12/20/13 Episode 81: Theros 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.

So last time, I started talking about the design of Theros. And I was nowhere near completed, so we’ve got some more Theros to talk about.

Okay. So when last we left, and by the way if you haven’t listened to the previous podcast, you want to, it’s Part I, this is Part II. Okay. So when last we left, I had talked about how I had figured out we wanted gods. And like I said, I knew for sure that the gods would have an influence, meaning that I knew the people of the world would believe in gods, the question was whether or not we represented the gods. And eventually I said, “Okay, how do you not have gods?” Like, if ever you’re going to have cards representing gods, like Greek mythology was the one to do it.

Now the interesting thing was that we didn’t quite know how to make the gods at first. So before I get to the gods, I need to talk devotion. (Dramatic fanfare) Okay. So long ago, during Fifth Dawn. So Fifth Dawn was the third set in the original Mirrodin block. I had an idea or maybe Randy had an idea, or maybe Randy and I together had an idea.

And that was Aaron Forsythe ran the website. So several years earlier, I had been tasked by Bill to sort of restart the website. The website really wasn’t very organized, and we decided that we wanted to have a real presence on the web. So the Brand team tasked Bill with doing it, and Bill tasked me with doing it since I was the Communication major.

And so Bill said, “Okay, we’re going to do a website, make an awesome website.” And I knew part of making the website is I needed someone to run the website. And so I had three candidates who I thought could do it. And interestingly, one of them would be Scott Johns who would later run it. But at the time Scott had to pass. And the other person, who I won’t name right now, also had to pass.

So the only person that was interested in doing it that I really thought could do the job was Aaron Forsythe. And if you’ve listened to my MagicTheGathering.com podcast, I talked about sort of getting Aaron—it was a big struggle. But eventually things all worked out. Aaron was running the website.

And Randy and I came up with this cool idea of letting Aaron be on a design team, and we thought if nothing else we’d get out of it a pretty cool article or series of articles about sort of being on the inside and what it’s like to be on a design team. And Aaron was a pro player, and we thought he could contribute. But the motivation, interestingly enough, was that we thought it would be something that would create some good content.

Interestingly, by the way, Fifth Dawn was also the design team—so the design team was me and Randy and Aaron and then a guy named Greg Marques. Who when I get to Fifth Dawn I’ll tell the Greg Marques story. But Greg Marques didn’t work for the company at the time. He would later work for the company, but he didn’t work for the company at the time. And so it is sort of someone plucked from—it’s a good story. But that’s really a Fifth Dawn story.

So during Fifth Dawn, Aaron turned in I think two cards. One of which was something like—something about a butterfly. Something Butterfly. And what it did was it looked at the number of white mana symbols at something. Like on creatures or something. And it made these little butterfly token creatures based on how many white mana symbols you had.

And I said to Aaron that I thought this was such a cool idea that we shouldn’t be doing one or two cards. And we really should wait to do it correctly. And I liked the idea of counting mana symbols. I thought it was very cool.

 

So come Future Sight, which was many years down the road, I was making mechanics from the future! And so one of the things I did is I had a bunch of different mechanics that I knew we wanted to do someday. So I decided a few of them I would tease in Future Sight. So one of the things was I knew I wanted to do this “count mana symbols.” I thought it was pretty cool. So I put it into Future Sight on a card. [Phosphorescent] Feast, if I remember correctly. 

Anyway, a year later I’m working on Eventide. So Eventide, Shadowmoor and Eventide were a miniblock in a larger—Lorwyn and Morningtide were the other mini-blocks. And the idea of—I want to get to Lorwyn—is each of the miniblocks had its own theme. The mini-block of Shadowmoor and Eventide was hybrid mana. About half the cards had hybrid mana.

And so when I was trying to find a mechanic for Eventide, it dawned on me that one of the themes of this mini-block was “color matters.” Because hybrid plays well with a “color matters” strategy. And like “Oh, well, you know, there’s lots of hybrid symbols,” more so than normal because when there’s two-color hybrid you can support more colored mana symbols, and like “Oh, this will be a good place to try out this mechanic.”

So we ended up calling it “chroma,” and we put it into Eventide. And, well… Eventide, when I did my Rosewater Rumble where I took my sixteen sets and I had them fight against each other, I think Eventide was my sixteenth seed. It was not my shining moment as a lead designer. The set went over not so great, and chroma is the mechanic that probably got the best reception, and even then it’s kind of like “Oh, okay,” you know, it was fair. It wasn’t well-received. It wasn’t poorly received, it just was like “Eh.”

