8/30/13 Episode 49: Scars of Mirrodin, Part II

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 last week, I started talking about the design of Scars of Mirrodin. And this week, I thought I would continue that talk, because I did not finish.

Okay, before I jump in, I made a mistake last week that I wanted to correct this week. I was talking about how, in trying to get percentages for the sets, we wanted to start the first set having the Phyrexians be as low a percentage as possible yet still feel their presence. And I said last week, off the top of my head, that it was ten percent. But I was wrong. It was twenty percent.

So what we had done was, the first set was eighty percent Mirrodin, twenty percent Phyrexian, the middle set was fifty-fifty, and the last set was ninety percent Phyrexian with ten percent Mirrodin. Now, by the way, if you do the numbers, if you do the math, because the first set was the large set, and the other two sets were small sets, those numbers made the Mirrodin and Phyrexian sides basically have the same amount of cards in the block.

Which, by the way, was interesting, because the whole shtick was you didn’t know whether it was New Phyrexia or Mirrodin Pure. But there were people that did the numbers and figured out that, you know, if—if the Phyrexians won, that they’d have enough numbers to balance it out. Which was completely true. So anyway, it’s funny—it’s funny that there was a lot of little clues if you understand our structure, to figure out where we were going. And there were plenty of people that did figure it out.

Okay, let me talk a little bit about that twenty percent. I mentioned watermarks last week. And I want to talk a little bit more about—about how we use the watermarks because it was interesting. Because we were trying to demonstrate the idea that there was a Phyrexian presence. And so we had—I had wanted, you know, eighty-twenty in the first set, and then I wanted fifty-fifty in the second set, and then the first set obviously was mostly Phyrexian, so you know. Just enough Mirrodin to show like a little resistance, and give the—you know, give the—the Mirran fans just a few cards.

But the question is, how do I show you twenty percent? And that’s where the watermarks came in. And so what happened in the first set was, we had strict rules of what made you a Phyrexian mechanically. Let’s see if I can remember these. I—I always do so well when I remember things off the top of my head. You know, next week—“Last week I said…”

Okay. So, number one: if you had any of the Phyrexian mechanics… So the two Phyrexian mechanics were considered to be infect and proliferate. I will get to proliferate momentarily, talk about where proliferate came from. So if you had either of those mechanics, you were considered Phyrexian. If you made use of -1/-1 counters, that was considered a Phyrexian thing. And if you—what else? I mean, if you interacted with poison in any way, if you interact with -1/-1 counters in any way… oh also, and this one’s a little more subtle.

Death triggers were given to the Phyrexians. So if you—when you died, if you had a trigger, that was a Phyrexian thing. And that the Mirrodin all had enter-the-battlefield triggers, and the Phyrexians all had death triggers. Oh! And, if you sacrificed something. The Phyrexians had—anything that requires sacrifice, that was on the Phyrexian side. In fact, we’ll get to it, there was actually a—for a while, a little bit of a sacrifice theme going on. Anyway. I will get there.

Okay. So, let’s see… okay, so where we left off yesterday. Oh, okay. So I basically had a little bit of a crisis where I got a little lost. This is probably the set where I—I might have gotten the most lost, where I was trying to make New Phyrexia, and just—I was swimming in things (???) Phyrexian, and I was getting an identity for the Phyrexians, but I didn’t understand what the block was about, and it’s like “Here’s Phyrexians, and more Phyrexians, and…” I didn’t have an identity.

And then I got a little pep talk from Bill, and… okay. I realize that, you know, I needed to sort of follow my passion, and I said “Okay. We’re telling the wrong story.” You know. We were telling the story where it ended. And I’m like “It’s an interesting story.” I thought like Mirrodin falling to the Phyrexians was a very neat story, and we were like—you know, it’s like “And… scene.” You know. “And Dorothy gets back to Kansas. Now we begin our story.” Well, that’s not where you begin the story. That’s the end of the story.

