Magic Sex Change Stories
Oswalda Shutte
In design, sometimes things go easily, and sometimes they don't. Today's article is about an example of the latter, a mechanic that was on the verge of being removed from Dominaria for almost all of set design and the lengthy steps I took to save it. It's finally time for me to tell the historic story of the historic mechanic. Also, I have a preview card to show off that'll trigger your historic payoffs, a legendary character that I co-created (along with Michael Ryan).
Before I discuss the lengths I went through to save it, I think it's important first to explain why I cared so much. Things get changed all the time in set design; mechanics come and mechanics go. I seldom fight the changes that happen downstream from vision design. Why was this time so different?
To explain, I will turn to my favorite metaphor for vision design. Let's say we're building a house. Vision design is the architect. We're getting a sense of what it is we're building. We're creating a blueprint to communicate our vision and allow set design to physically construct the house. Set design can make all sorts of changes to the house as they're building it. Maybe they want to change carpet to hardwood floors, or they want to add some windows, or they want to put some additional stone on the fireplace. As the architect, I don't jump in. That's the right of the house builder to adapt as they're building.
Now let's say they decide to knock down a wall because they want to make one room bigger. In that case, as the architect, I'll jump in if the wall they want to tear down is a load-bearing wall, if it exists to hold up the second floor. That change is going to cause a structural problem for the house, so as the architect I have an obligation to intervene. That's basically what happened here.
Last week, I talked about us trying to capture the concept of history in a mechanic. I mentioned that Aaron suggested caring about artifacts and legendary things and that I latched onto the idea very quickly. What I didn't talk about was why. Why was the combination of artifacts and legendary things better than just focusing on legendary things? To understand this, we have to go back to Champions of Kamigawa block, the one time we tried to make legendary things matter. I've talked about how that block made a lot of design mistakes, and one was the "legendary things matter" theme. Let me get into the nuts and bolts of the problem.
"As-fan" is an R&D term, short for "as-fanned," that refers to how much of a particular characteristic shows up in an average booster. An as-fan of 1 would mean that we expect, on average, one card with that quality to show up in every booster. So 1.5 would mean that on average one and a half cards of that quality show up. You can get fractions because we're averaging across all the boosters. Five boosters having one and five boosters having two is an average of 1.5.
As-fan is a problem because legendary cards tend to skew toward higher rarities. In most sets, they only appear in rare and mythic rare. Kamigawa block had all the rare creatures (mythic rare wasn't a thing yet) be legendary and it still didn't occur often enough for most players to realize it was a thing. We even added some uncommon legendary creatures (something we do infrequently), and still the as-fan was far too low to make the theme work mechanically in Limited.
We really need common cards of a given characteristic to bring the as-fan numbers high enough, and having common legends flies in the face of the flavor of legendary (aka one-of-a-kind things). Dave Humpherys, Dominaria's lead set designer, would eventually choose to have a legendary creature in every pack (based on Ethan Fleischer's idea), which definitely helps, but even then the as-fan wasn't all the way to where we wanted to see it.
Legendary creatures also tend to be more than one color. For flavor, design, and Commander reasons, there are pressures to add extra colors to the mana costs of legendary creatures. This means when you stuff a lot of legendary creatures into the same deck, you tend to push it toward having more colors. To make matters worse, the cards you tend to use to help fix your colors tend not to be legendary themselves.
While we make legendary artifacts, enchantments, lands, and planeswalkers (and now, thanks to Dominaria, sorceries), we tend to make the vast majority of legendary items creatures. Also, we tend to make legendary things larger and splashier. That makes a deck filled with legendary things less flexible than most decks. It tends to have to break theme to get the utility it needs.
Now you might see why adding artifacts was looking attractive. We can print common and uncommon artifacts to help bring down the as-fan. We can make cheap artifacts to help you fill out your curve. Artifacts are good for both ramping and adding colors to help you play your more expensive multicolored cards. And artifacts can provide all kinds of utility. So not only were artifacts a good pairing thematically, they also helped fill in the gaps where legendary things suffer most.
