6/20/14 Episode 132: Story Through Design

All podcast content by Mark Rosewater

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

Okay. So last time, I talked about the story of the story. So I explained how, through the years, we’ve found different ways to tell the Magic story. So today is kind of Part II, today I’m going to talk about how we’ve told the story through the design. Because I’m in charge of design. And so clearly, the pictures and the names and the flavor text are all very, very good vehicles for us communicating some sense of story and flavor.

But I’m not in charge of any of those things, and so the thing that I’ve always been focused on is “How can the game itself tell the story?” The gameplay tell the story. Because one of the things—so let me walk you through some history, and you’ll see that it evolves over time.

So in the beginning, there was Alpha. So the first set that I worked on was Tempest. The best way to explain this is, the people that made the sets in the early days were also the ones that did their own flavor. And so there were flavors in the sets, I talked last time about how Antiquities, clearly there’s this story behind the scenes, but one of the things that really didn’t happen in the early days was the gameplay wasn’t particularly designed to tell the story. There were a lot of top-down cards made, meaning cards that had a particular flavor, but there was never any sense of the overall gameplay communicating something in the early days.

So what happened is just, people would come up with mechanics and then they would try to make sense flavor-wise. Now, there was a little bit of, “Oh, I want this flavor and so I’ll have this mechanic,” but the gameplay itself never really tried to tell a story in the early days.

So let’s get to Tempest, that’s my first set. So Tempest was the first set that I can think of where we tried to make a connection between mechanics and story. But the way we did it was we made the mechanics. Once the mechanics were known, I then crafted the story to include them.

So for example, the slivers. If you know your Tempest storyline, the slivers play into the storyline. The Weatherlight crew has to fight the slivers. And in fact, defeating the slivers has to do with them understanding how slivers work. Which is that by separating them, they depower them. Because they need to be near each other for them to share information on how to do things.

And so one of the key things was, by separating them from each other, they were able to defeat them. And so clearly, for the first time at least, the story is acknowledging the mechanic. But the mechanics came first, we made the mechanics, and then I just found ways to work within the story of the mechanics.

Which is very, very different than nowadays, which we’ll get to in a second. But it was really the first time I could think of where we were actually trying to make sure that the story that was trying to be told interconnected with the mechanics. We wanted that connection.

Okay. So after Tempest came Urza’s Saga. Well, like I said, I was very involved in Tempest. I was not that involved in Urza’s Saga story. And so Urza’s Saga definitely retreated a bit. In fact, it got even worse. Urza’s Saga, we decided to make an enchantment block, and the story wanted to talk about artifacts. And so there’s this huge disconnect. Like I joke about how it was called, “The Artifact [Cycle],” when the theme of the block was enchantments. So that wasn’t exactly things lining up.

So after Urza’s Saga we had Mercadian Masques, we had Invasion, and those sets were definitely—there was a story going on, but there wasn’t—part of it was, there was a deconnect between R&D and the story people at that point. But we didn’t quite know—the story was being done independently of the mechanics. And so we were always trying at the end to sort of make them fit. But it wasn’t like they were being done together. They were being done independently.

And what that meant is, there was a lot of disconnect a lot of time. I mean, I think like when we did Mercadian Masques, we knew we were in Mercadia, and so the idea of the spellshapers was definitely the sense of a marketplace and people selling things, and that flavor was there, but it was only like each of us started with “market city” and went our own way. And there wasn’t a lot of connection between them.

The other thing that was very funny is that Orim, who was the Samite healer, who was the healer of the group, when we made her, she was supposed to be a pretty minor character. Also, by the way, for those that don’t know, Orim originally was “Oram,” which was MaRo backwards. And we decided that it was hard to pronounce so we changed to “O-R-I-M.” She was actually not meant to be a very major character.

But then, during the Mercadian Masques story, they needed a Weatherlight crew member to fall in love with… what was his name? The one who led the rebels. He’s a famous legendary card which is slipping my mind. And you guys are all screaming it.

I always imagine, by the way, when I’m trying to remember a card and I can’t remember it, that everybody listening is just screaming the name—Cho-Manno. That’s his name. Everybody is just screaming, like “It’s Cho-Manno! Cho-Manno!” Anyway, Orim and Cho-Manno I believe had a thing [NLH—Yes], and so Orim actually ended up playing a much bigger thing than she…

In our mind, when we had filled out the Weatherlight, we definitely archetypally thought of it like Star Trek, we’re like, “Okay, what kind of characters do we need?” And like we knew we needed the engineer, that was Hanna. And we knew we needed security, that was Tahngarth.

