind of stuck. And I actually got called in for Bill, and Bill’s like “What’s going on? This—you seem to be spinning your wheels,” and I explained what was going on, and Bill said, “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to change up the team a little bit. I’m going to change a few people out,” and he gave me this pep talk, and so—kind of what happened was, I said, “Okay, okay. Let’s stop…”

Because I’d spent a lot of the early time of the design trying to understand who the Phyrexians were. Because one of my—one of my new goals is, in that—by the time we got to Scars of Mirrodin, I was doing something different with design. Something that I do now.

Which is, I like to think of the idea that the game mechanics are an aspect of the flavor. That if you want to get the flavor of an environment, you know, you have the art. You have the names. You have the flavor text. But you also have the mechanics. And I want the mechanics to represent the story, so that as you play, you feel the story through the play. That’s very important to me. And I’m very big on the emotional sort of—I want the gameplay itself to have an emotional, flavorful component.

And in some ways, Scars of Mirrodin might have been the first set where I was really trying to do this so hard. I mean--I mean Innistrad would come later, and that’s where I—sort of like—anyway, I feel like Scars of Mirrodin was—one of my goals was I wanted you to get a sense of the Phyrexians. I really wanted mechanically to define them in a way that made you sort of afraid of them.

And I—I knew in the back of my head that poison—poison was a very good fit for the Phyrexians. The Phyrexians were all about taking things over, and then, you know, polluting them essentially, and so like, “Okay. Look, the—the Phyrexians taint you, and take you over, so, you know…” Poison felt like a neat way to represent that.

So one of the things that we’ve talked a lot about was, I said to my team, I said, you know, “Let’s—let’s—metaphorically figure out what—what… what the Phyrexians were. And so after thinking about a lot of it, I finally realized that they were a disease. You know.

That they were, you know, they were a bad guy, but they were a bad guy in a metaphorical way that’s sort of like—the way disease is so scary is that it comes, and slowly infects you, and it takes over your cells, and it—it starts kind of—it starts turning your body against itself. You know. And that I liked that idea of these guys being a disease.

So what I did was, I came up with four adjectives to represent them. Let’s see if I can remember my four adjectives. I wanted them to be… relentless, I wanted them to be toxic, I wanted them to be adaptive, and I wanted them to be… what was the last one? One more… and—really what I did is I said I wanted to get different mechanics to sort of represent that state. You know. And so… what was the other one?

Well… so anyway, the toxic part I knew poison made a lot of sense. And so very early on, we were messing with poison. We started with poisonous, which I used in Future Sight. The idea of poisonous was, the way most of the poison creatures worked, in the early days, was I hit you, and then… I did poison to you.

Now some of them replaced the damage with the poison, meaning some of them—instead of dealing damage to you did poison. Some if they weren’t blocked it poisoned, but the thing that was important was, I liked the idea that these things are, you know, they’re—you don’t want them to hit you. They’re scary to you.

But poisonous wasn’t getting the job done. In that—the problem with poisonous was—okay, so if I’m poisonous 2, that means when I hit you I do two poison. So there were a couple problems. One was that there’s just times where I would beat you with damage before I beat you with poison. Especially if I was mixing together poison and non-poison creatures.

But the bigger problem was that it wasn’t—so for example, let’s say I have a poisonous 2 creature. Okay. So I attack you. You’re now at two poison. Okay, so now I attack you again. You’re at four poison. So now I attack you again. You have four poison. You’re not scared of this guy yet! You’re like “Whatever, I have four poison. Fine. I’ll take two more poison.”

Like, the poison guys didn’t get scary until you were like up—until the lethal hit would get you, they weren’t scary. And what I wanted to do was I needed a little more uncertainty. Like, I didn’t—like what happened with the poison creatures with poisonous was, like, they weren’t kind of scary until the absolute positive end. And I wanted to find a way to say “Hey, maybe you want to block these guys.” You know.

Because the flavor—the flavor was, never block a poison creature, you know, unless you’re going to die to damage or die to poison. Otherwise, whatever. Not a big deal. And there wasn’t any real, you know, like—they weren’t scary to block, they weren’t that scary to hit you—like I said. One of the things I wanted is, I wanted to bring the Phyrexians back, I thought they were the most awesome villains we had, I wanted you afraid of them. I wanted you to go “Oh my God, the Phyrexians. Oh my God, the Phyre---ohh, I’m scared the Phyrexians are here. And I thought poison could do that, but it wasn’t getting—it just wasn’t getting the job done.