When I talk about mechanics, there are different kinds. Some add splash. Some add flavor. Some add utility. Some mechanics, though, are what I call glue mechanics. They make the set work. They hold everything together. From a design standpoint, a glue mechanic is a load-bearing wall.
Another thing that's important to stress is that where historic ended up is not where it was when vision design handed it off. As I'm going to walk through below, there were some real problems with historic, so when I say people weren't on board with it, a big reason was that it needed to be fixed. There are stories I've told in the past where people didn't like a concept (split cards, hybrid mana, double-faced cards, etc.), but that's not what happened here. The execution was what needed work.
It turns out that most players skip over ability words. Keywords require you to understand what they mean because they carry mechanical weight, but ability words are followed by text that explains exactly how they work. As such, players have learned to gloss over ability words and they do a poor job of conveying flavor.
Dave Humpherys understood what historic was doing in the set from a structural perspective, but had concerns about how it would get used in tournament play. He asked me if I could find a way to tweak historic to help with the first problem. Mark Globus, the set's product architect, was concerned with the second problem. People weren't getting the flavor. I needed to work on that.
One of the tricky things about being head designer is that I'm juggling a lot of balls at any one time. Dominaria being in set design meant "Spaghetti" was in vision design and "Meatballs" was in exploratory design. We were also fleshing out some future worlds, so I was doing a bunch of additional work to figure out their mechanical identities. And none of this takes into account the various other projects and daily activities I was responsible for. I had to squeeze in time to give Dominaria and historic some attention.
The first step I took to solve this problem was figuring out what I could do with the design to keep "play a lot of cheap artifacts" from being the optimal strategy. I, and others, came up with a few possible answers:
This problem was a perceptual problem, so I spent some time trying to figure out what was wrong. The ability word was one issue, but there were others. One of the interesting things I realized was that the brain treats groups of two differently than groups of three. Two items get thought of as a pairing, while three items get thought of as a collection. In other words, when you see peanuts and cashews, you just think "peanuts and cashews," but when you see peanuts, cashews, and almonds, you think "nuts." What if the key to helping players see the items as a group was to add another component?
The obvious choice was to add planeswalkers. They're characters and they definitely have a sense of historical importance to them. Okay, historic was now artifacts, legendary things, and planeswalkers. It was around this time that we decided (independently of Dominaria, by the way) to consolidate the legendary rule with the planeswalker uniqueness rule by making all the planeswalkers legendary. We were back to two items.
All of this came to a head during a meeting with Bill Rose (the vice president of R&D). About once a month, Bill checks in on how various sets are doing (the cycle means each set gets checked in on about four times a year), and it was time for him to look in on Dominaria. He recognized that there were still problems and decided that it was time to pull the plug on historic. I made an impassioned plea, saying that it was the glue of the set and that if we pulled it, the set was going to unravel. Bill said, "Okay, Mark. You have a month. At that time, I'm going to look at Dominaria again, and if you haven't solved the problems with historic, I'm pulling it from the set."
I cleared as much time in my schedule as I could. If historic was pulled, I didn't know how to salvage Dominaria. That meant I had no choice but to solve the problems and save the mechanic. Oh, and Bill had added one more thing for me to solve. He was concerned that the mechanic wouldn't be resonant. While solving everything else, I had to show how historic could be flavorful.
I began by coming up with as many tropes as I could with the mechanic. The adventuring archeologist. The wise museum curator. The monster that returns to life whenever people read about it. The ancient tome filled with diagrams and charts of technology ahead of its time. The history buff who likes to tinker with inventions. For each one, I designed new rules text and worked with Mark and Kelly to find appropriate art and creative text. Meanwhile, I experimented with different names for the ability. I played around with expressing it as a keyword rather than an ability word. I tried new templates. I took the approach that any piece could be changed.
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