1/3/14 Episode 84: Theros Part IV

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. Last couple podcasts, I’ve been talking about the design of Theros. So today I’m going to start talking about some individual cards and some stories about the cards. But before I can do that, I realized  I never introduced my design team. Bad MaRo. Bad MaRo!

One of the things I always like to do is talk about the design team. Part of the point of my podcast is a little historical context, and hey, who are the people that made this set? I do want to talk about that a little bit.

So, first up. Ethan Fleischer. So Ethan was the winner of the Great Designer Search 2. And at the time this started he was an intern. He hadn’t yet been hired full-time. But I wanted him on the set, and in fact I had given him an assignment, as I talked about previously, to do research because research was something he was very good at, and I said, “Okay, let’s do some research on Greek and Roman mythology. I wanted some experts. I had one other expert I’ll get to in a second.

And Ethan—obviously the way it works at Wizards is we don’t tend to hire people right away. We tend to give them an internship, and then we use that internship to sort of give us six months to gauge how we feel they’re doing. And this gives us time to pick the right people. That we’re not sort of just guessing without knowing, that we have someone who we can actually spend some time with.

So Ethan during the six month period was trying very, very hard, he wanted to stay at Wizards, and I wanted him to stay at Wizards. I thought he was very good. I had seen a lot of potential during the Great Designer Search, but I wanted to make sure that the potential I saw became realized so other people could see it as well.

And so I thought this would be a very good project for him. He was very passionate about Greek and Roman mythology, he was very excited. Like, what happens is, when you come to Wizards, we fill you in and you learn all the stuff, all the sets in that we’ve done that are done but you don’t know yet, and then you learn stuff that’s upcoming that we’re going to work on.

And when Ethan found out that we were doing Greek and Roman mythology, he was very excited. And so I said, “Okay, I’m going to tap into this.” Ethan—so one of the things that I do in my designs is I have what I call a “strong second.” Which is I have somebody take care of the file.

Now I do this for two reasons. One is I’m very busy, and sort of inputting the file is a lot of work. It’s something that for many, many, many sets I did, normally the lead designer does it. And it’s a very valuable tool for a lead designer because just being able to constantly put things in and looking in the file helps you to sort of figure out where you want things to be.

But I’ve done a lot of sets, and what I learned is that having somebody else be in charge of inputting everything gives them a much better chance to see—the same reason the lead designer wants to see a set, it allowed my strong second to do that.

And so A., it freed me up a little bit because I’m busy, and B. it was a good teaching tool. And so the reason I have a strong second all my sets is it’s a very, very valuable way to teach. Because the person’s there, they see all the changes, they walk through the things they want to do, and they’re the ones constantly monitoring the set of watching what’s going on.

And I’m the only person that does that, because mostly designers still want to sort of control their file—or monitor their file, I guess I control my file. But want to monitor the file. And I’ve done it long enough that I don’t need to be so close to sort of get a sense of where it’s at.

Anyway, Ethan was my strong second, he did a very good job. Another reason Ethan was on the team was we were planning to have Ethan lead his very first set. Which was going to be Journey into Nyx. Which was the third set in the block. And so I wanted Ethan on the first and second set. So by the time he got there, he was well-versed on every set in the block.

Okay, next. Ken Nagle. So Ken Nagle was the runner-up for the first Great Designer Search. Alexis Janson won. Both Alexis and Ken got internships, and then Ken ended up turning his internship into a full-time job. Alexis also turned it into a full-time job, but not in R&D. She is very, very involved in the digital side of things, in Magic Online.

So Ken was in charge of Born of the Gods, which was the next set. And so usually on the large team we always have the person leading the next set on the team so they can observe what’s going on. We don’t always have the third person on the first team. Sometimes they’re on the second team. I just need them to be familiar before they get there.

But since Ethan was new and it was his first set, I wanted him to be involved for the whole block. Also I doubled things up in that I get a second that I’m teaching with, so Ethan kind of doubled up both in the strong second role and the fact that he could watch the upcoming sets as he was working on the third set.

