12/20/13 Episode 80: Theros 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 oftentimes when I’m doing this podcast, I tend to do things from the past. Leaving the more recent things for my column and such. But today I thought I would talk about the design of a recent set. Theros.

Now I’ve recently written about Theros, and so we’ll see how this goes, and there will be some overlap here. Hopefully I will add some new stories and new things that you did not hear, and embellish the ones that I talked about in my column. But today and probably for a few podcasts, since I have plenty to say, I’m going to talk about the design of Theros.

Okay. In the beginning—okay, so what happened with Theros is many years ago, Aaron called me into his office and told me that he wanted me to do another seven-year plan. So what had happened way back when is when Randy Buehler was my boss, he asked me for a five-year plan, I ended up making a six-year plan, and then Aaron I guess asked me for a six-year plan and I made a seven-year plan.

So during that time period, Theros was what was year three. So year one was Innistrad, which had been planned—when I made the six-year plan I kind of knew the seventh year was going to be Innistrad, although it took me a little while to convince everybody that it was a good idea. And then year two it was known that it was going to be Return to Ravnica. That was a known thing. So year three was the big unknown. The big question mark.

I had a very interesting idea for a block that was structured differently than we had done. But it required signing off from the creative team, because I had signed them up for a Herculean task. And when I sat down with both Aaron and Brady, Brady Dommermuth, the former creative director of the creative team, Brady said, “Okay, Mark, we can’t do that.”

They’re an awesome team, they do awesome work, I had just asked a little more of them than Brady thought was something they could do well. And I mean it was Brady’s job to make sure that his team was not signed up for more than he felt they could do. And the creative team does amazing, amazing work, and probably Brady was 100% in the correct of I was asking them to do something that would be a little hard for them to do.

So, my year three idea was dashed to the rocks. And so Aaron’s like “Well, do you have any other ideas?” So Brady said, he goes, “Well, we’ve always talked about doing a Greek mythology set. Maybe we could do Greek mythology.” And at the time this was going on, Innistrad hadn’t come out yet but it was in the process of being made. And we kind of knew it was going to be a hit. It was just clear as we were making it that all cylinders were in line and everything was going real well.

So Brady was like “Okay, we know top-down design can work. We’ve talked about doing Greek mythology, we think we can make Greek mythology work.” And I’ve always wanted to do Greek mythology.

So growing up, one of the things I did as a kid is I loved to read. I was a bit of a loner, and I had a lot of me time. And I loved to read. I was a bright little kid, and so what I did was I would pick a topic, and then I would read every book I could find on the topic. At one point it was space. At one point it was coded messages. At one point it was Native Americans. Anyway, I would read and read and read whatever the topic was at hand. So one of the topics that I got very into was Greek and Roman mythology. And I read a lot on Greek and Roman mythology.

So over the years we had talked about doing Greek mythology. The reason we shied away from it was that so much of what Richard had built into the game was kind of built on Greek mythology. That if you started listing just “What are the things from Greek mythology,” the vast, vast majority Magic has done. In fact a lot of them Magic continues to do on a regular basis.

And so we were kind of concerned that it just wouldn’t feel different enough. But what Innistrad taught us was—because Innistrad did a horror world. Not much of what we did in Innistrad had Magic never done before. I mean, even werewolves, which we hadn’t done much of, we had done a couple. We had done three, I think.

And so what we realized was that if you just kind of organized things and put them together, even if you see them on a regular basis, when they’re grouped together they have a different feel. The horror world felt horror even though a lot of the things you see, vampires and zombies and spirits and humans, we do all the time. But just kind of grouped together and flavored together, and with the right creative treatment it felt very different.

So we realized we could do Greek mythology. And so I wasn’t worried about that. But Brady had an idea, he said that a lot of Greek mythology has to do with dreaming and the subconscious and that he thought maybe there was something that we could mess around there with an enchantment theme.

