Magic design is broken up into various stages. At some point, the earlier stage of design hands off their work on the set to the later stage. In modern design, a vision design team hands off their work to a set design team. Before that, the process involved a design team handing off their work to a development team. Whenever there is a handoff, the earlier team makes a document outlining the larger goals, themes, mechanics, and structure of the set to help the later team better understand the work of the earlier team. These handoff documents have proven very popular as they give a great insight into the world of Magic design. As such, I've published a lot of them. Here are the ones I've previously published:

Today's document is a little different; it's from the past, roughly thirteen years ago to be specific. This is the original handoff document I wrote for Khans of Tarkir, the first and namesake set of the Khans of Tarkir block. As with all my design handoff articles, most of what I'm showing you is the actual document. My notes, giving explanation and context, are in the box below the text. This document was long enough that I've broken it into two parts.

"Huey" Design Philosophy

"Huey" Design Team: Mark Rosewater (Lead), Mark Gottlieb, Adam Lee, Billy Moreno, Shawn Main, and Ken Nagle

"Huey" Advanced Planning Team: Mark Rosewater (Overseer), Dan Emmons, Ethan Fleischer, and Shawn Main

Khans of Tarkir was designed under the old system of design and development. We used to do the handoff later in the process, during what would now be mid-set design. Mark Gottlieb was my strong second. Adam Lee was the representative from the Creative team. Billy Moreno was the developer in charge of making sure things were properly balanced in our playtests. Shawn and Ken were both powerhouses who designed a lot of cards.

I created the Advanced Planning team to train three of our more inexperienced designers. Ethan and Shawn had just come in first and second place respectively at Great Designer Search 2 and received six-month internships. The third-place winner, Dan Emmons, was interested in doing more design work. This team went on for a whole year before the design started and focused on figuring out how to do the block. The experience went so well that I incorporated it into the design process, eventually becoming the two- to three-month exploratory stage.

Khans of Tarkir was codenamed "Huey," as the block was "Huey," "Dewey," and "Louie," named after Donald Duck's three nephews. This turned out to be a bad codename system, as very few designers remembered the proper order or could properly spell the names.

The "Huey" block, at its core, is telling a resonant story—what I'll call the "Time Travel Trip-Up." This is the structure of the archetypal story:

Act One

  • The protagonist has reason to reevaluate their home after an extended time away.
  • They realize it is fundamentally flawed and wish there was a way to fix it.
  • The protagonists discover time travel. They realize they have a way to try and fix their world.

Act Two

  • The protagonist travels to the past to find a world that predates the time where things have gone wrong.
  • The early world gives the protagonist hope, as it's a sign of what the future world could be.
  • They change something that has been well-established as being a key part of the world's history.

Act Three

  • The protagonist returns to the present to find a world different than the one they left.
  • At first, they're happy, because the thing they saw as a problem has been fixed.
  • Unfortunately, the change has led to a world even worse than the first world. The protagonist becomes upset. What have they done?

Design often works ahead of the story, and that was even more common back in the day. At the time of design handoff, we knew that this was the Planeswalker Sarkhan's homeworld. The dragons had been killed off, and Sarkhan would go back in time to save them. We planned to make the third set focus on dragons. We didn't know any of the specifics of what exactly Sarkhan was going to do. In the story, he saves Ugin after a fight with Bolas. Also, the trope usually has the person who makes the change come to realize they've made a mistake, but we never had Sarkhan see it as something he did wrong.

This sets up each of the expansions to have a strong tone. As this is the "Huey" design handoff document, I'll talk about what it means for "Huey." The initial set must establish that this is a flawed setting. Things have not simply gone astray, but the setting has warped itself to such an extent that Sarkhan feels he has little to lose in trying to change it. To create this tone of a world that has lost its way, the design did several things:

  • Defined clans – As the setting is based on the conflicts between its clans, the Design team worked hard to make sure each clan had a strong mechanical identity that matched the flavor and feel of the clan.

We knew early that the set was going to have multicolor clans run by humanoid khans that would become multicolor clans ruled by dragons in the third set. At first, the Creative team had ideas for four clans, so we came up with a system with two three-color clans and two two-color clans. Then, the Creative team came up with a fifth clan: the Sultai. We shifted the structure of the set to add them in. The three-color/two-color model would later get used in Ixalan.

Once we had five clans, we had to have a more balanced structure to match the color pie. Shards of Alara focused on three-color shards (a color and its two allies), but we'd never done a wedge-focused set (a color and its two enemies).

Once we settled on wedges, I decided I wanted the third set to be focused on enemy-color pairs. We'd done more ally-focused sets, and I wanted to mix it up. Erik Lauer, the lead developer for Khans of Tarkir, pointed out that a wedge set makes players draft enemy colors because it leaves their options open for which wedge to play, so having an enemy-color set would play very similarly. We then changed Dragons of Tarkir to focus on the ally-color pairs.

