11/7/14 Episode 172: Lessons Learned, Part VI

All podcast content by Mark Rosewater

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

Okay. So many years ago, in the beginning of my podcasting, I started a series called Lessons Learned. Where I talked about different sets I’d designed and what lessons I learned from them. And I did four of them, and then like a year and a half went by. And I hadn’t done one. So last time I decided to do another podcast on Lessons Learned.

And I didn’t even finish one set! So I think the real lesson here is, I’ve learned how to talk more about a single topic than I used to. Or maybe—maybe in the early days of my podcasting, I just didn’t realize that I needed—I think I didn’t realize early on, when I started my podcasting, like, hey, I’m going to do this for a while. I need lots of topics to talk about. I could talk at length about the things I want to talk about. So  I think I was quickly getting through stuff.

So I promise today by the end of today I’ll finish talking about Scars of Mirrodin, maybe I’ll get to Innistrad. But I’m continuing today. Today is Part Six. So you will get Part  Five and Part Six right next to each other. I thought about like just doing Part Six later, but I’m like—I don't know, I felt like it was weird to start on Scars of Mirrodin and not finish Scars of Mirrodin.

So you guys get back-to-back Lessons Learned. Okay. So we’ll talk about Scars of Mirrodin. Interesting—I learned a lot about Scars of Mirrodin. So we’re going to talk more about it.

Okay. So last time I talked about the Fifth Age of Design, kind of learning how to evoke emotions through design, I talked a little bit about how I try to make the Phyrexians feel very invasive, I made them feel very invasive. To the point where some people felt they were a bit invasive. But there’s some more stuff I want to talk about.

Okay. Next big thing is, so for those that don’t know the story, I’ll recap real quickly, originally Scars of Mirrodin was supposed to be called New Phyrexia, and we were going to go to a brand-new plane. New Phyrexia. Because you’d heard of Old Phyrexia, they were defeated during the Weatherlight Saga, well apparently the Phyrexians are back! And they have a new world. A new plane called New Phyrexia.

And we were going to spend the whole block in New Phyrexia, and then at the end, kind of like the end of Planet of the Apes, where…. I don’t want to ruin Planet of the Apes. But… there would be a big discovery. That “Oh my goodness, it isn’t a new plane! It was Mirrodin!” That was the plan. That was the plan. That we’d have somebody, you know, Charlton Heston falling to the beach on his knees going, “Not Mirrodin!”

But what we found was two things. It’s tricky to—the Phyrexians kind of, the most interesting story about the Phyrexians is the Phyrexians attacking. Because you get to see a world turned into Phyrexia. Once they’re already Phyrexianized, I think that’s a word, I mean there’s infighting, and we definitely in New Phyrexia like showed a little of like what’s the world like, but we’re like, “Ooh, how do you do a whole block?” Like, okay, you can do—I mean, it felt like we were really having trouble telling the story.

And then we’re like, “We’re missing the good story!” Like—it’s like, at the end, we’re like, “Oh, by the way, this cool thing happened. This plane that you formerly loved was taken over by the Phyrexians.” And you’re like, “What? How’d that happen?” And we’re like, “Are we just skipping the good story?”

So one of the lessons of Scars of Mirrodin for me was, the importance of—I mean, obviously we figured this out. This was a lesson I guess from making it, because obviously we figured this out before it got published. But of trying to—like, don’t skip the story. Like, we were going to do this cool thing where like, as an afterthought, we hinted at this cool story. And like, what, would we come back someday and tell that story?

Like, really—the other thing, by the way, about storytelling in general, is one of the things they teach you when you take classes in writing is that where your story starts and where your story ends has to be far apart from each other. And pretty much, one of the tricks they tell you is, I had a teacher that said this very bluntly, they go, okay. You want to write a good story? Here’s what you do. Figure out where your story ends. And then get as far away from it as you can and start.

And so, for example, when you’re talking about like character arcs, so character arc is a fancy way of saying how the character changes during the course of the story. If at the end of the story, your character learns the importance of kindness, we’re talking Christmas Carol here, at the end of the story, Ebenezer Scrooge realizes that he needs to share and be loving and caring about other people.

Well, to make that a good story, you’ve got to go to the other end. So at the beginning of Christmas Carol, he is a miser. A miserly miser. The miserliest of misers. He doesn’t even want to give his one employee Christmas Day off. He like begrudgingly does it because he has to. And like he won’t pay for heat. And I mean literally he’s like, how miserly, how misanthropic can we make that guy? If you’re going to make him have a journey, you want to get to the other end.

