12/27/13 Episode 82: Theros Part III

All podcast content by Mark Rosewater

I’m pulling out of my driveway! We all know what that means! It’s time for another Drive to Work.

Okay. So the last two podcasts have been about the design of Theros. But I was not yet done, so I shall continue.

Okay. When last we left, we were up to talking about the heroic mechanic. Okay, so at this point, we knew that we had gods, we knew that we had an enchantment theme that represented the touch of the gods, we knew that meant we’d have a lot of auras, we knew that the gods themselves would be enchantment creatures, we knew that we wanted to have devotion, which was going to be a reworked, chroma, and we knew that we wanted the monsters with a monstrous mechanic. That’s what we knew.

So now we were trying to figure out what the heroes would be. So the key to understanding the heroic mechanic is twofold. First off, the parameters. What were we looking for? Okay. Well, I knew that I wanted to capture the sense of adventure that to me was key of a lot of the Greek mythologies. That I loved the idea that people would build things.

And that there would be this game as your hero leveled up, essentially. That it would get bigger and bigger, and eventually it would be able to take on the giant monsters that it had to fight. Which by the way also had their own little level-up track.

 

Okay. So that brings the question to mind, “Why not the level-up mechanic?” And the reason for that is, the level-up mechanic has a lot of complexity to it. And we just needed to put our points in other places. Also, the level-up mechanic when it was done in Rise of the Eldrazi got a lukewarm reception. 

I was already trying to redo chroma, which was already a mechanic that didn’t hit really strongly the first time we did it, and I was trying to sort of give it a second chance, and so A. I already had a returning mechanic that had a lukewarm response originally and I’m trying to do something with it, and there’s a lot of complexity that comes with the frame. I’m not saying in the right environment maybe we wouldn’t do it, but this just didn’t really feel like the right environment.

Plus auras were going to be an important part of what I was doing. I wanted the buildup to have the touch of the gods with them. That if I had a level-up guy that just leveled himself up, you didn’t get any sense that the touch of the gods mattered. That just kind of on his own he’s motivated and does his own thing. I wanted some interaction. So I loved the aura thing, I knew we had the aura thing, so level-up  didn’t quite work. I wanted to use auras. I mean, obviously monsters had monstrosity, so there’s already a way for the monsters to build up.

So the parameters were I know I wanted the heroes to start small and to build with time.  I knew I wanted the auras to be involved so I wanted them to play well with auras. So I was looking for something that kind of liked encourage interesting gameplay and worked with auras. That was my general goal.

Okay. So the flashback—Flashback, my friends, to Invasion block! Okay, so Invasion block was a set that I  had done with Bill Rose and Mike Elliott, and it was the beginning of what I have dubbed the Third Age of Design, where we started doing themes in our blocks, Invasion was really the first set to have a cohesive mechanical theme, which was multicolor.

So while we were messing around with multicolor, I was trying to find different ways to make multicolor matter. So one of the mechanics I came up with was a mechanic that said… they were cards that cared… like a Giant Growth that would make any creature +2/+2, but a green creature +4/+4. And the idea being that the spell kind of cared what you would target it with. And it sort of had a color preference, if you will. “This spell is good for anybody, but really good if used on green creatures.” And I liked that mechanic. Invasion ended up not needing it, as we were doing other things. We had a spell mechanic with kicker. So it ended up not fitting in Invasion.

And so later on—I’m trying to remember what set this was. Maybe it was during Shadowmoor, because Shadowmoor also had a color-matters theme. I tried flip-flopping it, so instead of a spell that cared about what it targeted, they were creatures that cared about if they were targeted by a certain color. And so I messed around a little with that, like “Oh, I like being targeted with green spells. If a green spell targets me, some good thing happens.” And so I messed around in that space. It was a little bit narrow. Things don’t get targeted all that much, and then subdivided into colors it just was a little bit too narrow.

But in the back of my head it was definitely an area—and this is very common in Magic design—where I will mess around with something. The thing I mess around with doesn’t quite work, but I know in my head that there’s potential, like I’m messing around in interesting space. And the key is just trying to find how to use that space somewhere.