  • A sense of uncertainty – The Design team also worked hard to create a setting shrouded in mystery. An easy way to convey this through gameplay is to give players less information about the battlefield.

Morph was in the set from very early on, as we wanted a mechanic we could use to show the three stages of the block: the present, past, and altered present. There was some talk of removing morph, as we also had five clan mechanics, but I felt that it added a lot to the set. I pointed that out in various places in this document, including here.

  • Overlap of purpose – While many settings have factions that are locked and separate, "Huey" stands out as a world where there is ebb and flow of the factions. Each clan has elements that are receptive to a different clan's messages, meaning that part of the conflict is that different creatures can shift alliances. The clans are always in flux. For Design, this means that adjacent clans have overlapping mechanics, creating different synergies to increase play options.

The big lesson from Shards of Alara's design was that its factions were inconsistently synergistic with one another, causing a lot of headaches when building the set's Limited environment. Khans of Tarkir was predominately built upon correcting the mistakes of the Shards of Alara block.

  • Use of multicolor – The audience has long been asking for a wedge set, and the overlap between the wedge colors and the clans worked out well. This allows us to use gold cards as another way of focusing on the setting being split between five warlord-led clans.

For years, the number of multicolor cards in a block was a source of much discussion. I was just putting the stake in the ground here, declaring that this set would have a lot of multicolor cards in it.

I will now go into detail on each of these four elements of the set's design.

Defined Clans

Each clan has one base color and two supporting colors. To match the five clans as defined by the creative and to properly set up "Louie," the base color is not the shared enemy color. Rather, it is one of the ally colors. This means that the base color always has one ally and one enemy.

One would expect a wedge set to focus on the color that is the enemy of the other two colors. However, these clans were going to shift over the course of the block. The final versions of the clans in Dragons of Tarkir would use ally-color pairs. We wanted the focus of the clans to be consistent all the way through the block, so that forced us to choose a color other than the shared enemy color.

Each clan has a keyword that plays into that clan's strength. The keyword shows up slightly more in the clan's base color. Currently, each clan has four commons with the keyword: two in the base color and one each in the supporting colors. There are also four uncommon cards with the keyword in the same distribution. There is a cycle of cards with the keyword in each clan's base color at rare. There are also a handful of one-off cards in supporting colors at rare and mythic rare.

Another mistake that we feel Shards of Alara made was that each of the factions didn't have their own keyword. Yes, each had a mechanical theme, but some factions had a keyword and some didn't, which felt uneven. To avoid repeating this mistake, we made sure each clan had its own named keyword or ability word.

It is very important to the overall feeling of the set that each clan has a mechanical feel and play pattern that reinforces the overall flavor of that clan. When we get to "Dewey" and "Louie," the colors of the clans will change, but we want the feeling to be the constant, so it's important that it gets well-established in "Huey."

As I'm going to outline in the second part of this document, we spent a lot of time giving each clan a very specific feeling. Since dragons were such a big part of the plane, we liked that each clan latched onto an attribute of dragons that it felt was the most important. Tying them to parts of a dragon would come later when we made the clan symbols.

Abzan Clan Symbol Jeskai Clan Symbol Sultai Clan Symbol Mardu Clan Symbol Temur Clan Symbol

Abzan, Clan of Endurance

Base color: White
Supporting colors: Green and black
Key mechanic: Hunker-down

The Abzan philosophy is "If you cannot defeat me, you cannot win." Abzan is the slowest of the five clans and is all about defense. The Abzan lean toward cards that either slow down the opponent or grow in strength over time. The longer Abzan is around, the greater the chance it's going to win. Hunker-down plays into the "strength over time" motif of Abzan.

We played around a lot with hunker-down. We added in a mana cost and a tap requirement both at Development's request. The one request from Design is that we feel the "I hunker-down instead of attacking" is important for flavor and gameplay. "{1}{C}, {T}: Put a +1/+1 counter on this creature" alone does not do the job needed to have the right feel for this mechanic.

Nowadays when talking through mechanics in handoff documents, we make sure to use examples of the mechanic on cards so you can see what we're talking about. We hadn't figured that out thirteen years ago, so I'm going to do the best I can to interpret what the mechanic was based on context.

I believe hunker-down was a tweak on outlast where, instead of being an activated ability, you had to forego attacking with the creature to use it. This likely played close to just having the mana and tap costs for the mechanic, so it wasn't worth the extra words. Since Development was free to go toward the mana and tap version, I was making a plea for the original version. Obviously, I was not successful.