And so one of the things about storytelling in general is, that the journey is a lot of the fun of storytelling. That you want to see the character change. You want to see—and in some ways, in Scars of Mirrodin, the character was Mirrodin. Slash New Phyrexia. Like, we were going to take something that people knew, and have it change to something really different.

Now, the interesting question is, why Mirrodin? So clearly if you know any—so what happened was, when we made Mirrodin—so real quickly, for those that don’t know their larger Magic story, Phyrexia showed up very, very early. In fact, the first real story that was ever told was in Antiquities, and it was the Brothers’ War.

The Brothers’ War is about Urza and his brother Mishra. Who were both artificers. Who had this mighty war, because they’re artificers they made all these machines that attack each other. Part of that story was that Mishra had been corrupted by the Phyrexians. Which were these series of creatures led by a guy named Yawgmoth. That lived on their own plane. That were creepy-crawly bad guys.

Then, during the Weatherlight Saga, the Phyrexians really came to the foreground as being like the main villains of the Weatherlight Saga. And that it turned out that Urza had this master plan to stop the Phyrexians. And destroy them once and for all. And the end of the Weatherlight Saga is the Phyrexians being destroyed.

Now, they were awesome villains. And we knew they were awesome villains. So when Mirrodin happened—there was Invasion, then there was Odyssey, then there was Onslaught, then there was Mirrodin. So like three years later. We knew that we wanted the Phyrexians to come back one day. And so Brady Dommermuth, the creative director at the time, came up with the idea that while he was building Mirrodin, he goes,  oh.

Well, what if we sort of plant the seeds, and so the idea is, Karn… Karn was… Karn’s a planeswalker. He’s also from the Weatherlight Saga. He’s a golem created by Urza. Anyway, he came up with this idea of Karn was the one that created Mirrodin. I (???) anything away here. And that Karn had been corrupted by the Phyrexians, and the idea that this corruption would slowly take foot, and it would be the return of the Phyrexians. That the Phyrexians would slowly invade Mirrodin and slowly take it over.

And that the seeds of it were planted in Mirrodin. If you go in Mirrodin, if you look in the block, I mean there’s definitely stuff there where you see the beginnings of what’s going on. Now, at the time people would attribute other things to it.

There’s even like a scene right at the beginning of the Mirrodin book where like, Memnarch finds the black oil, and he rubs it and it goes in his skin. And then they don’t talk about it again. But anyway, we had planted it. One of the things I love when you get to do long-term storytelling, where it’s like, “Hey, seven years ago, we did something that seemed inconsequential. But it wasn’t! Here’s the consequence.”

And so the idea was, we knew that Mirrodin was going to get turned into New Phyrexia. That was a done deal. And I think that when we started, we were like, “Okay, that’s like a done deal.” We really were in this like—“Oh, now we have a chance to visit Phyrexi again.”

But like I said, the lesson is don’t skip the story. Tell the story. What is the cool part of the story? Tell that part. And it took  us a while. I mean, we were probably halfway through design before we figured out that we weren’t New Phyrexia but we were Scars of Mirrodin.

And the funny thing is, once we figured that out, once we knew we were revisiting Mirrodin, and the Phyrexians were there and like there was going to be a conflict, and then Bill came up with this awesome idea that the third set we didn’t know the outcome, so it had one of two different names, once they all clicked together, everything formated and it worked.

But the lesson I struggled with a  lot. Scars of Mirrodin might be the set I struggled the most with. I was just having trouble figuring out the angle. Because I was trying to bring New Phyrexia to life, and I just wasn’t sure what I was telling. I mean, I was doing a lot of things to make you feel what the Phyrexians were, but I was missing sort of the essence of what I was trying to do. What the story was and what the conflict was.

And in the end, one of the big lessons about Scars of Mirrodin is, Scars of Mirrodin on some level might be the best environmental story we’ve ever told. And what I mean by environmental story is, usually when you tell a story, you’re talking about a character story. The character does something. And we have characters obviously.

But an environmental story is, sometimes in a story, the environment is as much a part of the story as the characters. And often that is true. Often the environment plays an important role. And that it’s not—the story doesn’t take place anywhere, it takes place here.

