1/10/14 Episode 86: Theros, Part VI

All podcast content by Mark Rosewater

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

Okay. The first thing, as I pull out, I realized that it is raining, which those faithful fans know probably means a slightly extra-long podcast. Although I need to point out that Ryan Spain, current R&D member, former Limited [Resources] podcast host, pointed out to me after I mentioned that people in Seattle can’t drive in the rain, he pointed out a good point. His hypotheses is that people in Seattle can drive in the rain, and that is why people are so slow, because when it’s raining the correct thing to do is drive slow. Anyway. A possible thought for the day.

Okay. So last we left, I was talking about card-by-card stories in Theros. Last we left, we were on C. Two podcasts and I’ve gotten to C. But hopefully you guys like this podcast. If not, (???) few podcasts for you. I hope you like it. In general you guys seem to like what I call the “down and dirty in the design” stuff where I talk about actual design.

And anyway, well, it’s a test. We shall see. So we got up to Colossus of Akros. So one of the things that’s interesting, and I’ll use this as my example, is one of the things that we’ve started to do, if you look at Champions of Kamigawa, for example, that was us trying to do a world inspired by Japanese mythology. And it was not particularly popular. It has gained some popularity over the years, I think the Commander format especially because the set is overrunning with legends, legendary creatures, has brought some current fondness for it.

At the time, (???) we have, it did not do well, but both Innistrad and Theros have done much, much better. And my hypothesis, which I’d like to run by you: I think what is going on is, what we’ve learned about top-down is that a lot of the joy of top-down comes from familiarity. Meaning any of you’ve listened to me talk at all about communications theory and stuff, a lot of connecting with an audience is making them feel comfortable with the source material.

And yes, there should be surprises and such, but the base of it needs to be very understandable. And the problem we had with Champions of Kamigawa is, we explored a lot of things that while being kind of true to the source material, were not very known by the vast majority of our audience. And thus I just don’t think it resonated as clearly with them.

And what we did with both Innistrad and Theros is we said, “Okay. Let’s make sure that the baseline stays very close to the source material, and that if you like horror, if you like Greek mythology, a lot of the things you expect are there.”

And what we’ve also done is made sure that the things that are better known are lower commonalities. So yeah, we have a Hundred-Handed One, but it’s not a common card. It’s a rare card. So the people that want a little more obscure stuff, we have, but that’s not what we’re basing our set around. It’s not like a set all around, “Hey, the Hundred-Handed One, there’s a whole bunch of Hundred-Handed One,” because the average person doesn’t know that’s from Greek mythology even though it actually is from Greek mythology.

And so the idea is, you want your lower rarities to be the more approachable, more known stuff, and your higher rarities can be a little more experimental. Also, in general, we have chosen to sort of—we want to meet a lot of expectations, so we definitely have hit more of what we’ll call “low-hanging fruit.”

One of the big arguments of when you do inspirations is “How much of low-hanging fruit do you hit?” And Champions of Kamigawa, the idea was, “Well, let’s not do all the low-hanging fruit. Let’s get a little more eclectic.” And the problem there was, people like low-hanging fruit. You know what people eat when they get to the tree? They eat the low-hanging fruit. And I don’t think you should besmirch it. Do not besmirch the low-hanging fruit. It is tasty.

And it is reachable. So we are definitely trying to mix things up, and we’re trying to add some new elements that are our own, and we’re trying to do our take on things, and our gods are not the Greek gods, but they’re definitely inspired by the Greek gods, and have a lot of the Greek god-ness to them.

But anyway, the reason I bring this up is Colossus of Akros was inspired by… a movie! Called Jason and the Argonauts.

So there was a series of movies. I think they were made in the ‘70s. That had at the time, well maybe at the time it was bad special effects, I don't know, maybe they were awesome special effects. It’s very hard to tell in modern day, looking back at old special effects, whether they were cutting edge for the time or not. Maybe they were.

But anyway, there was a sequence where there’s a giant statue, I think of an Argonaut. And they get attacked by it.

And anyway, this was inspired by that. By the giant statue coming to life and attacking you. And… so one of the things we definitely tried to do is, we are very cognizant of pop culture. I know in Innistrad, for example, one of the things we talked about when we were doing Innistrad is, how should the zombies be? And the reality is, the source material we were borrowing from, there weren’t a lot of zombies. There was like—Frankenstein is the zombies, I guess. They were more along the line of Frankenstein. And less along the line of Dawn of the Dead.

But we’re like, “Look, people expect Dawn of the Dead. I don’t care if Dawn of the Dead necessarily lines up with the source material, it’s what people expect from it. That if you have a bunch of zombies, you’re expecting—especially in black. Dawn of the Dead zombies.” And so we made sure to deliver that, even though that wasn’t 100% to follow the sort of era we were coming from in looking at our source material.