And the point is, if we have other stories to tell the Phyrexians, we can do that later. But I feel like there was an awesome story we wanted to tell. And once I framed it that way, it became a lot clearer what was going on. Like I had a much better understanding of what—what we wanted.

Because once we—we said, “Okay. This block is about the conflict between the Phyrexians and the Mirrodins…” For example, for Scars of Mirrodin, I said, “Okay. I want to revisit Mirrodin.” So that was one of the goals. “We’re going back to Mirrodin, eighty percent of the set is Mirrodin, I want to show off Mirrodin.”

Meanwhile, I needed to introduce the Phyrexians, and, you know, concentrate what they were doing, but you want to get the essence of the Phyrexians right away. So—let me talk about the Phyrexians before we get to the Mirrans.

So what happened was, the Phyrexians—oh, so yesterday—I don’t think we finished. I said that in the beginning of the design, I wrote down four adjectives for the Phyrexians. And the idea was that I wanted the Phyrexians to capture these four qualities. Now, notice this was a—I did this at a time in which it was just Phyrexia. Everything was Phyrexian. So I was trying to come up with—I wanted four mechanics for the Phyrexians, because at the time they were all—it was all Phyrexian. And so I came up with four words that I was hoping would inspire us to make four keywords. And I talked about three of them yesterday, couldn’t remember the fourth one. But I looked it up.

Okay, so. Number one was they were toxic, and poison was going to represent that. They were relentless, and we toyed around with a mechanic not that far away from undying, what would later get used in Dark Ascension. It wasn’t exactly that mechanic, but it was this idea of allows them to come back. And then there was adaptive—I don’t remember what adaptive was. We had early mechanics for all this stuff. But anyway. The fourth one was viral. That they—that the Phyrexians were toxic, adaptive, relentless, and viral.

It plays right into the disease theme. Like I said. I really thought thematically that the Phyrexians were like a disease. And that, you know—the thing that’s—that’s interesting about them—and we’ll make some great villains—is that they really are scary. They very are scary. Like, you know, the idea is, the last thing you want to see is a little Phyrexian oil in your neighborhood, because things are going to go bad. And I would try to capture that.

But once we realized—okay, so—I knew I wanted the sense of spreading. And—and, the other thing I wanted was I wanted to make sure that poison counters were a little different. So let me talk about this for a second, it’s an important point. So I didn’t want poison to just be another life total. You know. I wanted it to have some qualities that were a little bit different.

So the first quality is that you got it through infect creatures, which meant that, you know, if you wanted to play this game, you had a subset of things you could consider. It wasn’t like I was open and free, it’s like “Okay. I have these guys.” And these guys keyed off of damage, which meant that I could interact with different things. But once again. Life—normal life does that.

So there was a couple key things that I’d done. Number one is, I—one of the things to make poison scarier in my mind is to sort of change up how… like we wanted it to be scary, I feel like if you just could easily get rid of poison, it’s less intimidating. But if poison was just a permanent thing, that when you got one poison, you always had one poison. That one poison never went away.

I felt like that really upped the ante. You know. It really made it have a little more like—okay, you’ve got to be—you know, just take one poison, you’ve got to be careful, because that one poison, you know, is never going away. And one of the things that’s interesting is, Homelands had a card called “Leeches.”

And Leeches wasn’t a great card, and the cost of getting things off was—it was pretty expensive. But I had never liked Leeches because I kind of felt like—part of what I thought was interesting about poison was the fact that it made it so much scarier when you couldn’t get rid of it. And so I made the call not to get rid of poison. I said “Okay, that’s—one of the qualities of poison that makes it scary is, you can’t get rid of it.” And I laid down the law and said, “Look, we’re not getting rid of poison.”

Now we did—by the way, we did toy around with some mechanics that worked against poison. We ended up not using them, but they’re interesting stuff in our bag of tricks the next time we meet the Phyrexians in that—we did have some more tools against—against poison.