And so one of the things that came up was, we came up with the idea of—so, wither is a mechanic from Shadowmoor, which interesting, Nate Heiss, who was also on this set, Nate Heiss—oh, no, no, no. I’m sorry. I came up with wither. Nate Heiss came up with persist. So. But anyway, Nate Heiss was part of—actually, he was on Lorwyn design, and he came up with it—in early Lorwyn design, we were thinking of using -1/-1 counters to represent things not being  as deadly, but it ended up making them seem deadlier. I’ll get there on the Lorwyn podcast.

Anyway, so wither was the mechanic that--actually I’d come up with wither during Shadowmoor to represent the idea of something that had a permanency to its damage. That like every time—because normally, in Magic, what Richard had come up with is, I mean, basically what Richard wanted is, he wanted as simple a system as possible for damage. And so what he said is “Look, creatures get in a fight, something happens, and then whatever. You heal.”

And the major reason Richard did that was he just didn’t want to track it. You know. “Okay, I’ve got to remember that this one has one damage on it, this one has two damage…” Like in a video game,  whatever, it can be tracked. But in a paper game, it just was a lot of bookkeeping. And Richard’s like “Whatever, you kill it, you don’t kill it, it gets better.” And so the idea of wither was kind of like “Oh, well no no no. These things don’t get better. These things—if they bite you, you are—you are damaged. You are not healing.”

And so what happened was, I ended up putting wither on some guys. So—because I liked the idea of wither felt like “Oh, these guys are scary, they’re poisonous.” You know. “Hey, creatures, you kind of don’t want to be poisoned by these things.” So we put wither on it.

And so wither, what we had done with wither was, originally when we had made wither, it was if you blocked you got so many -1/-1 counters. But what we ended up doing was we tied wither to damage, which said it dealt its damage to creatures in the form of -1/-1 counters. And that just played a lot better. Because otherwise there was a lot of math that went on, and like “This is clean, he does two damage to you, fine. You get two counters.” And so what it did was to replace the damage with -1/-1 counters.

So what happened was, in Scars of Mirrodin, we—I started putting wither on these guys. Because I wanted—I wanted your creatures to be afraid of them. And—one day, I don’t know, one day just the neon light—I just remember, like, you know, something’s just completely obvious, and then one day just—like, you see it? Because we had wither on a lot of creatures, and wither dealt damage in the form of -1/-1 counters.

And then one day, it’s just like “Why doesn’t poison deal damage in the form of poison counters?” Like that’s—that’s exactly what we want. And the reason that that was so awesome was that it had the thing I’m missing. Which is let’s say I have four poison, and you attack with this 2/2 creature. Well, you might be able to make the creature bigger. You can Giant Growth it or something. Meaning I don’t know how much poison I might be taking. I have to be careful.”

And so the—you know, it definitely said—the fact that Magic gives you variables on power, tying it to power had all this dynamic stuff. Also, what it meant was all of a sudden, things mattered. Like for example, we were in Mirrodin. Mirrodin wanted a lot of equipment because we’re back on Mirrodin. Well hey, you know. The second that infect dealt on damage, any equipment that boosted power was now much more interesting. You know, playing with the Phyrexians. Playing with infect.

And, I mean, it made Giant Growth more interesting, it made damage prevention more interesting… anything that interacted with damage, and Magic had a bunch of things that interact with damage, all of a sudden became much more interesting. You know. Trample became more interesting. You know, it—it definitely did the thing where I said, “Oh, this is neat. Okay, now I—Magic plays around with damage, this now cares about damage,” and so for a while we had both wither and—we started calling it infect.

And then one day, we were just like “Why are we...“  Because I—most of the cards had infect and wither. And I’m like, “Why are we bothering to write wither on these cards? What if infect just had wither built in? ‘Look, I’m poisonous, I hit you, I give you—you know, I give you a bunch of poison counters. Creatures I give damage to -1/-1 counters.” And it all just came together and it—it was a beautiful package.