For example, let’s take The Wizard of Oz. It is important that the story takes place in The [Land] of Oz. It is not like The Land of Oz does not play pretty big into what is going on. Oz has a weird makeup, and there’s a weird mix of creatures. The Yellow Brick Road. Or just the poppy field, or Munchkinland, or all these different components that really kind of make up this journey.

And a lot of what’s going on is the idea of Dorothy being not home. That she’s away from home. She‘s in strange circumstances. And the land really reinforces that. I guess I will argue that the best stories have environmental components. But not all stories are easily told through their environment. Some stories, the environment itself goes through some series of change which help tell the story.

So the reason that Scars of Mirrodin did a good job of that was, we come and we see Mirrodin. Well, Mirrodin has a very distinct feel. We established it. When we were in Mirrodin the first time, it ‘s metal world. It’s a world in which—it’s an artificial world in which the inhabitants over time have all been enmeshed with metal. It’s really different. You haven’t seen stuff like Mirrodin in other places. It’s a pretty unique world.

And, we knew the Phyrexians—so the Phyrexians, their big thing, for those that don’t know, is they are a race that believes in perfection and in—it’s funny, as I describe this it makes it feel very blue. They are definitely trying to promote their way and spread their way everywhere. And that they—like I said, they’re the plague archetype.

But one of the things they do, which is very Borg-like, I guess, is that they believe that their way is best. But as they take things over, they acquire qualities of what they take over. Meaning that they’re open to the idea that there’s more that they could do to improve themselves. And that they’re constantly sort of corrupting things, but they try to make use of the things they can. So they don’t take over and change them, they adapt them.

And the big thing about the Phyrexians has always been this sense of mix of metal and flesh. And the way I think Brady’s described it is, “They add flesh to metal, and they add metal to flesh.” And so they’re very bizarre creatures in that they’re like, part metal, part flesh.

Well, why were they a nice fit for Mirrodin? Because Mirrodin’s a world of part metal, part flesh. And so in some ways, Mirrodin had been—if you want to think of light and dark, like the light side, and then New Phyrexia’s the dark side.

So it was a neat transition, because it wasn’t like you were Phyrexianizing something that was—I mean, I think the reason Brady really liked it was, we were introducing a world that really kind of seemed really apt. It was kind of the Phyrexians, but the sunny side of the Phyrexians. And we got to see the darker side. So the transition of the world seemed pretty cool.

But anyway, that is what we took. So any last lessons of Scars of Mirrodin before I move on? The mechanics of Scars of Mirrodin. I’ve talked a lot about poison already. Or infect, sorry. What else was the mechanics from… oh, so we had metalcraft .

So metalcraft was interesting in that—so Mark Globus was one of the original Great Designer Search finalists. He came in fourth, I believe. And what happened was, when we were—so the way the Great Designer Search works, for those that don’t know, it’s kind of like a reality show, the Great Designer Search, I did a whole podcast on this [NLH—Not transcribed yet], but  the short version is, I was told by Randy Buehler, who’s my boss, that I could have an internship for a designer. But I didn’t know how to find a designer. It’s hard to find. I’ve been having trouble internally finding a designer.

So I said to him, I think at the time I was watching—I don't know, The Apprentice or Project Runway—some of those reality shows. The employment reality show, which is you are trying to prove you’re really good at something, and then you win the right to do that thing, you get a job or something.

And I said to him, I go, oh, could I do something like that? Could I run an employment thing that’s kind of like a reality show, where I’m just putting a few people through their paces? And see what they could do? And Randy said okay.

So I ran it. The first one was originally going to have sixteen finalists, one dropped out at the last minute, so we had fifteen finalists, and then we ran five weeks of challenges, and then after each challenge I eliminated a couple people.

So at the end, there were five people going into the last challenge, and then I eliminated two of them, and the final three got flown out to Washington to have an interview. To have official interviews. So the final big challenge was coming and being interviewed by everybody, and we did a live challenge. (???) the last thing is in-person you get to meet them and interact with them.

So we were planning it. At the time we were planning it, we knew there were five, and it turned out that it was cheaper to book the tickets for five a little bit ahead of time than wait and book the tickets for three. So we booked tickets for all five because it was just a cheaper way to do it.