And that pop culture has shaped perceptions of things, and that one of the big things is, so I’ll use my example here. There’s a game that we made long ago called “What Were You Thinking?” Richard Garfield made it. It was called “Hive Mind” in design. And the idea of the game is, you get asked a question, and then everybody is supposed to write down the answers that they think everybody else is going to write. And the idea is, you are trying to get the answer that’s the most popular answer.

So one day, it’s like, “Name some number of insects.” And one of the best answers was “spider.” And someone then said, “What do you mean spider? Spider’s not even an insect.” And the answer was, “It didn’t matter. The point was to write down the most popular answer, not to write down the right answers.” Yes, spider’s a pretty important answer for “What’s the most popular insect,” in the fact that it’s not an insect. But, in a game where you’re trying to write down what other people are writing down, maybe spider is the right thing. In fact, it was, because it was in the top… you got a lot of points for writing “spider” down because a lot of people wrote it down. And the funny thing was, a lot of the people who wrote it down knew it wasn’t an insect, but they thought enough other people would write it down that they wrote it down.

Anyway, that’s important. And I do believe when we talk about how we do top-down stuff, I think it’s very, very important to understand, like, the influence of the pop culture is important, because when people—here’s an important thing also to remember. People don’t know where they get their information from. This is a very important thing I’ve learned, in the way humans process information. The information that you learn and where you learned the information from are actually not stored in the same place in the brain. In fact, one of them goes into long-term information, one of them goes into more short-term information. Because your brain says, “I need the information. Oh, I need to know that.” So it puts it into long-term.

But where I got it from is not a super crucial thing. And so that goes into shorter-term memory. So what happens is, with time, you remember what you learned, but you don’t always remember where you learned it. And the reason I learned this in school is, when you study the effects of communications, one of the things about television and movies, for example, is it will teach people things, and then people will learn that as facts, and then forget that they saw it in a movie.

Because if you ask the average person, “How realistic is TV,” they’re like, “Oh, you know, TV’s not that realistic. You know, TV shows and such.” But they’ll learn something, and if they don’t know any better, they’ll put it in their head, and then they forget they learned it from television! And so one of the real powerful things about television is it fills in people’s knowledge gaps, but it’s not necessarily true. And so it is very—TV has a great ability to sort of subconsciously almost teach people things, because they will learn things, kind of know they’re not true, and then forget where they learned them and assume they’re true because they know them. Anyway. Little communications for you.

Next, Curse of the Swine. So in the Odyssey, I talked about the Iliad last time, which is the Trojan War, the Odyssey’s the second book, in which Odysseus, our hero, tries to get home. He has pissed off Poseidon, and he’s in a ship trying to get home, so Poseidon messes with him for like… I don't know, eight, ten years. One of the places he ends up is on an island where there’s a sorceress named Circe, and Circe turns all his men into pigs. It’s a pretty famous story. Anyway, we wanted to capture that, and so Curse of the Swine is us doing a little “Turning men into pigs, Odysseus’s men into pigs.”

Originally, by the way, the card was a devotion card that it turned a certain number of creatures based on your devotion. But it ended up making more sense just to turn all creatures rather than necessarily some creatures, and they ended up making Master of Waves the devotion card in mythic blue other than Thassa. Anyway, Curse of the Swine definitely—I mean, we wanted to hit a trope. Development tweaked it a little bit, but I mean it stayed mostly as we made it. I mean, minus the devotion obviously.

Okay. Cutthroat Maneuver. Oh, this is a bestow card. So this card gives +2/+2 and lifelink. The reason I’m bringing this up, I talked about this in a previous podcast, I just wanted to sort of point it out that when we were making bestow cards, especially when we’re making common and uncommon, that we wanted to make sure that they were easy to process. And so the way we did that was we lined them up. We made cycles. And instead of doing vanilla stuff with different numbers, which is harder actually to process, we made them all the same, so that they have the same bonus. So the cycle that Cutthroat Maneuver’s in, they’re all +2/+2 and an ability. Lifelink in black.

Anyway, one of the things to remember, and I’ll stress this again, is that when you are designing, by the way, it’s called mindspace, I think I called it mind-share in a podcast a couple times ago. It’s always important to remember mindspace is that your audience only has so much that they can absorb. And whenever you can use things to consolidate information, so that they can have fun—because one of the things to remember is that every card does not need to be different.

