Gothic 2 Returning 2.0 Deutsch Download

[Zee Palmer]

Welcometo the first Dominaria Preview Week. Those are words I've been dying to say for a long time. Today, I'm going to start to tell you the story of Dominaria's vision design and show off a whole bunch of preview cards. Before I do that, I need to introduce you to the Dominaria Vision Design team.

I remember when, while plotting out the seven-year plan, we realized we'd be able to revisit Dominaria on the 25th anniversary of the game. We hadn't been back to Magic's original home plane for thirteen years, so I was excited to have the opportunity to return to Magic's old stomping ground. As you will see, it turned out to be a bit harder than anyone expected.

As senior director of Magic R&D, Aaron is my boss. He doesn't get the chance to work on a lot of sets, but Aaron said if he could only work on one set for the year, it was going to be Dominaria. Aaron, like me, is an old-timer who has a lot of fondness for the sets from Dominaria. I don't get to work a lot with Aaron on design teams, so it was great having him back.

Ian was the representative from the Play Design team. I think when we started he was actually the development representative, but I'll get to that soon enough. Ian's job was to make sure that all the crazy things we were coming up with actually worked in a tournament setting. He would cost the cards before playtests and was responsible for sanity-checking our ideas.

Kelly was the creative representative. Not only were there a lot of story pieces to coordinate, but Dominaria was going to be a set with a lot of references to the past, and Kelly (along with Ethan) was our sourcebook. There were a lot of balls to juggle, but Kelly kept them all in the air.

Gavin was my strong second taking care of the file. That means he took notes at all the meetings, tracked every change, and then input the cards into the database, filling in any gaps. This was Gavin's first time in this role and he did a wonderful job.

For years, when people ask if Richard would ever be on another design team, I always said all he had to do was ask. It then came to my attention that when Richard was asked if he'd ever be on another design team, he always replied he'd say yes if I ever asked. Well, years went by where the two of us were unaware we were each waiting on the other to say something. Once this was brought to my attention, I called up Richard and said, "How would you like to be on another Magic design team? I think I have the perfect set." As always, it was a treat to work with Richard on a design.

The reason it took so long to return to Dominaria was that the plane had a small problem. In modern Magic, our planes each have a clear and definitive identity. Innistrad is the gothic horror plane. Theros is the Greek mythology plane. Amonkhet is the Egyptian-inspired plane. Zendikar is the adventure-world plane. Ravnica is the city of guilds plane. Because we had spent so many years and so many sets on Dominaria, it didn't have a singular identity. Was it an ice plane? A jungle plane? A mutant plane? A post-apocalyptic plane? It was all of the above. The challenge before us was to capture the essence of Dominaria while carving out a clean identity moving forward. And that, it turned out, was very hard to do.

Exploratory design spent some time looking back at Dominaria mechanically. We listed every mechanic that had ever appeared in an expansion set on Dominaria. We also looked back at things we once did mechanically that we had since stopped doing. It was at this point that I invoked what I called the "Time Spiral rule." Our job, I said, was not to return Magic to the past (aka make it play like it once did), but to take elements of Magic's past and bring them forward to modern gameplay. We had made this mistake during Time Spiral block and caused endless confusion about what was and what wasn't accepted in modern Magic. Dominaria could and should have nostalgia (as the good parts of Time Spiral did), but not by violating the color pie or returning to things we had purposefully removed from the game. Another lesson from Time Spiral was making sure that the cards were cool out of context. For example, if we had a powerful sword from the past, it needed to be exciting in a vacuum. You didn't need to know that that sword once belonged to a famous Magic character from the past to enjoy the card, but if you did, it would be added value.

While all this was going on, R&D decided it wanted to fundamentally change how we made Magic sets, and one month in, the yearlong design turned into a six-month vision design, the first of its kind. What exactly was a vision design and how did it work in the new R&D system? We were going to have to figure that out.

