1/3/14 Episode 85: Theros Part V

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. Last we talked about Theros, I had begun doing my card-by-card stories, and I had gotten up to A. Which means today we get to go to B! Exciting. So for those that are unaware, normally when I do my design stories I’ll talk about the design, and then at the end I’ve started doing card-by-card stories. And the reason I do that is A. I have a lot of interesting stories to tell that have to do with the cards, and B. it lets me sort of catch some stuff I might have forgotten about and just round things out.

So anyway, we’re going to start with B, and the first card to talk about is Bident of Thassa. Okay. So two things: first off, one of the funny stories was, so Poseidon, God of the Oceans, had a trident. A very famous object. Probably of all the objects of Greek mythology, it’s one of the more famous. The trident of Poseidon.

And I think the creative team was trying to mix it up a little bit. They wanted a seafaring thing. But rather than a trident, they decided to have a bident. So a bident is a trident, but with two prongs rather than three. The problem is, “trident” is a pretty well-known famous thing. And a bident, not so much.

So every time it would come up, this would happen every time. I would say, “Oh, it’s the Bident of Thassa!” And the person would go “What?” “Bident.” “What’s that?” “Like a trident, but a bident.” And then they go “Oh.” And it’s just funny that like, for some reason, your brain, even though your—tricycle, bicycle, “bi” is two, “tri” is three, people get that, for some reason, a bident as being a two-pronged trident was never obvious to people.

And so anyway, I thought I’d use the Bident to talk about how we ended up with enchantment artifacts. When I get to the Spear of Heliod I’ll explain how we got these things in the first place. But this story’s more like “Okay, we’re going to do them, we have the weapons of the gods.” And if you had asked me before the whole thing began, if I was going to make enchantment artifacts, I would have said no. Probably emphatically no. “Oh, that’s dumb. Why would we make enchantment artifacts? It doesn’t even make any sense.”

But, and this is how design works, how you get to places that you don’t think you’ll get to, was we had with the enchantment creatures really established that enchantments were the gods and the creations of the gods. That all the enchantment creatures are the creations of the gods, so the things the god creates are enchantments. That the way it represents the influence and touch of the gods is enchantments.

Okay, well didn’t the gods make their own weapons? I mean, someone else didn’t make the weapons of the gods, did they? They didn’t like find them lying on the ground or something. The gods made them. Well if the gods made them, then aren’t they enchantments? And it’s like, “Well, yeah, according to the rules we laid out, they are.” “Well, aren’t they artifacts?” “Well, pretty much they’re defined as artifacts. They’re weapons, and they’re… So yeah, they’re artifacts.” “So aren’t they enchantment artifacts?”

I remember we had this design meeting where somebody brought this up. I forget who. And like as they’re walking through, “Isn’t this true? Isn’t this true?” It’s like… I felt like I was in court. “Therefore, your honor, I say it’s an enchantment artifact!” And it’s like, “Oh, I could not refute the logic.” The logic was very tight.

So they became enchantment artifacts. And once again, like I said, the reason I was okay with it is the enchantment meant something and the artifact-ness meant something. Now, be aware that one of the things I was very adamant about was whenever you have cross-pollination of two different card types, I wanted to make sure that both card types come through. Like Lucent Liminid, one of my big issues with it, was it was a creature but it didn’t feel like an enchantment.

So I wanted to make sure these things were both enchantments and artifacts. And so if you notice in the design that they have both an ability that you can activate, and then an ability that’s just there, and the idea is one of them is more the activated one with the colored mana is more enchantment-y, and the other one is more artifact-y.

So anyway, we wanted to make sure that they both had that feel. And one of the things that’s nice about them is even if you don’t have the colored mana to activate them, I mean you still need the colored mana to cast them. But there is an effect that happens without you spending extra mana to make it happen.

But anyway, I enjoy how the gods’ equipment came out. Oh, I keep calling them equipment. So originally, by the way, they were equipment. Originally when we handed over the file, it was “Enchantment Artifact—Equipment.” And the problem was when we turned them over, Development went to talk to Creative, and Creative said, “Oh, these are one-of-a-kind items. There’s not many Spears of Heliod. There’s a Spear of Heliod.” And so what they did is they said, “You have to make them legendary. There’s only one.”

