Welcome to Magic: The Gathering® | Avatar: The Last Airbender™ preview season. I'll be upfront: if you've come to hear about how we designed this set to capture all the wonderful flavor of Avatar: The Last Airbender, that isn't what I'm writing about today. Luckily, Chris Mooney, the lead set designer for Magic: The Gathering | Avatar: The Last Airbender, wrote all about that. DailyMTG will be publishing their articles in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.

Today, I'm going to talk about a big-picture aspect of Universes Beyond design that I haven't talked about yet. I've talked at length about how we design Universes Beyond sets for fans of the property, but what about all the players who are unfamiliar with it? We still want them to enjoy the set. Today's article will talk about how we do that. And yes, you'll still get a card preview from Magic: The Gathering | Avatar: The Last Airbender.

Last time I covered a Universes Beyond set, I had the role of what we call an SME (subject matter expert). For Avatar: The Last Airbender, I'm an SMA (subject matter amateur). I've never watched Avatar: The Last Airbender, not a single episode. I've heard great things about it, and it's on my lengthy list of TV shows to watch when I get time. But when I attended my first playtest for Magic: The Gathering | Avatar: The Last Airbender, I had no idea what to expect. I wasn't on the design team, so I hadn't done any research on it. I came to the draft cold.

My plan for today's article is to walk you through my personal experience with the set, as I started piecing together the world of Avatar: The Last Airbender through the cards I opened. As I do that, I will talk about the various techniques we use to appeal to the players unfamiliar with the property.

As I started reading the cards during my first draft, I began picking up little aspects of the world. There was something called bending, a type of magic, which applied to each of the four elements. There seemed to be a lot more waterbending, firebending, and earthbending than there was airbending. There seemed to be factions connected to each of the types of bending, and there was clearly a conflict between some of the factions.

Lesson One: Lean on the Richness of the Property's Worldbuilding

The fact that some portion of the audience isn't familiar with the source material isn't nearly as big a problem as you might assume. Why? Because Magic showcases new worlds all the time, and mostly players discover those worlds by looking at the cards. That means Magic players are trained to absorb new worlds and that the key to making a set shine for the uninformed is to lean into the environment of the world. If we've chosen to make a Universes Beyond product out of the property, it's been successful and has a lot of fans, which means it's pretty cool. Our job as designers is to make sure we lean into what is cool about it and let people unfamiliar with the property to fall in love with it for the same reasons that all its fans did.

For example, Magic is a game about magical combat. We need flavorful creatures that do exciting things. Avatar: The Last Airbender takes place in a world where many people can manipulate the elements. That's not just cool, it's something a person can appreciate in a vacuum. The fact that some people can manipulate fire and some people can manipulate water is a neat piece of worldbuilding. Not only does that lead to exciting cards but also a larger tapestry. The Avatar fan will know who a particular earthbender is in the story, but the uninformed player still gets a card that's exciting without having that knowledge.

This is why it's good to have a subject matter amateur on every design team. Design teams should have someone who isn't familiar with the property because they can tell you what's cool without the knowledge of how it fits into the property. In other Universes Beyond design articles, I've talked how we create what we call a knowledge pyramid. It's a document shaped like a pyramid where we list as many elements of the property as we can. The bottom of the pyramid is for the most well-known things. If you're at all familiar with the property, these are the things you know. Aang, for example, is the protagonist of Avatar: The Last Airbender. The middle of the pyramid is for things that the more enfranchised fan would know. The top of the pyramid is for things that only the most die-hard fans would recognize.

The knowledge pyramid is very important when designing for fans of the property, but one thing I like to do is let the SMA take a pass at it and explain what's cool to them without context. This, of course, leads us to the next lesson.

Lesson Two: Highlight Cool Things in a Vacuum

Another thing I noticed when I was drafting the set for the first time was how all the animals in the set were hybrid (not hybrid mana). That is, they were half one animal and half another animal. I found that super endearing and probably drafted way more of them than I should have.