But in my heart of hearts, I had belief—I believed Chroma actually had a lot of potential, and I felt like Chroma was one of the mechanics that I felt was most kind of missed. That I really think had potential that didn’t quite connect with the audience.

So anyway, flash forward, we are now working on the design for Theros. And we were looking at… one of the things that Bill Rose, a couple of years back—or at this point many years back, decreed that we should try to repeat a mechanic every year. And I agreed with him.

One of the things about Magic is the biggest threat to design is that there’s this pressure to constantly do new things. And we want some new things. Every set should have new things. But what we realized is a lot of what we need to do is make use of the resources we have.

And that what we discovered is when we bring back mechanics people like, hey, they’re happy, they’re excited to see these mechanics they like. And that newer players who haven’t played with them are excited because they’re good mechanics, and that we should be bringing back mechanics more. And I was completely on board with Bill. So we made an effort every year to bring back at least one mechanic. Sometimes more than one. As in the case with Theros.

So we were talking about what mechanic we might want to bring back. And Zac Hill, one of the team members, Zac was on the development team but he was the dev rep for this design team, suggested chroma.

And the funny thing is, I’d been thinking about chroma as well in the back of my head, and when Zac said that I was like “Yeah.” So here’s… here’s a thing that I liked about it, was we knew that we needed some way to represent the connection between the people and the gods. And I didn’t know whether that was going to be a new mechanic or an old mechanic, but when Zac brought up chroma I was like “You know what? Chroma does a pretty good job…” Like if you have gods in the five colors, that’s your gods in the set. They’re five mono-colored gods. That “Oh, well, it seems like… oh, how do I show that I have allegiance to the red god?” Well, red mana symbols, that’s pretty good.

But the key was I knew we had to rebrand chroma. First off the word was super generic. I mean, chroma is just a [Greek] root for color. And I knew that we needed to sort of give it a face lift. So for starters I knew that we needed a new word. Also, while we were giving it a new word I thought maybe we could tighten it up a little bit.

So the way chroma worked is chroma was, “I’m an ability word, I will tell you where to look, and I will tell you of the place to look to count mana symbols.” So it could be in hand, it could be in the graveyard, it was in a bunch of different places. But I was like “Okay. What I want here is to show your allegiance to the god. Well, who cares what’s in your hand or your graveyard? What do you have in play?” And I felt like that was a good place to sort of represent how I feel: “What do I got in play?”

And so I decided we’ll narrow it down. Instead of it being all over the place… for people that don’t understand the difference between a keyword and an ability word, the biggest way I describe it is this: if you take the ability word off the card, it just works. The ability word doesn’t do anything to make the card work, it’s just a way to group it thematically.

But a keyword is something in which it needs to be on the card. Now, you can’t reference ability words, but you can reference keywords. So for example, if I wanted things to reference this ability, I needed it to be a keyword and not an ability word because ability words can’t be referenced.

So for example, you could not make a card that said “Look at the battlefield, and if your chroma count is something, something happens.” Because chroma is not a keyword. It’s an ability word. Now, for the end user or the game player, it doesn’t matter too much in the sense that keywords, ability words, I think people think of them pretty similarly. But from a mechanic standpoint, they actually work a little bit differently. The fact that you can’t reference them is pretty important.

So I knew in my head that we wanted things to key off of it, so I knew we needed a keyword. I also was looking for something that like I said, had a little more flavor to it. And so I came up with the idea of devotion. Of “Okay, how do you know that you care—you’re devoted to it.”  And then the idea with devoted was we could add the color. So it’s not just devotion, but it’s devotion to something. You know. I could be devotion to blue, to white, and such. And so I started trying that on our cards.

One of the things that’s very common to do in playtests, is… like I said, I talk about this all the time, but I’m a big believer in words. I’m a big believer that language shapes opinions. And so I tried very hard in my playtest to figure out where the words are going to matter, and then I try out words. I try out to see how things are going. And devotion to color, I had a good thought of, but I wanted to try it. And what I discovered was it just felt very natural, if your devotion to blue is such-and-such, it had a nice ring to it.