Ken Nagle’s interesting. Ken is my most experienced designer now. Besides myself, obviously. And it’s funny because I remember when Ken had an internship, but five years have gone by and Ken has made a lot of sets. And Ken has become a very, very good designer. So it’s fun watching your little ones grow up.

So yeah. Ken has really come to shine, and you’ll see with Born of the Gods he did an excellent job. But anyway, Ken was here to sort of—Ken’s just a good designer. One of the things you want to make sure on every design team is to just have enough good designers that you know you’ll get a lot of cards. And Ken is a card machine. So having Ken around is always useful, and like I said. He gives good insight, makes great cards. And Ken has been really coming along as an excellent designer. So it is fun to watch Ken’s growth over the last five years.

Next we have Zac Hill. So I talked about how we always have a developer on the team, what we call the “development representative” or the “dev rep.” Zac has been on a number of different design teams. I really enjoyed having Zac on my team. He was a developer that actually did a decent amount of design.

The dev rep could vary. Some developers do a little bit of design, some do a lot of design. Most developers can do some design. They understand the basics. Some of which—and there’s a variance of how much design they did. Zac was in the middle. He was a developer that could do design. He wasn’t quite a designer in the traditional sense. But he was a developer and contributed very, very much to the design process. And I loved working with Zac, I say past tense, because Zac has since moved on to other things. He’s no longer at Wizards. But I really, really enjoyed having Zac.

And another thing Zac did on this set is we have a design team and then we have a development team, and we always have a person that’s on both. The crossover. Somebody who on the development team can speak the vision and the ideas that the design team had. And so it’s not always the dev rep. Sometimes it’s somebody else. But in this particular set it was Zac. So Zac was very, very involved in this set. Because he was on both the design team and the development team.

Next we have Jenna Helland. So Jenna is from the creative team. So one of the things that I like to do is there’s something called “card concepting.” What card concepting is, is for a set, somebody has to sit down and look at what the cards mechanically do, and figure out what the art’s going to be about. What’s the concept of the art.

And the idea of card concepting is saying “Well, I need to get an image that I think will both portray what this card is doing and capture the flavor of the world we’re doing.” I have a few examples later on of some interesting places, how they concepted.

Anyway, I like having—we always have the creative team member on the large set. We try to have creative team members on all sets if we can, but for sure on the large set. I like having the person in charge of concepting be my creative person, and Jenna was, because it allows the person doing the concepting to really understand what matters.

So Jenna, by the way, was the other expert on Greek and Roman mythology. She also did a lot of research. And they needed to do a lot of research to be able to do the background. Because a trick about Creative was, we are doing a world inspired by Greek and Roman mythology, which means it has a lot of elements of Greek mythology, and once again, we didn’t do Roman mythology, we did Greek mythology.

It had a lot of elements of ancient Greece and Greek mythology, but it was very important to them that we make our own world. Like, one of the things is, early in Magic, you take a set like Arabian Nights, where it’s just really trying to copy Arabian Nights, it’s trying to like… “What would Arabian Nights look like?” Nowadays, we more want to carve our own world, and so Theros has its own cosmology and its own cities and people and monsters, but it has its own history to it. And now it’s very much borrowed from Greek mythology in the sense that that is the source of inspiration, but it’s its own thing.

Like, one of the things that came up from time to time is we want to add a few things that are our own tweaks on things. And I know the leonine are the ones that got the most attention. And the idea was, “Look. Mostly we are doing Greek mythology, but we’re trying to have a little bit be Magic’s version of it.” And so we had a few things that are our own.

We took a lot of things that were in Greek and Roman mythology, but we also for example a very, very common thing is in Greek mythology, most monsters there was one of. There was one Minotaur. There was one Pegasus. I think there was three Gorgons. There was not a lot of certain monsters. But for us it was like “No, we need a lot of monsters,” so in our world they’re races. They’re not individual singular things.