So then Erik had a problem in which “Legendary Enchantment Artifact—Equipment” didn’t fit on the card. And so he looked it over, he said, “Well, Creative says they’re legendary, and they’re clearly artifacts, and by Mark’s rules about the gods they’re clearly enchantments. I guess they’re not equipment then.” And we decided that these are such powerful things that maybe only a planeswalker can wield them. “You can’t give them to your minions. You must use them. That’s how powerful they are.”

Oh, and the other thing, by the way, is they all had names. People ask this. Like the Spear of Heliod, I don’t know the name off the top of my head. The Spear of Heliod has a name. Like Mjolnir is the Hammer of Thor, so that one I know.

So why didn’t we put the names on? And the answer is, “We did! And they didn’t fit.” And what we realized was that if we just called it by its name, you wouldn’t know what it was. But if we say “Spear of Heliod,” you get, “Ohh, this is Heliod’s spear!” So we went with the more generic names so you could understand what they were. But for those who are in the know, they do have names, and if you want to refer to them as that, you can, although a lot of people might not know what you’re talking about.

Okay. Next. Boon Satyr. Okay. So I’m going to use Boon Satyr to talk about a different concept. So Boon Satyr is—I think it’s a 4/2 creature with bestow. And it’s got flash, I believe. So one of the things that is interesting is, when we—one of the things that we need to do, and Development encourages us to do this, is when we hand over a file, Design has to figure out where we want to push things. What colors are doing such=and-such. Now, Design more controls Limited because we’re controlling numbers and rarities, so we have a lot of control over Limited.

But in Constructed, it only takes one good card to really put something somewhere. So Development has a lot of control over Constructed. Since Design doesn’t handle costs, we have no impact—I mean, we have an impact in that we do things that Development then follows up, but we have no direct—like, we don’t cause a particular thing to be in a particular place other than we’ll choose number and we’ll choose color.

So it’s interesting that Bestow is in an interesting place, where for Limited, it ended up getting pushed in white and black. Which means there are more white and black creatures that have bestow. For Limited purposes, they’re a little bit stronger. So if you’re going to play bestow, odds are you have white or black in your deck. I mean, there are good bestow creatures in all the colors, bestow is spread through all five colors. But there’s more good ones and more of them in white and black.

So in Limited, if you’re going to play a very heavy bestow deck, odds are you’re pushed toward white/black. But in Constructed, one of the things that Development does is whenever we make a new mechanic, they can if able, and sometimes they are, and sometimes they aren’t, try to make an honest push of new mechanics in Constructed. The idea is, “Here’s some new stuff, it’s fun, let’s try to push one or two, at least one or two, and try to see if they can become a Constructed thing.”

And Boon Satyr was their push. One of their pushes for Constructed for bestow. So it’s interesting to note that the Constructed push was in green, where the Limited push was in white and black. And that sometimes they line up and sometimes they don’t.

Where they tend to line up most often is where we isolate them  in two colors. For example, in Ravnica and Return to Ravnica, an Azorius mechanic is white/blue, it’s not going to be anything but white or blue. And if they’re going to push it, well it’s going to be in white or blue. That’s the only place it is.

So in those cases, Design is dictating Constructed in the sense that it’s limited to certain colors. Like I explained earlier, because of the nature of Theros, that we needed to spread stuff out a little more, we kind of separated things. I’m going to talk about this real quickly. I mentioned this in my previous thing.

So I talked about how we took heroic and heroic is concentrated in white and black. I just mentioned bestow is concentrated in white—I’m sorry, heroic was concentrated in white and blue, bestow was concentrated in white and black. Monstrous, monsters were concentrated in green and red, although I’ll get to that when I get to monsters, and what’s left? Devotion in Limited was concentrated in green and black. So that every color had access to something in Limited. I’ll talk more about these as I catch up to the relevant cards.

Next is Bow of Nylea. Okay. So the Bow of Nylea, one of the things that happened was, we originally made the equipment and we turned them over. The gods weren’t quite done yet. We had taken a stab at them, and when I get to one of the gods I’ll talk about the creation of the gods, but we had taken a stab at them, but we ended up coming black and Design did another take on them afterwards and Development tweaked what we did, and there was a lot of work on the gods.

