Duskmourn: House of Horror Vision Design Handoff, Part 2

Once we decided to have an enchantment theme in the set, we knew we'd have to have enchantment creatures. "Type-matters" themes need to have a certain as-fan, and there's no practical way to reach it without involving creatures. Luckily, Theros showed us the way by adding enchantment creatures to the game. Another simple trick was to make enchantment creature tokens. This allowed cards that weren't just enchantments to help with your enchantment count.

The idea that we latched onto early was the idea that these creatures represented light. Much of the horror genre is about darkness. The dark is a scary place where monsters like to hide. Light usually embodies hope and a fight against that darkness. Light in Magic is often white for flavor. One of the challenges we have with small tokens is that they often are better at being defensive than being aggressive, so we gave them an attack trigger.

The Creative team liked the idea of hope but found light a bit too literal. They came up with the word "glimmer" and built a lot of the setting around that. With so many threatening things in the house, it was nice to have some cards that showed things helping the survivors.

When Duskmourn added delirium and a graveyard focus, Set Design changed scry to surveil. Since white isn't good at surveilling, they dropped the attack trigger. This also helped simplify the tokens.

One thing Vision Design explored that ultimately wasn't pursued was the idea that there might be monsters that were vulnerable to the Light tokens. Monster Under the Bed, for example, was interesting in that it essentially gave you a 3/3 creature for 2B that could become a 7/7—the challenge being destroying all of the Light tokens. The reason this wasn't pursued was mostly a matter of complexity. There was a lot going on in the set and the enchantment creature tokens mostly filled their purpose by just existing, so the Set Design team chose to use the complexity elsewhere.

Most of the mechanics in this document made it to print in some form. Injure did not. Like most of the other mechanics, it started as us trying to capture a common horror trope, in this case the injuries that humans face while trying to get away from the monsters. We wanted the mechanics to mirror how injuries work in horror stories. It slows you down and threatens to be the cause of your death.

As Annie pointed out above, we ended up using a mechanic that we liked that hadn't gotten used in the set we designed it. Debt gave debt counters to a player, usually your opponent, but sometimes yourself. If that player didn't pay off the debt, it would make them lose life. We really liked how debt played, but it didn't work well as a guild mechanic as the structure of Ravnica sets is there needs to be a lot of overlap mechanically with guilds that share a color. Debt didn't lend itself to that kind of structure.

When the idea of injuries came up, I pitched the debt mechanic. The Vision Design team liked it and put it in the set. It was a fun and flavorful mechanic, but again it didn't blend well with other mechanics around it. Also, it had a lot of operational complexity in a set that already had operational complexity. It doesn't surprise me that Set Design cut it. I do think some version of the mechanic will see print one day.

Afraid is what we call a glue mechanic. You take disparate parts of the set and find a way to tie them together. Afraid made use of batching. Caring about enchantments was the most important part. The big issue was what to connect them to. The low hanging fruit was scary creature types. Horror and Nightmare seemed like the obvious choices. Both were being used elsewhere in the set.

Afraid cared about entering and attacking because we were trying to add more aggro into the set. There was some discussion if attacking felt weird with enchantments, but the fact that we had enchantment creatures felt like it justified it enough to make sense. In the end, the Set Design team decided they could make cooler cards if it triggered less. Also, the set wanted the Horror and Nightmare creatures to be enchantment creatures, so calling them all out felt repetitive. Once the Horror and Nightmare synergies were removed, triggering from unlocking Rooms got added to make sure this didn't just feel like constellation.

Another interesting aspect of afraid was that it granted a state to the opponent, not the player using afraid. When you did what the mechanic asked you to do, you didn't get a bonus. Rather, you granted a negative state to your opponent. That wasn't something we'd done before and the flavor behind it was pretty cool. The idea was that we could design cards that got an upside for an opponent being afraid, which read and played well. This is another example of Set Design finding a place to trim back complexity. It is a cool concept though, so we'll put it in our back pocket for future use.

It's interesting to note that, while Rooms changed a bit, the current version still meets all of these criteria. An important part of this document is spelling out why we did certain things, because as things change the Set Design team needs to keep in mind the role different mechanics are playing in the larger structure.

This version of Rooms isn't too far from the printed version, with the biggest exception being that you're forced to open one Room first. I do think the final version does a much better job of making the set feel like a giant house. It also adds that feeling of movement that the Vision Design team was after. Additionally, the extra name and artwork adds to the flavor.

The reason we changed from door counters to locked rooms was twofold. First, door counters weren't doing a good job of communicating that you couldn't access the second part of the card. Saying something is locked has the implication that it's off limits and heavily implies that there's a way to unlock it. Second, counters added extra words and we really needed the Room reminder text to fit on two lines. We knew we could make play aides that could help remind players a room is locked without having to designate the reminders as counters mechanically.

Besides the issue with manifest and double-faced cards, we also were trying hard to make Duskmourn feel different from Innsitrad, and there's no mechanic more associated with Innistrad than double-faced cards. While the double-face cards with creatures on the back were flavorful, they didn't do nearly as good of a job at playing into the core enchantment theme of the set. Rooms also allowed us to tweak eerie to let you to get two triggers with one card.

Usually when you make a set in vision design, there's one thing that's at the heart of the design and, for Duskmourn, that was Rooms. It was the center point of both the mechanical heart and the flavor of the set, so a lot of time was spent making it a splashy centerpiece. I really liked how they turned out.

As I explained earlier, usually a few weeks before a Vision Design team hands off the file for set design, we have a meeting called a Vision Design Summit where a lot of eyes look at the design and give feedback. After the set's Vision Design Summit, we got a lot of notes, added a few new team members, and did a bunch of changes adapting to all the notes.

White-blue focuses on eerie, which was what afraid turned into. Unlike afraid, eerie is completely enchantment focused. The finished archetype was more tempo focused than the archetype we handed off.

Blue-black also switched from afraid to eerie, but this archetype changed a lot as it was more creature-focused, and most of that aspect went away when it became eerie. The final archetype leaned into being a control deck.

Injuries went away, so this archetype changed significantly. It ended up being more about sacrifice than life payments.

The red-green archetype ended up being about delirium, something that simply wasn't in the file at handoff. It also was more aggro and less midrange.

The final green-white archetype was about survival, another mechanic that simply wasn't in the file at handoff. It did still have some aspects of go-wide, although it was a bit slower.

There were two big changes to this archetype. First, the possess mechanic went away, changing into enchantment creatures that die into noncreature enchantments. Second, a graveyard component was added in set design. This archetype leaned heavily into that.

The blue-red archetype was one of the ones that changed the least. The finished version was still focused on Rooms and had a slower control style.

Manifest evil stayed in the file, later manifest dread, but moved out of black-green. Black-green ended up being a slower, grindier archetype focused on delirium, again a design not yet in the file at handoff.

The red-white archetype stayed aggro, as red/white usually is, but added a synergy with creatures with power 2 or less, which did work with the Light, now Glimmer, enchantment creature tokens.

Green-blue is another archetype that didn't drift too far from what was handed off. It stayed focused on manifest dread.

A final thanks to Annie for letting me show all of you this document. And a big thanks to her and the entire Exploratory Design and Vision Design teams for their work creating all the mechanics and card designs that led to this handoff.