Part of transitioning a set from vision design to set design is the creation of something called the vision design handoff document. It is written by the lead vision designer and walks the Set Design team through the larger goals, themes, mechanics, and structure of the set to help them better understand the work the Vision Design team did. I have regularly shown these off and they have proven very popular. Here are the ones I've previously published:

As with all my articles about vision design handoff documents, most of what I'm showing you is the actual document. My notes, giving explanation and context, are in the boxes below the text. This document, like most of them, was long enough that I've broken it into two parts. Also, normally the documents I show you are written by me, but I did not lead the Vision Design team for Duskmourn: House of Horror. That was Annie Sardelis, and this document was written by her.

"Swimming" Vision Design Handoff

Exploratory Design Team 

  • Mark Rosewater (Exploratory Design Lead)
  • Annie Sardelis
  • Doug Beyer
  • Jacob Mooney

Vision Design Team 

  • Annie Sardelis (Vision Design Lead) 
  • Mark Rosewater
  • Doug Beyer
  • Jacob Mooney
  • Jeremy Geist
  • Dan Musser
  • Bryan Hawley
  • Jules Robins (Set Design Lead)

Worldbuilding Team

  • Ovidio Cartagena (Lead Art Director)
  • Doug Beyer (Vision Worldbuilding Lead)
  • Emily Teng (Set Worldbuilding Lead)
  • Grace Fong
  • Roy Graham
  • Miguel Lopez
  • Dillon Deveney
  • Lauren Bond

As with all Vision Design Handoff Documents, we start by listing the people involved in the Exploratory and Vision Design teams and the Worldbuilding team. The Vision Design team consisted of all four members of the Exploratory Design team plus Jeremy Geist and Dan Musser After the Vision Summit, Bryan Hawley and Jules Robins joined for a month to help work on some of the notes we got from the summit. Jules was the lead set designer for the set.

New planes are traditionally a bit trickier, as we have to build out the essence of what the plane means creatively and mechanically. A return always wants new twists, but those are built upon the work of previous sets. Duskmourn had the added difficulty of us pushing our creative boundaries more than normal. As this was Annie's first time as lead vision designer for a premier set, it was a lot for her to tackle.

Topline

"Swimming" is Magic's modern horror set.

"Swimming" is an expansion focused on 1970s-1980s horror media to the present day. Many films from this time have cemented themselves within pop culture, with iconic horror visuals and themes inspiring media to this day. As a top-down set, "Swimming" will explore these tropes to delight horror fans.

"Swimming" is set on a unique new plane. Rather than most of our planes, which are more analogous to a continent or planet, we are focusing on a single haunted house.

As I said in my first preview article, the two things about the set that got it greenlit was a modern horror theme and a plane-spanning haunted mansion, so it should be no surprise that those two things are the core of the topline for the set.

Set Goals

😱Be Suspenseful
Just like in the movies, we want to leave you waiting to see the true form of the monster. The mystery of not knowing exactly what is going on—What's behind that door?—is where we capture our version of fear. We will see scary monsters straight out of your nightmares on the cards, so having a mechanic that adds mystery and suspense to these creatures is critical. The manifest evil, a face-down card mechanic, is our take on this.

I often talk about the emotional resonance of a set. When playing with it, how should the set make you feel, especially in Limited where all your cards are from it. While this set was doing a lot to distance itself mechanically from Innistrad, the core emotional resonance was similar. We wanted playing of Duskmourn to be more suspenseful than the average game of Magic. The director Alfred Hitchcock talked about the difference between suspense and shock and surprise. The former needs to inform you about a bad thing that could happen, forcing you to stew in your worries about it happening. Shock and surprise, in contrast, is something that scares you because you didn't see it coming. Duskmourn wanted to be more about suspense than shock.