While we were slowly solving the problem of how to make the Phyrexians scary, we had a bigger problem. Which was “What was the block about?” So one of the things I’ve talked about in block design is, it’s very important when designing a block, that there’s some—that each set in the block has to have its own identity. That’s one of the big things about block design. That—what we have discovered is that blocks do the best when each block is about something. You know.

And from time to time, it’s clear, when we—we don’t give—like for example, I think in Innistrad, one of my regrets about Dark Ascension was we didn’t give it enough of its own identity. That it just kind of was like more Innistrad. And what it needed to be was something where it had—like, I—I think we excel best, especially with a middle set, when the middle set represents something.

And so I liked a lot the idea of instead of end—instead of starting with the end—essentially what happened was, Bill gave me this pep talk, and I walked into Bill’s office like—I don’t know, a couple weeks later, and I—because what Bill said to me, I’ll—Bill said something very nice, which was I was kind of stuck.

And Bill basically gave me a pep talk and said, “Look, Mark, you’re good. You’re very good.” And he goes, “I think what’s happening is, you are trying to deliver what you think other people want. Rather than what you want.” You know. And he said, “Stop trying to… you know, stop trying to…” Because for some reason I was in this mindset of—I didn’t even know why, that’s a longer issue, but I—Bill really sort of slapped me out of it and said, “Look. Make something that you think is awesome. And, you know—that’s where you shine. Don’t—don’t try to make something awesome…”

And this—this is an awesome lesson by the way. Lesson Bill gave me is an awesome lesson which is, if you want to make something awesome, you have to make something awesome that you the designer believe is awesome. That follows your heart.

And the reality is, design of any kind, any kind of creative design is built on passion. If you, the creator, are not passionate, it will not have passion in it. And it will not excel. If you want to make something that’s truly awesome, that is truly something that stands out, it has to be because you, the creator, have put some of yourself in it. And in order to do that, you have to believe in it with all your heart.

And if you don’t believe in it with all your heart, it’ll just—when you try to make something for somebody else, you will ultimately fail. I mean, I’m not saying you can’t make something for somebody else, but it will not be—if you want to hit it out of the ballpark, you have to make it something that is you. That belongs to you.

And I think for some reason I had gotten stuck on this project. I’m not sure why. I was excited by the Phyrexians, I was excited to sort of show what they could do, I was excited to have poison, but I—I kind of—when we had started, we started with the parameter of “Hey, we’re on New Phyrexia.”

And what I realized was, the whole reveal, the whole, like, you know, “Oh my God, I can’t believe this is Mirrodin,” that works great in a movie. In a movie you have a focused moment where everybody’s watching, and like you get a—you know, you get an end, and the music has a sting, and like “Oh my God!” But that doesn’t happen in trading card games. You know. That it’s hard for you to have that moment. And we were kind of—we do this sometimes where we have this awesome cinematic moment, and then we forget like we’re not a movie. Like we don’t have that moment.

And what I realized is, Magic stories that excel are Magic stories that can be told in a way that Magic excels at. And what does Magic do really well? Telling what I call an “environmental story.” Watching an environment change. That’s why, if you notice, so often, you know, dramatic events happen! And the world is like—the worlds have to change, it’s the nature of what makes Magic Magic.

Because if we’re going to show you something, we can’t show you tiny nuanced little things. You know, we have to show you—“Here’s a world. Here’s a different world or a changed world…” Or something that says “Hey, things are fundamentally different.” That’s how we show things. Because that’s what—that’s—that’s the paintbrush we use.

And so I sort of walked away—I---in my heart of hearts, I knew. That’s what my team had been saying, that’s what my—I finally walked in to Bill and said “Okay, Bill, we’re telling the wrong story.” I said, “You want to tell the story, the awesome story we have to tell here is, the Phyrexians takeover Mirrodin. That’s the story.”

And so I said, “Look, it’s—it’s—we don’t want to—we’re starting with the end. And you don’t want to start with the end they’ve won, no! This is an amazing story of watching the Mirrans, one of the badasses of all time, you know, being taken over by the Phyrexians!” Like, really what this was was we were putting a stake in the ground and saying “The Phyrexians are back, and they’re bad.” You know. “They took down that…” You know, bad as in very good. “And they took down the Mirrans, who were this potent force!”