We ended up not using them because we were a little worried that it wouldn’t be good enough. It’s funny, obviously it’s gone on to prove itself okay. But we were worried that if we had too much stuff stopping it that it wouldn’t be scary, and so we—we held back a little bit on the—the things to fight Phyrexia—to fight poison with. Although once again. None of them removed poison. There’s a lot of neat ways to fight poison without actually taking it away. But maybe that’s for the poison discussion.

Okay. The second thing that I thought was very interesting was the idea that there was some way that once you got poisoned, that you could fan the poison. And that’s where proliferate came from originally. So at one point we had in—we had infect, infect put -1/-1 counters on creatures, it put poison counters on players, and so one of the ideas I came up with is, I made a card. At the time it was just a singular card.

And it was like, “Spreading the plague” or something. And what it did was, I think it was an enchantment that sat in play and just said “At the beginning of your turn, if you have a -1/-1 counter you get another one. If you have a poison counter you get another one.” And it just—the idea was, it made sick things sicker was the flavor.

And so we played with it. And it was pretty powerful. Because it happened every turn. And we’re like “Oh, well, I’d tone it—let’s tone it down a little bit.” And so I said, “Okay, let’s just try a spell in which it does that.” And it was—it was interesting. And what I found was, it actually did kind of cool stuff. It kind of like—it helped, like it said “Once you start doing stuff, this will fan it along.”

And so I showed it to the team, and Mark Globus’s comment was “Well why…” Because—I spelled out particularly, it—it increased poison counters and -1/-1 counters because I was trying to say “Oh, it’s fanning the plague.” And then Globus had a really good comment, he’s like “Well, why—why couldn’t it just be any counter?” And I was like “You are correct! You are correct.”

And the reason that was so awesome was, one of the themes of the Phyrexians—sorry, of the Mirrans was--I was trying to play on a lot of themes that we had done the first time we had, you know, been to Mirrodin, and that one of those was charge counters.

That you want to—I love—so when I did the very first Mirrodin, I played around a lot with the idea of—because it—there was a lot of artifacts in, obviously, Mirrodin. I liked the idea of Serrated Arrows, of so many uses. Like a lot of things, if you go to objects in other games and things, that you can’t use things an infinite number of times. I mean, some things like a sword you can.

But like arrows. Like you have so many arrows. And when you’re out of arrows, then you have no more arrows. And I played around with charge counters in Mirrodin, and I liked that, and I said “Okay, well we’re going to use more charge counters in Scars of Mirrodin, because we’re going to try to capture--a lot of what I was trying to do with the Mirrans, I’ll get to that in a second, is—is capture what the Mirrans—what happened in Mirrodin. To feel like the Mirrodin part felt like Mirrodin.

And so, I knew we’d have charge counters, and by making proliferate affect all counters, it affected charge counters. And I really liked that because one of the things that I was very worried about in my design was even though there was a war, and there were two sides, and the two sides were designed to fight each other, I wanted to make sure that you could mix and match between them.

And like I said, some of this work got undone unfortunately during development, but—so one of the things that proliferate was important to me was, we decided to base proliferate in blue. So we decided—what I wanted to do with infect, because the whole block—I wanted to show evolution, what I decided was, we were going to take the elements that were Phyrexian, start them small and located in the first set, and then watch them grow.

So for example, infect, the idea was “Well, what are the two colors that make most sense for infect?” Black and green. Because those are colors that pretty much had poison in the past. And the reason is, those are the two colors that—that creatures that carry poison, and, you know, the idea was, if the Phyrexians were going to infect anybody, I felt like black and green is where they’d get their foothold.

You know, black and green play right into the Phyrexian sort of—the feel. I mean, a lot of--the Phyrexians have a lot of, I don’t know, black-green qualities to them. In fact, disease has a lot of black-green qualities to it. In fact, disease is kind of like, you know, it has the growth of green but the destructiveness of black, and kind of mixing those together.

So anyway, we decided to put infect into black and green. So proliferate, I also wanted to be there, and I said “Well, what—what colors make the most sense for proliferate?” And there were two colors that were the clearest, which was blue and green. Those are the counters—those are the cards that mechanically do what proliferate does. The ones that expand on counters and things.