Vision design happens before the worldbuilding push for which we bring in outside artists to flesh out the world visually. Usually, to get a sense of what we're trying to do, the creative team will make a few images to help give us inspiration. For Dominaria, Mark Winters, art director for the set, had Sam Burley create a piece that showed the contrast of the world being reborn while incorporating elements of its past. Mark, and the rest of the creative team, felt strongly that Dominaria, after years of hard times, was reflourishing, but it was doing so while incorporating elements of its past. In the art, we saw a new city that was being built up around remnants of the Phyrexian invasion. Its past wasn't being ignored but rather was becoming part of its present. I really liked the idea that Dominaria was a world whose present was defined by its past.

And that's when it clicked for the design team. What if the defining trait of Dominaria was history? What if it was a world obsessed with its own past? It was a world where a lot happened, but all of it shaped Dominaria into what it had become, a vibrant world that always found a way to thrive even when encountering the harshest of adversity. The cool part of this was that the history wasn't new for the audience. Just as Dominaria had lived it, so too had we, the audience, lived it. The Brothers War. The Phyrexian Invasion. The Mending. These were all giant events on Dominaria, but they were all also big moments of the game. The history theme gave the world an identity and tied directly into the nostalgia theme that we also wanted in the set.

As we dug into this theme, we discovered that it was something already baked into the world. Even when the game started, Dominaria was a world with a past that defined its present. Urza and Mishra were artificers digging up Dominaria's past to learn about the Thran, an ancient civilization. The deeper we dug into the theme, the more we realized it was the perfect fit for Dominaria. The one question that remained centered on what that meant mechanically. How do you represent history through gameplay?

Once I knew history was our theme, we had a meeting where we brainstormed what history meant mechanically. The one thing we kept coming back to was the graveyard. It was filled with creatures and objects that were once on the battlefield and spells that had been cast turns ago. Flashback got mentioned numerous times, as it's a mechanic literally named after looking back to the past. Just one small problem: both Shadows over Innistrad and Amonkhet (the latter of which was going to coexist with Dominaria in Standard) had strong graveyard themes. Also, our experiment of having the same theme overlapping several sets apart hadn't gone as well as we had hoped. The graveyard, as a major theme, was off limits, as was flashback due to Amonkhet using aftermath.

Okay, what represented history other than the graveyard? How about artifacts? Many of them represented objects of long ago. The name especially connoted a sense of age. How about legendary permanents? They themselves could be famous, or they could represent a lineage hinting at famous things from long ago. Maybe certain enchantments? Every once in a while, we used them to represent the telling of a story. And that was about it for our list.

We looked at each piece. An artifact theme didn't feel right for this word. Yes, there were a bunch of famous artifacts, but Dominaria didn't feel like a world specifically about artifacts. A legendary theme felt more at home in Dominaria, it definitely was the place of a lot of famous characters, but we'd tried legendary as a theme before in Champions of Kamigawa block and it proved problematic. Legendary permanents skew toward higher rarities and the as-fan (the percentage of cards as they show up in a booster pack) was too low to make it matter enough mechanically, especially in Limited. "Enchantments matter" as a general theme felt wrong in Dominaria, and the subset of enchantments we were talking about was tiny. No, none of it seemed to work.

That's when I made a suggestion. What if we came up with a word, like "historic," and used it as a supertype? Anything that represented something historic would just get labeled. We'd have historic creatures, historic artifacts, historic enchantments, and historic lands. We tried a playtest, but this plan had two problems. One, as we had learned with devoid, many players hate what R&D calls "markers." That is, words that have no mechanical meaning other than being something to refer to on other cards. Two, the mechanic was not at all backward compatible. It felt wrong to travel back to Dominaria and then make a mechanic that you couldn't mix with old cards from Dominaria.

It was at this point that Aaron made a suggestion. What if we just grouped artifacts and legendary things together? What if we represented history mechanically by combining two different things that represented history in the game? I was very fond of this idea because it tapped into something I'd been trying to do with the historic supertype. I love when you introduce a theme that makes players think differently during deck building. I was trying to find a way to group different categories of things together, but Aaron's idea did the same thing from a different direction. Players had made artifact-themed decks before. They'd made legendary-themed decks before. But the one thing they'd never done was make a deck that mixed those themes together. This was a way to make something new without creating a new category.

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