Well, one of those five was Mark Globus. But Mark Globus got knocked out in the last round. The last round. So he didn’t make it to the final three. But we had bought him a ticket. Because it was cheaper to buy a ticket. And at the time, we were doing something called Gleemax. Gleemax was—we had this idea of doing a social media site built around games. And the idea was—I don't know, it was sort of half social media and half games. We called it Gleemax. It was this big idea. It ended up kind of not working out.

But anyway, they were looking for people. And Globus was a programmer and had a lot of skills that seemed valuable. And we had literally bought him a ticket. So they’re like, “Eh, let’s have him fly out. We’ll do some interviews with him.” So he flew out separately. He didn’t fly out when the final three flew out. But he flew out at a different time. Had an interview, went really well, and got a job.

And so for a while he worked on that. Eventually he started doing more Magic stuff. He then moved over and became the producer for Magic, which is—I mean, he switched some roles within R&D. But he’s worked on Magic ever since.

Anyway, he was really interested in getting better at design. So he was working with Bill Rose. And what Bill Rose had done was he said to him, “Okay Mark, let’s have you build a set. Make your own set.” And so Mark made a set. And then he just made cards and mechanics. And this was a means by which Bill could give some feedback and stuff.

So he had made a set, his set—the theme of his set was like angels vs. demons, I think. It was kind of light vs. dark. And one of the ideas in the set was basically the metalcraft mechanic. Actually, I’m telling the Scars of Mirrodin story here.

Anyway, the interesting lesson was—so when we were making Scars of Mirrodin, I really wanted to do affinity . Once we decided there was a Mirran side and a Phyrexian side, I really wanted to do affinity.

And the reason was, I felt like I wanted the Mirrans to like—I wanted you to feel like the Mirrans had all the tools at their disposal, they were just as dangerous as last time you saw them, and still they fell to the Phyrexians.

The problem was, affinity caused all sorts of problems, and even though the developers felt they could balance it, we didn’t know for sure. There was a percentage chance they’d miss. With any mechanic they’d miss. And we felt that the PR of missing on that mechanic, that had caused so many problems before, PR-wise just was a hit we didn’t want to take. So we decided that we needed to get a different Mirran mechanic.

So the interesting lesson here was that we ended up going to—like, I had seen Mark’s set because Mark had me look at it, and Mark was on Scars of Mirrodin, and so it was an interesting lesson where one of the things that I definitely learned is, over time—when I first started doing design, I was very cognizant of the idea of, “I want to make sure that I and my design team make everything.”

And in fact, one of the things designers early on always tend to do, is you get a little possessive of your stuff. Design is personal, creative acts are personal. And you feel—you really fall in love with the stuff you’re making, you really want to make sure it gets to print. And so a very early tendency is you make things and you just protect them.

And the problem is that it’s a bad habit because sometimes you protect things that aren’t the best thing for the set. Because you really, really want to see print. And Magic—I always say, Magic’s a hungry monster, if you have a good idea, it will eventually see print. We’re constantly looking for things. It’s not like good ideas won’t find their way to printed form.

But one of the things you have to learn is that—and this was a lesson, helped reinforce this is, get the ideas wherever you get the ideas. It doesn’t matter if you made it, it doesn’t matter if the team made it. That a good idea is a good idea, and a good idea that works makes your set work.

And in the end, your job as a designer is to make your thing do what it needs to do. And if you’re lucky enough to be in a situation where you have other people that are external that can help you, do not turn down that help.

I mean, like I said, unfortunately I’m unable to take unsolicited material from outside the building, but I am able within the building to be able to share stuff, people can share stuff with me, and if people have neat ideas they’ll share them with me.

And this was a good case of a mechanic that really came about not because of anything the design team had done, but something—I mean, it happened to be a member of the team, I guess, but they had done it beforehand, and that it really ended up being the answer to our problem in that I think there’s an interesting lesson of getting—of learning to get outside yourselves, and accepting the answer that you find. And not worrying about where the answer got generated.

Also in the set, oh, proliferate. So here’s the lesson of proliferate. So proliferate came about because, like I said, we had this disease theme. And I had made one card, which was I think because—we had the -1/-1 counters, we had the poison counters. And so the card was, at the beginning of each turn, any creature that has a -1/-1 counter gets a -1/-1 counter, and any player that has a poison counter gets a poison counter. And it was called, like, “Feed the Plague” or something. And the idea was, once things are poisoned, this spell hurries it along.