Devotion was also nice in that it fit thematically and has a flavor sense here, but it is broad enough. My classic example is bushido. Where we had an ability in the Champions of Kamigawa block that said, “If this creature is blocking or blocked, it gets +1/+1. In combat it gets +1/+1.” Is that it? Blocking? It might just be when blocking. Anyway, it gets +1/+1.

And bushido means “the way of the sword.” So we put it on samurai. Well, the problem was, for example, we had a card called Chub Toad back in Ice Age that essentially had the bushido ability. But we didn’t retroactively through Oracle put bushido on it. I think we since have. But at the time we didn’t because why would a frog have bushido? It’s the way of the sword. What about the frogs means he’s trained in swordplay? It just didn’t fit. The name didn’t fit.

The nice thing about devotion is, it’s a step back. We’ve learned to do this with our keywords, which is “It has some flavor, but it’s a little looser.” Devotion just means I have some attachment to this. It doesn’t necessarily mean a religious devotion. Obviously in Theros it’s tied to the gods, but I believe we could use it in other places, and that devotion is a pretty generic enough concept that we could make it work in other environments. And we’re trying hard to do that.

Okay, so now we have devotion. And like I said, I knew that we wanted to show the people’s connection to the gods. Like I said, once I divided the set up into gods, heroes, and monsters, it meant figuring out what each of those meant.

So the god part meant a couple things. A. I had to have the gods. B. I needed the creations of the gods and I needed the touch of the gods. That’s another important thing. I knew the gods were going to be mythic rare creatures. So there’s only so much interaction one gets with mythic rare creatures. Hopefully players will get one, maybe get multiples, but still, just in a Limited game, the chance of you opening up a god in a Limited game is not that high.

And even in Constructed, depending on how many cards you buy, there’s a good chance that you open up a god, but we needed the feel of the gods to be everywhere. So one of my maxims, I say this all the time, is “If your theme’s not at common, it’s not your theme.”

Well, I wanted Greek mythology, and I wanted the gods to have a presence. So I knew I needed to figure out how to make the gods’ presence felt. So the thing that I liked about enchantments is, I liked the idea of tying the gods to enchantments. The gods have this ethereal quality to them, I felt like things made by the gods would have this ethereal quality.

Also, as a side note, one of the things we were trying to do… when you look at Greek mythology, one of the staple stories of Greek mythology is the idea of mortals interacting with gods, and by being touched by the gods, the gods send them on quests or the gods tell them they must do things. And I thought that was pretty cool. That the interaction between our heroes and our gods might be that the gods bless the heroes. Or curse the heroes.

And I liked the idea of auras. That auras had a very nice feel of the touch of the gods. “I do something.” Which brings up another important point, which is you’ll notice in Theros, there are no global enchantments. Zero. Now originally we did have some, but then we realized as we were putting together the block that it was stepping on the toes of something we wanted to do.

So by the way, this is the downside of me doing a podcast about something that’s not completely done yet, is that I can’t talk openly about it because there’s things to come. If I’d done this podcast in two years, I could just explain everything. I’m trying something new to see if you guys want something that’s a little more contemporary. But the downside is I can’t tell you everything, because I’d like to keep some surprises.

But anyway, if you’re wondering why there’s no global enchantments, we’re well aware there are none. It’s not a mistake. It is done with a purpose. And once you see the whole block I can explain why we were up to that.

But anyway, I liked a lot of the idea of auras, and I liked the idea of auras being the touch of the gods. So we had enchantment creatures that would be the creation of the gods, and we had enchantments that would be the touch of the gods.

Now, mind you by the way, enchantment creatures, or at least bestow did not exist yet. So in the beginning there were five enchantment creatures in Theros. The five enchantment creatures were the five gods. And I was not planning to introduce enchantment creatures until Born of the Gods, the second set.

So let me tell that story. Okay, so—actually, I’m writing an article about this, but I think this will come up. I think this podcast comes up before you read this article. I’m not 100% sure of the timing. So let me talk a little bit about something called advanced planning.

So, what happened was Ethan Fleischer won the Great Designer Search 2. And we also gave an internship to Shawn Main, who came in second. One of the things that I had done in the second Great Designer Search a little different from the first Great Designer Search was at one point Bill and I were talking, and we realized that there’s many different components to design, so one of them is what we call vision design. Which is kind of coming up with big picture, and starting with a blank page and sort of crafting how something will be made. And we realized that we’re just kind of low on that. It’s something where I happen to be very good at it, but one of the things that’s very important is tomorrow if I’m hit by a bus…

Somehow that is the defining thing that’s going to take me out. You ever notice that? It’s a bus. Somehow I know like late in life—hopefully late in life—that a bus will do me in. “Ah, the great bus!” I always talk about being hit by a bus.