That it does not make the game more fun if every card is radically different from every card. There’s a point at which it’s just overwhelming. We want to make sure the audience grasps and understands what’s going on. Also, because we have a whole block to do, we want to make sure that we give ourselves room to grow, because there’s really, really no reason when you’re introducing a new mechanic in the first set, in the fall set of a block, not to try to do the simplest version that’s the easiest to grok onto. You want your audience to have the simplest thing to jump on and learn, and you want to give yourselves some room to grow so as the block goes along you can evolve and do things.

Okay, Dark Betrayal! I want to talk about this cycle. This cycle is the “color hurts itself” cycle. And Dark Betrayal is black killing the black creature. So the reason this cycle came up was not a design thing. Design did not make this cycle. This got made in development. And I assume, usually when Development makes a cycle, it’s because they want something for Constructed, that’s usually why a cycle gets made. Or especially a cycle like this. I mean, they might make a cycle that’s using themes on the set. But this really is separate from the themes of the set.

So I do not know for a fact why they made the cycle, but knowing Development and knowing that it didn’t tie directly into the themes of the set, I mean it fits, but it wasn’t using one of the mechanics, that it seems like it’s something that Development wanted for Constructed. That’s my guess. And these cards, they seem pushed enough that I assume they’re meant to be sideboard cards.

Next, Elspeth, Sun Champion! Okay, so let’s talk about how Elspeth ended up in the set. Okay. So like I said, when I first started, once again, my caveat is, when I make a story, it’s not the story, it’s just me trying to fill in an archetype. Really the story I was trying to tell was I wanted an evil planeswalker taking advantage of the Greek world and the gods to create—originally he was going to bring their dreams to life. But it shifted with time, and then the dreams ended up being more the realm of the gods…

And so what happened was, in my original version of the story, which was a super early version which is not a real version, it’s more of me trying to make a hypothesis, anyway, that caveat out of the way, originally I had Jace in it, because I thought if you’re going to have Dark Jace, you need Jace, because it’s much more exciting when the person gets to meet their own dark mirror. I mean, Batman could fight Bizarro, but not as exciting as Superman fighting Bizarro. So.

And so originally when I pitched this, I suggested Jace. They weren’t really gung-ho with it, they were trying to get a real Greek feel. And so the story they wanted to tell, the correct story for a Greek plot, is a story that had a little more of a Greek feel to it. And so they really, they were interested in telling the story of a reluctant hero. That’s another trope of a Greek drama, is the idea of the hero that is destined to be a hero, but he doesn’t want it.

And the idea of the reluctant hero, the trope is, that the hero is trying to get away. They don’t want the responsibility. That they’ve suffered responsibility in the past, and things have gone poorly. In fact, for those that are fans of the Weatherlight saga, the beginning of the Weatherlight saga, Gerrard is a reluctant hero. He had a bad experience with the Weatherlight, he didn’t want to go back.

Now, he gets drawn back, and that’s the way the reluctant hero trope works, is something makes them have to go back. In the Weatherlight saga, Sisay, his mentor got kidnapped and he had to go rescue her. In this story, Elspeth comes to Theros because she feels like in a world with gods, how is she going to be needed? She won’t be so special in a world of gods, no one will expect anything of her.

And ironically, the gods need her! Heliod needs her, and is the one that calls her. And the true thing of the reluctant hero is, even though they don’t want to be a hero, when the time comes they do step up, and they become the hero they need to be. And usually by becoming the hero they learn an important thing. Which she will.

So the key about Elspeth, or one of the things I like about Elspeth was they wanted to take one of our planeswalkers and be able to dress them up in sort of Greek gear and have a neat look to it. And it’s not that Elspeth worked really well, one of the flavors we’ve been trying to do with the planeswalkers, in fact Dan Emmons is one of my designers on the design team, has a little side project where he’s been documenting every planeswalker and what they do, and try to make sure when we do planeswalkers, that we are not being inconsistent. We made a Liliana that really didn’t fit the other Lilianas, and people were complaining, like “You’re right. We have to be more consistent with the planeswalkers.” So Dan’s monitoring that.

So Elspeth has her army. She summons her creatures. And then one of the tell-tale signs of her is she makes token creatures. Soldiers. And so we wanted to repeat that. And in general, by the way, her basic thing is she’s like, “I make soldiers, I help my soldiers,” and then usually she’s also a fighter. And so the middle thing, so basically what we did is, she makes some soldiers, she kills things, big things, she kills monsters, and one other big thing I’ll get to is one of the big parts of her story is, we wanted this big scene of her fighting the hydra. Because we wanted it on the packaging. We felt like we were trying to look for the iconic monster, and a hydra both was impressive-looking and it felt very Greek mythology. So we decided to do a hydra.

