9/27/13 Episode 57: Champions of Kamigawa, 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 time to talk Magic design. So today is another set design. I’m going to talk about Champions of Kamigawa, with—Theros should have come out not too long ago, or should be coming out soon. I’m never good at predicting the future when I record these. But anyway, Theros is coming out or has come out around now.

So I thought it might be fun to talk about the first block that was a top down design. One that didn’t go quite as well as either Innistrad or Theros. But important learning lesson. We learned a lot from it. So I’m going to talk about sort of how it got put together, some of the lessons we learned, and I’m just going to talk about Champions of Kamigawa design.

Okay, I always like to talk by mentioning the design team. So this is interesting. I looked this one up. So here’s who’s listed on the design team. So the lead designer was Brian Tinsman, I know that one. Also on the team was Brandon Bozzi, Elaine Chase, Brady Dommermuth, Mike Elliot, Bill Rose, and myself.

But I know I wasn’t on the design team. So I think what happened was, I designed the splice mechanic, splice onto Arcane in the set, which I will get to in a bit. So I was given credit for design even though I wasn’t on the design team. So it is possible a few of these people weren’t on the design team.

I mean, I know stories about the design, so a lot of these people were—well, I’ll assume everybody that’s not me was on the design team. We’re going to talk about these people for a second, just because one of the things—like I said. I like—I feel it’s one of my jobs as the historian is to tell you about who designed the game. And developed the game, although I lean toward the design side obviously.

So Brian Tinsman I’ve talked about plenty. He was lead designer. This was his first large set lead design. He kind of—his first set he did was kind of Judgment, although it was more like Bill did Judgment and he was like the right-hand man. But he ended up getting credit for leading it even though Bill did a lot of the structure beforehand.

And then… was this his first? No, Scourge… Scourge would have been his first lead design all on his own without, you know, aid of Bill. And then this might have been after Scourge. I think so. He would later go on to do Saviors of Kamigawa, which would be after Champions of Kamigawa, and he would do, you know, Time Spiral and Rise of the Eldrazi and a few other things. Okay. But (???) Brian… you know, I’ve talked plenty about Brian.

Brandon Bozzi. So Brandon was a member of the Creative team who for a while was in charge of names and flavor text. And in fact, he was in charge of—for Champions of Kamigawa, names and flavor text. So I’m going to get—when I get into the story of how Champions of Kamigawa came to be, the fact that there’s two different creative team members on the design team will become very important as you come to understand how Champions came to be. But Brandon was on the creative team and, like I said, he was in charge of names and flavor texts for Champions.

Elaine Chase. Elaine is a very interesting story. If you’ve ever seen the New York—the Pro Tour New York One video—so we made a video that went along with the Pro Tour, the very first Pro Tour New York. One of these days I’ll do a podcast on it because it is a crazy story. But anyway, in the video, I am interviewing people in line. I’m in the video, interviewing people in line.

One of the people that I’m interviewing is this woman, named Elaine Chase. Who would later go on to be a Magic—you know, she came in through the OP department, doing events, she was a judge. And then she came in and she worked there for a while. Then she came over to R&D and worked in R&D for a while and did a couple Magic sets. And now she is the—the main Brand Manager for Magic. The head Brand Manager for Magic. So Elaine has a circuitous path. But anyway, she’s still very much involved in the game and has a huge impact on the game.

Next is Brady Dommermuth. Brady for a long time was the Creative Director in charge of the creative team. And this time he was in charge of worldbuilding. He wasn’t yet in charge of the creative team. But he was in charge of worldbuilding. And so he’s in charge of building the world. As you will see—Bill gave him a giant challenge, which he had to step up for.

Mike Elliott, I’ve talked plenty about Mike Elliott. One of the most prolific designers on Magic. And Bill Rose. I’ve talked quite a bit about Bill Rose. So I think that most of these names we’ve talked about. Okay, but let’s get to Bill. Because Bill—the impetus of Champions of Kamigawa actually lies at the feet of Mr. Bill Rose.

So Bill’s currently the vice president of R&D. He and I started about two weeks apart from each other. And like I said, he and I have taken different paths. He is very much—he went the management track and worked his way up, obviously becoming vice president. I wanted to be creative and make—and do designs, so I ended up path to Head Designer.

But it’s interesting because like I said, Bill and I started very, very close to each other, and we’ve definitely taken slightly different paths. Although we work together quite a bit. But it’s funny like when I deal with Bill in that I’ve—you know, Bill and I have worked together for eighteen years.  So it is a very long and historied relationship.