And it was playing really fun. And I said, “You know what, this is really fun. We should just do more of it.” So I mean, one of the things—I’m not sure this is a lesson of Scars of Mirrodin, but it’s a lesson, I guess, which is, a lot of the great ideas don’t come from you trying to find a great idea. They come from you just making a small idea. And then realizing it’s bigger than what you made.

Like, one of the big things about playtesting is, you don’t know where your ideas are going to come from. That sometimes the best ideas come from the smallest of places. And that sometimes you’re trying to come up with big grandiose mechanics, and you do. But other times, the way you get a great mechanic is, there’s just one card. There’s just one card that shines.

One of the things I talk about when you design cards is that one of the most important skills of being a good Magic designer is having the ability to recognize a good idea and a good card. That when you playtest, certain cards will just shine with a beaming light. Like, it’s just like… (sings angelic chorus sound)

Like, when I—I’ve learned to see that. When I see a card, I’m just like, “This card is just firing on all cylinders.” And when it does that, you’re like, “What is this doing? Why?” Sometimes it’s just super synergistic and works with everything. Sometimes it just taps into something that’s—I don't know, primally fun.

There’s just different things about it. And when you stumble upon that, that is a very important thing from a design standpoint. That you want to figure out when you stumble upon moments of joy, if you will, and figure out what’s there. What’s the magic.

Because one of the things, and in fact, I’ve talked about this last time, which is, I know I know I know that we like to intellectually do things, and we’re creatures of intellect, and we really like to think about how things are doing. And it’s not that you don’t think a lot about your design. You do.

In fact, you think—on some level, my argument is sometimes you think too much about your design. And that a lot of good design is not just cerebrally approaching it, but it is emotionally approaching it. This is a good example, where there’s just moments where cards shine.

Where it’s just like, “That card is fun.” And you have to stand back and go, “That’s fun.” Now, you can intellectually think about it, and you can try to figure out why it’s fun, and that’s okay. But on some level you also have to respect the fun-ness of it. Like, “Damn, that is a fun card.”

And that when you find that—one of the things I will often do is I will take a card that is fun and make more cards like it, just to kind of go, “Okay. Is this magic something I can recreate? If I try this—is this card a special one-of? Or is this something really I can make more out of?”

And proliferate’s a really good example of, I just made one card. I was just trying to do one thing. I had one very simple theme. But when I was playing with it, I’m just like, “Wow, this is fun. This is fun.” And I’m like, “I want to have more fun.” And so what I did is, it was one card. Then I made a vertical cycle. And then I’m like, “Damn it, I’m just going to make a mechanic out of this.”

So the next lesson is, when I made proliferate, the original version worked on -1/-1 counters and poison counters. Because the flavor was it’s fanning the plague. So Globus was on the team, and he said to me, “Is there a reason why you can’t increase any counter?”

And so one of the things also—like I said. Just like you want to make sure that you recognize moments of brilliance in the card, you want to recognize moments of brilliance in your people. In people you’re working with. And like, I felt like a bell went off when he said that. Like, “Ding ding ding!” I’m like, “You are correct!”

Now, the set also had charge counters, because a lot of the things about artifacts is, having so many uses or building up to do something. That artifacts like having some sort of counter. And we had used charge counters, which was based on what we had done in Mirrodin.

And I’m like, oh, there’s even a reason why you would want to do something else in this set. Forget outside the set, where of course there would be. And so I’m like, okay, well clearly, clearly clearly we want charge counters, because that would be brilliant. And the other problem I was trying to solve was, there were two sides. Whenever you have two sides of conflict, and you build mechanics to represent the sides, you want to make sure you have mechanics that link between the sides so that when you’re building you’re not too siloed.

Now, development ended up chopping out a bunch of stuff I had put in to cross the streams, which ended up making the product a little more siloed than I wanted. But—well, this is one of them.  Proliferate in the original design was at common, showed up a lot more than it ended up showing up in the final thing. So proliferate was meant to be something that would make you want to play, because blue had proliferate, blue with colors that were on the Mirran side. Anyway.

But—so not only trust the ideas, trust your people. And that it doesn’t matter who gives you an idea, if the idea’s a good idea, embrace the idea. I know there’s people who like will say, “Who’s giving me the idea? What do I think of that person? Well, let me judge the idea through the prism of which I think of the person.” That’s a mistake. A good idea is a good idea. It does not matter where it comes from.