Anyway, so her first ability is to make soldiers, her second ability is to kill big things, her third ability is to help the soldiers. And Elspeth I think has become—people are very fond of Elspeth. One of the things that’s interesting is, certain colors have really cemented around a planeswalker that just becomes the one that people define the color with. And other colors, not quite as much. I mean, white is the color where I believe that Ajani and Gideon and Elspeth have all been sort of jockeying to be, “Who’s the key white person?” And I think what happened is, Ajani early on was the one that got the least traction of the original Lorwyn five.

Our hypothesis is because he’s not human, and that it’s just a little bit harder to relate to a non-human. There’s people who love Ajani, I’m not trying to besmirch Ajani, I like Ajani, but anyway, and white’s definitely the one that’s been trying to, you know, settle down, like “Who’s its key planeswalker?” Anything else about Elspeth? I guess that’s it, mostly. We’ll talk about some other stuff as we go along. I’ll talk about her hydra-fighting when we get to the card that she fights the hydra on.

Next is Ephara’s Warden. Okay, so she is a tapper. But unlike most tappers, she only taps creatures with power 3 or less. Okay. So this is a card I wanted to talk about another concept, which is the biodome.

Now we sometimes use “biodome” in a negative context, which means when things get too—so when you design a set, you are creating two things. You’re creating a world that’s going to live by itself, that’s what we call the biodome, usually it’s Limited, and you’re making a set that’s going to interact with other sets in Magic. That (???) more Constructed.

And the idea is, Design is not well-suited—I mean, we clearly are aware of things in general what’s going on, we’re aware big picture of what mechanically is happening, we definitely make overlaps between mechanics between blocks, for synergy, but we are not up-to-date on where exactly the metagame is. That’s what Development does and not Design.

And so we have a little less say on how things are going to interact big-picture. We definitely interact mechanics big-picture, like “Oh, this mechanic and that mechanic will work well together,” but we’re not fine-tuning things. Development’s more fine-tuning.

So Design spends a little more time on the biodome, which is “Okay, we’re in a world in which this is all you have.” And the attractiveness to the designer of the biodome, and the dangers, is that you have a lot more control. That Ephara’s Warden is an example of we wanted to build an environment where you were crafting things and building up things, and making giant heroes and monsters, and really sort of evolving your creature over time.

The problem was that a normal Magic set has a lot of things that would easily negate that. Tapping being one thing. Well if I spend three cards and lots of mana to make this giant creature,  and you can spend one mana every turn just to tap it, oh, well that really negates a lot of what I’m doing.

And so what we decided was that we were going—I mean, there’s answers, and we made sure there are answers, the answers are a little bit different than normal, and they definitely don’t punish the play pattern we wanted as much as normal Magic. So Ephara’s Warden is an example of a card where, okay. We still want you to have some control, but you know what? We’re going to build in a weakness to the tapper. The tapper’s going to be bad against big things.

Meaning… so, not only when you build a big thing aren’t you punished, but also when you’re looking at the set, it’s one of the cards that encourages you to build big things. That we want the messaging that big things are better. Not that that needs tons of messaging, because big things are better. In a lot of ways. Although building things up with lots of cards can be a problem.

So anyway, Ephara’s Warden is just an example of us sort of saying, “We need to craft the environment.” You have to be aware of your biodome. You want to be careful not to go to crazy, because sometimes you can make things work. Rise of the Eldrazi had this problem a little bit, where like super, super biodome-y. “In this world you can do this, but once you get outside this world it’s a lot harder to do.” And you can get trapped in a world of, like, “I’m going to make this work to such an extreme that things don’t even…”

So Rise of the Eldrazi, for those that don’t know, historically, is an interesting set in which it split our audience. The casual players did not like it. Do not play it much, do not buy it much. The advanced players looooved it. Especially in Limited. They loooooved it.

And so what we found was that when you get too biodome-y, the real—the people that just dig in and love Limited, they’re fine with the biodome, because they’re like, “Okay, what crazy thing is going on now?” But what we found is the casual player, if you just push it too much, it just—they have nothing to hang their hat on, if you will. That part of being able to sort of deal with a Limited environment is having something that you know to be true and being able to work with that.

And while we can shift some things, Rise of the Eldrazi was shifted a little bit too much for the more casual Limited player. But on the flip side, the more advanced player really did enjoy that because it was so different from what Magic normally is.

Also, in general I think when you slow things down, mentally, a lot of the Limited players really enjoy that because it allows a lot more give in play. And it does make it easy for the better player to win. Because usually the longer the game goes, the more decisions get made, the better player just will make more of the decisions correct and so they will win. So long games tend to reward experienced players. That’s why experienced players like control.