So let me talk about the enchantment theme. So way back when, back in the day, during Urza’s Saga, we decided that we were going to do an enchantment theme. And if you actually look at Urza’s Saga, you break it down, there’s a lot of enchantments in it. Enchantments play a big role. In fact, for those that remember Urza’s Saga Limited, you actually played enchantment removal maindeck in Urza’s Saga Limited, because there’s a lot of enchantments that were super scary. Including the common Pestilence which was a wonderful idea.

Anyway, but what happened was at the time, one of these days I’ll do this podcast once I get permission to do it, but what happened was we were doing the Weatherlight Saga, but Mike and I, who had originally come up with the story, were kind of forced off the team. Once again, a story for another day. And the team that was there decided that they were going to spend a year going back in time and see what Urza was up to, and explain Urza’s connection to the Weatherlight Saga.

And so they were creating the story that they wanted to tell, but design-wise we had built this enchantment block. And then they had said “Oh, well we’re going to tell the story of Urza.” And our first response was, “Well, Urza’s an artificer. Like, he’s famous for artifacts. But this isn’t an artifact set.”

Now, so what happened was, the Brand team decided that they were going to play up the story more than the mechanics, and so they in fact called it the Artifact Cycle, because Urza’s an artificer. Even though there wasn’t… okay. And then, to make matters worse, Urza’s Saga is probably from a developmental standpoint the most broken set we’ve ever made. And so we happened to make a whole bunch of broken things, some of which were artifacts.

So, we had a set revolving around Urza. In fact, all three sets were named after Urza, famous famous artificer, in a block in which we had a lot of broken artifacts that was labeled the Artifact Cycle. And by the way, talk about broken artifacts, we banned a whole bunch of cards that block. Zero of the cards we banned were enchantments. We in fact banned ever other card type but enchantments.

So we had a broken block in which none of the broken things were enchantments, called the Artifact Cycle, starring an artificer, with broken artifacts, surprise, surprise, no one got that it was an enchantment block.

So it’s something people had always wanted. That people wanted an enchantment block, and the one time we delivered it, no one thought we’d delivered it, so we knew it was something we needed to do at some point.

And so Brady had this idea of “What if you combined top-down Greek and Roman mythology world with enchantment theme. And something about dreams…” He talked a lot about how if you read a lot of Greek mythology, the gods enter the people’s dreams and a lot of times omens came to people in their dreams, and just a lot of dreaming in Greek mythology.

So I said “Okay, let me think about it.” The other seven years we had all signed off on. And this was really the only one. And ironically, this was the one that was starting soon. I guess Innistrad might even have been out, because when I had this talk, I was a month away maybe from starting on Theros design.

Oh, by the way, another side thing that comes up. So Theros block was Friends, Romans, and Countrymen. And everyone was like, “You always say that the code names have nothing to do with the set! And Friends, Romans, Countrymen, that’s a famous quote by a Roman, Julius Caesar!” I mean, in Julius Caesar it’s Mark Antony. “And this is a set that’s about Greek and Roman mythology!” And the answer is, when it was named, it wasn’t a set about Greek and Roman mythology.

Also, by the way, I guess the side note is, when we got into it, originally we were thinking Greek and Roman mythology, and the design team—I guess not the design team, the creative team came to us and said “You know what? We’ve looked at it. There is a very distinct difference between Greek and Roman. We think there’s a lot of Roman tropes maybe we can use later, so we’re just going to make this Greek mythology and not Greek and Roman mythology. So when I talk about it being Greek and Roman, once we actually got into the design it became just Greek and not Greek and Roman. There’s a lot of overlap in the mythology, so obviously most of the mythological things we’re referencing, there’s parallels in Roman mythology. But we’re sticking to Greek.

So yeah. This whole discussion happened about a month before I was about to start the design. So I guess Innistrad might have been out, and Return to Ravnica must have been in Design.

So I needed a little time to think about it. It wasn’t that I was worried about Greek and Roman mythology top-down or Greek mythology top-down. I knew there was plenty there. So what I did was I was thinking about the enchantments. And I came up with a story idea that I really liked. Interestingly, the story idea I came up with really isn’t what happened. It isn’t what was in the set.

