Designing Magic: The Gathering® | Avatar: The Last Airbender™: The Four Elements
Water. Earth. Fire. Air.
Long ago, I was a kid growing up with Avatar: The Last Airbender™. I was right around Aang's age when the show aired. I loved the characters, the world, the creatures, and, of course, the bending powers. And, as an Asian American kid growing up in Hawaii, I found the show's mix of cultural influences very resonant to my life.
But everything changed … when I fell in love with Magic: The Gathering! The game was fun, it had a lot of history, and (most exciting for me) there was a lot of writing online about how it was made. I loved reading Mark Rosewater's articles about Magic design and started to design my own cards for fun. Naturally, I combined my favorite show with my favorite game and made my own Magic cards based on its world and characters. And though my passion as a kid was great, I had a lot to learn before I was ready to make games for anyone.
You can imagine how it felt, fifteen years later, to get to make Avatar: The Last Airbender Magic cards as part of my job! To say it was a childhood dream come true would be an understatement. This project felt like the culmination of so many parts of my life, both personal and professional. And, rather than imagining this world and these characters by myself as a kid, I would get to work with a team of other fans and experienced game designers.
When preparing to design a Universes Beyond set, there are many ways to start. For Avatar: The Last Airbender, the place that felt the most obvious was the bending arts. Bending is an iconic and unique aspect of the show's world. It's the cornerstone of its fantasy worldbuilding, exciting action scenes, and characters' narrative journeys.
To start out, we considered whether one mechanic could capture all four elements. After all, the four share a lot in common in terms of name, function, and their place in the series's world. It could also be neat to have cards that cared about any form of bending. However, we moved away from this direction quickly for a simple reason: it was too repetitive.
When making a Magic set, it's important to create many different strategies and experiences for players to enjoy. Having all four elements work similarly to one another meant that the different Magic colors would do too much of the same thing. It just wouldn't be as fun or true to show. Sure, airbending and earthbending might be alike when compared to other magic systems, but in the specific story and world of Avatar: The Last Airbender, they couldn't be more different. We decided early on that we needed to have four different mechanics that could each capture the essence of their element.
What did it mean to capture the essence of each element?
1. Flavor: This one is obvious, but it's still important to write it down. The bending mechanic needs to feel like it does in the show.
2. Color: Each element is very strongly associated with a Magic color (water with blue, earth with green, fire with red, and air with white). A bending mechanic had to be able to show up a lot in its primary color, which meant a higher need for design space and internal synergy with that color.
3. Flexibility: One of the most appealing parts of bending in the show is that benders can be very creative with how they use their powers. I wanted to make sure players also got to feel creative by using the bending mechanics in different ways through gameplay.
4. Action: Benders use their powers to impact their environment, and bending mechanics always felt best when they had a proactive impact on the game rather than triggering off of other actions (like landfall or prowess).
Let's dig in and explore each bending mechanic, in the order of the Avatar Cycle!
Waterbending
Waterbending proved to be by far the hardest of the four elements to get right. We had a meeting where we sat down and listed out every effect we could think of that felt like water in Magic. From this exercise we learned two things:
- Water has been associated with many different effects in blue, but none of them consistently or exclusively enough for it to be considered the iconic "water effect" color.
- Almost all effects commonly associated with water negatively affect your opponent's creatures, which is not a very fun keyword mechanic. Trust us—we tested some of these out.
We couldn't find the perfect effect for waterbending, so I decided to embrace the flavor of waterbending from the show. Iroh calls water "the element of change," and waterbending is by far the most flexible of all the elements. The ability for Waterbenders to use water in various forms (solid ice, gaseous mist, or a tool for healing or controlling living things) led me to think about waterbending as an "input" mechanic. This would allow us to design many different cards with different outputs that represented everything waterbending could do, which would be tied together by a shared, flavorful input.
When looking for an input, tapping your permanents ended up feeling the most resonant to our team. The act of tapping and untapping felt like the tidal push and pull that inspires waterbending movements. The show features many moments where Waterbenders need to get creative with their water sources, and the ability to split up a cost between mana, creatures, and artifacts captured the flexibility we were looking for.
Earthbending
The mechanic for earthbending came to us relatively early in the process. Playtesters strongly associated earth with lands mattering, even if they weren't familiar with the show, and it was a natural fit for green. As the most solid of the four elements, we wanted earthbending to have a tangible and permanent impact on the battlefield. That's how we decided on turning lands into creatures. Throwing rocks at your opponents or using them to block incoming attacks was very resonant and flavorful, and players enjoyed the flexibility between stacking up counters on one land or spreading them out.
The earthbend keyword action is similar to a mechanic called awaken. We updated the gameplay of awaken in two important ways. First, earthbend could be used in many ways rather than only being an additional cost. Second, the lands you animate with earthbend can return to the battlefield from the graveyard or exile. Not only does this prevent players from permanently losing their lands, it also gives them more ways to hook into other effects like landfall or cards that sacrifice lands.
Firebending
When approaching firebending, there was one obvious answer that came to us: damage! Contrary to water, fire in Magic is heavily associated with one specific mechanic: dealing damage. In fact, we literally call spells that deal damage "burn spells." The connection was so ubiquitous that it made sense as a natural starting point.
However, we quickly found that, despite the resonance of damage, it did not make for a very fun mechanic. In your average Magic set, there are usually plenty of red cards that deal damage, so adding more was not very interesting or exciting. It also caused various gameplay issues, like punishing small creatures and making aggressive strategies much stronger.
We went back to the drawing board and thought about what else made firebending special. I was inspired by the fact that firebending was the only element that could generate the element itself. Was there something in Magic that could represent generating a temporary burst of fire?
Red mana being a temporary burst of energy—and looking like a literal fireball—meant that it resonated with our players despite not dealing damage. Connecting it to attacking helped to sell the aggression and action-oriented nature of firebending, and tying it to combat meant that players had cool ways of using their mana, like activated abilities and instants. Super-fans like me may also enjoy how adding mana makes firebending more about creation and less solely about destruction. Since this was such a key lesson the characters learned, I was happy to find a version of firebending that represented that.
Airbending
The story of airbending is probably my favorite of all the elements. Universes Beyond teams tend to include a lot of franchise super-fans, but we like to make sure that those who are unfamiliar with the franchise also work on these projects. These representatives provide an outsider's perspective, ensuring super-fan designers aren't getting too niche or specific when referencing the source material. For this team, Mark Gottlieb was the designer who knew the least about the show. He had never seen Avatar: The Last Airbender and only knew what we explained to him in our meetings.
In one such meeting, we were discussing airbending and trying to come up with something that would feel right. After a lot of back-and-forth among fans in the group, Mark asked if we could describe how airbending was depicted in the series. After we told him about airbending and how it focused on protection, evasion, and delaying the enemy, he pitched us a mechanic.
That idea turned out to be a perfect fit! We put the mechanic in the set, and it never changed from that day on. Players could use it defensively to save their creature or temporarily remove an attack, or proactively to blink their large creature or temporarily remove a blocker. Not only is this a great example of Mark's excellent design skills, it also shows how clever design can still be resonant to players who aren't fans of a Universes Beyond property.
That's four elements down, but what about all the non-benders? And what about the color black? Check back soon to read more about how we designed Magic: The Gathering | Avatar: The Last Airbender!