Jenna, by the way—the creative team, like the dev team, there’s a mix of how much design they can do. Jenna always surprises me with her design. She always—it’s very funny. Jenna is always the person who goes, “Oh, I don’t know, I’m not sure if I can do this,” and then like turns stuff in and it’s good. And I’ve had Jenna on a bunch of teams. She also was on Innistrad, so I’ve had Jenna on both my top-down designs, and she’s been very, very helpful.

One of the things we used to do is Jenna would make a list of names and bring them in. And we did a lot of top-down from the names. We’ll get to some of those. Where she’d just come up with a cool name and then we would design to it. And there was some very, very cool stuff that we made that was just based on names we had.

Finally, this last person, Billy Moreno, wasn’t actually on the Theros design team, he in fact was on the advanced planning team, but he was the guy who made bestow. And so one of my big beliefs in design is I’m a big believer in design credit. I want to make sure that whoever designed things gets credit for what they do. And so I gave him credit as being on the design team, although technically he wasn’t on the design team, but he did contribute bestow, which is a huge part of the design. So he gets credit for the design.

Billy, like Zac, is no longer with us. We’ve had a little bit of churn in our development. Interesting, by the way, both Zac and Billy left of their own accord, both of them had reasons they needed to leave. Both loved Wizards, but both had other opportunities. We enjoyed having both of them there, and both of them will be missed.

Billy, by the way, is a little more of a developer than a designer, but he definitely is a developer/designer hybrid, in that Billy is a pretty strong designer. That if Billy had focused his energies, I could have used Billy on my design team. His thought process is a little more development than design, but he was a very strong designer, and bestow I think is an excellent design. It’s an example of what Billy’s capable of.

So finally, of course, I was on the design team, if that’s not obvious. I was leading the design team. One of the things that happened is Aaron Forsythe, the director of Magic R&D, Aaron and I decided that for the near future, that I’m just going to lead all the fall sets. I’ve led four out of the five fall sets, so this is not a giant departure. I did not lead Return to Ravnica. Instead I did Gatecrash. But before that I had done Zendikar and Scars of Mirrodin and Innistrad. So I had mostly been doing the fall sets, we just sort of solidified it.

There’s a lot going on in the large sets, and as Head Designer a lot of structure in the block, it helps for me to be the person doing the first set. Anyway, it just for a lot of reasons made a lot of sense for me to do it. So I for the foreseeable future am doing the fall sets. I did next year’s fall set, I’m currently working on the fall set after that. So I did Huey and I’m working  on Blood.

Okay. Let’s talk some Magic cards. Okay. So let’s talk about the Akroan Horse. So one of the things that we did early on is we wrote on the board, we had a brainstorming session, “What Magic cards would you expect to see? If you know we’re doing Greek-inspired world, what would you expect to see?”

So one of the things we stuck on the board was “Trojan Horse.” So for those of you that don’t know the story, I’ll do an abbreviated version. Homer wrote a book called The Iliad and the Odyssey. Two books. The Iliad was about a war. The Trojan War. And Odysseus, the main character, who’s a king, a lot of kings in Greek mythology, he travels to Troy to participate in this war. Anyway, the wars start because he takes Helen. Anyway. There’s a war, I guess is all you need to know.

And one of the things is the city of Troy is well-defended. They have like a giant wall, and they’re having trouble fighting against Troy. So one of the things they do in the story is they make a giant wooden horse. As a gift. And they leave the wooden horse, a giant statue basically, out in front of the city. And the city goes, “Oh, how nice. A gift. Maybe they don’t want to fight anymore. And to show this, they are giving us this gift.” And so they wheel this giant horse into their city. And of course, inside the horse are a bunch of the soldiers from the other side, and at night when it’s dark they sneak out of the horse, let their fellow people in, and sack Troy.

Anyway, it is a pretty iconic piece of the Iliad, of Greek mythology. So okay. Got to do a Trojan horse. Now clearly it couldn’t be a Trojan horse, because there’s no Troy. So it’s an Akroan horse because we have Akros. Akros, by the way… there are three cities, and Akros was the Sparta-inspired city.