So we  knew we needed a doctor, like we needed somebody. And like, “Okay, a Samite healer makes a lot of sense for a doctor.” So we had her on the ship. Like I said, she was meant to be a smaller role character. But ended up being a bigger role in Mercadian Masques.

So anyway, during this time period, we definitely were doing our thing. Like, Invasion for example, we decided to do this multicolor block. I don’t think the story people were even aware we were doing multicolor, didn’t play into multicolor in any way. So I mean, Apocalypse we ended up doing this enemy color thing, and it was a big finale, and so there was a fight, and so maybe enemies were fighting? I don't know. You rationalize it, but it wasn’t really planned out.

Then comes Odyssey and Onslaught. Which if you have any idea of—so clearly when we were doing Odyssey, I had this “brilliant” idea of… (???) see me, “brilliant” is in quotes. Of changing up our creature types. And we followed that up with Onslaught, which was all about creature types! And creatively, it was set in the same world! Yes, the Odyssey world and the Onslaught world were the same continent of Otaria. And the two blocks had nothing to do with each other. Even the creature types didn’t have anything to do with each other. It’s like all of a sudden, on this side of the island, there’s merfolk! And goblins! There weren’t merfolk. But there were goblins! And elves. And such.

Anyway, so we finally will get to Mirrodin. So Mirrodin was the first time—so what happened was, there was a big change-up on the creative team between Onslaught and Mirrodin. Technically I guess it was between Odyssey and Onslaught, but a lot of Onslaught was the team finishing off the story that had begun by the team before them.

And Mirrodin was the first chance for this new creative team, led by Brady Dommermuth, to really sort of do their thing. And so the idea of Mirrodin was, I had worked with Tyler Bielman, who at the time was in charge of the creative team, although Brady was the Creative Director. Tyler was kind of the manager of the creative team.

And we had come up with an idea. We wanted to do an artifact block. We knew that. And we said, “Okay, well let’s… let’s make a world that makes sense. So it’s not just like—hey, after the fact, here’s something.” And so we came up with the idea of this mechanical world. A metal world. Where things, for some reason, there were a lot of metallic components to it.

Anyway, so the creative team really created Mirrodin. That’s the first, when I think of kind of modern world-building that we do, kind of what is now our bread and butter that we do awesomely, that was the first really chance of the creative team doing that.

I mean, there’s some other worlds that had been made. Obviously Rath had some energy put into it. Mercadia had some energy put into it. So it’s not that we hadn’t done worlds per se. But this is kind of the push of the modern-day world-building.

And so Brady and his team crafted a metal world. A world in which our story could take place. And, one of the things that happened was, we actually talked with—so the creative team, one of the things about the change of the creative team was, I had known Brady for a long time. He had been editor before he got on the creative team. And I had a good rapport with Brady. And I knew most of the people on the creative team. And as we had started a new team, bonds were repaired and R&D was once again working very closely with the creative team.

And so, what happened was… what happened? Let’s see if I can get the story right. So they were doing concepting while we were building, and early on Tyler and I had come up with some different ideas. Originally, by the way, I mentioned this in my column, that we had an idea for a three-block story in which the first block was Mirrodin, and it was supposed to be this world where the main character was experimenting and trapping people. And then making them fight. And then the second world was going to be an underground prison world in which also there were pit fights and stuff.

And then you would learn in the third world that it was the leader of the first world vs. the leader of the second world, and each one of them had brought the forces that they’d discovered through their means to have this big battle in the third thing. And that was our idea. Hold on one second—I’ve got to lower my mirror. Sorry, I had to—my mirror was pushed and I realized I needed to be able to see.

Okay, so Mirrodin was definitely the first time in which there was some talk back and forth between trying to have some components of what was going on. But still, I mean mostly we wanted the flavor of “There’s lots of artifacts and you care about artifacts,” and wanted a world in which caring about artifacts tied into what the world was.

Oh, and what had happened was, we had originally pitched this different kind of metal world, and then Brady was the one that came up with the idea of, “Well what if these things have been brought there, and now we flash forward 100 years or something, in which the new generations as they’re born start having metal be part of them.”

And that the creatures don’t even remember where they came from originally at this point. That the ones that were actually plucked from other worlds had died off, and that the world had slowly started changing them and weaving metal into them. So that everything, the artifactness was a biology of the plane.

And so Mirrodin in my mind, definitely for the first time had that sort of flowing in, in the sense of “I want you to care about artifacts, and I want you to care…” So that as you play the game, there’s some sense of that.