One of the challenges of designing a Universes Beyond set is that the property wasn't designed with Magic in mind. When we're making our own worlds, we can dictate how the world is built. If we need something mechanically, we can just ask the Creative team to add it. For instance, when designing the original Innistrad set, I realized that we could turn all the monsters into ally-color factions. But to make that work, we needed red Werewolves. That wasn't the plan, so the Creative team didn't make any red Werewolves. But once I explained why I needed them, they figured out how to creatively justify them in red.

When working on a Universes Beyond set, the environment is mostly locked. We're capturing what already exists, so if we need something to aid in our design, we have to work around it. That often means that there are things like color imbalances, holes in the creature grid, or a lack of an important game resource like flying that the design team has to deal with. This means a lot of time is spent determining our liabilities during the early stages of design for Universes Beyond sets.

But we also need to spend time understanding the opposite. Where are we flush with resources? What elements of the property have an embarrassment of riches? Where do we have a lot of options? You see, when we're starved for a resource, we have few options. If the property only has a handful of fliers, we're almost obligated to use them all. But when there's a bevy of options, we have the ability to lean into the uninformed players. Obviously, we want to make sure we always capture the key components of a property. But once we hit those key components, we start allowing ourselves some wiggle room to prioritize things that are cool outside knowledge of the property.

For example, as I said above, I found the hybrid animals super endearing. Why? Because they fulfil the idea of an elevator pitch. When you're a writer in Hollywood, you do a lot of pitching. No one wants to hear a long pitch, so it's key to consolidate your pitch into the fewest words possible. This is often called an elevator pitch. Imagine you're riding an elevator with the person you're pitching to. You both get on the elevator on floor one, and they're getting off on floor two. That's how long you have to pitch your idea.

There are two major components to a good pitch. One, it has to be an innovative, new idea that does something fresh and exciting. Two, it has to be an idea with minimal risk. Those do seem like opposite things, but writers are a crafty bunch. Here's one way it could work: "My story has [Product A that was successful] meets [Product B that was also successful]." You might use two known, successful products as your descriptive elements to show that your idea clearly has a pedigree of success, but you combine them to show that you're doing something innovative.

The idea of hybrid creatures embodies such a concept. They combine two different yet familiar animals with this fun, novel twist. Everyone's familiar with a bear and a sheep, but no one's seen a bear-sheep before.

Now, combine that with the fact that creatures are core to the game of Magic. After all, over fifty percent of the cards in a set have to be creatures. By making some of those creatures hybrid animals, we can showcase a wonderful worldbuilding element that's lovable whether or not you've ever seen Avatar: The Last Airbender. It takes a lot of cards that could just be fluff in most sets and makes them novel and memorable. Are they a big part of the show? I honestly don't know. But they're a fun environmental aspect that gives this set a unique feel, and that's key to design. The designers leaned into something unique and organic to the property that makes for a fun Magic set. They did so in a way that doesn't require the players to have to know anything about the show to appreciate them.

And the ones who do know, get an entire extra level of appreciation. I'm sure the fans of Avatar: The Last Airbender will have favorites among the hybrid animals. Some of them might play a big role in particular episodes. This leads into my next lesson.

Lesson Three: Make Use of Lenticular Design

Many years ago, I wrote an article about a concept I called lenticular design. The basic idea behind it is that a designer can design one card for two different audiences by leaning into the fact that one audience, usually the less experienced one, won't be able to see things that the more enfranchised player can. For example, a card might have synergies that are invisible to a beginner, or it may have strategic ramifications that would only make sense once you're thinking about a certain aspect of the game.

Normally when I'm talking about lenticular design, the two ends of the spectrum are beginner and advanced players. With Universes Beyond, we get a different spectrum, which is the knowledge of a property. One end includes players who don't know the property, and the other end includes players who do. The key is to make cards that work on two levels. The primary elements of the card can be appreciated by those unfamiliar with the story, but it has extra meaning to the fans. A good example (I'm told) from Magic: The Gathering | Avatar: The Last Airbender is Sokka's Haiku.

0071_MTGTLA_Main: Sokka's Haiku

As someone who doesn't know the series well, I see the charm in this card. It references a haiku, a type of poem known for having a specific structure: a line of five syllables, then seven, then five. The rules text for the card is a haiku (at least in English). As someone who knows a bit more about templating than the average player, that's a really tricky feat to accomplish. This is a card that I can appreciate without knowing anything about what it's referencing. But for fans of the show, it's not just anyone doing the haiku. It's Sokka, who makes haikus in the show. That gives it an extra level that I can't appreciate, but I can still enjoy the card without that knowledge.