And so one of the things that I’ve done over the years, and this is the advantage of doing this for a long time, is I have built up a repertoire of just interesting ideas. Of things that, eh, didn’t work out, but I know maybe could work out. And so every once in a while, when I’m trying to solve a problem, I have this inventory of spells that didn’t quite work.

Now be aware. This is another very important thing to understand. Just because a mechanic doesn’t work doesn’t mean it’s a bad mechanic. A lot of times what you’re trying to do is when you’re building a set, you have a very specific need in mind. And you try mechanics, and those mechanics might not meet that need, but that does not mean they’re not good mechanics. It just means “Oh, they don’t fit right here.”

And so when you discard things, anything that we try, that I feel has any potential, I keep onto it. I hold onto it. I mean, most of it’s in my head. I know we keep talking about having a database and I know we’re starting to work on that. In fact, I think there is a database. But anyway, there’s the database in my head, which is where I keep most of my stuff. We’ve tried a lot of things over the years.

And the thing that people don’t realize is we try a lot of different things. When you see something, when you see some mechanic, let’s say you see four mechanics in the set. We might have tried twenty mechanics. Sometimes we’ve tried fifty mechanics. I do know, for example, in Zendikar landfall was probably the twentieth mechanic we tried for the land mechanics. I know dredge in Ravnica was more than twenty. We tried so many mechanics for the original Golgari mechanic.  Sometimes just you try a lot of mechanics. Sometimes you hit it out of the park right away, monstrous was pretty much our first attempt at it and we liked it.

So anyway, in my head I liked the idea of things that liked being targeted. And the reason that this came up was “Oh, auras target.” Now, there was a problem inherent there, is that knowing auras target requires a little bit of rules knowledge. We actually talked about rewriting the aura rules, the reminder text, to remind you that they target, or maybe even putting target on the card. We ended up not doing that.

But anyway, the fact that auras target and they’re one of the few things that don’t say they target is a thorn in the side of some people. But anyway, I liked the fact that auras were targeted, but it also meant that it wasn’t just an aura mechanic. There were other ways to target your things. You could target them with instants and sorceries.

The reason creatures don’t work, by the way, real quickly, is we did not want abilities to target. And the reason when I did heroic originally we did not have abilities target is it’s just too easy to break it. It’s too easy to target something again and again and again. So we restricted targeting to spells, which meant that creatures, if they have a come-into-play ability, that’s a triggered ability, that’s an ability. It’s not a spell. And so there was no way for creatures to trigger it, or not in a way that we naturally made creatures.

Anyway, so I liked the idea of having creatures that when targeted got a bonus. So the original design (???) first pitch it, what I pitched was, “Whenever this is the target of a spell, it get a +1/+1 counter.” I pitched that as the ability. And then what we realized was that my original version was a little too tight. We could loosen it up a little bit. That what we needed was “Okay, I want to be targeted, when I’m targeted, something positive happens.” We liked +1/+1 counters, but we decided we would divvy it up.

So let me talk about this, because this is going to be a big part of today’s topic. Which is once you figure out what you want your mechanics to be, one of the important things is figuring out who does it best and where to put it. Every mechanic is not always supposed to be in every color.

Now, in Theros, because I was trying to do Greek mythology, I did in fact want gods and heroes and monsters showing up in all the colors. But that didn’t mean they needed to be in equal amounts. So for example, with heroic, what we decided was “Let’s divvy up how heroic gets used.” And we decided that certain colors would be better at heroic. So what we chose was that white and blue would be the best two heroic colors.

And what that meant was, development was costing—there’s two things to do when you want to push something. There’s quantity and quality. So quantity is just you want more of them. And the reason that’s important is if I’m drafting, well, I’ll just see more of them. I have more opportunity in these colors to do this. So we decided that heroic we wanted to be blue and white. That just means that blue and white got a little bit more heroic.

So as-fan—let me describe the term for those of you who might not know it. As-fan is a term that R&D uses to talk about “What percentage will you see this thing as opening a pack?” Because remember, when you look at a file, that is different. So let’s say for example, ten percent of the cards in the file do something. Well, it depends what rarity they are. If they’re all common, yeah, you’ll see that a lot. But if they’re all rare and mythic rare, you might barely see that in a pack.