To follow that with Champions of Kamigawa, and the idea of that was to do a top-down world in which we’d start with the—essentially the story would come first and then we’d do the mechanics to it. So the problem we found was that story is much, much more flexible than mechanics.

And so if you look at Champions of Kamigawa, we did do the story first. The idea of this war between the spirit plane and the mortal plane, and spirits mattered and there was—all that was woven into it. That there were samurai. There were ninjas in Betrayers. That there were the snake people… I think the naga, they’re called? [NLH—Orochi.] And so what happened is that there was this neat thing that was happening. Where they had designed something, and we could make things to match.

But the problem we found was that mechanics are pretty limited. So you want to do samurai? Okay, we can make a samurai mechanic. But then every samurai just has the samurai mechanic. And every snake has the snake mechanic. And it was a little ham-fisted in that the way to paint-by-numbers with mechanics made it such that it was just very limiting. It was a bit repetitive, and worst of all, it led to gameplay that just—there was a lot of the same style of gameplay to it. And when we came in after the fact, to try to match stuff, we were very limited in how we could do things.

The other problem is, the way mechanics work is, the first mechanic you put in the set, you have all the room in the world. You can do whatever you need to do with the first mechanic. The second mechanic has to stay out of the way of the first mechanic, so you’re a little more limited. Well by the time you get to the last mechanic, you’ve just got to fit it where it fits.

And so the problem with doing story first is that you can choose one element of the story to match and do a pretty good job, but eventually what starts happening is, you start not having the ability to get things in. And so to make them fit, you end up making things very parasitic. What parasitic means is, that they make sense here, but they don’t make sense in larger Magic.

For example, “samurai matters.” Cards that care about samurai. Well, we’d never ever done samurai in Magic before. “This card cared about samurai.” “Okay, well these cards are only good here.” Splice into Arcane. Well, we had some neat stuff with splice onto Arcane, but Arcane magic didn’t exist anywhere but here. So splice was limited to just here.

Even spirits mattering, at least Magic had had some spirits before, but it turns out we hadn’t had a lot of spirits. And so spirit mattering—and we hadn’t had very many good spirits. So yeah, it tied into the past a little, but  not in a way that had a big impact. Most of the good spirits were in this block.

Okay. So move on from Champions of Kamigawa to Ravnica. Okay. So now, my friends, we started getting to what I considered to be the start of the modern era. Of storytelling and design. So what happened there was, the whole design started with me wanting to do—it was a gold block, and I liked the idea of playing up two-color pair because the previous gold block, Invasion, had been all about playing as many colors as you could.

So what happened was, I had gone to Brady, and I said to him, “Okay, Brady, here’s what we’re going to do. The focus is going to be on two-color pairs, and we’re going to focus on ally and enemy equally. All the two-color pairs are going to be treated the same.” And then Brady came back with the awesome idea of the guilds. “What if we have ten guilds?” It was a city.

We had decided—actually, I don't know, I think Brady decided it was going to be a city, because Brady decided, “Let’s have 10 factions, oh we could do guilds, ooh, that would make sense in a city.” And I think Brady came back with the city.

And then, once Brady came up with the idea of the guilds, I said, “I love it, let’s run with it,” and I decided to make the guilds the cornerstone of the block plan. That we’re going to play with guilds.

Okay. So what happened was—and that’s where I realized that if we were going to build around guilds, I came up with the 4-3-3 model, where the first set only had four guilds in it. Which at the time, by the way, was really radical, because how could you not have all the combinations in it? What do you mean, only four two-color combinations are in the set? What about the other six two-color combinations?

And it was very radical at the time, but part of what I was trying to do was, I wanted the design to play up the flavor. And if you wanted the guilds to matter, then I needed to give guilds the time to focus. And it was clearly, in my mind, the right call, but it was an example of the reason it was the right call was I wanted the mechanics to play up the flavor. I wanted the focus to be on the guilds.

Well, in order to do that, I couldn’t give you all the guilds. If each set had all 10 guilds, then it isn’t about the guilds. Whereas if I say, “It’s four, then three, then three,” then this set’s about these four guilds. And there’s focus. And it’s loud. And mechanically you can tell what it is.

And then I said, not only is it about this guild, but we are going to figure out the flavors of the guilds, and we were going to match the guild flavor in the mechanics. Meaning, “Okay, we have the Golgari. That’s black and green. Well, what are the Golgari going to do?” We had to figure that out.