So I’ll give you a little… my original story had to do with I wanted to have a new evil planeswalker. And so my original story—now be aware that the way this tends to work is, Design comes up with something that is archetypal usually, and then when we get to Creative, Creative starts filling it out. So a lot of my ideas were sort of suggestions that I had a kind of story I wanted to tell. And I guess the more I think about this, the problem with the story is, if it’s not so far removed from the actual story that me telling you doesn’t give you some information. So… hmm.

So I’ll tell this. I’ll tell you a little bit about the story that I can tell you. My original—the villain that I wanted was a dark mirror of Jace. So for those that know their superhero comics, there’s the famous trope called the Dark Mirror. And what a Dark Mirror means, it is the hero with all the powers of the hero, but a dark evil version.

So for example, Superman has Bizarro. That Bizarro has all of Superman’s powers mostly, depending on what version you read, but he’s a clone of Superman, but he’s evil. Sinestro was Green Lantern but evil. Same powers, but evil. Reverse Flash, or Professor Zoom, as he’s called, is basically Flash but evil. Captain Marvel has Black Adam. No matter what you take, there’s an evil version. There’s a character that is—Spiderman has Venom. That there’s some version that’s like the dark version of the hero. It’s a very popular trope.

And so I thought it would be neat to have a dark version of Jace. And the reason I did is, my story was very mental in how I was setting things up. And so I needed a villain—I was trying to make a new villain. Now, I knew there was a good chance it might not actually be Dark Jace. But that was my original pitch.  And probably I’ll have to tell the story maybe when I do a podcast on Journey into Nyx. When the story is done I can sort of tell you a bit about my original story. But anyway, I had a story, and I came up with an idea of how I could use the enchantment creatures.

Let’s talk a little bit about enchantment creatures. Okay, so during Future Sight I made a card. It ended up being called Lucent Liminid. And my card was a white flying enchantment creature that had an effect. I forget what the effect was. It might have been a Crusade, or some very staple white enchantment effect. I think it was Crusade? It was some effect.

During development—Mike Turian was the lead developer. So Future Sight, surprise surprise, had some complexity issues. Which is funny because when it came out—it’s funny to think of, by the way, the set is probably the most complex set we’ve ever made, and in development it was more complex. So he took off the ability so that it was just an enchantment creature. He figured, “Oh, okay, that’s different enough, that can…”

Oh, this was a future-shifted card, meaning it was in a new border representing something from the future. And the reason I’d made it was “Oh, we had mix-and-match permanent types. We’d never done something that was both enchantment and creature.” And my idea was very simple. “Okay, it’s a creature, it has an enchantment effect. Hey, it’s both enchantment and creature.” I didn’t know quite what it was going to represent, but Mike ended up taking off the global ability, static ability I guess.

And he and I fought about it. My problem was I didn’t feel like it was an enchantment creature if it didn’t have any enchantment-ness to it. But it ended up being printed that way, and in the back of my head I knew that one day I wanted to do enchantment creatures. I just wanted to do them correct.

Meanwhile, when we talked about this being an enchantment block, one of the things we do often—the lowest-hanging fruit if you will, when you do a card type matters, is to do card type matters. It’s to say “Oh, well it’s the artifact block, so what happens? Oh, there’s lots of artifacts and lots of cards that make you want to play artifacts, and okay, play a deck full of artifacts.”

I was trying to do something a little different this time around in the sense that I wanted enchantments to mean something, and so what I was looking for is I wanted the enchantments to play a role in the set. So the idea I had was I’d liked the idea that enchantment creatures were creatures that were made by the gods. And that the gods themselves would be enchantment creatures.

And so early on, I had in my mind that I wanted to see if I could use enchantment creatures in some way. Partly because I wanted to find what they meant. And partly because I thought it might be a different way to approach it.