As such, since the gods were changing, it was important to us that the weapons of the gods worked well with the gods. If you have the Hammer of Purphoros and Purphoros, hey, that should work together well. If you have the Spear of Heliod and Heliod, they should work well together. The gods should work well with their equipment. We wanted synergy.

So one of the things that happens during Development is we’ll create what we call mini-teams. Which they’re mini design teams. And the idea is we’ll take a problem, usually one isolated problem, and then put together a team, and that team will meet for usually just a week or two weeks. Not too long. Sometimes a little longer for the bigger project. And hammer out, like if there’s a team that their only dedication is to this one problem, so they’re very hyperfocused on that problem.

So Erik made a design team for the gods and their equipment. And really what it was, was to fine-tune the gods and the equipment so they lined them up, make them all work. I don’t remember the whole team. I know Erik was on the design team. I was on the design team. Aaron Forsythe was on the design team.

So Bow of Nylea was made by Aaron. I think what happened was, I work at home Friday and they had a meeting on Friday, and I think they pulled Aaron into the meeting since I was out. And Aaron came up with the Bow of Nylea.

So the Bow of Nylea is supposed to represent—people are like, “Why the four abilities?” And she’s the god of the hunt, and of the seasons, and so they’re supposed to represent four seasonal abilities. To the best of my ability, here are what the four seasonal abilities are. And people are like, “What? I don’t get it!”

So first we have +1/+1. Well, that is growth. That’s spring. And representative of the growth and things growing and things getting stronger. Next is 2 damage to a flier. Well, that’s summer. Because summer is the time of the hunt. And she is an archer, and very much you want to hunt and take down things. 3 life is autumn, that’s the harvest, because in the summer, especially in ancient Greece, the fall is very important for gathering the food that you’re going to use to last through the winter. And then taking cards from the grave and putting them on the bottom of your library was winter. Sort of hibernation.

And so anyway, that’s the flavor, that the Bow of Nylea is supposed to represent the four seasons. I know—I like it, I think from time to time it’s fun to do stuff like that, and the card’s a rare card. I think it’s okay to make people sort of go “What?” every once in a while. Then when you find out that there’s actually some planning to it, it’s kind of cool. But anyway, for those who wanted to know the Bow of Nylea, it’s kind of cool.

Next. The Breaching Hippocamp! The only reason I bring this one up is just it’s a funny story, which is Ethan Fleischer was on the team, and before the thing began I explained that he had been putting together a document of things—basically the document was “What has Magic done that could be done in Greek mythology world, and what would make sense in a Greek mythology world that Magic hasn’t done?”

And so we had done a lot. Literally if you just walk through Magic, I mean, from gorgons to Pegasus to Cyclops to centaurs to hydras to—I mean, on and on and on. There’s lots of mythological things throughout Magic.

But one of the things that Ethan was very interested in is what hasn’t Magic done? What is a good staple Greek mythological creature it hasn’t done? And then Ethan had a small list of ones that he wanted, and then he worked really hard to get those in the set.

So one of them was the hippocamp. Now the hippocamp, if I recall correctly, is like half horse, half fish. The Greeks, by the way, they loved mixing and matching their animals. “It’s half this, half that! It’s part this, part that!” So the hippocamp, I don’t know why you would mix a horse and a fish, other then… I don't know. I don't know why there’s a horse and a fish! It seems like a very quirky combination. But the Greeks, they were not one to shy away from their animal mixes.

So anyway, Ethan is looking for a hippocamp, and every time we come up with something that he felt could be a hippocamp, he would make it a hippocamp. Because he was my strong second, he was in charge of the file. So when we would make something, I would let Ethan sort of concept it design-wise, meaning he would make it something, and then later on Jenna, who did the actual card concepting, when she felt Ethan had gone the wrong way or something, could reconcept, but Ethan was trying to sort of fill in Greek mythology as he went along.