And the thing is, green had done infect, so I’m like “Okay. Why don’t we give it to blue in the first set?” And then what I knew was, that I knew that proliferate would have use both in infect decks, but also would have use in artifact with lots of charge counter decks.

And so what I did was, I—I put proliferate pretty heavy in common blue. In fact—what’s the name of the bird? The little bird that hits you and every time it hits you it proliferates? That was a common card originally. Thrummingbird? That was a common card originally, for example. And so one of the things that I had done was I pushed proliferate pretty strong, so for Limited that blue really became this interesting swing color, and that blue played with black and green and played with white and red.

Now I’d also done a bunch of other things to interact, you know, that you could pick one of the infect colors and then—for example there’s a lot of power pumping that went on. At the time in white and red. That interacted with infect.

Anyway, there are a bunch—I did a lot of cross-synergies, like there was a whole theme I made of sacrificing, that red sacrificed artifacts and black sacrificed creatures—oh, by the way, the Phyrexian was the sacrifice creature part, not the sacrifice artifact part. That was Mirran.

But you could mix together. You could take the sac—artifact sacrificing of Mirrodin and the creature sacrificing of Phyrexian and there’s a deck. I made some cards that cared about things being sacrificed, and allowed you to sort of draft a red-black deck. That also got tuned down a bit during development, but in design it was a big part of a reason you would play black and red together.

So anyway, proliferate—I liked a lot that it was something that linked to—it could link to the Mirrodins. And do something cool. And that changed. And proliferate went on, by the way, to be a really popular mechanic—in fact, infect ranked the best in the godbook studies, but right behind infect was proliferate.

And one of the things—I’ve talked about this before, I talked about this in my State of Design, one of the things I feel bad on is I think I gave the two most exciting mechanics to the Phyrexians, which once again, if you kind of watch where we were going, I was trying to stake the claim—I was trying to have Phyrexia, you know, plant their stake to say “We’re back,” you know, “We’re the bad guys to watch.” And so I think I ended up giving them the more dynamic and more exciting mechanics because maybe in my heart of hearts I was really wanted you to like the Phyrexians. Because a lot of what this block was was sort of having them reclaim their villain status.

Okay. Let’s talk about the Mirrans, because—so the Phyrexians—I—the Phyrexians was very established. I had poison, I had infect, I had proliferate, both were awesome, they were playing well. Okay. And, once again, remember, I spent a lot more time working on Phyrexia because for the first, you know, three, four months of design, all it was was about Phyrexia.

Okay, but once we realized we were going back to Mirrodin, I said “Okay.” My guideline for my team was, “Okay. I want the Mirran half to feel like Mirran.” Now things could evolve, things could—I’m not saying it has to be Mirrodin as Mirrodin was, but it had to feel like this felt like—an evolution of Mirrodin. Like we came back to Mirrodin, “Oh…” What I said to my team was, “Imagine there was no Phyrexians here. We’re just going back to Mirrodin. All the Mirrodin part of the set has to have that feel. Like we’re going back to Mirrodin.”

And by the way, the other thing that I loved is, it gave Scars of Mirrodin a really nice feel. Because a lot of Scars of Mirrodin was just “Hey, we’re going back to Mirrodin.” I mean, there was a whole Phyrexian threat that took up twenty percent of the set, but eighty percent of the set was just “Hey, we’re back in Mirrodin.”

Okay, so what that meant was, I needed to use mechanics that either were from the Mirrodin block or were—had the right feel. Okay. So, the problem was, when you looked at the mechanics, for starters, you have stuff like modular and sunburst, but in order to make infect work I needed to use -1/-1 counters.

And one of our rules is that we do not use -1/-1 and +1/+1 counters in the same block. I mean, Lorwyn/Shadowmoor, which were two mini-blocks, did each—for contrast purposes used the opposite ones, but they never played together in Limited, so—if you’re ever going to play a format together in Limited we do not mix them.