So what we care about a lot of times is the as-fan means “Okay, when I open up the average pack, average pack meaning I’m going to have ten commons, three uncommons, and a rare 7/8s of the time and a mythic rare 1/8 of the time, how often will I see this thing?” And we actually have a little calculator program that Dave Guskin wrote where like you say “Okay, I have this many things at common, this many things at uncommon, this many rares, this many mythic rares, what’s my as-fan? How often do I see it?”

And if it’s something that we want to matter, it depends on what it is, because some things you need to have more volume than others. Some things, for example, let’s say you need something to show up, you need seven or eight of something to be viable. Well, you need a higher as-fan than if you need three or four.

Usually if we want the as-fan to matter, the low end is probably one percent if something really matters, and the high end can be two, two and a half percent, depending on what the thing is. In fact, certain things, if they blend nicely with the set can be even higher.

For example, when I was doing Shadowmoor, hybrid had an as-fan of about fifty percent. But hybrid does not get in the way of what people draft. It’s not super linear. So certain things can be higher. Gold will be higher. The as-fan of gold will sometimes be higher in sets that are very focused on gold. But it’s important for us to understand when you open it what you will see. So that’s one thing.

The second thing is quality. Which is when development is pricing cards, if they know that certain colors have certain strategies, they just make those things better in those colors. So heroic not only shows up more in white and blue, but at lower rarities especially. Especially for Limited. The heroic stuff’s just a little bit better in white and blue. You’re more likely to want to play it.

If you’re drafting Theros, it’s not that you can’t make heroic decks of other colors. And obviously we decided to make white and red a little more aggressive. So what we did is white and blue we decided would be the best heroic colors. We decided red would sort of be number three. So white and green we gave the +1/+1 counters. The way we divvied it up was white tended to get one +1/+1 counter and sometimes another ability to the creature and green just tended to get a lot of +1/+1 counters. That’s why green has two +1/+1 counters and three +1/+1 counters.

And then blue and red more often got spell effects. Rather than getting bigger, rather than increasing the creature, they tended to affect the board. And then black was kind of in the middle, we gave black a little of each. Now, in a lot of sets you don’t necessarily put all the mechanics in all the colors. I know players grumble when we do that, but one of the ways to give an identity to things is not to put them everywhere.

So remember, I say this from time to time but let me give you an example here. So the color pie is the most important thing, not just for design, but also for development. And the reason is that if every color can do everything as well as every other color, or even if every color can do everything, it makes less reason to branch out and do different things.

And one of the things that makes the game so much fun is its variety. There’s different things. There’s different decks you can build. If every color has access to the same things, then it gets monotonous. Meaning all the decks are drifting towards the same strategies.

But if you make heroic really good in white and blue, but make devotion really good in other colors, then “Oh… well, maybe there’s not a white devotion deck…” Now, I know, I know in Constructed there’s a blue devotion deck, but I will stress that they’re both mythic rare cards. That is a Constructed thing only. In Limited it is very, very, very hard to do blue devotion. I mean maybe you get the god, maybe you get Master of Waves, it’s not something that’s a major part of blue’s game in Theros Limited.

So anyway, we definitely try to mix it up. This set was interesting in that because I was trying to do top-down, and I wanted the key components to show up, I made sure that every color had a little bit of access to it. For example, every color needed a little bit of devotion because of the gods, and there was one other mythic blue card so that if you wanted to build a devotion deck… obviously it turned out to be pretty good. But we wanted to make sure that there was tools.

What we do for Limited and what we do for Constructed are not always the same thing. Sometimes they overlap, sometimes it goes a little bit different. Constructed only needs a couple good cards to make something work, where Limited needs a lot more to guarantee a draft strategy (???) that things will happen. Okay. So we tried heroic, we realized that we wanted to branch out from just +1/+1 counters. We started giving identities to colors. That was playing pretty well.

Okay. Now we come to the math problem! Okay, so at the time—now I’ll catch you up to date here, we had enchantments with lots of auras, and then we had the gods. We had devotion. We had monstrous. We had heroic—monstrosity, sorry. We called it monstrous in design.