Okay. Next. Erebos, God of the Dead! A couple things about Erebos. First is, so the original ability of Erebos, because he was always God of the Dead, was you can play creatures from your graveyard. That was his ability. And I think when they died they got exiled. I think when he was in play, creatures died to exile, but he could play creatures out of the graveyard. I think that’s how it worked.

And that was an awesome ability, and it’s god of the dead, it fit really well. And then what ended up happening was it was a little bit too good, and Development had to kill it. Which often happens sometimes with pretty cool abilities is they’re good because they’re a little too good.

So Erebos is very interesting. One of the things I enjoyed quite a bit—so Brady Dommermuth, who is the former Creative Director, he’s no longer with us, but he was with Magic for a long, long time. If you liked Mirrodin, if you liked the guilds of Ravnica, there’s a lot of stuff that Brady had his hand in big time.

Anyway, the way the gods worked is each member of the creative team, or five members of the creative team took one of the gods and wrote up the god. And Brady took up Erebos. And one of the things Brady was trying to do—the reason he took Erebos is black is tricky. It’s very easy to fall in the habit of just doing “Hee hee,” you’re like—for example, if you do god of the underworld, it’s so easy to get to like Hades from the Hercules cartoon, from Disney’s Hercules. Where it’s like personified evil with a flaming head. And that Brady wanted a little more subtlety to it. That he wanted a god of the dead that was a little more remorseful and not so gleefully evil. And that he sees it as a responsibility and something he needs to do. But that it’s his duty. It’s something that he has to do.

And anyway, it’s an interesting take on black, and I think black—it’s very easy for black just to become sort of maniacal evil. Stereotypical maniacal evil. And we try hard from time to time to carve other shades into it. It’s not that black can’t be evil, obviously it can, it does it quite well, but it doesn’t have to be evil, and I really appreciate a lot of stuff Brady did with Erebos to try to give him a little more—a little more feel.

Okay, now that I’m talking about Erebos, I can talk about the gods! The design of the gods. Okay. So here’s what happened. When I made the gods, I knew the gods were going to be very important. Aaron and I talked about it, I said we’re going to do something special. But there were a lot of other moving pieces, and when I actually handed off the file to Erik Lauer, who was the lead developer for the set, I said to him, “Everything is done except for the gods, the gods aren’t done, we’ve got to fix the gods.”

I said, “But give me some time, I’ll put a team together, and we’ll focus on the gods.” I’d been focusing on so many other things that I knew the gods needed to get done, but the other thing to remember is, early development is about balance and a lot about Limited. And so mythic rare cards, we have a little bit of time. You can playtest Limited without some mythic rares and really get a sense of environment.

Plus another important thing in development is you have to concept cards, you have to choose cards to get concepted, meaning we have to figure out what cards are so that they can do the illustrations, well, it turns out the gods, they spent lots of time and energy. They were going to put that in the first art wave, and like “Draw the gods from our style guide.” So I knew that we had a little bit of time on the rules text, because Erik would be able to put them into the first wave of card concepting, and it wouldn’t affect Limited. So I knew I had a little bit of time. It’s just me sort of knowing the process. And there was a lot going on. Theros had a lot of moving parts.

And so anyway, what happened was, once a week my design team has a design team meeting. It’s just a meeting for the designers. So it is me, my design manager, Mark Gottlieb, who—I explained this once before, but I oversee the product and he oversees the people. So he’s the manager for the team. But I’m responsible for all the technical growth and sort of grooming them as designers. And then Mark’s in charge of all the managerial stuff, monitoring their time, making sure that they are on enough projects and the right projects, and he does all the  management. The people management.

So the design team is me, Mark Gottlieb, Ken Nagle, Ethan Fleischer, Shawn Main, and Dan Emmons. And we meet once a week to talk about design issues. Whatever is on our mind. And it’s a place where we can talk super design-y, sometimes we’ll look at design in some other areas, or we’ll talk about things we’re doing, or there’s a lot of updating so everyone’s aware what’s going on in the design of different projects.

But anyway, it’s a chance where the designers can talk design. So I used one of our meetings to brainstorm on the gods. And so we came up with an interesting idea. So the idea we had is, when you summon the gods, they didn’t go into the battlefield. They went to a new zone: The Nyx Zone. And the idea was, the gods, while in Nyx, had an ability that affects you. They have an enchantment-like ability. They are enchantment creatures. But if your devotion was strong enough, you could bring them to the battlefield. And then they could fight for you. But if they ever died in the battlefield, they went back to Nyx. That was our original version.