And once we realized they had a focus on the graveyard, we’re like, “Okay. We’re going to give them a graveyard mechanic. And we’re going to…” One of the things that Ravnica did for the first time is it said, “Okay, as you play, you are going to learn about what the guilds mean and represent. And not just through the flavor text and the art and the name, but the actual mechanics. The gameplay.”

“Oh. Well, the Azorius tie things up. And the Golgari care about the graveyard. And the Boros are aggressive and work together.” That each one of them sort of showed you the essence of what they were. And the thing to me that I loved from a game design perspective is, I want you, when you play the game, to walk away knowing more about the story and the environment than you knew before you played. That playing isn’t an adjunct to the flavor, it’s part of the flavor.

And that I feel like Mirrodin is the first set where we said, “Let’s consciously try to mix them together,” but Ravnica was the first set where the gameplay and the story just wove so closely that you learned things about the guilds by playing them. That the act of playing the game was one of the most instrumental ways of learning about what the guilds were. And what they represented.

Okay. So Ravnica was followed up by Lorwyn. [NLH—Time Spiral, then Lorwyn.] So Lorwyn block, we came up with an idea for structure, we wanted to do a four-block structure. I wanted to mirror them, the two mini-blocks. And so we sat down with Brady and his team and said, “Okay. How do we do this?” And the creative team said, “Okay. If we’re going to do them, we want to contrast them.” And I said, “Okay, I like this idea.” So we said, “Okay, what if we do light world/dark world, and the things transition over?”

And so we figured out—and then the thing I was playing around with mechanically was, I liked the idea of having tribes in the first set, and then a mechanic in the second set that you cared about. It ended up being hybrid. So the idea was, the first set cared about creature type, and the second set cared about color, but you know what? The first set had cards that were of color, and the second set had the creature types that you cared about in the first set.

Now that ended up changing a little bit, Eventide moved farther away. The plan originally was that when we shifted over, we would shift colors of—so like all of the creature types would shift colors, so one would stay the same but one would shift. So elves, for example, were originally in Lorwyn, were black/green, and then they ended up being white/green when we shifted to Shadowmoor.

The goblins, I think were black/red and they shifted to red/green. [NLH—Yes.] And the idea was, the base colors stayed the same, but we shifted so that part of moving was, now you had new decks that were available to you, so the new block would give you new tools.

In retrospect, by the way, I probably needed to keep them in the same colors. But anyway, lesson learned. Anyway, the important part of this was that we sat down and we figured out what creature types were going to be in this world by figuring out what the world was. It wasn’t like we just picked some creature types that we wanted and said, “Okay, Creative, make this make sense,” no.

We sat down with them, and it was a careful deliberation between what do we need… and what happened was, we started picking a few things we needed. And as the world started to flesh itself out, Creative said, “Well, what if we do these?” That started figuring out where things went. It was a very collaborative process. To figure that out.

And Lorwyn  very much tried to communicate what was going on through the gameplay itself. That obviously, the creatures mattered very much in the first set. When you got to Shadowmoor, we played up the fact that it shifted. We wanted the gameplay, for you to get the sense of “Here are these things, and now watch them change.” And that was important.

So Lorwyn was followed by Time Spiral. [NLH—Other way around.] So Time Spiral—it started with me wanting to do some time-flavored mechanics, and then Brady and team figuring out that they needed to revamp the planeswalkers. And so we were going to do a major story about this accident. And that it wove time into it. And then we ended up doing this time-travel flavor where things in the past got washed in.

So as nostalgia came up, we interwove it with the time travel stuff. So it definitely—there was this idea of everything breaking apart. Of this temporal disaster. And now, like I said, a little mish-moshy in that I don’t know if we conveyed the story as well as we could have through the mechanics. We definitely conveyed the idea of time breaking down and time mattering, and the past slipping in and some levels of future slipping in. But I mean it definitely was one where we communicated that.

 So after that was [Shards of Alara]. And [Shards of Alara] was another one where it was a gold set, Bill who was the lead designer really wanted to stress three-color play, and the creative team said, “Okay, let’s really play three-color play. How about a world in which it’s chopped in five, of which each shard of the world is only three-color?” And so we played around with that to figure out what it meant.

And a lot of our design came from—the creative team made five worlds, and then we went back and said, “Okay, oh, Esper is this thing.” And we for example got the whole idea of the artifact thing from understanding what Esper was. “Oh, these are people that are constantly trying to prove themselves to the point in which they’re part artificial now.” Like awesome, they’re all artifact creatures because they’ve made so many changes that they have an artifact component to them. And that was the perfect thing, where the gameplay came from matching the story.

