A Dragonstorm Is Brewing, Part 1
Welcome to the first week of Tarkir: Dragonstorm previews. Today, I'll introduce you to the Exploratory Design and Vision Design teams, start telling the story of how Tarkir: Dragonstorm was made, and show off a cool new Dragon.
The Calm Before the Dragonstorm
Before I can get to the story of how the set was made, I want to introduce you to the team that made it. Well, at least the initial teams. I'll introduce the Set Design and Commander Design teams next week. Normally, I have the lead vision designer introduce their team, but as Erik Lauer is no longer at Wizards, I'll do the introductions.
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Click here to meet the set's Exploratory Design and Vision Design teams
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Erik Lauer (Exploratory Design and Vision Design Lead)
Erik Lauer got his start in Magic on the competitive circuit. He is a renowned deck builder, earning the nickname "The Mad Genius." He built a deck that won the very first Pro Tour he attended, though it was piloted by Randy Buehler. Randy would later offer him a job in R&D, where Erik worked for many years. Erik led, or co-led, the development and set design of many releases, including Magic 2010, Magic 2011, Mirrodin Besieged, Innistrad, Return to Ravnica, Theros, Battle for Zendikar, Kaladesh, Ixalan, Guilds of Ravnica, Throne of Eldraine, Zendikar Rising, Innistrad: Midnight Hunt, Innistrad: Crimson Vow, Dominaria United, Phyrexia: All Will Be One, The Lost Caverns of Ixalan, and Khans of Tarkir, his favorite set.
Erik was interested in leading the vision design of a premier set, so the return Tarkir seemed to be the perfect opportunity.
Mark Rosewater (Exploratory Design Lead and Vision Design)
Erik and I have worked together on many sets, so it was fun to help him on his Vision Design team.
Adam Prosak (Vision Design)
Adam was the lead set designer for Tarkir Dragonstorm, so he wanted to be on the Vision Design team to have the best understanding of the vision for the set. Adam has been the set lead of numerous expansions, including Modern Horizons, Core Set 2021, Innistrad: Crimson Vow, and Phyrexia: All Will Be One. It's always nice to have the set design lead work on the vision design for any given release because they're good at asking questions that will affect things downstream.
Chris Mooney (Vision Design)
Chris was a finalist in Great Designer Search 3 and has just celebrated their fifth year at Wizards. Chris has led many projects, including Wilds of Eldraine, Ponies: The Galloping, Innistrad: Midnight Hunt and Innistrad: Crimson Vow's Commander decks, and the recently announced Universes Beyond set Magic: The Gathering® | Avatar: The Last Airbender™, which comes out later this year. Chris is always insightful and studious and has worked with me on many vision designs. Chris has a great way of thinking about how components work together and always makes suggestions that improve the design.
Dan Musser (Vision Design)
Dan was a play design manager for many years and worked on many vision designs as a play design representative. Dan was very good at understanding the ramifications of decisions. Whenever you were making a new mechanic, Dan was the designer you'd call to fiddle with it and tell you what problems it might cause for future teams. Dan recently left Wizards, but his impact on the set is clear.
Daniel Xu (Exploratory Design)
Daniel is a relatively new designer. He was my strong second on the upcoming set "Amsterdam." He was also worked on the vision designs for Murders at Karlov Manor, Bloomburrow, and Magic: The Gathering Foundations and set designs for Wilds of Eldraine, The Lost Caverns of Ixalan, Outlaws of Thunder Junction, and Bloomburrow. Daniel has a very analytical mind and is good at seeing how component pieces work together. He also designs a lot of cool cards.
Doug Beyer (Vision Design)
Doug works on most Magic-IP premier sets as a creative representative. He led the vision design for Magic 2013 and Bloomburrow. He has a good sense of how mechanics and flavor overlap. Doug helps make sure that the gameplay accurately captures worldbuilding.
Glenn Jones (Exploratory Design)
Glenn has led the design of numerous Universes Beyond products and Secret Lair drops, including the Transformers cards, Jurassic World™ Collection, Secret Lair x Street Fighter, and Secret Lair x Stranger Things. He led the vision design for Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur's Gate and the set design for The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth™. I don't often get to work with him on exploratory design, so it was a pleasure to have him here. Glenn is excellent at creating flavorful designs.