And so since he was controlling the file, sometimes in meetings I would name something or I would say “It needs to be such-and-such,” and I would dictate what it was. But if I didn’t dictate what it was, meaning I left it up to Ethan, he would try to fill in his little chart of mythological creatures we hadn’t done yet. And I know at the slideshow—because hippocamp was all over the place. He’d make a hippocamp, then we’d kill the card. I mean, not because it was a hippocamp, but just cards ebb and flow. And for the longest time he just couldn’t keep a hippocamp in the file. So I know at the slideshow, when he finally saw a hippocamp, he like applauded. Like “I did it! There’s a hippocamp in Magic!”

Bronze Sable. Okay, the funny story about Bronze Sable is, we knew we wanted an artifact creature, and we knew we wanted a bronze statue of an animal that came to life. We knew we wanted that. But one of the questions is, “What animal?” And so I remember, it kept changing in the file because we kept coming up with different animals, and they would tend to be silly animals, but we were trying to, like, “What kind of animal do they make a statue out of in Ancient Greece?”

And in the end I believe Jenna had made it a sable, because there’s sables there. I do know that the card had lots of names through the course of design, and I think for a while it as Bronze Weasel. No, it was a Bronze Ferret. It might have been Bronze Ferret. It was some form in the weasel family.

Okay, next: Cavalry Pegasus. So originally, so this is a good example of Development fine-tweaking things. So when we made it in the file originally, it said, “When this attacks, another target creature gains flying.” And the idea is, “Oh, this creature can climb aboard the pegasus and then it also flies.

Meanwhile, as Development was trying to figure out the set, they realized that there was a little bit of a human theme. And so they were looking for just a few places to have humans matter just a little bit. Not tons. And I think somebody pointed out that, “Well, can anything ride the pegasus? I mean, can an elephant get on top of the pegasus?” And so they realized that flavor-wise, in the stories it tends to be the humans riding the pegasus. Oh, okay, well we were looking for a human-centric card, and flavor-wise it makes more sense that it gives humans flying rather than just anybody.

And also, the other thing it did, which is interesting, is it de-powered the card a little bit. Because humans just aren’t that big. So if you say, “Humans…” Now, if anything can be made unblockable, well you can just take your giant beast and make it unblockable. Take your monster and make it unblockable. Take your monster and make it unblockable.

And so I think it’s the combination of they didn’t want that gameplay, and they wanted more “human matters.” So it’s sort of like two birds, one stone. They’d managed to solve two problems with one solution, and then we ended up with the Cavalry Pegasus. Which is a cool card.

Centaur Battlemaster. . Okay, so this is the green creature that has heroic that gets three +1/+1 counters, it starts as a 3/3. So one of the things we did when we were trying to separate our heroic was to try to give each color a real identity. And so one of the things we wanted to do was we wanted one of them to be the growing color. And we decided that green, being the growing color, was a good place. And so the idea of green is it’s got a couple key ones. Especially there’s this one and the one that has two +1/+1 counters, where the key about heroic is, “Look, you’ve just got to do it once or twice, and it gets pretty big.”

This guy, like he’s a 3/3. Target him once—in fact, put an aura on him, like let’s say I just put a +2/+2 aura on him. All of a sudden he’s an 8/8 with whatever ability. Like +2/+2 and lifelink, he’s a big lifelinker. Like, “Wow. Bam.”

And so one of the things about heroic that we wanted to do is we wanted a couple creatures that just said, “Look. Just once. Just one time. If you one time can heroic me, you’ll be happy.” And so that’s where the card came from. It’s just, we wanted to make sure that there was some stuff where like, it’s fun sometimes to be able to heroic a lot, and we had cards that definitely make you want to heroic a lot.

But this was a card, where like—I mean, not that this card is upset if you heroic more than once. But you can make it happy with only one heroic. It doesn’t necessarily need to have multiples to make you excited. Sometimes what we call a “combo of one.” I mean, combo of two, but pretty much you just needed one thing and you’re hooked up.

Next, Chained to the Rocks. Okay, so the way this card came to be is one of the things I did during Innistrad—so Jenna was my creative rep on Innistrad. I had her back on Theros. And one of the things I had her doing during Innistrad that worked out really well, really well, was she would come up with names of cards. Just like “Here’s a good card name that fits this world.” And then we in the design meeting would match it. “What does that mean?” So one of the abilities she came up to is “Chained to a Rock.”