Okay. So what happened was, Bill came up with this idea of—the way Magic was made at the time was we would come up with some mechanics. You know. So this is Champions of Kamigawa, so at this point we’re in the third age of design. Where we’re doing thematic design.

So Invasion was the first in this age, and it was like “Oh, we’re going to do multicolor design.” And then Odyssey was like “Oh, we’re going to do graveyard design.” And then Onslaught was like “Oh, we’re going to do tribal design.” You know, each—each set had a real thematic theme that drew through it. And, you know, Mirrodin was obviously artifacts.

So Bill said, “You know what? Instead of having a mechanical theme, what if we had a flavor theme? What if we picked something that was super flavorful, and did that first? And then did the mechanics?” And so Bill came up with the idea of—I think Bill started with “Let’s start with the—let’s do top-down design. Let’s start with the flavor, and then we’ll build it in.”

So it’s interesting historically if you look at Magic, Alpha had some top-down qualities to it in that, you know, Richard was definitely starting from “How do I make this? How do I make that?” But the set as a whole was very patchwork in that it pulled from lots of different sources.

Okay. So, the very first expansion, which Richard had to do very quickly, was Arabian Nights. Well, that was the first true top-down design. It was capturing the flavor of Arabian Nights. And then Antiquities came along, that was mechanical, that was doing an artifact thing. Legends had a top-down flavor in the sense that they were trying to capture role-playing. But it was not—it was not doing a cultural thing as much as saying “Oh, we role-play, here’s our characters, let’s see if we can turn our role-playing campaign into a set.”

Now, The Dark definitely had some sense of tone. The Dark was the first set all about building around—they wanted to show the fact that all the colors had a dark side. Then there was Fallen Empires, and Fallen Empires definitely had the conflict theme to it. About these five factions that were warring. And then—we started getting into more mechanical design, but Homelands I guess is the one other really, like, they got the flavor first. And then kind of made cards to match the flavor.

And then after Homelands, Magic got a lot more mechanical. I guess Mirage and Ice Age had some stories built into them, especially Mirage, but from there on out, Magic had become much more mechanical. The—you started from a mechanical place and built on top of it. And Bill was like “You know what? We should be able to start from a place of flavor and build on top of it.”

And so Bill’s idea was, “What we’re going to do, is we’re going to get a world and we’re going to flesh out that world. Before we do any design, we are going to flesh out our world and know our world, and we’re going to start design knowing that we have this world.”

Now, I’m trying to remember why Japanese. I think Bill had a short list of different—of different cultures he thought we could do. And the big issue for Bill was, he wanted to pick something that he felt was deep enough that there was a lot of space for us to do things, but that the—the public would have some sense of what it was. You know.

So okay. So. He had a short list—I don’t even remember all the short list. I know—I know Egyptian was on his short list. It’s possible Greek and Roman was on the short list? Interestingly enough. Although I—the reason we had (???) At some point I’ll talk about Theros, but I know when we first considered Greek and Roman, our concern was Magic has a lot of Greek and Roman in it. A lot of what Richard did was based on Greek mythology. But anyway, I think he looked at it all and decided the most potential was Japanese.

So Brady—Brady Dommermuth was in charge of world-building. And Brady the year before had done Mirrodin. I think Mirrodin had been his first world he had built. And Mirrodin was this very rich, cool world. So he set out to discover how to do that. Now it turns out that Brady is a big fan of anime, and a lot of—I think he—he might even be a little bit into manga, although more anime than manga. I know he liked Miyazaki. I mean, he—I know that he definitely had—and also a lot of—I know he watched a lot of Japanese films, and so he did a lot of research.

I mean, one of the things people don’t realize is, when we decide to go somewhere, the creative team usually picks some inspiration. Even if—even if the world, by the way, isn’t as top-down as this, they still pick a real-world place to at least have some inspiration from. Like, you know, Ravnica they went to Eastern Europe. You know. Just to get a sense and a quality that—you know—that—to give the—to ground each set in something, they’ll bring some real-world thing.

Now, the more top-down it is, the more resonant they try to bring it out. And so Brady was very gung-ho. Now, once again, I say this every time I talk about top-down. The goal wasn’t to make just Japanese set. It was to make a Magic world inspired by Japanese set.

And there were a whole bunch of goals at the time. I know Brady also, in trying to put together the story, ended up having a white pro—a white antagonist and a black protagonist, something Brady had always wanted to try. But anyway, Brady slowly put together this world. And I think he built it a lot on Shinto. I don’t—I have not talked to Brady about this. Or—it was a long time ago. But the—he got the essence of the idea of a war. A war between the spirit world and the human world.