One of the cities was inspired by… I’m trying to remember off the top of my head. By Athens, and was a more philosophical-based—Athens was more about the philosophers, and they were the thinkers. And then you had Sparta and they were the fighters. And so we had our two cities, one was based on Athens, one was based on—I did not write down the name of the cities. Akros was the Sparta city… I’m not good at names off the top of my head driving in my car!

And the third one was based on Amazon. For those that know Wonder Woman, she was from Amazonia, or Paradise Island, or Themiscyra. And the idea is it’s where the Amazons live, and the third city’s kind of based on that.

And so one of the things that the creative team wanted is the idea of city surrounded by wilderness, super Greek, and the idea that there’s culture and there’s people who live in the city but they’re surrounded by wild animals and wild beasts. Very, very Greek. They wanted to do that to play that up. They wanted to play up the different city states.

So the key to the Trojan Horse was trying to find a way to capture the flavor of the Trojan horse but also make a card that plays well. One of the big things that can happen is when you are making top-down cards, here’s a common mistake, is you make a card that’s really, really top-down. It matches. “Oh my gosh, that’s exactly what it is. It matches exactly.” But it doesn’t play well. And the problem is, we’re not going to make Magic cards that don’t play well. Or at least we don’t want to. Maybe we occasionally make them. But we don’t try to make them. We want our cards to play well.

The goal of making a top-down card is not to make it as matching the flavor as possible. It is not, actually. The goal of a top-down card like this is to—once again, I talk about threshold. Hit the threshold where it makes sense and it’s flavorful, but then have a good gameplay. So what you want in a top-down card is a marrying of good gameplay with matching what is going on. But the goal is not to match it as closely as possible, the goal is to match it enough that it feels right and then make sure it plays well. And Akroan Horse was made by I believe Ken Nagle, and so basically what the idea is you gift the horse to your opponent. But then you get a token every turn.

So a bunch of people have said, “Wait, wait. Shouldn’t it have been like one dumping of tokens, because you know, they hide in it and they jump out at night?” And what we found was that just the gameplay of slowly getting things we felt matched close enough and just was better gameplay. And so we liked the idea of “If I get this out, the longer I can keep it out.” Because one of the things we wanted is we wanted your opponent to go “Oh, oh no! The horse! I’ve got to get rid of the horse.” And they have to do something with the horse. That if they want to stop you getting people, they’ve got to stop the horse. And that was just better gameplay.

Okay. We move on to Arena Athlete. By the way, when I do this card-by-card, a lot of the cards I’m talking about I talked about in my article on cards, mostly because the best stories I had, I wrote about. I will try to add new information here so you learn stuff you didn’t know from the article. And I’m also trying to pick some cards I didn’t talk about. Arena Athlete being one of them. But there’s going to be a lot of duplication from my article.

Pretty much, by the way, if you don’t like hearing things I said in my articles, I mean I try to make sure my podcasts add extra value, but there’s going to be some repeated content. That’s just the nature of I have so many stories to tell and so many mediums to tell them in.

So Arena Athlete is a good example of how we take heroic and craft what we do. So one of the things that’s very interesting is, one of the things that Design will do during design is—and this is something that Development had been doing and we just started doing in Design, so that like by the time it gets to Development, Design’s already spent some time and energy on it. Something Erik was very big on.

It started I think in Innistrad. The first set that Erik had led for me, Erik had asked for something, which is he goes, “Can you define for me the ten two-color pairs in draft, what you expect to do if you’re drafting those colors?” And so in my document I handed off to him, I spelled out what those ten things were. And he used that as inspiration to how to develop the set. A few of them he changed. Occasionally he’ll come to me and go, “Oh, you said this and that’s not working out, what do you think of that?” And he and I will talk it through.