So one of the other problems about enchantment block or a block with a lot of enchantments in it that enchantments are the one permanent type that’s a little harder to kill than the other permanent types. If you get to land, well red and black and green can all kill land. You get to creatures, everybody but blue can kill creatures, and blue has creature answers. You get to artifacts, white and green and red can all blow up artifacts.

And you get to enchantments, and white and green can destroy enchantments. Blue has some answers and it has counterspellls. But three of the colors, blue, black and red, do not destroy enchantments, and black and red do not have a lot of answers to enchantments. Black has discard. Red has… not a lot of answers. I guess a lot of people talk about this on my blog.

People really get upset that red seems to have the greatest vulnerability. But they miss the fact that I think it’s important that red has the greatest vulnerability. It is the color that least tries to cover its vulnerability, that’s kind of red’s thing.

So I wanted to make sure that we could handle enchantments. By making enchantment creatures be a major thrust, I knew that red and black could handle creatures. And so by making a lot of enchantments be on creatures, I knew that red and black would have an answer.

On top of that, like I said, I was trying to figure out a way to use enchantments—so one of the big things that has happened since Innistrad—or actually since Scars, what I call Fifth Age of Design. So the First Age of Design says that Magic was very much about individual cards. That the focus was “How do I make this card design as awesome as it could be?” And everything was very focused on a card-by-card basis. Now, it caused a lot of continuity issues, the rules were a little fuzzy because cards worked differently from each other.

And the Second Age of Design was more like “Okay,” I thought more in terms of mechanics and how things went together, started grouping things together. Now the First Age of Design is Alpha through Alliances. Second Age of Design was Mirage through Prophecy. The Third Age of Design started with Invasion. It talked about the idea of building themes and designing for the themes. And that’s when we started getting, like “It’s the multicolor block. It’s the graveyard block. It’s the artifact block.” Stuff like that.

And so Third Design goes through… what’s the one before Ravnica? Was—what was right before Ravnica? I’m blanking. I’m blanking. Was Champions of Kamigawa. Through Saviors of Kamigawa. So starting with Ravnica, we started doing (???) was me becoming Head Designer. We started doing block design. And so it got a little bigger in scope. And so that was the Fourth Age of Design, and that goes until the end of Zendikar. Rise of the Eldrazi.

So Scars of Mirrodin in my mind was the beginning of the Fifth Age of Design, in which it was more about the way we design, where it’s a different take on how we do design. The metaphor I use is the idea of painting. That before, we would frame the whole block as having some identity. And then we’d figure out how to cut that identity up to make a block structure. And starting with Scars of Mirrodin, it was more like, “I want to tell a story. I want my design to be something. And to do that, I will use different components of mechanics as paint, to paint the canvas if you will.”

So the idea is, in Third and Fourth Age of Design, it would be like “Oh, it’s a graveyard block.”  Or even then, I guess—I mean, Fourth Age of Design might be “It’s a guild block.” But the Fifth Age of Design is like if you look at something like Innistrad, where it’s sort of like “Okay, we’re trying to portray this, how do we—oh, well we can use a graveyard component. We can use a tribal component. We can…” You know, that it took different elements to build it together.

And it is a different way of looking at it, a different way of designing. And so one of the things that I was looking at was I wanted to figure out how enchantments was one of my paints. It wasn’t the be-all, end-all of my design. My design wasn’t built around enchantments. It was built around having a certain feel.

And that’s another big thing, I think I guess, that starts with Fifth Age of Design. That’s the idea of an emotional component, like of—Fifth Age, as I move forward, the question I’ve always asked is, what emotion am I trying to get out of my audience?

Scars of Mirrodin I was trying to make you intimidated by this opposing force. I wanted you to feel what it was like, feel sort of on the side of the intruders and the side of the intruded. And a big part of how I do design now, and I’ll do a podcast on this, is I’m a big believer that emotions are very important in design. That you have to understand how the audience feels. And so a big part of how I design now is thinking about what mood I want. What emotion I want. What’s the emotional response I’m trying to get. And it turned out Greek Mythology was tricky. I started assuming that it would be like Innistrad, that it would be top-down, okay I would capture the feel, and I would go to pop culture.