Because in Shinto, I believe, the—in Japanese culture, there’s a lot of strength of the spirits—like—much like in Greek mythology there were gods that represented different things, I believe in Japanese mythology there—there are forces that represent—though, Greek mythology it’s more—the more human-like. The gods have more of a human quality. Where in Japanese mythology, in Shinto, I believe, they’re more essences of things. Or spirits of things. Rather than being a human analogue.

But anyway, Brady came up with this story where the main character, who was this white emperor, who was trying to—he was trying to help his kingdom, I mean he was white, so his goals were one of trying to make his kingdom better, but he ended up stealing an egg or something? It was—I don’t know if there’s a name for it. But it—essentially stealing this important thing, and which was like a baby spirit or something. From the spirits.

And they got really mad and they declared war on the human world. And so the idea was, it was this human-spirit war. With a lot of Shinto thrown in, and—okay, so what happened was, that got kind of created before the team started. So I’ll jump to the end a little bit here. So one of the big lessons of Kamigawa was that flavor is more flexible than mechanics.

And one of the things you’ll see as I walk you through the mechanics of Kamigawa is that flavor’s pretty flexible. You know, if you want to come up with things, there’s lots of stories and lots of—flavor is a pretty flexible thing. Mechanics are not that flexible. There’s a—there’s a limit of what mechanics can do. And so the mistake of Kamigawa was, they locked down the flavor before locking down the mechanics. In order to match the mechanics to the flavor, it was very ham-fisted.

As you will see, mechanics—so one of the things we’ve talked about is when something is dependent upon--(???) think of a good word here. We call it—what do we call it? When it is—it starts with a p. (sighs) Downside of doing a podcast. I’m blanking on the word. So the idea is—I’ll describe it. And then the word will come to me. In Magic design, when you design something that only can be used with itself, that it doesn’t have any backward compatibility.

That the idea is—mostly when you build something, some things play with themselves. You know. There might be a few things that are like, “Well, to really shine, you need to play with this other stuff in the set.” But usually whatever it’s playing into, there is stuff from the past that you can blend it with.

For example, Mirrodin, the set before this, was all about artifacts. Now, something like affinity from artifacts, yeah affinity from artifacts plays well with other affinity from artifacts. But in general, you know what you need to play with affinity from artifacts? Lots of artifacts. Well you know what? There are a lot of artifacts before Mirrodin came out. You know, there’s hundreds and hundreds of artifacts. So it wasn’t like if you wanted to play with artifacts you were forced to play with Mirrodin. But as we look at the mechanics for Champions of Kamigawa, you kind of were stuck with the mechanics from Champions of Kamigawa.

Why can’t I remember this word? It starts with a p. It will come to me. P-p-p-p… it is… Man! The world will come to me. Let’s talk mechanics from the set, talk about where—so first off there was a war between the spirits and the humans. And so they wanted to get some sense of the spirits. And so they came up with something called soulshift. This was a Mike Elliott design.

And the idea of soulshift was that when something with soulshift died, it allowed you to get spirits back from the graveyard. And so the reason this was kind of nice was, we knew the spirits were going to matter quite a bit, and this allowed you to have some sort of replay with the spirits.

Now, the problem was—parasitic! Aha! Parasitic is the word. So parasitic is the word we describe to say that it just plays well with itself. Now, you would think that spirits—the spirit creature type, it pre-existed the set, but it turns out there weren’t a lot of spirits. If you went back and looked at before this set, there were in the tens. Like twenty, twenty-five, thirty spirits. In all of Magic.

And so it wasn’t really—like we talk about artifacts, there were hundreds and hundreds of artifacts. There might have been a thousand artifacts. Before Mirrodin came out. But that wasn’t true with spirits. So spiritcraft played well with this set that had a lot of spirits, but it didn’t play great with (???) before that.

Also, they knew they wanted—the humans were going to be represented by fighters, and they wanted samurai. They knew they wanted ninjas, but we had—they’d decided at the time to save the ninjas. The idea was that ninjas would be so popular that they were going to save it for the first expansion. So Betrayers would later have the ninjas.

This would prove to be a mistake, by the way, another—I mean, one of the other lessons is, not only is it hard to build mechanics on top of design, because design is more flexible—mechanics is less flexible. But also, part of doing a world is you have to deliver the expectations. So one of the things that’s important about design is you—your audience has expectations. That whenever you say you’re going to do something, there’s an expectation on the level of your audience.

Now. Some of the time, you want some surprise. The audience might expect one—you know, they expect you to zig and you want to zag. You want a little of that. But you also need enough of you presenting what the audience expects you to present.