So one of the things was we wanted to figure out how to use heroic, meaning where was it valuable? And so what we came up with was there were three decks that we thought could use heroic. And once again. When I’m talking about archetypes we’re laying out, it doesn’t mean there aren’t other things you can do. It just means there’s certain directions we point you into say “Here’s some guidance in these color combinations.” That doesn’t tie your hands, that doesn’t mean that there’s not other things you can do. But it does mean we are trying to guide you in a certain direction.

So with heroic we realized there were three different styles of play. There was a white/blue heroic deck, there was a white/green heroic deck, and there was a white/red heroic deck. You could do other combinations, but those were the colors that we had spelled it out that sort of had a strategy to it.

In white/blue, because they’re the heroic colors, allows you to have the most heroic creatures. And allows you to stock your deck full of things that were heroic enablers, like as I’ll get to, the spells that target two of your things and such.

White/green was a building-up, was more midrange. White and green are the ones that have +1/+1 counters on them, so white and green was definitely building up, so that was not quite as fast. White/red was the more aggressive “aggro” strategy, as we call it. White and red is the most aggro color combination. If you notice, most of the time, if you’re playing white and red in draft, you are playing a more aggressive deck.

By the way, people always ask me like “How come in this set, white and red doesn’t do something different? Why are they always the aggro?” And I’m like, “Well, there’s consistency to Magic.” The nature of what white does and what red does is white is weenies and red has an aggressive strategy, that they lend themselves together to doing something.

So every once in a while we’ll have a set where maybe they go a little bit in another direction. But really, the point is white/red is the most aggressive color combination, and they’re going to be doing aggressive things. You’re playing white/red, you’re playing an aggressive strategy, usually. And so each set we’ll have different things that we’re doing, but it will be—I mean, there’s different ways to play the aggro deck, but just like there’s always a Giant Growth every set. We’ll twist it a little bit and do different things with it. Magic is Magic, there’s always a Giant Growth. Magic is Magic, there’s a white/red aggressive strategy in draft. That is kind of what white/red is about.

So when picking heroic abilities for white and red—now be aware, white for example has a bunch of different strategies. So its heroic creatures, we knew that not every heroic creature would fit in a white/red deck. But we made some that overlapped, some of the smaller ones that get +1/+1 counters are good in white/green and white/blue and white/red.

Anyway, red heroic was a little more focused on white/red, because that’s the number one strategy we expect heroic to be played with. In Limited, mind you.  We did a lot of stuff for Constructed that’s a little different.

And this is a perfect example of “What’s an ability you can give a heroic creature that’s really good in an aggressive strategy,” and “can’t block” is very good. In a slower control-type strategy, not very good. But in a strategy where I’m just constantly hitting you and I’m trying to eke out every point of damage because I’m trying to beat you as quick as I can, that’s very valuable. And it’s a good thing.

And so one of the things you’ll find is, when we are figuring out what heroic things to put on a creature, we are also very, very careful to think in our heads about how it plays into the strategy. It’s not just like “What can we do in red?” It’s more so than that. It’s more like “Oh, what is red going to do here, and how can we maximize what we’re doing?”

 

Okay. Next is Ashiok! Now Ashiok is very hard to talk about, only because not using pronouns is very tough! So I will say the word Ashiok a lot. Ashiok is very interesting because I talked about how I had a story early on.

Now once again, let me phrase this. I’m not in charge of the story. I’m in charge of doing design. But early on, I needed to have some archetypal story for me to understand, and usually I get Creative to sign off on some base story that they then tweak once we get farther along.

So for my purposes I have a story so that I have an idea of what I’m doing, knowing that it’s going to be changed a bit along the way. In my original story, I wanted to make a planeswalker, a new villainous planeswalker. And my planeswalker had the ability to bring dreams and nightmares to life. That was his shtick. That was what he was good at. And like I said, originally it was Dark Jace was my idea.

Some of what I was doing with enchantment creatures was messing around with the idea of bringing dreams to life. The gods were involved, but anyway, I very much had a nightmare character that I had pitched in the early version of the story. And the creative time, when I get to Elspeth I’ll talk about this, really wanted Elspeth to be the hero. And they had a much more Greek mythological story they wanted to tell, so they shifted a little bit away from where I started.