Jeskai, Clan of Cunning

Base color: Blue
Supporting colors: White and red
Key mechanic: Kung fu

The Jeskai believe that the key to victory is outthinking their opponents. A force with greater resources can be defeated if they can be manipulated to use those resources suboptimally. The Jeskai are the clan that takes advantage of trickiness. The Jeskai are the second fastest clan and take advantage of evasion and spells to keep their opponent guessing.

Kung fu was created because we were trying to marry the feeling of Shaolin monks with the trickiness of the clan's cunning. It keeps the ability creature focused while using instants to keep the opponent guessing. To support kung fu, we put a cycle of common combat-oriented cantrips in the Jeskai's colors.

I'm pretty sure kung fu is prowess. The only possible change that happened in development (and maybe this change happened in design; I don't remember) was going from triggering off only instants and sorceries to triggering off all noncreature spells.

Sultai, Clan of Ruthlessness

Base color: Black
Supporting colors: Blue and green
Key mechanic: Delve

The Sultai value the ruthlessness of dragons, meaning they are the clan willing to use whatever means necessary to win. Part of this flavor is that the Sultai make great use of the undead as a resource for their army. We had been looking for a place to use delve—the mechanic from Future Sight that people want to see most other than Contraptions—and it ended up being a perfect fit for Sultai. Delve also fits the slower gameplay of the Sultai. (They are tagged as the second slowest clan.)

We chose to lean toward delve on spells because three of the five mechanics are used solely on creatures (hunker-down, kung fu, and raid). We do have a few creatures with delve because it works there, but we want it on more spells than creatures. Also, the Design team hoped that we could repeat one of the three delve cards from Future Sight. The Development team asked us to remove Death Rattle, so we thought about potentially making the black rare delve card a Tombstalker. Unfortunately, that was reprinted in Modern Masters a year earlier, so we weren't sure whether that was possible. Logic Knot, the counterspell, doesn't feel flavorful. As a note, some cards have "random card from your graveyard" effects, and delve can be used to control the randomness.

I'd been looking for a place to use delve, and Sultai seemed like a perfect fit. The most interesting story here was my quest to get a future-shifted card into the set. I originally put in Death Rattle, which says "Destroy target nongreen creature. It can't be regenerated," so it felt weird. Development was worried about its power level, so they asked us to remove it. I considered Logic Knot, but it didn't feel right for the Sultai. I then tried including Tombstalker. But we removed it because of Modern Masters and because the Creative team said the set wasn't going to have Demons in it. While the final set does have Demons in it, including one with delve, Tombstalker was still cut.

Mordu, Clan of Speed

Base color: Red
Supporting colors: Black and white
Key mechanic: Raid

The Mordu are the clan of speed. They believe that victory comes to those that can strike the fastest. The Mordu are the fastest clan, relying on an aggressive creature-based strategy. The raid mechanic was chosen as their mechanic to help encourage attacking. Raid also has a secondary function in that it hides the motivations of morph creatures attacking. The opponent doesn't know whether you have a trick or are just attacking for the raid bonus.

Design has chosen to only put raid on creatures. While originally that was to make space for raid on spells in "Louie" (back when "Louie" was going to do some riffs on "Huey's" mechanics), the current reason is to make raid play nicer with kung fu. Raid on spells doesn't work with kung fu creatures. You need to cast the spell before attacking for the kung fu bonus, but raid needs you to cast the spell after. Since raid and kung fu share both red and white, we felt it was important to make the mechanics not work against each other.

Raid was only tweaked in its application. Development did end up using it primarily on creatures, but they did make two spells with it. These spells could be used prior to combat to get your prowess bonus.

Temur, Clan of Savagery

Base color: Green
Supporting colors: Red and blue
Key mechanic: Power-up

The Temur are the clan of savagery. They believe that it all comes down to might. The biggest, baddest fighters will win the day. They're the third fastest (or third slowest) clan. They tend to have a more midrange strategy and ramp up to larger creatures in the midgame.

The Temur's mechanic is power-up, which plays directly into the clan's "bigger is better" mantra. We specifically gave Temur numerous spells and activated abilities that temporarily, and sometimes permanently, turn their 1- and 2-power creatures into 3-power creatures to trigger power-up. With one exception (which could be cut if necessary), all the cards with power-up are instants and sorceries.

"Khan You Believe It?"

That's all for this week's article. I hope you enjoyed this look back at an earlier iteration of a beloved set. As always, I'm eager for any feedback on today's article or any part of Khans of Tarkir that I talked about. You can email me or contact me through social media accounts (X, Tumblr, Instagram, Bluesky, and TikTok).

Join me next time for part two of Khans of Tarkir's design handoff document.

Until next time, may you find your favorite clan.