Now, for those that don’t know… I keep on saying Pythagoras, but it’s not Pythagoras. It is Prometheus. Pythagoras made mathematical equations. He actually existed. Prometheus was a Titan who gave fire to the humans. And who I think mythologically might have made the humans in the first place? [NLH—Yes.]

Anyway, he gives fire to the humans, upset the gods, the gods torture him, and the torture is, they chain him to a rock, and they have an eagle tear out his liver every day. And then it grows back and every day it tears out his liver again. Until I guess Hercules eventually frees him.

Anyway, so she had come up with Chained to the Rocks—Chained to  Rock was the name of the card originally. And so we’re like “Okay, what does this card do?” And we’re like, “It seems like it’s some kind of imprisonment, so okay, maybe we could do some form of an Oblivion Ring-type card, right?” One of the things that white is really good at is what I call “Answers with answers.” Which is “I can answer your threat, but my answer could be answered.” Meaning “As long as this is in play, your guy can’t attack or is removed.”

And so we knew we wanted the card either to be A. a Pacifism/Arrest variant, or B. an Oblivion Ring variant. We weren’t quite sure. I think we were leaning toward Oblivion Ring because we hadn’t had one and we kind of wanted one.

And then somebody in the meeting, I don’t know who came up with this, said, “Well, what if it was “Enchant Mountain?” And we’re like—you can tell when somebody has a great idea because everybody’s eyes in the room just light up and we’re like, “Done!”

Now originally, by the way, it was any mountain, it wasn’t your mountain, it was just a mountain. And so it ended up being a very good sideboard card of white against red. What happened in development, though, was it was too good. It was so good that it was causing people to choose not to play red. And that was not the intent, the intent was not to be a super color hoser.

So what ended up being was, kind of if I’m playing white, well, I need to have red. It’s for the white/red deck. Now, we liked to have cards that sort of push in certain directions, and so in some ways it’s a white/red card. I mean, you need mountains to make it work. In Constructed, there are ways to get a mountain without actually… Ravnica lands. So there’s a way to get [mountains] without ever actually having red stuff in your deck.

But anyway, we made that card, and in the same meeting we also made Rescue from the Underworld, and I love both those cards. In fact, they’re my two favorite cards in the set. And I remember saying in the meeting, like, “Guys,” like, before we left, like “See these two cards? These are the cards. This is what I want. This is what the set needs to be. If we can make cards like this, we will succeed.” And I was very, very happy. In a lot of ways, these cards were the guiding principle that sort of steered us in the right direction.

Oh, one last thing. The actual card is called “Chained to the Rocks.” Why, why was it “Chained to a Rock” and “Chained to the Rocks?” I asked. I don't know. It’s something like that he probably wasn’t tied to a singular rock but to a mountain, which would be a bunch of rocks. Anyway, they’re both good names. But it’s one of those things where I was very used to the name and it almost stayed, but it’s like I still sometimes call it “Chained to a Rock,” and then people are like, “You mean Chained to the Rocks?” And I’m like, “Well…” Anyway. It’s a fun card.

Oh, the other thing that’s interesting is when we first made it, it was common. And it was really, really good. So we moved it up to uncommon because it was too good for Limited. And then it turned out it was still too good for Limited, and Development moved it up to rare. Because they liked the card, they wanted it to be good, but they didn’t want it to warp Limited. And so it got moved up to rare.

People often ask, by the way, one of the roles of the rare rarity is there are things that cause problems in Limited. And when they cause problems in Limited, what we do is put them in rare, mythic rare to make them not happen as much in Limited. But, if the card is for somebody, we have to put it somewhere, meaning if we want to do the card, and the point is not for Limited but we want to do the card, it has to go in rare or mythic rare.

And there’s a lot of cases where there’s some card that is a bomb in Limited, like “Why’d you make this card?” Well, if you see it in rare or mythic rare, it was not made for Limited. At best we understood it impacted Limited and we moved it out of common/uncommon to minimize its impact on Limited.