That we wanted to put the—the whole point of this block was to put the Phyrexians back on the map. Of saying, “Remember these guys? Hey, these are some of the—these are Magic’s—these are one of the best Magic villains you’ve ever seen.” And so, I said “We’re telling the wrong story.” And then Bill said, you know, “But…” Bill came up with the idea of “Well could we make it dramatic who wins?” And I said to Bill, I go, “Well, the problem is, we’re going to announce the name of the third set, that’s going to give it away. So I’m not sure we can keep it secret.”

And then Bill said, “Well, wait. What if we don’t announce the name?” And I’m like “No, we have…” You know. I’m like “We have to send out… like, in order for people to order stuff, we have to send things out,” and Bill says, “Okay, what if we give two names?” And Bill suggested the idea of “Well, what if we didn’t let people know how the block ended?” You know. That we started the story, and then we gave them two outcomes, and we could actually, you know, people were ordering the product, we could actually not even tell them the names! It’s one of these two names.”

And that’s what we did, by the way. Which by the way, it—one of the things I love about doing Magic is that we’re a game about breaking rules. But that doesn’t just mean breaking rules we’ve broken before, sometimes it means breaking rules we’ve never broken before. And like I remember, you know, we went to the sales team and said “Guys, what do you think?” You know. “Of we’re going to try to sell a set, and we’re not even going to tell people the name. It’s like either A or B. It’s one of the two.” And what the salespeople said is, “Oh, awesome. No problem. This is Magic.” You know. “You know how we sell a Magic set? We say, ‘We’re making another Magic set.” You know.

And like, he said it would be awesome. In fact, it would be something that they were excited by, because it was something that was out of the ordinary. What they love when they go to sell sets is, to perk up, you know—the people who buy sets, you want to perk their interest a little bit, go “Ooh, what’s going on?” and go, “Okay. It’s a set that we don’t even know—you’re not even going to know what set it is.” You know.

And the retailers and the distributors—they really actually—they got into it. It was fun. Because what they realized was, look, Magic is Magic, they had a lot of trust in us, they knew we were going to do a good job, and so they’re like “Hey. Let’s—let’s have some fun.” And so once we took that idea and we ran with it—okay, so the idea was, okay.

So now we clicked it and we said, “Okay, we’re going to tell a story. We’re going to tell a story, one of the rules about telling a story is figure out where you want to end, and then go to the opposite side of the spectrum. That’s how you tell a good story. Okay?

So for example, let’s say you have a story about a guy who realizes how to be selfless, of how—in the end he becomes someone who really learns to share with the world. Or whatever. Well, at the beginning of the story, he better be a selfish guy! He’s got to be selfish, because you need to have the room for him to grow. You know what I’m saying? That—like Jerry Maguire, Jerry Maguire has to start the way he starts so that he has room to grow. You know. That—that—part of—of any sort of story is, the main character has what’s called an arc. And so you have to start in the opposite place. And it’s not just with character. You know. That the beginning of the story is, you’re taking yourself in a different direction.

So we’re like “Okay. If we know…” We knew we were ending with the Phyrexians—New Phyrexia. The Phyrexians have taken over, redone Mirrodin, Mirrodin as you know it is dead, it is now New Phyrexia. Right? And so in order to do that, we’re like “Okay. We know we want to end with New Phyrexia. So where do we start?”

So I’m like “Okay. What we want to do is, let’s go back to the earliest point we can, where the Phyrexians are the smallest threat they can feel—like, they have to be enough of a presence that you know they’re there, but like mostly it’s Mirrodin.”

Now, the other big thing this allowed us to do is Phyrexia’s pretty dark. You know, New Phyrexia’s pretty dark. And I’m like, “You know, I think we can do a set of New Phyrexia, but do we want to do a block of New Phyrexia?” And what I liked the idea of “Look, let’s go back to Mirrodin!” By rolling back the thing, “Hey, we get to revisit Mirrodin. We get to see Mirrodin again.” And I was kind of excited. “You know, before we turn Mirrodin into  New Phyrexia, let’s see Mirrodin again.” You know.

And I thought it was awesome—for example, we had been back to Dominaria many times. But this is the first time we really said, “Hey, we’ve been to this world, we’re going back to this world.” You know. And Mirrodin at the time had been the best-selling set, and we knew people liked Artifact World.