Anyway, if for some reason I was gone, not that I’m planning to go anywhere, but things happen, I wanted to make sure that Magic would continue, and that meant I needed to sort of work on creating more people that were good at vision design. So in the second Great Designer Search, that was one of my criteria. In fact, if you notice, one of the things we did in the second Great Designer Search is made them build worlds. Why? Because I was looking for this exact skill. And Shawn and Ethan had it. Or they had potential, I guess I should say.

And so what happened was, when I hired them for the internship, I needed to figure out whether or not they had this skill, because we wanted to figure out whether or not we wanted to keep them around. The internship was a testing thing.

A very common thing now for design and development, especially development, is you don’t just get hired at Wizards most of the time. Usually you get an internship, which is six months long, to sort of demonstrate your worth. And almost every single developer we have right now was an intern first. In fact, most of the designers were interns first as well. So most of R&D started as an intern.

And I needed to figure out what they were capable of. So I came up with this idea that said “Okay.” At the time we were working on Friends. Or we were about to start Friends. I talk about how I had about a month to go before the design started, and Ethan, who was there, I had him write the little booklet about Magic and Greek mythology.

So anyway, cut forward a month or two, we had started Theros, and so I started this project with Ethan and Shawn in which we started working on Huey block, which was the following year. And the reason we did that was I just needed something they could work on that let’s say for example, nothing came to fruition. Well then I’d still have all my design time to design it. I felt I was goofing around in an area where I had time.

So we worked ahead. And the idea was I just wanted to let them goof around. But what happened was, as we started creating a process by which to let them do that, I figured out that we had this amazing new tool which we now call advanced design. Which was before we start design, I have a different set of people that work on advanced design.

And it’s a place for me to sort of experiment. I don’t do the work, basically the way it works is I give assignments to the team, they try things, and then once a week they come and they playtest with me, and I give notes to them on what’s going on. And so essentially I’m sort of steering them but I’m not doing the work. They’re doing the work.

Anyway, obviously Shawn and Ethan worked out. They both got hired. Advanced planning became a thing. So some time during Friends—we were in the middle of doing Huey when we realized that Friends could use a little love. So I took my advanced planning team and I stuck them on Theros block. Now Theros was mostly on the way. So they more or less did Born of the Gods and Journey Into Nyx.

So one of the things I said to them was I was trying to figure out how best to use enchantment creatures. And one of the team, a guy named Billy Moreno, who is no longer with us but he was with us for a while, he was a developer, very good, former Pro Tour player, Billy came up with the idea of the bestow mechanic.

And the idea of the bestow mechanic was that they were enchantment creatures but essentially they were auras. And the idea was that you could stick them on a creature. You could play them as creatures or you could stick them on a creature, and the idea is that when you stick them on a creature and the creature died, then you got the creature. 

The idea was to sort of take away card disadvantage from auras and (???) you have a choice between a creature and an aura. Although the nice thing about Billy’s design was if you used the aura you always got the creature.

Anyway, we designed that. I liked it a lot. A signed off on it. I said, “Okay. Born of the Gods, we’re doing that.” And the reason I had saved it for Born of the Gods originally had to do with the story I was trying to do. Like I said, it deviated a little bit from there.

Okay. So we have that all set up. So let’s go back to Theros. Okay. So I had figured out we wanted gods, we had figured out we wanted devotion. The next thing that happened was I had said that we wanted heroes, and we wanted monsters. So we had figured out that we had wanted auras, and I had figured out at the time that I wanted the enchantment theme to be the touch of the gods. I figured out auras would be an important part of that.

So the next thing is we were trying to figure out heroes. Or actually, sorry, sorry. Monsters came next. Heroes took a little longer to figure out. Monsters story is not the most exciting story but I will tell it.

So what happened was, I said, “Okay guys, we want monsters. Magic has monsters. All we want…” I said, there’s going to be two things different about our monsters in Theros other than normal Magic monsters. Number one is we’re going to have more monsters, just because it’s more of a theme. And number two, I wanted monsters to be a little bit bigger. Not tons bigger, but just a little bit bigger. And so we decided that we would try to make our monsters have just a little bit more girth if you will.