But look, we make cards for many reasons, and if a card has a reason to be made, it will be made. And that just because a card impacts Limited… we’re  not going to take a card that we think somebody will really like, that’s for somebody else, and not make it because it’ll mess up Limited. We just will restrict how much it gets in Limited by changing its rarity. But there’s lots of ways to play Magic and lots of different audiences in Magic, and so there are cards that like “Yeah, maybe they’re bombs in Limited, but they’re also making someone else happy somewhere else.” And that’s something—Magic is a game for many people, and many players, and we have to make sure that every single set is for every single member.

And that is tricky. It’s probably what the hardest thing about Magic is, I say this all the time, Magic’s not really one game, it’s many games, and every time we design for it, we have to design for normal expansions. Supplemental products we can aim a little bit, they’re more for specific subsets. We try to shift around so that different subsets eventually get a supplemental product. But the main booster expansions, we’ve got to make sure that everybody can have them. That’s important.

Okay, next I have Chronicler of Heroes. Okay. So Chronicler of Heroes is an uncommon white/green card that you get to draw a card [if you have a creature] in play with a +1/+1 counter. So this is a good example of something we do in design, and this card might have been made in development, but it’s something Design does and Development does, is one of the things that we really like to do is to make cards that help define draft archetypes.

So for example, there’s an archetype that we made where you draft white and green cards. It has a lot of heroic, you beef up your creatures, so a lot of them get bigger and a lot of them get +1/+1 counters on them. And so the idea was, there’s an uncommon cycle of gold cards in Theros, and the role of that cycle was to encourage you to go down these different paths. And so we figured out each of the ten paths, and then there’s cards to encourage those paths. Actually, is there an enemy cycle? [NLH—Yes.] For sure there’s an ally cycle. I think there’s an enemy cycle. 

Okay, so this is white/green. So the role of this card’s to say, “If I open up this card in pack one, it’s pack one, pick one, and I see it and go, “Oh, okay, I see, I want to go white/green, and I want things that have +1/+1 counters.” Well coincidentally, that’s exactly what that deck wants to do! And so it just is something that encourages you to sort of build around.

So I talked about the role of rarity, and one of these days I will do a rarity podcast. One of the roles of uncommons is to provide guidance for drafting. And the reason uncommon does that is rare cards show up very infrequently. But uncommon cards show up on some regularity. What that means is, you won’t see them every draft, but you’ll see them every third draft maybe. Maybe every second draft, depending on the size of the set.

But the thing about it is that we really wanted to be able to do some cards that sort of send you down interesting paths, because one of the neat things is if you get a certain card early enough, it alone might encourage you to do some strategy. And so we sometimes make uncommons that push down traditional strategies that we want you to do, and then every once in a while we’ll make ones that go, “Oh, this is special, here’s a special thing you can try to do.”

And like in Innistrad—I’m blanking on the card name. But Innistrad has the green card where you get the 1/2 spiders based on creatures in your graveyard. Spider Spawning? Spider Spawning. PICTURE And that was made to enable a green/blue strategy that we had built in the set. And the idea was, “Here’s something fun you can do,” and that if you get this card early, “Hey, here’s a strategy. Here’s  a plan. Here’s a thing you could do.” And drafters really like those cards.

So it’s something that I’ve been working hard to try to encourage, because we want to make sure—I mean, drafting is yet another way to play the game. And part of making a good draft environment is giving the tools for drafters to do fun things. Both to have certain paths they can go down and to have special one-of things that they can try if the stars align.

Okay. So I managed to get through the entire first column of my first sheet. So… holy moly, we got lots to talk about.

Anyway, I hope you guys are enjoying this, and it’s fun, I like talking about Theros, like I said, this is a big experiment to see what happens, if I talk about something recent. The big, big plus is I know so much about it and I have a lot to say, so it’s lots to talk about. Hopefully it’s not also downside.

So I hope you’re enjoying the ever-ongoing Theros podcast. But anyway, I am now at work. I see the Wizards sign and the Wizards building. And while I love to talk about Theros, and I love talking about all the Magic that I’ve made, it’s time for me to be making Magic. Talk to you guys next time.