So what happened was, once I figured out what I wanted to do, and I said to Aaron “Okay, I got it, I can do this,” I tagged Ethan Fleischer. Ethan’s the winner of the Great Designer Search 2, who is on the design team. I said to Ethan I had a design project for him. And this was—Ethan was actually still an intern at this time. Was I wanted him to go through Magic and through Greek mythology, and I wanted him to sort of say “Where are there opportunities both in Greek mythology to do Magic, and in Magic to do Greek mythology?

And he did basically a research project and made a pamphlet, a little book that sort of talked about “What’s all the stuff Magic has done that is Greek mythology, what is the Greek mythology that would lend itself well that we haven’t done but that would lend itself well to Magic?” And he wrote all that up.

And meanwhile, I was trying to figure out sort of “What is the essence of what I wanted to do?” Now, I literally started my design like I started my Innistrad design. So for example, Day One. We walk in the design meeting and I say to my team, “Okay guys, we’re going to write up on the board everything you can think of that represents Greek mythology.” Or at the time, Greek and Roman mythology.

And so we just filled up the board. And meanwhile, a little contrast here, I had been at the library with my kids. And so one of the things at the library, for those that aren’t familiar with the Dewey Decimal System, so what happens is when you want to look things up, things are grouped in different categories. There’s numbers. And so if you want to find something, you have to say “I want to find such-and-such.” You look up the catalog number and you find it.

And so one of the quirky things about the Dewey Decimal System is sometimes when you’re looking for one thing, you find other things because like the section you’re looking at is only so big. So we were looking for my daughter, and my daughter—I don’t even remember what she was looking for. But while looking for a book for my daughter, I stumbled upon—it was like Greek and Roman mythology for kids. And I thought that it was interesting, because one of the things that I’m trying to do is I’m trying to make sure that I hit all the most common tropes. And I’m like, “You know what? This is perfect. Like a book aimed at kids, this is the basics, right?” Of Greek and Roman mythology.

And I got the book out of the library that day. The subtitle of the books was like “Greek and Roman mythology: Gods, Heroes and Monsters.” And that really hit home for me. And when we were having our first meeting and we were writing stuff on the board, I looked at the board and I realized that we had basically put things in four categories.

Now one category was just “Ancient Greek things.” A coliseum. An urn. A toga. They’re just things that you associate with Greek and Roman mythology. Because really you’re associating it with Greek. But once I took those out, the remaining three things fell into three categories. They were gods, they were heroes, or they were monsters. It was Zeus and Hera and Apollo and Ares. Or it was Perseus and Theseus and Hercules. Or it was Medusa or Pegasus or Cyclops or whatever. And that really they fell into those categories.

And I decided early on that that was an interesting way to think of it. Because one of the things, this is an important thing we talk about with in design, one of the things that happens early on is I need a way to mentally process each set. And I need a way to mentally process it that’s a way that I haven’t done before.

I talked about this in my creativity podcast, in that one of my tricks when I’m doing a design is I want to make sure I approach it unlike I’ve approached any other design. Why? Because I want to sort of fire new neurons. I want to go down paths my brain hasn’t gone down before. That if you do something that you’re well familiar with, you will keep coming up with things that you know. But when you challenge yourself and say, “I’m going to do it under some constraints I’ve never done before,” you just get to areas you never get, and it’s a way to get lots of fresh material.

Now, I was already going down the path of Greek and Roman mythology. I’d never done that before. I knew I was going to find a lot of things I never knew. But I needed some way to mentally process it. So not only do I need a new vantage point, but I need some way to sort of group it in my head.

I’ve talked about this many, many times, but I will mention it one more time. The human brain likes to group things. It just makes it easier. That if my set has too many components, it’s hard for me to sort of acknowledge. But three is a good number. And I said “Okay. I’m going to break up what I’m doing into three parts.” And gods, heroes, and monsters seemed like a good thing.