Okay, so I said to the team, “Really what I want is, I want something cool to put on monsters that just says ‘Rrr, I’m a monster!” And so I sent the team off. And the next week all the team came back with different ideas.

And normally in design the way this works is, all I really need them to do is to give me one idea, one card to represent the idea. If you give me one card I get the gist of what it is, I’ve done this long enough I can understand how to extrapolate. So usually it’s like sometimes people give me a couple cards if they come up with a couple, but usually it’s like “Give me a sample of the mechanic and give me one card that does it. A couple cards if you really are dying to show me a couple cards.” Or sometimes mechanics have a couple different ways that they can be executed, you’ll show me a couple cards. So (???) brought stuff in, we had a lot of really cool stuff. I believe Ken Nagle is the one that brought in what became monstrous. 

So Ken Nagle’s original version were just abilities that could be used once per turn. Not once per turn, sorry. Once per game. That the idea was “Here’s this awesome monster ability, it can be used once per game.” And what Ken had done, because it had a memory issue which was “Have I used this or haven’t I?” He did a very common thing, which was “Okay ,we’re going to mark it. How do we mark it? Well, we want these to be monsters. What if we just put +1/+1 counters on it? Okay, cool, when you use it it’ll get bigger, which is neat. And now you’ve marked it, you know it’s being used.”

Now a little side note: one of the things I got when we first introduced monstrous is… because it’s not the +1/+1 counters that make it monstrous, they’re just the thing to remind you that monstrous has happened. And a lot of people—not a lot of people, the people who complained when we first showed monstrous that “Well, what if something removes the counters? And then something else puts counters on? Or removes and it’s monstrous but you don’t know it.”

And I’m like “For starters, we made sure that it was very hard to add or remove counters in Theros.” So if you saw counters, odds are that’s how it got there. And even in Constructed there’s not that many ways to remove them. And you know what? It’s a giant ability. It’s very memorable. You should probably remember whether or not you did it. And 99% of the time it’ll have counters on it.” So we thought it was fine.

My one sadness in the way it evolved was when it got template, they took off “once per game.” This is tied into something I said earlier with the power of words. One of the things that attracted me to the mechanic was the actual phrase “once per game.” Because it felt super special. We’ve never—I mean, we’ve done things that functionally are once per game, but we’ve never done things that literally spell it out once per game.

And I was really enamored with it. And like I said, it’s one of the reasons I picked it. And when they get to templating they decided they wanted this “If it’s monstrous,” and I don’t know. I mean, I understand why they did it, and I’m not saying it’s the wrong choice, but it saddens me a little bit. Because I really liked the oomph of “once per game.”

I did talk to them. It wasn’t like the issue didn’t come up. And for those that care, the way it works is usually in design, we do what we call “rough template.” You know, we’ll go to the Rules Manager, which is Matt Tabak, and he’ll do a rough version. It’s not the final version. But it’s good enough that we can play with it.

I mean the one concern you have to worry about early in design is whether or not the mechanic A. can be written out, and B. how wordy it is. Suspend I’ll use as the poster child for—it’s a pretty simple concept, right? I’m trading time for mana. Like, “Oh, well it costs less, but it takes more time.” So you know, I get three mana less, but it takes me three turns. You know. But the actual writing it out, logistics, what it entailed was so burdensome that it became hard for people to understand what was happening.

And suspend got sunk because even though the idea was elegant, the execution wasn’t. And so we’ve learned in design that we have to at least get a good understanding of the execution even just for simple elegance. And for complexity as well.

And so what happens is, design will have a rough version, usually during development, early in development we’ll try to get a more finalized version. One of the things when you’re a designer is you watch as… once you hand off your file, you are not done as a designer. Your job as the lead designer is to keep tabs on the file. And what that means is kind of poke your head in once in a while, see what they’re doing.

I have a very good rapport with Erik Lauer, who is not only the Head Developer but normally the lead developer of the fall sets, usually the ones I run. So most of the time Erik’s the one I’m dealing with. And Erik is very, very good about coming to me whenever he makes any change in anything substantial, he’ll come talk to me to make sure that he’s not doing something that fundamentally violates something that I care about.

And whatever. The vast, vast, vast majority of the time, what Erik’s doing is fine. Usually I lay out when I hand off my file what I want, Erik’s trying to follow my vision. Every once in a while he’s missing something or he’ll do something where I’m like “Oh, this has a ramification you might not see.” But it’s infrequent.