A potent way of creating suspense is to give you partial information. Manifest dread creates a colorless 2/2 creature that could become another creature, but you don't know what that creature could be. It could be anything in your opponent's deck. Mechanics like eerie and delirium telegraph what's going to happen, but not when. Mechanics like impending give you a ticking clock, so you have a clear idea when a scary thing is going to happen. All of these create a suspenseful play environment.

👻 Be Referential
Modern horror is a new trope space for Magic. We will look to reference pop culture movies and games to satisfy both fans of the genre and set ourselves apart from our other horror setting, Innistrad, which looks more to gothic horror literature. Various top-down designs and flavorful creature types such as Survivor, Nightmare, Horror, Clown, etc. will carry a lot of weight here.

One of the things we do at the beginning of every set is examine the resonance we are playing with. What are the tropes? What are the archetypes? What are the pop culture influences that shaped this genre? We then make a list of them and look for opportunities to use them on cards. Duskmourn, in particular, looked to pull from things that had previously been the domain of Universes Beyond and acorn sets.

🕯️ Capture Mood and Tone
Where Innistrad focused on the monster as the horror with double-faced creatures and typal mechanics, "Swimming" highlights the mood of horror. Modern horror films capitalize on the set-up and mystery, sometimes only showing the monster a short moment\ or at the very end of the story. We found the card type most suited to expressing his mood is enchantments think Crawling Sensation, Triskaidekaphobia, Always Watching as theyhave a lingering presence on the board state. For example, think Crawling Sensation, Triskaidekaphobia, and Always Watching.

Annie is trying to hit at the idea that enchantments carry a different emotional weight. When they are the focus, they can create an environment where the cards come together to set a specific tone. Duskmourn is as much about making you fear the things you don't see as the things you do.

🏠 Explore the Haunted House Setting
The scope of our setting is unique, being contained to a single (albeit enormous and fantastical) haunted house. We will look to express the kinetic motion of moving from room to room in a haunted house, and what it means for our conflict to exist in a more modern, interior setting.

As I talked about in my first Duskmourn preview article, the idea of a haunted house has a quality of movement to it, that we spent a lot of time trying to capture it in exploratory and vision design. The low-hanging fruit, having an actual game piece that represents the player physically moving from card to card, proved to be too complicated, but the Vision Design team was still looking for ways to represent that. The dual quality of Rooms, the idea that you only visited one part and then got to the second part later, was an important part of capturing this quality.

"Swimming" Mechanics

Manifest Evil

Burst from the Chest
R
Instant
Target creature gets +2/+0 until end of turn. When it dies this turn, manifest evil. (Look at the top three cards of your library and put one onto the battlefield face down as a 2/2 Horror creature. Put the rest on the bottom of your library. Turn it face up any time for its mana cost if it's a creature card.)

Woodland Cryptid
4GG
Creature - Horror
5/5
Whenever CARDNAME attacks, manifest evil. (Look at the top three cards of your library and put one onto the battlefield face down as a 2/2 Horror creature. Put the rest on the bottom of your library. Turn it face up any time for its mana cost if it's a creature card.)

The latter design came the close to seeing print. Hauntwoods Shrieker is a three-mana 3/3 with this text. Turn Inside Out from the main set harkens back to Burst from the Chest.

Latent Psychic
1U
Creature - Human Survivor
0/3
T: Scry 1.
3U, T, Sacrifice CARDNAME: Manifest evil. (Look at the top three cards of your library and put one onto the battlefield face down as a 2/2 Horror creature. Put the rest on the bottom of your library. Turn it face up any time for its mana cost if it's a creature card.)

Manifest evil is a variant of manifest from Fate Reforged. This version allows you some selection in order to hit a creature more often, as flipping over your surprise creature is where all the fun is. This mechanic is key to expressing our goal of suspense, with your opponent not knowing what monster is lurking in the next room (or rather, on the battlefield face down). The 2/2 creature is a Horror, which is bundled in with the types of permanents we care about in the set. It's also spooky! You can manifest evil with a counter on it, such as +1/+1 counters or keyword counters, which can be useful on more expensive costs to help strengthen your 2/2.