And the reason—it’s a pretty simple reason, which is if I look at cards on the table, and your guy has two counters on it, I should be able to know what that guy is. And—so people often ask “Well, if that’s true, why did you make the +1/+1 -1/-1 counter implosion rule?” And the reason is, it’s just to simplify the board. Like, if a creature both has +1/+1 and -1/-1, look, it cancels each other out, let’s just cancel them out.

It’s funny because (???) any rule, it stems from quirky things, especially with like persist and undying. But, you know, I do think it’s a nice clean rule. Yet people always ask me, real quick I’ll go into this, because they’ll always say like “Is that really important? Is it so important? Can’t people just use red counters for +1/+1 and blue counters for -1/-1 or pennies and nickels or whatever?” And my answer is that one of the things that we’ve learned over the years is that Magic requires concentration.

So think of it this way. There’s so much energy you have to concentrate. And at some point your brain redlines. And when your brain redlines, what it means is, more than your brain can handle. You can’t handle it. And what happens when your brain redlines, you just stop thinking of everything. You—your brain goes, “Well what’s important?” And just stops thinking of things.

And one of the things that Magic got to a place where the—the board, you know, what you got a few turns in, would just start redlining. Because there was so many things to keep track of and so many things that mattered. You know. And here’s the worst thing is—sometimes we had something that only mattered one percent of the time, but we made you track it a hundred percent of the time.

I mean, mana burn was in this camp. Where it’s just like “Yeah, it mattered—when it mattered, it mattered—you know, when it mattered it did matter. But then it didn’t—it mattered so infrequently that, like, making you take up brain space to monitor something that’s just going to happen so infrequently, we were just constantly redlining you.

And for example, something you’ll notice for example when you—when you play, especially in Sealed, and you draw a vanilla card. That sometimes you go, “Oh, a vanilla card.” And the reason you’re doing that is your brain is like “For the love of God. Thank you. Thank you. I can rest. This card doesn’t make me like go ‘Oh, what’s going on?” You know.

And that I think it’s very easy when people look at things they look at them in isolation. Like “Okay. Forgetting everything else, I’m just looking at this card,” and people go “Oh, that’s a minor thing.” And what people forget is, there’s an aggregate of what goes on.

And this is true of any game, which is—when you’re looking at complexity, it is not just a matter of—of large complexity issues. It’s a matter of all your tiny complexity issues add up. And if your tiny complexity issues add up into a major complexity issue, then even though each case is a tiny small thing, it becomes a big thing.

And, you know, Magic is more fun because you have—you have the brainpower to focus on the decisions that matter. Not that I’m, like, paralyzed because so much is going on, like “Ah, whatever.” You know. And I know there—everyone has had this moment. This is how you can tell you’ve redlined. Where you have a board state and there’s so many creatures, and like “Screw it, I’m attacking.” You’re like “Ah, I can’t do the math, I’m attacking.” You know.

And that—Magic should not be like that the majority of the time. I’m not saying Magic should never redline you, and it does. I mean, that’s the other thing that I find hilarious is, this idea that if we take out complexity, that like Magic has no complexity. And like “No no no no. The reason we’re trying to lower complexity is because there’s so much complexity! And there’s so much to track. And there’s so much you have to sort of just, you know…”

I mean, I know for example, that, you know, if you play Magic, you go to a tournament and play, at the end of the day, you’re just exhausted. You’re exhausted. Because Magic requires immense amount of concentration.

Anyway. That is why +1/+1 -1/-1 counter do not coexist. And the reason for many other things that we do. Okay. So I cannot use sunburst, I cannot use modular. Go back to the—go back to the conversation. In the mind of Mark. As I drift around to things.

So we’re talking about—I wanted to use a Mirrodin mechanic. Okay. Modular and sunburst were out. So—okay, so the four mechanics in Mirrodin was equipment, entwine, affinity, and… imprint. And then I had indestructible and modular in the second set, and the third set had sunburst and scry.