And so when Erik got ahold of them, I think he liked the general gist of what it was, is you summon the god, he has sort of an enchantment effect, you need to have enough devotion and then he’s tangible and he can fight for you. And so the idea that—Development did a couple things. Another good example of how Design and Development work together. Design was trying really hard to get the concept, the idea. It’s a god, and he has this enchantment-like feel, and if you have enough devotion you can bring him, so he takes form and you can have him fight for you. All that came from Design.

But a lot of the execution—Development changed a lot of things about the execution. Number one, they said “We don’t need another zone! No Nyx zone. We’ll just put them on the battlefield. Number two, our version was it was hard to destroy them because when you destroyed them they went back to Nyx. There’s no Nyx. So fine. Make them indestructible. You can’t destroy them.”

And then he just said, “Okay, well let them sit on the battlefield. They’re enchantments—until you make them a creature, they’re just an enchantment.” Or I don’t know if they have creature status, I’m not really sure how that works. But the idea is, they’ll function like an enchantment until such a time that you have your devotion. I think that is what turns them into creatures. I mean, I know devotion turns them into creatures, but I think they become creatures at that point.

And so the fact that they sat in play and added to devotion meant that they now helped themselves a little bit, and they balanced that. But mostly what they did, which is a nice example of—Design has some pretty out-there ideas to make something that’s very different, and then Development said, “Well, what’s the special thing about them?” and re-crafted them to makes something that just would play a little better and function a little better. I think in a lot of was, that is a perfect example, a little microcosm of Design & Development. That Design’s job is to kind of be out there and get very cool and neat things, and it’s Development’s job to ground it and make sure that it does it in a way that’s playable and balanceable and such. Anyway, that is the gods.

Okay, next. Fellhide Minotaur. Ah, the fate of the minotaus! So one of the things—so one of the things that happens sometimes is I talk a lot about where Design and Development sometimes will butt up against things. Design and Creative will sometimes butt up. And the minotaurs are a good example.

So one of the things that happened early on was, I really wanted minotaurs to be red and black and to have a little aggro play, and that one of the draft strategies in red and black was you can draft minotaurs.

So one of the problems that happened, though, is that the creative team came to us and said, “Look, minotaurs are decently big. You can’t make little teeny minotaurs.” And so what they said to us is, “Okay.” For Theros, the guideline was, the power and toughness combined had to be at least five for a creature to be a minotaur. 2/3 or 3/2 was big enough to be a minotaur.

Well, one of the problems is, if you’re trying to make a more aggressive deck, it’s problematic if none of them are small. We’re talking that’s three mana at the lowest. And you might want one mana or two mana. So we weren’t able to do that.

The other problem we ran into was that we wanted more minotaurs. Jenna was trying to fit all sorts of stuff in the set, and there’s a world filled with Greek mythology. The reason we chose it was there’s so many cool new things to do.

And so there wasn’t as much room for as many minotaurs as we wanted. And the thing that we were torn between is, there’s a tribal component for minotaurs, but it wasn’t like this was a tribal block in which there was a major thing. It was more a minor thing. And so we wanted enough minotaurs to make the tribal thing work, but Creative needed enough space to be able to do all the cool things from Greek mythology, so we kind of found a middle ground.

If Design had its way and we had no creative concerns—and be aware, the creative concerns are important, just because I’m saying Design wants something doesn’t mean that Design should get everything it wants. The creative concerns are very important. I’m just sort of saying, “Excluding the creative concerns, the design concerns probably wanted more minotaurs.” In fact, the design originally had more minotaurs, and it got scaled back a little bit because of trying to make sure that we could represent the different things we needed to.

Now, the good news is, this is a whole block, there’s more minotaurs coming. We knew that we wanted a little more minotaurs, and the compromise was, “Okay, we’ll have some in this set but more minotaurs are coming.” So Fellhide is funny in my mind, in that I feel like this set is all about thumbing its nose at Hurloon Minotaur. And this is a 2/3 in black.  It’s a 2/3 for 2B—for 2C rather than 1CC. But anyway. Hurloon Minotaur has a much bigger thumbing coming up.

Feral Invocation. +2/+2 and flash. Oh, it’s an aura that gives +2/+2 and has flash. So one of the things we did early on, and this is one of the remnants of that, is we said, “Okay. Today’s brainstorm is, let’s come up with every card we can that you would normally see in a Magic set, but done as an aura.” And so this card was Giant Growth done as an aura. Well, how do you do Giant Growth as an aura? Well, you do power and toughness boosting, and you make it flash. And then, aha, surprise, I Giant Growth my guy.

Now, it’s permanent, that’s a little bit different, that’s why it’s +2/+2 and not +3/+3, but this card came form that brainstorming session, which is, “Let’s turn existing cards into auras.” Because we were trying to up our aura space a little bit. And part of that was to figure out things that we needed to do because Magic always does it, but to try to move it into the aura space. And that’s what this card was doing.