But anyway, I find it interesting that there did end up being a planeswalker associated with nightmares and to a lesser extent dreams. And Ashiok is that planeswalker. I don’t think Ashiok was what I was envisioning, because Ashiok is more—the character I had made (???) Dark Jace. But it was a villain. A villain through and through. Up to no good. Ashiok, a little less clear what Ashiok is up to. Because Ashiok is a mysterious planeswalker with mysterious motives.

One of the things that I enjoyed quite a bit, by the way, was it was always our intent that Ashiok was a mystery. But what happened was, when people, especially in the player’s guide, they wanted to talk about all the planeswalkers like they always do, and it is just very, very, very hard to talk about something for a long period of time and not use pronouns. And so the writer just decided, “Ashiok is undefined, but I will just use “he” because it’s easier to talk about.”

And a little bit of that undercut—Doug really, really wanted—part of Ashiok’s—the unknownness of Ashiok is a very important part of Ashiok. And I’ve (???) how well Ashiok’s been received. It was interesting how much people really latched on and really took Ashiok to heart. So I’m very happy we made Ashiok.

And like I said, the intent of the unknown was always a key part of the character, and so I think… once again, if we know who the planeswalkers are at the time, we knew Elspeth for example, we will design cards during design. But sometimes—Ashiok, what happened with Ashiok was, so the way the planeswalkers work is, the creative team comes to us and says, “Here’s the characters we need. Here’s the planeswalkers we need. They’re in the story, they’re important, we need.”

And they sit down usually with Erik and figure out… because normally we have five planeswalkers in a block. And they will figure out who they need to have and then what colors those characters are, and then they work with Erik to figure out what the gaps are. Because there needs to be a color balance in the planeswalkers. Because planeswalkers are very powerful, and we need to have a color balance.

So for example for this set, they knew they needed Elspeth, and they knew Elspeth was white. They knew they needed Xenagos, and Xenagos was red/green. There are two other planeswalkers to come. I don’t want to talk about them too much. But they definitely, some of them were defined.

And so the hole ended up being we needed a black planeswalker. And so the goal basically was we needed a black planeswalker, and then I don’t know who made Ashiok, but the idea was they wanted this mysterious character that showed up at times of peril, and it made more sense as a blue/black planeswalker, so they talked with Erik and the blue was okay, so they… Anyway, Ashiok got made to fill a role, which was they needed a black planeswalker, and blue/black was okay. Anyway, so that’s where Ashiok came to be.

Sometimes, like I said, planeswalkers start from “Oh, we need this character, they’re this color, hey, make this planeswalker.” And so the creative team always gets to start with a couple. But then Development gets to come in and sort of say “Okay, now we need to balance them.” And then Creative will make one to fit that balance.

Okay. I am pulling into work. And looking at my chart. So here’s—I mean, you can’t see this, because this is the lovely audio medium. So I have—I make a little list when I have stuff to do. And so I made a—I have a page-full thing with divider lines, so two columns. I have one page full. Second page full. Third page, it’s just a little tiny bit on. But I have over two pages, two columns, of cards to talk about. How far did I get? I haven’t left A yet. I haven’t got out of A.

So anyway. Hopefully you guys like hearing about Theros, because I’ve got some stuff to talk about. But you know what? I’m going to keep talking about it. Because from all I can tell, you guys like the podcast about the sets and about the card designs, and so I’m having fun talking about it, and like I said I’m trying to add some new information and tell you some stuff you might not have heard, along with a few things maybe you have heard.

But anyway, I’m looking at the Wizards building right now, and I know that I have some work to do. So I enjoy talking to you guys all about Theros. It’s fun. I had a great time making Theros. I have a lot of fun talking about Theros. But while talking about Theros is fun, the reason I get paid is for making Magic. I’ll see you guys next time. Bye.