So let’s talk a little bit about the gods. Because it’s something that came up very early in design, which was “Are we going to have gods?” Gods are kind of daunting from a Magic standpoint. Because what is a god? You are a planewalker. You’re this really powerful person that shows up and can summon things out of nowhere, and you have a lot of god-like powers. I mean, old-school planeswalkers were a little more actually god-power-level, but even modern planeswalkers could be mistaken for gods by the natives. I mean, they definitely are powerful in some ways.

But the more and more that we studied it, the more it was clear that like it’s hard to do Greek mythology without the gods. The gods are so entwined in Greek mythology that the very idea of doing Greek mythology and not having gods?

Now, I knew, by the way—I knew that the people who lived on the world would believe in gods. That I knew. That I couldn’t do Greek and Roman mythology without a god system. The real question was, were we as designers going to make cards that were gods?

And one of the things that is important in design is, you’ve got to figure out early on the expectations of your audience. That you can buck expectation to a certain extent, but at some level, if everybody’s expecting you to do something—like if you went on the street and said “We’re doing a Greek mythology set, what would you expect to see?” And 90+ percent all say the same thing, then you need to have a really, really good reason not to have that thing. And what I said is, “Everyone’s going to expect gods. We’re doing Greek mythology. How do you not have gods?” I said, “Okay, okay. We’re going to do gods.”

Then I had an interesting idea. I mean, it’s kind of an obvious idea, but I was the one who had it just because I was the first one to think of it. Was I wanted to figure out how to make gods uniquely their own. Now, if you listen to me and my podcasts or read my column or interact with me in any way, you know that I believe that at the core of the game, the thing that makes Magic tick. The most important dig-down-deep center of everything, is the Magic color pie.

And I’m a huge huge fan. Obviously I’m one of the color pie gurus. I understand the color pie very well. And so one of the things I said is “Okay, the crux of Magic, the core of Magic  is the color pie. The core of Greek mythology is the gods.” So it didn’t take a rocket scientist to like go “Hmm… gods, color pie!”

And so it’s obvious that we needed to have five gods, right? One for each color. But then as I thought about it, I said, “You know what? One of the things that makes the gods so much fun is that there’s a pantheon of gods.” And I said, “Well, five is a pantheon,” but I thought maybe we wanted a little more than that. So the next logical place, if you follow the color pie, is to say “Well, what if we have five major gods and ten minor gods?” Have all the two-color combinations.

Now the other nice thing about the minor gods is we were following up on Return to Ravnica block, which meant we had a lot of two-color decks that were there. Like “Okay, we can throw a bone to two-color decks.” And it allowed us to do five—fifteen was the perfect number, it allowed us to do three cycles. One cycle for each set. 

And so one of the things that’s nice when you’re building a block is you want to have hook and you want to make things exciting. And like “Okay, it’s a Greek mythological set. Three sets. Every set has a cycle of gods. Cycle of mythic rare gods.” That sounds pretty exciting. So we decided we’d up front and have the major gods in the first set, and then have the minor gods in the second and third set. Their pattern is not hard to guess if you think about it.

But anyway, so I knew I wanted gods. Now, how were we going to make those gods? That, my friends, is a long story. And I see work. So of course, as I predicted coming up, we are—I just started talking about the gods, I haven’t mentioned any of the five mechanics. So I predict this will be a multi-parter. Many parts, probably, because I have a lot to say about Theros. Luckily, I’m driving to work every day. So this will be a busy week as I talk about Theros.

So anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed my first glimpse into the world of Theros. Like I said, there’s a lot going on. There’s a lot of moving pieces. I’m hoping by doing a little more recent podcast, that I can give you a little more detail, because I’ll just know it off the top of my head. This is something that I’ve lived with for a long time but recently lived with.

So anyway, I hope you’re enjoying Part One. There’s many more parts coming your way. So anyway, I’m now at work, so instead of talking about the Magic that I made in the past, I must be making Magic. Thanks for joining me, guys, I’ll talk to you next time.