So here was my problem. I couldn’t use modular and sunburst. Those were off the table. Both equipment and indestructible had become evergreen, meaning every set had them. So I couldn’t define Mirrodin—I mean, obviously we had darksteel things that are indestructible, we had lots of equipment. Those would be there. But they—those no longer felt like on Mirrodin unto themselves. I mean, we made sure they were there because they were Mirrodin, but they didn’t give us a feel of Mirrodin.

Okay, so. So the problem with both entwine and scry is, they’re fine mechanics, they’re both good mechanics, we brought scry back, I’m sure we’ll bring entwine back one day, they’re both fine mechanics. You know. But—but—and this is the important thing. They didn’t have anything in particular to do with the feel of Mirrodin. I mean, they’re nostalgic in the sense that they were there in Mirrodin, but they don’t really evoke a real sense of Mirrodin.

Okay. So that leaves us with affinity and imprint. Both of which, to me, felt very Mirrodin. So—so the mechanic that I said “Okay, you want to feel like Mirrodin? Well, no-brainer, affinity.” So we started making affinity cards. And what I did was, I—I started—I—I took the colors and I started branching affinity out.

So green was affinity for creatures, for example. I think blue and white were still affinity for artifacts. And black and red… or maybe red and green were affinity for creatures, and black was affinity for… creatures in grave, or… anyway, I…

I came up with a couple different ways to do affinity and spread them out through the colors, so the idea was, okay, the Mirrodins have advanced a little bit, it made it a little bit safer so we had less cards that were affinity for artifacts, because obviously—I mean, for those that don’t know, the original Mirrodin block was very popular, the first set was one of the best-selling sets of all time for a long time. Was the best-selling for a long time.

And—but—the—the environment broke. We just made lots of broken cards, we didn’t really put in a mana system to separate them so they all sort of globbed together, we called it the Blob. And it broke—it broke Magic. I mean, we—eventually we fixed it, but it drove a lot of people away. Because when Magic is not fun, people stop playing. And so one of our roles is—you know, in Development especially is, keep Magic fun.

And there’s two times in Magic where I feel like Development really fell down. And Magic degenerated into really unfun play. One was during Urza’s Saga, called “Combo Winter,” and—well, maybe this is the third. There also was Necro—Necro Summer, which wasn’t awesome either. And then Mirrodin was the other one. And—which never got a name. Like there was like “Necro Summer,” and “Combo Winter,” but we didn’t have like “Phyrexian Fall” or something. Or the—the—not Phyrexian, Mirrodin. Mirrodin… ah, I don’t know.

So when I came up with affinity, I felt like affinity—like there was nothing more definitive of Mirrodin than Affinity. I mean like—and not only that, I wanted—I wanted the Mirrans to seem like badasses. I wanted Mirrodin to go “Okay,” you know, like, “The Phyrexians are here, but these—these are the Mirrodins.” You know.

I didn’t want it to feel like it was—like, once we established that we were going to set up this conflict, I’m like “I want you to go ‘okay, the Mirrans have a real good shot. They’re not—they’re not some pushovers.” You know. “This is Mirrodin.” You know. “They broke—they broke Standard, okay. This—this is Mirrodin.” And so I liked affinity because I felt like it came back with them on a strong suit.

And so what happened was, I—my team designed for affinity. And then I turned it over and showed Development. Because I had talked to them, and I said to them, “Do you guys think you can develop affinity? In a way that’s safe?”

And all the developers said, “Yeah, we—we think we can.” So I proceeded. But the more they thought about it, what they said is, “We think we can, but there’s some chance we can’t. And you know what, here’s the worst thing,” you know, “is to make the same mistake twice.”

And not only that. People—like a lot of people who had left during Mirrodin, who had come back to the game, like having another broken Mirrodin block—their concern was it just was too big of a risk. You know. That the risk was not that big, that they thought they could do it, but there’s some percent chance, five percent chance—there’s some percent chance that they mess up, and that would be disastrous.