And the reason for that—I mean, this stems back to my writing days, which is the audience—remember my communication—I wrote an article about this. I’ll talk about this in my podcast. But I talk about the three things that communication theory teaches you that humans want. They want comfort, they want surprise, and they want completion.

Okay. They want surprise, so you want to throw some curveballs at them. But they also want comfort and they want completion. Both comfort and completion are about meeting expectations to a certain extent. Comfort is about getting things that they already know. Completion is about setting things up and following through on those.

And so—for example, if you say you’re going to do Japanese culture. And I write down everything I expect to see. Well, you know, ninjas are pretty high. Because even though ninjas in actual Japanese mythology are very tiny part of what’s going on, they are a very big part and they’re resonant of most people playing the game.

Because most people playing the game are not super enfranchised in Japanese mythology. That they know the surface level but not the deep level. And one of the problems that Champions of Kamigawa had was they went pretty deep. Like, if you really knew Shinto and a lot of the religion, they did a lot of cool things that you would recognize. But the problem was, they didn’t do enough stuff that was easily recognizable.

And that’s one of the tricky things about resonance is, resonance isn’t reality. Resonance is perceived reality. Meaning what the audience knows is not the same of what really is. And part of trying to do a resonant set is, yes you can do faithful things that are realistically there. But you also have to do some stuff that’s perceived to be there.

And that’s an important point, which is you have to meet some expectations. Otherwise, the funny thing is, the audience feels like you’re not doing what you say you’re doing because even though you’re being faithful, it doesn't feel correct to them.

And that’s the tricky part of—you want to kind of be faithful to your source on some level, but you also want to make sure you’re faithful to the perception of the source. And that’s another thing that’s really important is design, is one of the quotes they talk about is “perception is reality.”

Which is, that people really sometimes—like for example, there is a game that Richard Garfield made many years ago that was called What Were You Thinking? In fact, in design it was called Hive Mind. And the idea of the game was that you would get a topic, and then everybody else would try to write the same thing down. So for example, we did one once which was “Name three dwarves.”

And the reality is—so one of the funny stories is that this guy named Joe—the Timmy, Power Gamer from Unglued, Joe was the model for it because he was the most Timmy person ever to be in R&D. And Joe was horrible at Hive Mind.  At What Were You Thinking. Because he just couldn’t think like the group. And the example is, name three dwarves. And so he goes, “Okay, okay, I got this, I got this, I got this.” He goes, “Okay, first, first. Gimli.” For those that somehow don’t know, that’s Lord of the Rings. And—but everybody else had written down dwarves from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. Like, the way you were winning that was writing down Dopey. Everybody else had Dopey.

And so the idea is you had to think like everybody else. Now, every other dwarf you can name is really a dwarf that’s really from a place. Things might be very important. Lord of the Rings is a pretty major source, especially of geek culture. You know. And it doesn’t mean any dwarf from that is any less… except! When you’re playing this game! What are the most famous dwarves? You know what? Snow White is going to hit the pop culture zeitgeist, if you will, before Lord of the Rings.

And, you know, part of what playing that game is like learning, like, what do people expect. Not what is true, like one of the things for example—I think the rules—if you said “Name the most popular—name an insect.” The right answer might be “spider.” Now, now, a lot of you will say “But spider isn’t an insect!” It doesn’t matter, that’s the correct answer. You know.

That sometimes when you’re trying to capture what the expectation of the audience is, that being right isn’t the correct answer. That sometimes being right is doing what the audience expects and not what—and not what the truth is. The truth will mess you up sometimes when you’re trying to hit the expectations of the audience. That’s my lesson there.

Okay. So let’s get back. So—so they knew they wanted samurai, and they were saving the ninjas. A mistake, I believe, but they saved the ninjas. So the—they decided that they wanted to do something to make the samurai all feel like samurai. So they ended up giving them a mechanic called “bushido.” So for those that don’t know bushido, it says basically “Whenever I attack or block, I get +1/+1 for attacking or blocking—whenever I attack or block, I get +1/+1.” 

So the—by the way, this mechanic was first seen on a single card in Legends, I believe? No, Ice Age. In Ice Age. Called “Chub Toad.” “Chub toad, chub toad, at the door, run away quick or you’ll run no more.” That’s the flavor text. Old childhood rhyme. 

Anyway, the mechanic had been done once. People liked Chub Toad, it was a fun card. And they decided “Well, what if we just took the Chub Toad mechanic and made it a mechanic?” And because we were trying so hard to do top down, they ended up giving it a name that means, I think “way of the warrior?” That had to do with samurais specifically. Like, “Oh, well all the samurai have this mechanic.”