Next, Fleetfeather Sandals. This was another card we made in design. We made a list of things we had to do, and one of the things we had to do was winged sandals. For those that aren’t familiar, Hermes, who is the messenger of the gods, one of the gods, and he’s the messenger, he runs around super-fast and one of the items he wears is winged sandals which allows him to fly. Actually, I don’t even know the winged sandals allow him to fly. He can fly. I always assumed it was the winged sandals. Anyway, obviously design assumes that it makes him fly.

So what we wanted to do is we wanted it to be fast and we wanted it to allow you to fly. Because that’s what winged sandals do. So we gave it flying, and we gave it hexproof. We had hexproof, I think. No, we have haste. Oh, because hexproof is annoying. Evasion and hexproof is annoying. So we didn’t give it hexproof. I think we talked about hexproof. But we gave it haste.

The thing about speed is, there’s a couple different ways to portray speed. Haste is one way to portray speed. Hexproof is another way. First strike is a way. There’s a couple different ways to do speed. But anyway, flying and haste felt like a pretty cool thing. The two mechanics combo very nicely together, and we made that very early in design. The numbers might have changed, but other than the numbers changing, I mean, it was pretty much as we designed it in the meeting.

Next, Fleshmad Steed. Okay, so I talked about this in my article a bit. The Mares of Diomedes, if you’ve ever read about Hercules and his labors, his twelve labors. So real quickly, Hercules is the demi-god, his dad is Zeus, I forget who his mom is, but he’s a demi-god, so not a god. And Hera does not like Hercules because he’s her husband’s kid but not her kid, although back in Greek mythology, Zeus had a lot of kids with a lot of different people. Anyway, I won’t go there, because this is a family-friendly podcast.

So Hercules was sent on twelve labors. One of the labors is he had to tame the Mares of Diomedes. And they were carnivorous—there were like [four] of them, I think? They were carnivorous, they were giant beasts, and they ate flesh, I think, and anyway, this was another thing that—carnivorous horses was another thing that Ethan was trying to get in the file.

A lot of people were like “But wait, these are supposed to be mighty creatures and this is a little dinky guy!” and okay, I do know that this one is not—for those true mythological buffs, this one did not hit the trope quite as dead-on as some of the others. We wanted the cannibalistic horses, the flesh-eating horses, we got them, yeah, probably in the story they’re a little bigger, but them’s the apples. That this was an example of a card that we needed, we needed some simple cards, and Ethan actually made this  card to be the mares, and it actually worked pretty well. And so sometimes you have super-complex cards, sometimes you get simple cards. And we liked the simple card.

Next, Gift of Immortality. So one of the recurring themes of Greek mythology is mortals becoming gods. Or at least becoming immortal. That apparently the gods had the means by which to give mortals immortality. And there are a bunch of different stories about how they get immortality. So we decided to make an aura that represented immortality.

It went through a lot of changes, only because—like, the funny thing is we knew what we wanted, right? The idea is you put this thing on, and pretty much you can’t die. You’re immortal. But how to make that work? And the problem that we’re running into, there’s a lot of ways, like if you put something on that goes, “I have protection from everything,” there are a bunch of ways to still kill it. And it felt bad that, you know, “I have the gift of immortality!” “Wrath of God.” “Oh, I’m dead.” That didn’t feel so good.

And so we finally found a thing that basically keeps it alive. It’s pretty hard to kill something with the Gift of Immortality. And I’m happy that once we’re all said and done and the dust settled, people really like it. That’s pretty cool.

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Okay, next is Gray Merchant of Asphodel. So let me talk a little bit about devotion! So I talked about how we got devotion in the first place. Let me talk a little bit about how we decided to put it in the set. So I mentioned this briefly last time, that one of the things that we do is, we decided to take each of the mechanics, and even though the mechanics showed up in most of the colors, that’s not true in every set, but in this set we wanted—like devotion for example. I didn’t want just some colors to be devoted to their gods. I wanted all the colors to be devoted to their gods.

So I wanted to do a little devotion everywhere. But we mixed it up as far as how much we did and what rarity we did. For example, blue ironically has only two, in Mythic Rare. They happen to be very good, and so yeah there’s a deck with them, but it doesn’t have much role in Limited.

So the reason we chose black and green is they are the two colors that naturally have the most mana symbols at common. Black because black is just the color that pushes you towards using itself the most, in the history of Magic there’s just more black mana symbols and things than other things. Early on that had to do with Dark Ritual, but it’s sort of like Dark Ritual went away, but that attribute carried on, so black still has a little bit more colored mana than most.