And so what they said is, “We really think it’s too dangerous messing around with affinity. Only because if we’re—if we’re off, the public is just going to, you know, react quickly. And strongly. And that it just seemed too dangerous.”

So I fought for affinity. I actually fought pretty hard for affinity. We had come up with a lot of very cool cards. But in the end—I mean, I was outvoted, like I said, I fought hard for it, but in the end it was decided—I mean, one of the things that it’s important to understand is, whenever we have a big issue, what we do is everybody sort of makes their case, and usually in the end Aaron is the one who will make the call. Usually the group comes to a consensus, and Aaron tends to go with the group consensus, not always, but he tends to. And so it’s pretty clear that affinity was dangerous, and it wasn’t worth the risk.

So okay, I needed to come up with something like affinity. Meanwhile, entwine now was the only—not entwine. Imprint was now the only, like Mirrodin-feeling mechanic that I could use. And I liked imprint, and I felt like it was a fun mechanic that we could do some more with, but it turns out that imprint is tricky, that it is not easy to make a lot of imprint cards, and so the philosophy I have with imprint is that we were under no obligation to make a particular number. Make good ones, as many good ones as you can come up with, that’s what we’ll print.

We decided to keep it out of common, that it was just a little too complex for common under New World Order, so imprint became an uncommon, rare and mythic rare thing, and we made some fun imprint cards, but we didn’t—we like kind of, like we didn’t stretch ourselves in the sense that—we made ones we knew were good, and we didn’t try to go beyond. It was like, “Imprint’s back! It’s not a high as-fan, but it’s a good as-fan. And the cards you see are awesome and they’re fun and they’re inventive, and you can have fun with them.

Okay, but that meant now we needed to find a replacement for affinity.  So what happened was, from time to time—well, one of the ways that people or—who want to do design—because it’s—if you’re a designer, and you want to do Magic design, what happens is, you always come and you say, “I want to do Magic design.” “Okay.”

And we—you start with hole-filling, and if you prove yourself you get on teams. If you prove yourself on teams, eventually you’ll be like a second on a team, and then one day you get to lead a team. And so what happened was, Mark Globus had gone to Bill. And said to Bill, “I want to get better at design. Help me.”

And so Bill said, “Okay. Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to design a set. You’re going to design your own set, and you’re going to make pieces of it, and I’m going to give you notes.” Actually, as—more as a project just to learn. That—there wasn’t any intent that this set was going to be published, it was just something for Mark to work on.

And in it, he—Mark had this—his set was about like angels vs. demons, had kind of a—a little bit of a, you know, a little bit of a religious undertone. But like—definitely kind of a forces of good and forces of evil. You know, forces of absolute good and forces of absolute evil.

But anyway, in it he had a mechanic he called “presence.” And presence was—you needed to have a certain number of permanents on the battlefield. And I remember at the time, I thought there was potential to it, I thought it was a little—it’s a little complicated because there’s a lot of permanents on the board.

And I said to him—because I had seen it, I made a note that “Maybe you wanted to narrow it down rather than look at everything on the board, look at a subset.” And so we were talking about artifact-matters stuff, I remembered presence, and I said to Mark, “Okay, what if the thing—what if you narrowed it down to artifacts? What if you just looked at artifacts? If you have enough artifacts, these things turn on.”

And presence is what we call a threshold mechanic, based on the mechanic threshold, which means “I need something to happen, but once that happens, bam, I get better. If I’m a spell, I do more, if I’m a creature, I improve.” And so the idea is we took presence, and we said “Okay. What—what if presence just means you have a certain number of artifacts?”

And I think we started with three, interestingly enough. And then we tried a couple other ones, but three always worked the best. And so we played with it. And I liked it. I thought it was very cool. And it did something I liked a lot, which said, “If you’re playing Mirrodin, that you really…” It said something that said “Hey, I want to play some artifacts.”