But one of the problems was that heroic, for example, said “Hey, I need to have a bunch of noncreature spells in my deck.” Because creatures aren’t going to trigger heroic. So if I have heroic creatures, I need to have some things that would trigger them.

And devotion was fine with creatures, because devotion just cares about permanents in play, and auras work well with devotion. So those two worked fine. Monstrous was working on its own. But the aura and heroic theme, which was a pretty important theme, we really wanted the theme of building up.

So once again, let me stress this, that one of the things that I try to do ever since the beginning of the Fifth Stage of Design, is say “What emotion do I want this particular set to evoke? When you play it, how are you supposed to feel?” And I was trying to capture the Greek influence on storytelling, in that…

Because one of the things I’ve learned, I don’t know if I told you this story yet, so when I was doing Innistrad, one of the things I realized was I was able to focus on the monsters because it’s like “Oh, I’ve seen a lot of different horror films and TV shows and things on zombies. I know how zombies are supposed to act. Ooh, I can make a tribal zombie deck. Ooh, I know what zombies are supposed to do. I know what vampires are supposed to do. I know what werewolves are supposed to do.” I had enough knowledge of how they functioned that I could design something that would match expectations of the public.

So when I started working on Theros, what I realized was people interact with Greek mythology in a very different way than they interact with horror. The horror genre is a genre, for starters. It’s very pop-culture-centric. Greek mythology very much influences Western culture, but it is not—if I say to you “Well, how exactly does a centaur function?” Well, maybe you know some of the tropes of centaurs. They carry a crossbow, they’re a wise mage. You know. But you don’t have a sense of what a tribe of centaurs would do.

So I realized that I didn’t have some of the sense that I was building off of for Innistrad. So what I went to is I said, “Okay. The thing about Greek mythology is it influences how we tell stories in Western civilization.” And that all the archetypes that Campbell has laid out, Joseph Campbell, I talked about him last time.

Once again, if you ever listen to my podcast, and it’s Part “Not One,” you’ve really got to listen to the previous parts. I just assume you’ve heard them. If this is the first part you’re listening to, there’s a Part I and Part II. Please go listen to it. It will make a lot of sense.

Anyway, Joseph Campbell outlined the different types of stories. [NLH—Campbell created the character archetypes and the Hero’s Journey. For approaches to story archetypes, read about the Seven Basic Plots or other systems.] Most of that is based off of—the Greeks are the ones that did it earliest. They were good storytellers. And so a lot of modern storytelling comes from that. And I liked the sort of sense of adventure built into mythology. And the sense of accomplishment. And so I decided that’s the emotion I was going for. That I wanted you to sort of build up.

And there’s lots of ways to build up. In fact, if you look at the mechanics and notice, the auras build up. Heroic builds up your creature. Devotion builds up over time as you get more permanents in play. Monstrous builds up. Everything in the set, it builds up. It creates larger things. Because I wanted a sense of “I start small and I build a mighty hero!” or “I build a mighty monster!” or “I call forth a mighty god!” That I’m always building towards something, and that’s a big part of what this set is doing.

Okay. So in order for that to be true, I needed to have you build up. That meant that I needed auras and I needed heroic. The stuff I needed to have you build up. But the problem was, and this was the math problem…

Okay, in a Limited deck you have 40 cards. Usually you have about 40% land, that’s like 17 land. That leaves you 23 cards. Now normally you want about 16 creatures, so that leaves you with about seven spells. And those seven spells have to do your creature removal—they have a lot of function to do things you need to do.

So there just wasn’t a lot of room to get in the auras. And to get in the cards that are going to trigger the heroic. And that was the problem. So we needed to figure out how to crack this. Meanwhile, I explained this last time, the advanced planning team had made the bestow mechanic. I had that in my back pocket. That was for Born of the Gods.

So one of the things that I realized… and a very funny thing will happen. Erik Lauer is the head developer. My equivalent on Development. He was the lead for Theros. So one of the things that’s interesting is Erik is very math-based. And so Erik had recognized this problem and sort of crunched through the numbers to figure out the solution.