And like, I think part of being a good designer is, I’ve learned over time of stop prejudicing—like, a good idea’s a good idea.  A good card is a good card. A good mechanic’s a good mechanic. I want to take everything and judge it on the basis of its own thing. What it is.

And if somebody gives me a card idea—like, for example, here’s something that’s very easy to fall into. Let’s say there’s somebody who really wants to make Magic cards. This happens all the time. Somebody in the company’s like, “I love Magic, I want to be a designer,” and they come to me and they go, “What can I do? My dream is to be a designer.”

And I always tell them the same thing. I go, well, you’ve got to start designing. A. on your own time, design, but B. Mark Gottlieb’s got seminars right now, you can go listen to the seminars. Well, internally. And we also have hole-filling, which anybody can participate in.

Where from time to time to time we send out a list of, “Here are the cards we need.” Development sends them out. Saying, “Oh, we have a couple holes that we’ve generated through development, hey, if you have any ideas for these cards, please let me know.”

And so hole-filling is a place where people get to try out their cards. And I’ve seen people turn in card after card after card for hole-filling, and just miss and miss and miss and miss badly. Like, “Oh, that’s no good. That’s no good. That’s no good.” And it’s very easy to write off that person, going, well, they’ve turned in a hundred cards, they’re all bad. Maybe I don’t need to listen to this person anymore.

And the answer is, you know what? If they’ll stick with it, I mean I guess—if someone is missing all the time, at some point you say, “Thank you very much for participating.” The more accurate point is somebody who hits every once in a while but misses a lot. That it’s very easy to write that person off because nineteen out of twenty times they miss.

But if one out of twenty they really hit, hey, maybe you want to pay attention. I think it’s important of the ideas are of value. And judge the idea and not the person. Not the venue by which you got the idea.

And that’s true in design. I mean, I think Scars of Mirrodin—kind of my point today is, there’s so many different times—like, that design was a very muddled design in that it took  a long time for us to figure out what we were doing. Like, it took us half the time to figure out like it wasn’t even New Phyrexia, it was Scars of Mirrodin.

But once you get something, once it all clicks, that’s another thing about…  okay, here’s my final lesson and then I’m almost to work. My lesson of Scars of Mirrodin was, I was pretty despondent in the middle. Probably one of my darkest days of doing design. Because I was lost. And this happens creatively.

This is something that’s important if you’re going to do any creative acts. That every once in a while, you will get lost. You will just—whatever your markers are to help figure out where you’re at, you just, you’re missing things. You don’t see where you’re at.  And you just get kind of tangled up in the thing you’re doing. And you can’t find an out. You just have no sense of direction. And you just try things and try things and try things, and nothing works.

And then there’s a little bit of despair. There’s a little bit of worry. Because I’m an optimistic person, and I tend to always approach my designs going, “There’s an answer. Find the answer.” And there was a point in Scars of Mirrodin where I was like, “Is there an answer?” A little doubt crept in. That I was really having trouble.

And I had, of all things, my pep talk, what snapped me out of it, was a pep talk from Bill. Bill Rose. The VP of R&D. Bill actually gave me—Bill recognized the set was floundering, and he gave me a timeline. He said, “Look. I’m going to give you six weeks. At the end of six weeks, I don’t see this improved, I’m going to put somebody else on it.”

Which had never happened. In fact, it’s the only time it’s ever happened. Where someone threatened to take me off a design. And it was very—it was humbling. I was definitely, I had never had that much problem with a design, and it really was causing me lots of problems. And the big lesson of the set, the big lesson from me was, I just needed to take a step back. And I had to question things.

One of the problems you get into is you assume things, and then you try to solve things. And when you just can’t find an answer, when something just isn’t working, you are just floundering about, you have to take a step back. And you have to say, okay, okay. I’ve assumed things. Something I’ve assumed, I have to—one of my assumptions can’t be true. I have scoped everything I possibly can with all the assumptions, let me re-evaluate all my assumptions.

And that’s when I really questioned the idea of New Phyrexia, and I really—one of the things that had been happening all along during the design was, I and my team kept coming up with… “Aren’t we skipping over Mirrodin?” Like, that kept sort of—underneath all our designs, that was kind of there. That we felt like we were kind of not telling an interesting story.