Graeme Hopkins (Exploratory Design)
Graeme was one of the finalists from the first Great Designer Search. His day job was as a programmer for Magic: The Gathering Arena, but we occasionally stole him away for design work. Graham is truly a great game designer, and I was always happy to see what new, creative designs he came up with.
Lauren Bond (Vision Design)
Lauren was the lead narrative designer for Tarkir: Dragonstorm. It's great to have members of the Creative team work on vision designs, as it lets us discuss connecting the set's mechanics with its creative. Lauren did a good job of speaking up when a mechanic we were working on had creative ramifications or when there was a story beat that would serve as a good jumping-off point for a design.
Liam Etelson (Vision Design)
Liam was one of our summer interns. We like to put our interns on design teams so that they get a chance to see how Magic sets are made.
Mark Heggen (Exploratory Design)
Mark is the vice president of collectibles, overseeing things like Booster Fun and the Secret Lair team. He wanted to be on an exploratory design team to get the sense of what we do at the very beginning of the design process of making a set.
The story of Tarkir: Dragonstorm's design starts fourteen years ago. We had just completed Great Designer Search 2. Ethan Fleischer, the winner, and Shawn Main, the runner-up, were both awarded internships in Magic R&D. I was interested in evaluating their larger design chops, so I created an advanced planning team with them and another designer to do preliminary work on the set the following year.
I had come up with an idea for a novel block structure. The first and third sets in the block (A and C) would be large sets. The second set (B) would be a small set. Both large sets would be drafted with the small middle set, but not with each other. Drafting the sets would look like this:
- Set A's release: draft A, A, A
- Set B's release: draft B, A, A
- Set C's release: draft C, C, B
While interesting, this structure raised two big questions:
- What exactly did this represent? Why don't you draft set A and set C together?
- How should the block's design reflect this structure? This is back in the days of design and development where design worked on the set for a year.
I started the advanced-planning team a year before the first large set (A) was scheduled to start design. This team would go so well that we would formalize it to create the exploratory design process.
We started by coming up with different flavorful explanations for the block structure. We created a long list of possibilities, but only three prevailed.
First was the idea of a cast of characters traveling from one place to another. Set A would be the setting that they were traveling from. Set B would be the vehicle they traveled on. Set C would be the setting that they were traveling to.
Second was the idea that the block was a war between worlds. Set A would be the first world. Set C would be the second world. Set B would be the place of conflict where the two fought, somewhere neither side of the conflict was from.
Third was the idea of a time travel set. Set A would show an initial setting. Set B would be that setting's past. The main character would go back to change something. Set C was the new timeline after the setting had been changed.
All these ideas had merit, but I'm a sucker for a good time travel story, so that one won out. We started building the set structure around the time travel pitch. This led us to morph, manifest, and other alternate designs for set C. We eventually landed on megamorph for Dragons of Tarkir, which wasn't ideal.
With this time travel idea in mind, I went to the Creative team and asked what setting made the most sense for it. Brady Dommermuth and I talked and decided that Mongseng would make a good setting. Mongseng was a plane that was first referenced in Planechase (2012 Edition).
Planechase (2012 Edition)
Mongseng was themed around Asian cultures and history, which we liked. In the end, we didn't go with Mongseng but kept many elements of it.
It was important to us that the third set had a cool twist to it, and the leading candidate was a dragon-themed set. We had made Scourge and advertised that as a dragon-themed set, but it wasn't designed to be one. I'd kept the idea in my head in the hopes that we'd make an actual dragon-themed set when we had the chance.
Shards of Alara
Mongseng plus dragons brought us to Sarkhan Vol. Sarkhan, who was a Planeswalker at the time, was obsessed with dragons. Mongseng was one of the planes we had considered making his homeworld. What if the dragons had all been killed off by Mongseng's warlords and Sarkhan went back in time to save the dragons? That felt very on-brand for Sarkhan.
Brady and the Creative team were intrigued by the idea of the plane having clans themed around various Asian cultures. They ended up creating four clans. To fit them into a set, I created a structure where two of them were three-color clans and the other two were two-color clans. Then, the Creative team created a fifth clan, the Sultai. Once we had five clans, that pushed us away from the 3-3-2-2 structure.
We had recently revisited Ravnica, so I wasn't interested in doing two-color clans. Shards of Alara had done shards (a color and its two allies), but we had never done wedges (a color and its two enemies). With a little massaging, we found a way to turn the five clans that Creative made into wedge factions.