Meanwhile, I had the same problem, and I intuitively understood it was  a math problem, but I never solve things through math—that’s not true. I sometimes solve things through math. More often than not I kind of go through a gut. I’m more intuitive in the way I function.

But anyway, I had come to the conclusion that we had to use bestow. Erik mathematically came to the conclusion we had to use bestow. And Erik actually came to me and said, “Look, I’ve done the math, you have to use bestow.” And my response was “I know, yeah, Erik, it’s already in the set.”

So basically what happened was, I needed to find a way to get some of your creatures to help build up your stuff. And one of the things that allowed me to both have creature slots that allowed me to help heroic and have creature slots that allowed me to start building my creatures up with auras, the bestow mechanic did exactly that.

And so we had to change around our story a little bit… I mean they always were going to be creations of the gods. In the original story they were a little different. But the idea was they were god-created things so it worked. We brought them forward.

So one of the things we did with the heroic creatures is we did a couple things. I tried to keep them very simple, they were all in cycles, because I didn’t want to take up too much mind space with them, because obviously later in the block they played important roles, and I wanted to sort of leave space.

 So what I did is we instituted the rule that all bestow creatures had to have a +X/+Y where X was its power and Y was its toughness. Which meant that every single creature had to at least give you some toughness pumping, because you had to have toughness to survive as a creature. In theory you could be a 0/1, 0/2, 0/3, 0/4. That could work. And whatever ability the creature granted, the creature had to naturally have. So if I give lifelink, I have to have lifelink.

What we decided was because I wanted to cycle them, I decided to avoid the vanillas. I wanted to keep them as clean and simple as possible, so I had them all grant the same stats. And let me explain the reason for that.

One of the things that’s important to understand is the concept—I’ve used it (???), but let me explain it. I call it “mind-share.” And what that means is, let’s think of the human brain as a computer. And it has so much processing. It can process so much information. So one of the things is—I mean I talk about this a lot of the time about how the brain functions, the brain—that if you have ten pieces of information, the brain could have trouble with it. But if you take those ten pieces of information and you consolidate it in chunks, I’ve talked about chunking before, that  makes it easier for the brain.

And so one of the things that we found is, let’s say I take my bestow cycle, and the commons—“This one’s +2/+4. This one’s +1/+2.” And I have them all different. Then what happens is, when I see them, I have to go “Oh, okay, it’s common bestow, oh, which one’s this one?” And it just requires your brain to have to process more.

Whereas if I make them all the same, they’re all +2/+2 or +1/+1 or just have an even stat, a few things. One, when you see bestow, especially if you see common bestow, you go “Oh, I know its stat boost.” And then I go “What color is it?” And then luckily, the creature abilities are pretty tied to color, so I’ve just got to learn which creature ability. But it’s much, much quicker. So rather than “Oh, this one’s plus what? Plus what plus what? Does this one grant abilities or not grant abilities?” It’s like “Oh. I know exactly what it is. I know the stats, and I know what ability it is because I know the color.” Also, I did square stats because square stats are just another easier thing to process. If I have a creature and I have to add +1/+1 or +2/+2, I can do that way faster than I can do +1/+4.

Now, people all the time, whenever I talk about simplifying things for math, they’re like “Whatever! Learn math! You have to learn math!” And the reality is, look. There’s a lot to process in the game of Magic. You know, to use my little computer analogy, there’s a lot to process. And then if you overload, the brain will just start shutting down. Or will start skipping things. And what we’ve been trying to do is just make it easier for things to process. We as the designers and developers can build things in so they’re easier to process.

Now, some of the game should be harder to process, and Magic is not shy of things you have to process. But the reality is, save those things. Think of you have so many cards you get to make people process. Use those wisely. And the reality is, having bestow all linked up just makes it easier to process. There’s no great value right here from making it different, and we have a block in which we need other bestow things. Let’s save some of that stuff for other sets.

Okay. So the choice was to limit how much we do so. Essentially what we decided was, “Enough bestow to do what we needed to do.” Enough to get the job done and no more. And that’s a common theme, by the way. One of the things when I became Head Designer, what I did not realize when I took the job is that one of… the two things that I probably do more than anything else when I’m looking at other people’s designs is saying, “Don’t waste,” and “Follow the color pie.”