But I’m like, “No, we’re doing New Phyrexia, no we’re doing New Phyrexia,” and then there was this nice clarifying moment—oh, sorry. The pep talk Bill gave me, I didn’t finish that story, is Bill said to me, he goes, “Look, Mark. I believe in you. I understand that you’re having trouble right now, but I have every faith in you. I’m giving you a deadline to sort of kick your butt. But I believe at the end of the six weeks… I don’t think someone else is going to do this set, I think you’re going to do this set. I need to give you a deadline to kind of kick your butt in gear, but you know what? I know you can do this.”

And it was very interesting. I really walked out of there like, ”Damn it. I can do this.” And I took a step back, I said, “Okay, okay. What am I assuming?” And then I said, you know what? I really don’t want this to be New Phyrexia yet. I really feel like we’re just skipping over the most interesting part of the whole story.

And I said, okay. “What if it’s not New Phyrexia?” And I was able to sort of say, “What if?” And I said, I’m at such wit’s end, I’m just going to explore this other possibility. What if it’s not New Phyrexia? What if it ends in New Phyrexia?

And I went in to Bill, I went back and said, “Okay, Bill. How about this? How about the story ends in New Phyrexia and not starts in New Phyrexia? How about we watch the fall of Mirrodin?” And it was that very meeting where—and Bill’s like, “Well…”

I talked about how the first set we visit Mirrodin and we know they’re there but it’s only the audience knows, and even the Mirrans aren’t aware of it yet. In the second set there’s like a war, and the third set is New Phyrexia. And that’s when Bill said, “Oh, what if they don’t know the outcome, and they have different names?” That same meeting is where Bill came up with that idea that I latched onto really quickly.

But anyway, so one of the final big lessons of today, my two-part Lessons of Scars of Mirrodin, my final, and this might be the biggest lesson I had of Scars of Mirrodin, because it was a searching of the soul. (???) design. That if you’re asking me why I did two whole podcasts on Scars of Mirrodin, it’s because I might have learned more in Scars of Mirrodin than any other design that I’ve done.

I mean, Odyssey’s up there too, but it was a dark time of the soul, and I really searched within, and the lesson I learned was, sometimes it’s important—you have to follow your gut, you have to question things, sometimes you have to take your givens and say, “What if this isn’t a given?”

Because the way I solved it essentially was, I said, “Okay, okay, okay. It’s New Phyrexia. Forget that! What if it wasn’t New Phyrexia?” And the second I went down that path, bam, bam, bam, everything came together. And I’m like, “What am I doing?” like, “This is an awesome idea.” And then it’s like, “Okay, now I have to go convince the powers that be that this is the right way to go because this is an awesome idea.”

And the reason I was able to do that was, when I sat down and pitched this to Bill, I was like—I mean, one of the things about pitching, I mean I’ll do a podcast on pitching one day. In fact, I’ll write an article on pitching one day. But one of the things with pitching’s really important is, the enthusiasm of the person pitching. That you believe in what you are pitching.

And I think I walked in and like, Bill could see it in my eyes. He’s like, “Okay. Now you’ve found yourself a block. You did not have it before.” Bill recognized it, I recognized it. Like, I was floundering because I didn’t know what I was doing. And by sort of taking a breather and stepping back and just examining things and requestioning things, and thinking, “Screw it, what do I want to do? What does the set want to be?”

And that I always talk about restrictions breed creativity. But sometimes, sometimes you’ve just got to go, “Screw that restriction. What if that isn’t a restriction?” And that you have to be able to question everything, even you’re restrictions.

So that, my friends, is the final lesson of today. So I will do more Lessons Learned. I will probably push off—you had two special back-to-back episodes because I didn’t finish Scars of Mirrodin, but hopefully you guys enjoyed this. I think—I hope this is good. It was good for me. It was cathartic for me. So if nothing else, these two podcasts might show you that really—I mean, part of doing a creative process is constantly looking at yourself and learning from it. And I feel like Scars of Mirrodin was a big growth for me.

Like I said, it got us into the Fifth Age of Design. And I think part of that might have been that I had to go through a dark time to get there. And I really had to—sometimes artists have to dig deep to find something new and discover new parts of themselves. And I think Scars of Mirrodin was that for me.

So anyway, you probably heard me put my parking brake on a couple minutes ago. I am now parked in my parking spot. Or a parking spot at Wizards of the Coast. Which means, this is the end of my Drive to Work. So thanks for listening, guys. See you next time.