The third set was originally meant to feature the enemy-color pairs. I thought it was important for it to be substantially different from the first set. I chose enemy factions because, at the time, Magic had done a lot more ally-color sets than enemy-color sets, and there were less enemy-color cards in existence. Erik noted that a wedge set would have enemy-color infused in it because that's how you want to incentivize the draft. Starting with enemy-color pairs leaves you open to two different wedges. So, Dragons of Tarkir was changed into an ally-color faction set.
Khans of Tarkir would go on to be a huge hit. The desire for a wedge-focused set and associated factions was massive. Dragons of Tarkir did okay but not as well as Khans of Tarkir. We ended up in a weird spot where we'd changed Tarkir, but the new version was less liked than the intial one. We recognized that we might want to return to wedges in future Tarkir sets, so the story included elements of the characters rediscovering the existence of the clans, hinting that they could be brought back.
The Dragonstorm Is a' Coming
This brings us to the start of Tarkir: Dragonstorm design. I knew it was important to capture the parts of Khans of Tarkir and Dragons of Tarkir that fans loved the most: the clans and the dragons. I introduced the mantra of "the best of both worlds" during exploratory design, and it stayed with the set all the way through design. Today, I'm going to talk about the dragon themes and Dragon card design for Tarkir: Dragonstorm. Next week, I'll discuss the clan portion.
Here are the major problems we had to solve with dragons and Dragon cards in this set:
Problem #1 – It's hard to do typal themes with large creatures.
Normally, when we design cards for a deck, we do so with the mana curve in mind. That means we make cards for each mana value to ensure that the player has something to do each turn. Smaller creatures, like Goblins or Elves, start at mana value 1 and work their way up the mana curve. Dragons are inherently larger, meaning you don't get low-cost cards. That can make it difficult when you're trying to build around them.
Problem #2 – It's hard to play a lot of Dragons in a deck.
This is related to the first problem. You can only put so many high-cost cards in your deck. If all your Dragons have mana value 4 or more, it can make it difficult to get a critical mass of Dragons in your deck.
Problem #3 – Common Dragons are tough to design.
The old design adage is: "If your theme is not at common, it isn't your theme." The newer version of it is "If your theme isn't at a high enough as-fan, it's not your theme." Dragons are primarily cards that show up at rare or mythic rare. To make a set care about Dragons, we have to make some common and uncommon Dragons. The trouble is making cards that work as Dragons and as commons.
Problem #4 – Dragons, when they are the focus, are often done in cycles.
Dragons are red's iconic creature type, so most of the Dragons are mono-red or partially red. When we focus on them, we tend to do them in cycles to keep everything balanced. This requires more structure and takes up space in the set.
Problem #5 – There's not a lot of space with five clans.
Factions tend to take up a significant amount of real estate in a set. A lot of the cards in your set must be allocated to the factions. Multicolor factions mean allocating more cards, as they need mana-fixing cards. This is why morph didn't return. Most of the space not occupied by the clans got eaten up by the Dragon typal theme. (Dragons do love to eat things.)
Dragon typal requires a lot of things that are hard to do, and the set didn't have that much space to do it in. After looking over all the problems, we found there were a few requirements for the set to pull it off:
- We needed a cycle of common Dragons and uncommon Dragons that had some mechanical reason as to why you would play more of them in your deck.
- We needed something splashy to boost the set's dragon themes.
- We needed some ways to care about Dragons separate from the Dragon cards themselves.
- We wanted some oomph for the rare and mythic rare Dragons.
Let's walk through how we handled each of these. We tackled these first two issues with one mechanic.
- We needed a cycle of common Dragons and uncommon Dragons that had some mechanical reason as to why you would play more of them in your deck.
- We needed something splashy to boost the set's dragon themes.
The idea that we liked in vision design was giving the low-rarity Dragons a secondary utility. We'd give each Dragon card a purpose, even if you never got the chance to cast it as a Dragon. The idea we liked best was called swoop. Here's how it worked:
Bolt Dragon {3}{R}{R}{R}
Creature — Dragon
4/4
Flying, haste
When CARDNAME enters the battlefield, if you paid its swoop cost, it deals 2 damage to any target.
Swoop {2}{R} (You may cast this card for its swoop cost. If you do, shuffle it into your library when it enters the battlefield.)