So the funny thing is that they used a mechanic that’s a very general mechanic that we easily could use again, except they gave it a name that makes it really hard for us to use. And so the funny thing is, we’ve never repeated it since Champions of Kamigawa.

And we will, although I guarantee the day we repeat it, odds are greatly that we’ll change the name because “bushido” doesn’t do any good for us, because—and let me explain why. So bushido means way of the warrior. So if you’re going to concept a card that has this, well, you somehow—it somehow has to say “Well, this thing, you know, is trained to be a warrior.” You know.

And—okay, there’s humanoids and things you can do, but let’s say I want to make Chub Toad again. Some giant toad beast. Because, you know, Magic needs more toad beasts. And—well, how do I—I can’t give it—you know, it’s not a way of the warrior. That doesn’t make any sense. In fact, Chub Toad was not even retroactively given Bushido because it didn’t make any sense. Although there was argument that the thing you can see inside Chub Toad’s mouth was a samurai. So.

So anyway, one of the problems about words for mechanics and stuff, especially now that we think about bringing things back is, that you need to give a word that’s basic enough that it gives you a lot of options on how to concept it. If it’s too narrow—like bushido just says “Oh, I can only put it on things that feel like it could have trained as a warrior.” Well, that means it’s humanoid or that means it’s probably not much bigger than a 2/2. You know. So, anyway. Like, it just causes problems.

The other thing that happened was in order to give the samurai some sort of oomph, because we gave it the samurai card type, is we made a few cards that cared about samurai. Some samurai lords type-ish things. But once again, that was parasitic, because, well, there were no samurai. You want samurai, this is the only set that has samurai. 

And real quickly, let me talk a bit about parasitic now that I remember the word. So what I talk about in Magic, I talk about modular and linear. So what that means is, modular is the mechanic where the card doesn’t sort of beget you to have other cards. Where linear says, “Oh, hey, you want to play with other cards.” You know, Goblin King says “Hey, I make goblins bigger. Maybe you want to play with goblins.”

So what is the difference between linear and parasitic? People ask this all the time. So linear means that I am begetting you to go to a certain subset. Parasitic is a subset of linear. There are linear mechanics that only call toward the set you’re in. So for example, affinity from artifacts is linear. It says “Hey, play me in a deck with lots of artifacts.” But Magic had a lot of artifacts predating Mirrodin. So even though it’s a linear mechanic, it wasn’t a parasitic mechanic.

So for example, soulshift—there weren’t a lot of spirits predating the set, so it became somewhat parasitic. The samurai, you know, mattering cards, that was parasitic. Now, bushido is not parasitic, because one bushido guy could play—you know, it didn’t beget you to have any other bushido cards. But the samurai matter cards did.

Now, the other mechanic I’ll get to, which also was very parasitic, was the splice mechanic. Which actually didn’t happen until development.

But anyway, I am approaching Wizards right now. So it’s crystal clear that I’m not getting—this is not a one-parter, although whenever I talk about sets these days I know they’re not one-parters. So what’ll happen today—let me wrap up today and then tomorrow I’ll pick up.

So design spent a lot of time trying to come up with stuff. And Brian, to his credit, tried all sorts of different things. I know he had like a kung fu mechanic where like you were literally throwing moves at your opponent and they had to block them and stuff. But the problem is, while that captured the general sense of Japanese, it didn’t match the flavor that had been built. And Bill really, really wanted them to build the world and match the world that they had built.

So design had had a lot of problems, and tomorrow I’ll talk a little bit more about this. But what happened was, a bunch of the things that ended up being in the set happened in development. Like, for example, both split cards—not split cards. Flip cards and splice would both happen in development.

And a lot of the legendary stuff that I’ll talk about tomorrow—sorry, I’ll talk about it next week—yes, the secret is I will do this tomorrow, you will hear this next week. Is a lot of this stuff did not happen until development. So what’ll happen is, I’m going to finish up kind of where design is tomorrow, and then I’ll get into development. Because this set had a very interesting development. And I happened to be on the development team. Although I was not on the design team. So a lot of design happened in development on this particular set. And I will get into that tomorrow.

But anyway, hope you enjoyed Part I of Champions of Kamigawa, and next week we will talk about Part II. So I’m glad you could join me—oh, I can see I had a quick ride in today. No traffic. This is where  you get hurt. “Curse ye and your no traffic!” But anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed Part I. Join me next week when we’ll have Part II. And until that, I need to go, because it’s time for me to be making Magic.