Because one of the things that happens is it’s very easy when you’re trying to design to just use as many resources as you can. Because you’re trying to do the best design you can. And it’s my job as sort of the Head Designer to say “Guys, guys, guys! This is a resource we’ve got to be careful with.” And for a a couple reasons. Here’s why it’s important.

One, look. Design resources are not infinite, and wasting design resources is wasteful of something that’s important. Number two is there’s only so much appreciation. So my analogy I often give is: I’m taking my kids to the candy store. Now, I could buy them one piece of candy, maybe two pieces of candy. Or I could buy them 20 pieces of candy. Will they be happier with 20 pieces of candy? I don’t know. Maybe initially. Only because I don’t normally give them 20 pieces of candy. But the reality is can they enjoy all that candy? No, they can’t enjoy all that candy.

And they’re probably going to stuff themselves and not be so happy, and then next time I go to the candy store, I can’t get them two candies anymore. Now they want 20 candies. And it sets expectations badly. It’s not something they can enjoy. If I give them two pieces of candy they might be happy. No one’s saying they’ll be happier with 20 pieces of candy. If they don’t know 20 is an option, they might be just as happy with two pieces of candy. Maybe happier in the end run.

And that’s the same as true with design, which is the goal of design is to make the audience happy. There’s a threshold of happiness. This is an idea I talk about a lot. In design, there’s a threshold of happiness. The goal is not to see how high you can go, the goal is to cross the threshold.

What that means is, I want to make our players happy. But once I make our players happy, I’ve done my job, in that once the players are happy they’re happy. I don’t need to like qualities of how happy I can make them. They’re happy. Once they’re happy, they’re happy.

And it is not like they go “Ooh, my (???) of happiness is…” Like, “I’m happy!” And our goal is to essentially use as little resource as we need to make a good gameplay that makes the players happy. And once they’re happy, we are just wasting resources beyond that point.

And a lot of times, like I know we’ve stuffed sets in the past and players didn’t even get it all. Like four months went by, we came onto a new set, and they didn’t even absorb everything we had. And look, you want to let them enjoy every facet of your game, but you want to make sure that they’re not missing things, because then you’re just wasting things you could do later.

Now, I know, I know whenever I talk about this, people don’t want to hear that I’m not maximizing everything I could maximize. But look, that is my job. My job is to make all of you happy, and make sure that I could do it next time. And the time after that. And five years from now. And ten years from now. And twenty years from now. My goal is not to make you happy right now, my goal is to continue making you happy as long as we can. And to do that I have to monitor my resources.

Okay. So we have all the mechanics in the set, except one. So the last mechanic, this is not a very long story because it’s not even a design story, is Erik was concerned during devign, devign is the period in between design and development, where Design still has the file but Development is giving notes, that he wanted more ways to spend mana. And so I was trying with monstrous a few ways to give them that.

And ultimately what he realized was that the set was missing something—that we had a lot of pieces that were cool things, but the set needed a little grease to help you make sure you got those pieces together. And he also wanted a little extra way to spend mana. And scry kind of fulfilled that role.

And so early in development—and once again, he came to me and talked to me. In fact I remember what he said to me is he said he needed to add a mechanic to smooth things out, and he said if I was okay with it he wanted to bring back a mechanic. And I said to him, “Erik, it just has to fit in Greek mythology. If it fits in Greek mythology I’m fine with it. And so he said, “How about scry,” and literally, he said, “How about scry,” and my response was “That is perfect.”

Greek mythology is full of omens and soothsayers and prophecies, and it’s very much a big part of Greek mythology, so scry is a mechanic that fit really well. And so I was happy. And so that got added into development, it wasn’t even added during design.

Okay. So I think I have told most of the basics now of the set. So next time I’m going to talk with some card-by-card stories. I have not told you everything about the set. I think as I see cards to talk about it’ll trigger some ideas and I’ll fill some other stories in. But anyway, hope you guys are enjoying this trip through Theros. It’s always fun to share and talk about it. But I am now parked at Wizards. So guys, I have to stop talking about Theros, and I have to start making Magic. I’ll talk to you guys next time.