Each Dragon with swoop had an effect that triggered upon entering if you paid the swoop cost. If you just wanted the effect, you'd pay the swoop cost, then it would be shuffled into your library. If you just paid the creature cost, you would get the 4/4 Dragon with flying and haste. If you paid the creature cost and the swoop cost, you would get the enters effect and the creature. That meant you had three different options:
- Spend
- Spend
- Spend
That is what we handed off after vision design. It turned out that there were too many moving pieces. After playtesting swoop, the team realized that the complexity wasn't justified by the mechanic's usage, so the team reworked it.
The team turned the enters effect that swoop gave you into an instant or sorcery spell. The layout then changed to that of an Adventure, as the version where you just paid the swoop cost was like casting an Adventure. The biggest difference is that, rather than exiling the card like an Adenture, the card is shuffled back into your library. Because of this, the spell has a different subtype, Omen. In Tarkir: Dragonstorm, Omens are on Dragons.
We did explore having the Dragon go to the graveyard rather than being shuffled away, but there were two problems with that. One, it caused play design issues because it made it too easy to get a giant creature in your graveyard that you could reanimate. Two, it just felt bad to not be able to play your Dragon. By shuffling it into the library, there was the dream that you could draw it again.
My preview card today is one of these Dragons.
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Click here to meet Bloomvine Regent
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Interestingly, this is the only one of three Dragons with an Omen spell that isn't a common or uncommon card. There is a monocolor cycle of rare Dragons, and the blue, black, and green ones have an Omen spell. There are two cycles of Dragons with Omen spells, one at common where the Dragons are the same color as the Omen spell and one at uncommon on monocolor Dragons with an Omen spell of the Dragon's enemy color.
Now, what were the other ways we made Dragons work in Tarkir: Dragonstorm?
- We needed some ways to care about Dragons separate from the Dragon cards themselves.
We knew that the dragonstorms were going to play an important role in the set's story (it is called Tarkir: Dragonstorm, after all), so we wanted to use them to enable Dragon typal decks. I believe that, in vision design, they were enchantment tokens created by various cards. The token reduced the cost of your Dragons spells by
Set Design would end up changing these to enchantment cards that mimicked the Trial cycle of enchantments from Amonkhet. Each has an enters effect. The enchantment is returned to your hand when a Dragon enters under your control. This allows you to repeat and replay these as you play more Dragons.
We also used a new keyword action called behold, inspired by an effect we'd done in Dragons of Tarkir where you would reveal a Dragon card from your hand. However, Dragons often sit in your hand rather than on the battlefield, which is an issue for Dragon typal. Behold requires you have a Dragon either on the battlefield or in your hand. This let us design "threshold 1" cards for Dragons, where having just one Dragon gave you a bonus.
- We wanted some oomph for the rare and mythic rare Dragons.
The main Dragons from Dragons of Tarkir, the Dragonlords, were all ally-color creatures. The two-color cards in a wedge set want to be enemy-color cards, as that's what is supported in a wedge-focused Limited environment. Players can start with an enemy-color pair, allowing them to move into one of two three-color wedge factions. If you take an ally-color pair, that card can only go in one wedge. That meant if we put dragonlords in the set, they would have to either be monocolor or three-color creatures.
The Creative team decided they would rather create new three-color Dragons and five Spirit Dragons that help the clans. We also decided that monocolor Dragons didn't make sense for dragonlords.
We talked about having mechanical throughlines for the two high-rarity cycles of Dragons, but in the end, we just made each one its own exciting card.
Here's a full list of the Dragons in the main set:
Common
- A cycle of monocolor Dragons with Omen spells
- A common Dragon artifact creature to increase the as-fan of the creature type
Uncommon
- A cycle of monocolor Dragons with an enemy-color Omen spell
- A cycle of three-color Dragons
Rare
- A rare cycle of monocolor Dragons
- The blue, black, and green Dragons have an Omen spell.
Mythic rare
- A mythic rare cycle of legendary three-color Spirit Dragons
- A mono-red mythic rare Dragon
Stop Dragonstorming My Heart Around
That's all the time we have for today. Next week, I'll explore how we designed the clans in the set. As always, I'm eager for any feedback you have, be it on today's article, Tarkir: Dragonstorm, or any of the mechanics I talked about today. You can email me or contact me through social media accounts (Bluesky, X, Tumblr, Instagram, and TikTok).
Join me next week for part two.
Until then, may you know the thrill of attacking with multiple Dragons.