So after Shards of Alara was Zendikar. So Zendikar was the next—well, I take that back. Scars of Mirrodin was probably the next evolution. In fact, Scars of Mirrodin is where I start the next age of design. What happened in Zendikar was, I wanted to do a “land matters” set, we figured that out, we figured out the mechanics we wanted to do for land.

Creative said, “Okay, if you want land to matter, here’s an idea, Adventure World.” We then took the idea of Adventure World, and then the second half of design we built into Adventure World. So traps and quests and allies were all designed to be part of Adventure World. That we left ourselves some mechanical space—so we designed some stuff that matched lands. The creative team made some stuff that made sense with that. We then used the second half of our design to match the world that Creative had made to match us. And this idea of a back-and-forth is a theme that becomes much more popular as you look at how design happened.

Okay. So, next, after Zendikar is Scars of Mirrodin. Okay, Scars of Mirrodin in my mind is the next step up. It’s the next age, by the way, it’s the beginning of the Fifth Age, which was we knew that we were going to have—when the dust settled we understood we were going to have a war between the Phyrexians and the Mirrans. And so I said, “Okay. I’m setting up a set.” And my entire block structure was set into, “I’m going to create this conflict.”

And the idea was, in the first set we figured out, “What was the smallest percentage we could have of the Phyrexians so that you felt their presence, but most of it felt Mirran?” And then the middle set we went halfway-halfway, so clearly there’s progression, the Phyrexians are gaining ground, now we have a war. And then the third set was, “Here’s the outcome of the war.”

And so one of the things I was very proud about Scars of Mirrodin is, on every level, as you played that block, you were part of that battle. You were part of the battle for Mirrodin. Now, I don’t know whether you were on the Phyrexian side or the Mirran side, but clearly the gameplay there—and one of the things I tried really, really hard to do was, I wanted to give the Phyrexians a feel. I wanted you to be afraid of the Phyrexians.

I probably succeeded a little too well. But the reasons I played with infect and the reason I did proliferate and a lot of mechanics we chose for them was, I wanted them to be this scary thing that you didn’t know quite how to answer. And the fact that I didn’t let you remove poison was part of it. I needed them to be intimidating and scary and feel invasive.

And the funny thing is, I think I succeeded. I think that I succeeded almost too well, where people were kind of freaked out by the Phyrexians in that I think a lot of the reaction to infect was just the idea of, “I feel kind of helpless, what can I do? I can’t remove them.” And that was the feeling I was trying to create, but I definitely made a lot of strong emotions with the Phyrexians. And the thing that’s great is I loved that there was a battle and a war and that you were part of that.

So Scars of Mirrodin was followed by Innistrad. So Innistrad was a similar thing was, and this is to me part of Fifth Age of Design, is the idea of “What’s the emotion?” I built my mechanics, so you playing the mechanics make you feel the emotion we want you to feel. Innistrad was about horror. That I wanted you to feel dread. I wanted you to feel suspense. I wanted you to feel like you felt when you watched a horror movie. I needed you to have that kind of—the hesitance.

I needed you to be concerned, and so one of the things that if you look at, I did a lot of things built into Innistrad design to create that sense of tension. A lot of the double-faced cards had the idea of, like you would get out the werewolves and like you knew the bad side was coming! You knew the werewolf was coming! And you were trying desperately to stop it, but you were always nervous, because you knew at any moment this thing could happen.

And that morbid was put in the set because we wanted death to matter, that when things died all of a sudden you were worried. That there was a lot of stuff in the set to make you worry. That when things happen, you were kind of suspenseful. That I wanted the gameplay to reinforce that.

Also, I wanted the gameplay to say, “Here are our monsters. I want our monsters to feel like the monsters.” The zombies feel like zombies. The werewolves feel like werewolves. The vampires feel like vampires. That was really important.

Now, that followed by Return to Ravnica. Return to Ravnica, we had a lot on our plate, and we were trying to recreate what we had done in Ravnica. Now, Ravnica had done a pretty good sense of the gameplay representing what the guilds were. I will admit, I’m a little—when the dust settles, when I look back at Ravnica, I feel like I didn’t next-level it.

And what that means is, I like when we go back somewhere, or to be fair, when we revisit a theme. Doesn’t necessarily need to be revisiting a place. But when we revisit a theme, I want us adding something that is over and above what we had done the time before. That we could use our design skills and do something that we hadn’t done before.