The reason green has more colored mana I think just has to do with that it’s bigger. So one of the things is, if I have a two-cost card and I make it CC, C being colored mana so let’s say green, I make it green green, that’s hard to cast. You need to have two forests out, ideally on turn two, which means, well how many forests are in my deck if I’m hoping to have two forests by my second turn?

Now, if you have a six-mana card which is four green green, four colorless and two green, well, you need green, yeah, but you have some time to get it. You don’t need to have that much green to have a hope of playing it. And so the higher, more expensive stuff can have more green mana in them, and green just has larger creatures at common. So green’s number two, mostly because it has larger things and ends up having more mana. So we put devotion in Limited into the two colors that most often will have extra colored mana at lower rarities.

And the idea with devotion was, we knew that there were fun build-arounds. The thing I like about devotion is it tells you what to do. It very much says, “Okay, you want to devote yourself to devotion? Pick a color. I’ll tell you what color, this color.” And we had just finished off Return to Ravnica, which Limited is super—I mean, it’s almost impossible to play mono-colored in Return to Ravnica. And so I wanted to make sure in Theros that there were strategies that you could play monocolor. And one of the things I liked about devotion is it really, really pushed you in that direction, right? It’s one of the strategies that allows monocolor play.

Now, the goal of Theros was not for everybody to play monocolor play. In fact, there’s lots and lots of stuff encouraging two-color play. And a little bit beyond that. But we wanted to make sure there’s some monocolor play. We wanted to make sure our pendulum gets pushed in different directions, so I liked the fact that there was a (???) for Constructed where monocolor could matter. The fact that the previous block had some hybrid in it was nice.

Because hybrid plays nicely with devotion, even though ironically, normal multicolor does not play—well, I guess normal multicolor has mana symbols in it, so it can, although it’s harder to play monocolor decks with—obviously with gold cards. Traditional gold cards.

But anyway, this has sort of become the poster child of black devotion in Limited. It’s very powerful, and it has a pretty huge swing. So I’m happy with it, I’m glad we made it, and it was a card—it was one of the first cards we made with devotion, when we made early devotion stuff. So anyway, I’m always happy when we make a card and people like it.

Final story of the day is Hero’s Downfall. I told this story in my column, but I will tell a little more detail, although I’m coming up to work. So I will finish this story before I finish.

Okay, so basically the story is, Erik Lauer comes to me and says, “We’re having a problem, Mark. Black in general is not seeing as much play in Constructed, and we need to help it.” And so Erik says, “Well, one of the problems is there’s three card types that black really has trouble with. It has no artifact removal, it has no enchantment removal, and barring a few cards, none of which are currently in Standard, it doesn’t have a lot of answers to planeswalkers. And so we need to provide answers to one of those three things.”

And so I said—I mean, the reason he was coming to me is as the color pie guy, and so what I said to him is, “Oh, that is easy. While black destroying artifacts or enchantments is not great for black, it has a lot of issues, black killing planeswalkers is fine. Fine fine fine fine fine.” Just from a color pie philosophy level, right? Black has no problem killing things. Death is black’s number one weapon is death. Well, guess what? Planeswalkers can die. So if anybody’s going to kill planeswalkers, black is the perfect person to kill planeswalkers.

And so I said to Erik, “You want to make mono-black planeswalker destruction, that’s okay. That is the color—if you were telling me one of the colors is going to kill planeswalkers, in a heartbeat I’d pick black. Black’s the card that kills things.”

So I said, “Okay,” the only thing I asked of him is I said, “Look, I would just like you not to make it too low in rarity, because planeswalkers are a super-special thing, and you know what? It shouldn’t be that easy to kill a planeswalker from a knowledge standpoint.” It’s not like “Planeswalkers are a rare item, but it’s a very common spell to learn to kill a planeswalker.” And so I said to him, I just didn’t want it too low in rarity. That I wanted it to be something special.

For Constructed purposes, it being rare didn’t matter. But for Limited, it would. And I’m like “Okay, I don’t want it to be this Limited bomb.” Or not Limited bomb. But I didn’t want it to be something that’s just like “it’s so easy to kill planeswalkers in black.” And so I wanted it to be a tool since we were talking about Constructed, I wanted it to be something that Erik could have for Constructed. So anyway, that is how Hero’s Downfall came to be.

So now, I look and I am at work. And, as predicted, it took a little extra time because there was rain today. So anyway, I hope you enjoyed, I got through a whole bunch more cards, I’ve got plenty left, because I’m on H obviously, we’ll continue until this is done. But anyway, I hope you guys were enjoying my trip through Theros today and all the different card stories. But it is time for me to stop telling stories and to start making Magic. I’ll talk to you guys next time. Ciao.