So anyway. That was monstrous. We came up with it, we used it. See, some of the time it’s long, drawn-out, we have to evolve the mechanic, and sometimes it’s like “Oh, that’s good.” And I mean we spend a lot of time figuring out what we wanted to do with monstrous, and as I’ll explain later on in the podcast, it will probably not be today but tomorrow, I’ll talk a little bit about how we did divvying up colors. That’s another important part of how we do design. Not every mechanic is in every color, or not necessarily the same weight in every color.

Okay. So now we get to heroic! Okay. So where are we? Okay. We know gods exist. We know gods have an enchantment impact. That their feel in the world is enchantments. Mostly through auras. And we know we have devotion to represent the people’s affinity for their gods.

Okay. Next. So we had some stuff for the gods, we had some stuff for the monsters, time for the heroes.

So for starters we knew that the auras were good. We wanted the heroes to have auras. And for example, let me talk about the ordeals. It’s a good example of where we’re going. So the ordeals was we wanted to have a cycle, and the idea of “the god sends you on a quest.”

Now, it’s interesting. If you look at actual Greek mythology, actual Greek mythology, the people that are being sent on quests were kind of born—like they were demigods, or they were like kings, or… unimportant people didn’t end up going on quests. It wasn’t like a random farmer ended up going on a quest.

But what happened was, one of the things you’ll find with the way literature works, the way stories work, is the core idea of the story will stay, but as society evolves the type of story will evolve. And so at the time of the Greeks, it was a pretty—we’ll say “the rich get richer” sort of environment. Where the people at the top were definitely… for example, if you were writing, you were already the elite, because only the elite learned how to write. And so a lot of the early stories very much played up the elites, were written by the elites.

But as time went on, the idea that the myth of the epic hero, the hero started from lower and lower stations. I mean, one of the things that is true now is that in the modern-day myth of the epic hero, the person is important, and they learn they’re important, but they don’t know they’re important when the story begins. They’re not a king when the story begins. They are, in fact, a lowly moisture farmer. Star Wars is the go-to example of (???).

Which by the way, which is very interesting—when George Lucas wanted to make Star Wars, he literally sat down with Campbell’s book. And there’s literally like forty… Joseph Campbell, what he does is he’s a person that studied storytelling and anthropology and sort of how people have learned stories, and what he did is he broke down about “Here’s the common bonds of how all stories work.” And he talked about the different types of stories.

So one of them’s called the Myth of the Epic Hero, and he broke it down, and George Lucas literally said, like there’s like forty steps or something to it. And he said, “Okay, I have to do step one. I have to do step two.” And like Star Wars step-by-step does every single one.

Now the interesting thing is, he also did the same thing with Willow. Star Wars, crazy success. Willow, not so much, and both of them like went through step-by-step and did Joseph Campbell’s Myth of the Epic Hero. So it’s interesting to say that execution is important. It’s not just details, how you do it is very important.

Anyway, so I knew that I wanted the flavor of things started small. You know, you’re a moisture farmer, and that you evolve. The other reason I wanted you starting small is it’s just a better story if you start from, like, one of the things about story, I’ll give you one of the most important things I ever learned in any of my writing classes. Right here. Right now.

Which is figure out where your character has to end, and then get them as far away, far to the other end of the spectrum as you can. And you’ll have yourself a good story. Meaning you need to give yourself room to grow. That’s an important thing about storytelling, an important thing about game design.

Now, I’ll give you the corollary. Where do you want your game player to end? Well get them to the other side! Give them a journey. You want to give your character a journey, you want to give your game player a journey.

So, I’d figured out that I wanted to capture the sense of the Myth of the Epic Hero, I wanted to start with a lowly person to build them up into a big hero. And I loved the idea, the reason that we had the ordeals was the idea that a god sends them on a mission, as they do the mission, as they attack, they get bigger.

Now the original version of the ordeals, every time you attacked you got a +1/+1 counter, and then once you had three +1/+1 counters, you got a creature ability. The problem was that in our version, we didn’t shut off the +1/+1 counters. Because it was very, very wordy to say you get them until a certain point.

And so what happened was you kept getting them, and Erik’s issue during development, which is a fine issue, is that… “Gaining first strike? No. I just want to get more +1/+1 counters.” And that in order to cost them for the ability to constantly gain +1/+1 counters, it was sort of overshadowing other things we wanted. And so the development team came up with a nice solution, which was “Build up counters. Once it has three counters, it falls off, but you get to keep the counters. And then it has a spell effect.” So that way you’re working towards something, the thing happens, but then once the thing happens you’re no longer adding +1/+1 counters anymore, and that way it’s balanced for card power.