And we did mix it up with the block plan, that was different in a lot of ways. But I feel like we didn’t really next-level Return to Ravnica. It’s one of my regrets in that I think we did the guilds very well, I think we executed wonderfully on the guilds, but I feel like we didn’t offer you other than the block plan something that the core design is a little bit different. We sprinkled a little bit of city flavor, but anyway. It’s one of my regrets that I feel like of the Fifth Age of the Design, it’s one of the sets that had the most Fourth-Age-ness to it.

Luckily it was Ravnica, and Ravnica—of any Fourth Age of Design that we had done, it was the one that had the most flavor built into the design, so maybe in some ways Ravnica was a precursor to Fifth Age, so I guess any set was going to be that.

The final block that we worked on that you guys know about, I’ve worked on other sets, was the Theros block. And the Theros block was very much me saying, “Okay. What does Greek mythology mean to modern sensibilities?” And what the people noticed, by the way, when I made Theros is, I didn’t match actual Greek mythology. I matched modern sensibilities through pop culture.

Meaning—in fact, there was a thread on reddit of “Did I have all my understanding of Greek mythology from Hercules, the Disney movie?” And the answer was, in some way, the Hercules Disney movie is what I was talking about, which is when you take Clash of the Titans, or you take Xena and Hercules, or take modern interpretations. Pop culture interpretations of Greek mythology. Greek mythology in the day was about the sensibilities of the actual Greeks. Greek mythology modern has to do with how we, in our society, interpret the Greeks.

And so one of the ideas that came out of the Greek is the idea of the Hero’s Journey. And what happened over time was, back in the day, the heroes were all demigods and the heroes themselves were not that far removed from the gods. But in modern day, the Hero’s Journey, which we talk about Joseph Campbell and stuff, it represents the everyman. That anybody could be the hero.

And so what happened was, I was playing in that style. I was doing the Greek mythology, but it’s a modern take on it. It’s a modern sort of “Every man could be the hero,” not just “Well, you have to already be…” you know, the heroes in Greek mythology were kings and demigods. People that were already born into places that were special. You weren’t an ordinary person became something special.

But now, in our modern sensibilities, that Luke Skywalker—well, Luke Skywalker, he actually was born to royalty. But the idea in a lot of our storytelling was that somebody who could feel as if every person could discover that they’re something more than that.

And so I was trying to play into the idea of the sense of building up. And so if you notice in Theros, the design is all about building up. Are you a hero? That is slowly through adventures going to start from a lowly hero and become a mighty hero? Through like the heroic mechanic? Are you a monster that is going to go out, and as you get experience use monstrous, and become a big giant monster? Are you a god that’s going to get followers and get devotion and try to get to the point where your true god-like powers come to form?

That all of Theros had these theories of building up. And why I wanted to build up was I was trying to get a sense of accomplishment. I wanted you to feel this thrill of making something. That to me was a big part of the modern sensibility of Greek mythology. That there was a quest that you went on, and you became something. That I wanted you the player to build something. And make it.

And even the funny thing is, now talking about Journey into Nyx, I didn’t talk about this when I talked about Theros, was another component was having enchantments mean something. And that the enchantments for us represented the touch of the gods. And so there was this thing I saved until the final set that is a different way to build. That says, “Collect these things. Get a lot of these enchantments.”

Go the way of the gods and collect the gods’ things, and then there’s ways for that to pay off in a different way. There’s a way to build up by having lots of enchantments. Which was a very different way to do it.

Anyway, I am now parking in the parking spot, and so hopefully today was—I was trying to demonstrate how—last time I was talking about how we tell the story through the sets. Today I’m trying to say that we’re going a step farther. That Magic isn’t just the titles and the art and the flavor text. Those are important, and the creative team works really, really hard to convey as much story as possible. But we don’t stop there.

Gameplay is as important as anything else in being able for you to understand what’s going on, and part of what I try to do and my team tries to do is make each experience, each world something in which you through the gameplay are living and experiencing the world you are in. And you are learning something about the story we’re trying to convey.

Anyway, hopefully that is coming through. I’m very proud of how we’ve done this. And around the corner I get to do it again! By the time I talk about this, I assume I’ve talked about… I won’t mention by name because I’m not 100%. But I assume I’ll have talked about next year’s block. And if you want to talk about top-down design reinforcing flavor, that block’s going to come through in spades.

So anyway, I love talking about Magic design and Magic story, but even more I like making Magic. So it’s time for me to go. Talk to you guys next time.