But three was nice in that it required you playing a certain number of artifacts, but it didn’t require you to play—one of the things we had done first time in original Mirrodin was we had done a lot of artifact matters stuff. And a lot of that pushed you to say, “Why are you playing non-artifacts?” And I—I wanted you to have space to play artifacts and space to play non-artifacts, and I wanted a little less all or nothing.

And so what I liked about presence or, you know, it became called metalcraft, was that it said “Hey, play some artifacts, make sure you have enough artifacts, but not that you couldn’t play some non-artifacts.” That it did a nice job of encouraging you to sort of raise your volume of artifacts but didn’t punish you for not going all out on artifacts. And I feel that that—I thought that played nicer.

And so we tested it, and it tested—it tested pretty well. I mean, I—it’s one of those things where—so one of the things in general is, that I’ve gotten pretty good at, I mean coming into my eighteenth year here, is I’m very good at playtesting mechanics once. And getting a pretty good grasp of what I think the potential of the mechanic is.

Now, most often the first version that you playtest is not the correct version. You know, most often it is… a lot of design, or—let me do a little thing here about game design. I believe that the best game design is an iterative process. Which means that you come up with ideas, you talk them through, you write them down, you playtest. You get concrete experience, you learn from that, and then you go back and you discuss what you learned, and from those discussions you make changes. And then you iterate. You do that process again and again.

And what happens for Magic is, I like that the—let’s talk about the iterative process as the length. Like, the beginning of it is you talking, and then the end is you playtest. And that iterative process, I like to shrink.

So early on, for example, like we might talk and build for a month in the beginning of the design, and playtest a month in. But by the end of design, we’re playtesting every week. Like the iteration gets so fast that like, it becomes a week or less. You know, sometimes for example, I’ll even do—playtest, learn things, change quickly, playtest, learn, quickly, within the context of one week. That your iteration process gets shorter and shorter as you go along.

Mostly—and the reason for that, for—a little game design information here is that as you get closer and closer to what you want, you need less and less iteration to matter. Early on, you’re making wide swaths because you’re making big changes. But as you start understanding what you’re doing, little—it is much more about little nuances and tiny changes than, you know, when you have a playtest, you change ten cards, it doesn’t mean a lot in early playtests. Because everything’s kind of vague. And then final playtests, when you’re getting near the end, like, “No no no, each card is very particularly doing its thing,” and so just changing a few cards really could matter.

Anyway, we playtested with it, I was pretty happy—I mean, it required a little bit of figuring out how to best use metalcraft. Like, any threshold mechanic, the lesson we learned from the original threshold was that you have to be careful—obviously there’s a switch that gets put on. And so the thing about threshold mechanics is, the board state changes quite a bit.

Now the thing that’s interesting about—that I liked a lot about metalcraft was, you have a lot more control over removing artifacts than you do about getting things out of your opponent’s graveyard. You know. You have to kind of dedicate cards to do that. Where in a block about artifacts, you’re going to be having artifact destruction, so, you know, you already have it in your deck, and it allowed neat moments where your opponent was at metalcraft and you destroy one of the artifacts and so they were counting on something, but it—you know, you were able to shut it off, and a lot of that played really cool.

Okay. So, we had infect and proliferate, we had metalcraft and—and imprint. So we had our two sides. So pretty much what I wanted to do was I wanted to get the essence of—of what they each represented. And I wanted to make sure that they had tools to play against the other.

And so anyway, I’m—I see work now, so—we were in a good state. Things were pretty good, so I think next week, I’m not done yet, so next week I want to talk about—wrap up a little bit (???), and I want to talk about some card stories. I think that—I’m realizing more and more that part of the fun of looking at a set is just jumping in and telling individual stories. So next week I will—I think I’m going to wrap up next week, and then I am going to also share with you a bunch of card stories. Because I—there’s a lot of fun—a lot of fun Scars of Mirrodin card stories that I’d like to tell you.

So anyway, hope you had fun today, it was—it’s always fun to go back and examine a set, and I even had a little bit of traffic at my kids’ school, so you got an extra little bonus today. And anyway, thank you very much for joining—thank you very much for joining me, time to go make the Magic.