A vision design handoff document needs to thoroughly list all of the mechanics and themes the Vision Design team is suggesting. There's a bit of art to how one goes about that. For example, the order you put your mechanics in affects how people see the set when they first read it. I believe the Vision Design team had the most confidence in manifest evil, later manifest dread, so Annie listed it first.

One of the things I like to look at when looking back at a vision design handoff document is to see what changed. There are a lot of little adjustments to integrate the mechanic into the rest of the set. For example, the spooky mechanic cared about Horrors, so manifest evil made the face-down creature a Horror. Some of you might question whether the mechanic can even do that. Isn't a face-down creature defined as a 2/2? It actually isn't, although it was when morph was first created. A face-down creature can be defined as anything we want to define it as. Normally we'll keep that to one thing within the set for sake of game play clarity, but that's us trying to avoid complexity, not a rules issue.

Another thing mentioned in this document that the Set Design team didn't end up using was the idea of combing face-down creatures with counters. For example, we handed a card that manifested a creature, then put two +1/+1 counters on it, and another that put a flying counter on. We felt this was a way to create more variety when the creature is face down, but Set Design didn't feel it was necessary, so they took it out of the set.

Possess

Endlessly Falling
3U
Enchantment Creature - Nightmare
3/3
Possess (When this creature dies, you may return it to the battlefield as an Aura with enchant creature. Enchanted creature has the following abilities.)
Flying

Attic Rats
1B
Enchantment Creature - Rat
2/2
Possess (When this creature dies, you may return it to the battlefield as an Aura with enchant creature. Enchanted creature has the following abilities.)
Deathtouch

Fiend of Idle Hands
R
Enchantment Creature - Devil
2/1
Possess (When this creature dies, you may return it to the battlefield as an Aura with enchant creature. Enchanted creature has the following abilities.)
This creature attacks each combat if able.

Folks get possessed by nasty stuff all the time in modern horror. The idea of something lingering and moving from creature to creature felt best captured by an Aura. The creatures with possess are all enchantment creatures so that your enchantment count remains the same if one is killed. Negative abilities are also something we're interested in trying, where you're incentivized to give your Aura with possess to an enemy creature. The template here is rather speculative, borrowing some wording from March of the Machine's boost mechanic. When the creature dies, the intent is that the Aura version of it comes back just once. If it's removed as an Aura, it's sent to the graveyard.

To clarify, the boost mechanic would go on to become backup in March of the Machine.

The story of possess is an interesting one. We came up with the idea of creatures that died and then possessed a living creature. The flavor seemed like a slam dunk. It even helped offset the card disadvantage problem of Auras where you cast two cards, a creature and an Aura, that both get taken out by a single removal spell. We thought we had a winner.

The first problem was that the design space was kind of narrow. You wanted the creature and the Aura to feel connected. The easiest way to do that was for the creature to have an ability that would then be granted by the Aura, but there's only so many keywords, and not all of them make for the best Auras. We also experimented with ones that had a negative ability that you granted to your opponent's creatures.

One of the reasons we playtest mechanics is to see if the hype lives up to its reality. For example, a lot of evergreen creature keywords act as evasion or something that dissuades blocking. This meant the possess creatures rarely died, so mostly they were just french vanilla creatures in the set.

Set Design found an elegant solution. Rather than having enchantment creatures with abilities that died and became Auras, they made enchantment creatures with static abilities that became noncreature enchantments. It didn't quite capture the flavor of possession, but it did fit into the mood and tone we were aiming for.

"There has to be an exit. Let's try that door."

That's all the time we have for today. I hoped you enjoyed this peek behind the scenes. As always, I'm eager for any feedback, be it about this document, any of my comments, or on Duskmourn itself. You can email me or contact me through any of my social media accounts (X, Tumblr, Instagram, and TikTok).

Join me next week for part two of the vision design handoff document.

Until then, watch out for the Razorkin.