This is a perfect example, by the way, of how Design had an image, it had a thing it wanted, it explained it to Development, Development is like, “Oh, well you’re not quite executing on your vision. We can stay true to your vision,” and they found a way to do exactly what we wanted, but in a way that just functioned a little better. That is what Development does and does well, which is Design sometimes will have a vision, it doesn’t quite—Development is a second set of eyes that will fix things. And that’s a good example of how Design had the ordeals in mind, Design wanted them to represent the gods sending the heroes on a quest. Anyway, that is it.

Okay, so let’s get to heroic. (???), I am close to work. So I think what I’m going to do is hold off on heroic until I get to Part III. And I’m going to talk a little bit about one of the lessons of… so let me get up to where we are. I’m a couple minutes from work and I know the heroic story is meaty enough that I don’t want to sort of cut it off mid-story.

So let me sort of recap where we were, so that when I get to work tomorrow I will pick up. Like I said, this is going to be a longer set of podcasts. The disadvantage of me doing a podcast close to when I did it was that I can’t tell you some stuff. But the good advantage is that I remember everything. It was not that long ago.

Okay. So at this point in the design, we knew that we liked the enchantment elements for the gods. We knew that the gods were going to be enchantment creatures. Early on, by the way, at this point the gods—I forget exactly what they were. They were nothing special. I mean, we kind of made just whatever gods, knowing that we needed to fix and make them better.

I mean it was well aware that the gods were going to have a lot of focus. I mean, when you make a cycle of mythic rare gods in a Greek mythological set, you knew they were going to have a lot of focus. And we were spending some time trying to figure out what we wanted to do.

The actually interesting thing about the gods, by the way, is—I’ll get to this later in the story, but we didn’t quite solve it. We had handed off the gods having not quite solved what we wanted the gods to do. And in fact, in my hand-off document I had said that we’re willing to spend some more work to figure it out, because we’d been distracted with other stuff, and the one thing about rares and mythic rare is when development starts, what they’re trying to do is figure out the balance of the environment. And so they just dealt with a Limited environment. And so like mythic rares had very little impact on the balance of the Limited environment. So you have a little bit of wiggle time at the end to try to fix some stuff that we need to.

But anyway, at this point gods were nothing close to the version you guys know them as. We had added devotion in. I don’t think we’d really got into the devotion for blue, for black, you know, that text yet, although I had made the decision to only count mana symbols on permanents on the battlefield. I’d made that decision already. But I think later we’d get the text.

With monstrous we’d signed off for once per game. And we were trying to figure out what kind of things we wanted. We figured out pretty quickly that at common we just wanted to add counters, because we were trying to keep it the simplest version we could. So it’s like, “Oh, these things you can pay and make them bigger, that’s good enough, it’s still a reward. And then higher rarities will have other things happening.”

And we’d figured that out. And we had started to do auras. We had the ordeals. We’d started to do auras that we were trying to get the sense of how the gods impact things and how things (???) better.

So I’m perfectly primed that that’s where we are, and it is us saying “Okay, guys, it’s time for us to make a mechanic for the heroes.” As you will see in our next podcast, the origin of the heroic mechanic actually goes way back, as I talk about it next time you’ll see that sometimes we come up with ideas and they sit for a long time as we try to figure out what to do with them. And the heroic mechanic’s a perfect example of a mechanic that I had fiddled with for years and years.

But! I’m driving up to Wizards, so I can tell that it is time for me to wrap up the story. But obviously we are not done. I have much more to tell you. I mean, today I introduced monstrosity, which was called… what was it called in design? I think it was just called monstrous in design. And I introduced devotion to you. And we started down the path of the gods as enchantments. So next time I’ll talk about heroic. I need to still talk about how scry got in the set, although that happened very late, that happened in development. Am I missing anything else? There’s a few other pieces I will tie into.

And then as always, probably next time I’ll wrap up the story and then after that I’ll do some card stories. I think is how it’s going to happen. But anyway, hopefully you’re enjoying the story thus far. But as much as I love talking to you about Magic design, I also like Magic design. So guys, I’ve got to bid you adieu for today, because it’s time for me to be making Magic. Talk to you next time.