Now, the wheels fell off the bus a little bit in Mirrodin block in that the tournament scene broke. We had some developmental issues, and we put out a lot of broken cards. And, you know, that caused all sorts of problems. But people liked Mirrodin world. Mirrodin sold real well, they liked Artifact World, I mean, they liked a lot of what Mirrodin had to offer. And so the idea was, let’s go back to Mirrodin, let’s make sure it’s not broken this time.

Oh, and as you’ll see next week, I did suggest some crazy stuff in that area. But anyway, so, what happened was, we rolled back, and I said, “Okay. How small could Phyrexia be?” It has to be big enough that you notice it, but the smallest it could be that you notice it. And finally we said “Okay.” We came up with ten percent. We said “What if the Phyrexians are ten percent?” That’s one in ten, that means every booster—the as-fan would be high enough that they showed up, that every booster you’d see a little bit of Phyrexia, you know.

And then, by the way, so the next problem that rolled into was how we represented the Phyrexians. So that—I’ll get to the story later, but that’s where the watermarks came in. Because one of our concerns was that we wanted the first set to be 10%. And then we wanted it to grow. And the idea, by the way was, okay. If we wanted it—we thought it would be neat that the middle set was about who wins. So what that meant is—okay, the middle set had to be a war, because then the outcome of the war would be the third set. Right?

And the neat thing about Scars is something that we—one of the problems of—of—see, storytelling has what’s called three-act structure. In which usually Act II is the largest act, and Act I sets things up, and Act II is the main part of it, Act III is the wrap-up, for those that read my article, Act I is comfort, Act II is surprise, Act III is completion.

Anyway, so the problem we run into a lot of times is that we kind of set up the conflict, and then like the third set—like, this time we set up the conflict in the second set, so the third set can answer it. Sometimes the conflict’s in the third set, and then it’s hard for us to tell you the answer. Even in the set it’s hard to see.

Where the nice thing about Scars of Mirrodin is, there was a conflict. Who won? Everybody can tell you who won. There’s no mystery, you know.Like, the Eldrazi ended up on Mirrodin. What happened? Not a lot of people know the outcome of that. But, you know, New Phyrexia, like “Okay, Mirrodin got invaded by the Phyrexians. Who won? That’s clear. The Phyrexians won.”

But we knew we wanted to set up a conflict, so okay. That means the middle set—it has to go either way. Well, how do you represent either way? Fifty-fifty. Right? Half and half. And so in order to do that, we said “Okay, well the first set’s going to go back as far as we can, with that ten percent.”

And then we used watermarks, because how do you tell the set went from ten percent to fifty percent? That’s hard to tell. You know. Can you look at a piece of art and go “Oh, that’s clearly Phyrexian art?” Some people can. But it’s murky. It’s muddy. It’s not necessarily the easiest thing to do. So we used the watermarks to represent that.

Okay. I am now pulling into my—into my parking—well, into a parking space. So clearly Part II is coming tomorrow. So—so basically, here’s where we left. I’ll leave this story with a To Be Continued. Is we figured out the block structure was, we wanted to tell the war. We wanted to show the corruption of Mirrodin.

So we had a first set that introduced the—introduced Mirrodin, and mostly as Mirrodin. We get to revisit Mirrodin. We get to learn the place before we take it over, we get to meet it all over again. We had just enough Phyrexian so you understand the threat is there. The second set would be half and half, a war between the two sides. The third set would be the victor, and that was us getting to blow out New Phyrexia.

Anyway. That’s the setup. Tomorrow I’ll talk about how we made that all happen. So anyway, thanks for joining me today—not tomorrow. Next week. See, here’s the secret. Whenever I do multiple—multiple podcasts, I have to talk about it tomorrow so I’ll remember what I said today. So I’m going to record this tomorrow. But you guys actually are going to hear it next week.

So next week will be Part II, when I talk about all the mechanics and sort of how we took what—the framework that I had set up, and how we then fleshed it out to then make the block of Scars of Mirrodin. And I’ll talk more specifically about how we made Scars of Mirrodin itself, since that’s what this podcast is about.

Anyway. So thank you very much for joining me today, and it’s time to go make the Magic.