Lesson Four: Create Flavorful Designs That Have Mechanical Appeal

I have one final lesson and a card to preview. Luckily, my card preview is a great example of my last lesson. Let's start by showing it off.

Click to Reveal Foggy Swamp Visions


0102_MTGTLA_Main: Foggy Swamp Visions 0339_MTGTLA_ShowElem: Foggy Swamp Visions

When I asked what this card referenced from the series, I was told the following: "In one episode, the main characters get stuck in a swamp that's full of spiritual energy. During the episode, they get visions of people (mostly) from their past who have died, so we wanted a card that let creatures come back very briefly. The card has waterbending because the people who live in the swamp are waterbenders, so the location is associated with waterbending."

Here's the important thing. I think this card is pretty cool. Not because I understand how it ties into the property, but because I play Magic and can appreciate it as a card. That's the final lesson. Every card we make shouldn't just capture Avatar: The Last Airbender, it should also function as a piece of Magic. Let me absorb this card as a Magic player:

Waterbend is a new cost that's kind of a cross between convoke and improvise. Here, it's being used as a kicker-like cost. What does the card do? It allows me to exile X creature cards from any number of graveyards and make copies of them for the turn. That could be a lot of creatures, especially since waterbend allows me to pay some of the cost without mana. I only get those creatures for one turn, though. They don't naturally have haste. So what can I do with that? As a Johnny player, it gets my mind spinning with ideas for potential combos.

That's probably the biggest tool we have in our toolbox. Magic is a fun game to play. If we craft a fun play experience, it doesn't necessarily matter if the world is familiar to the audience. Like I said above, Magic players are used to being tossed into new worlds. An important part of making a Universes Beyond set approachable to a non-fan is to make something that's fun to play.

This brings me back to my playtests. I ended up doing a lot of Magic: The Gathering |Avatar: The Last Airbender drafts. I had a schedule for a few months where my design meetings didn't conflict with our main playtesting time, so I was always available. I really enjoyed my playtests. Every time I saw it on my schedule, I was excited to play again. I enjoyed exploring all the different types of bending mechanics (a few of which evolved over my series of drafts), I liked drafting hybrid animals and, most importantly of all, had fun getting to know the world of Avatar: The Last Airbender.

And remember, I was in early playtests. There was no art and minimal flavor text, just things the designers had put in the file. While the names weren't final, they did a good job of giving me proper names to learn. I only had the mechanics and early card names to work with, and I was fascinated by the world as I played with it. It drew me in. Now, all of you get beautiful art and carefully crafted flavor text.

In my past Universes Beyond articles, I spent a lot of time talking about how much fun it is to get to experience a property you love through the lens of Magic. But it's also fun to experience a world you don't know through the lens of Magic. We have an amazing Worldbuilding team, but there are others outside of Wizards that also make amazing worlds, and we're partnering with the best of the best at it. You all get a chance to play fun games of Magic living inside those worlds. If you know them, you'll get to appreciate all the craft that went into defining the property through cards and gameplay, but if you don't, you have this wonderful opportunity to experience some of the greatest worlds of all time through Magic gameplay.

I hope this encourages you to experience the worlds we bring to Magic in their original forms. For example, everyone I talk to about Avatar: The Last Airbender has raved about the show. If you play with this set and enjoy what you see, there's all this amazing content out there for you to enjoy in a completely different medium. And once you check out that content, you can come back to the set and experience it in a new way. Yeah, it's a haiku, but now it's Sokka's Haiku.

Today was a bit of a different look at Universes Beyond design, but it's something we think of with every Universes Beyond set. I hope you appreciate it. As always, I'm eager for any feedback, be it on today's article, any of the elements I talked about, or about Magic: The Gathering | Avatar: The Last Airbender. You can email me or contact me through my social media accounts (Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, Bluesky, and TikTok).

Join me next week for another installment of Making Magic.

Until then, may you discover your inner hybrid animal.