Lessons Learned, Part 8
In addition to writing Making Magic and running my blog, I have a weekly podcast called Drive to Work (listen on Apple and Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts). I do two episodes a week, usually recorded on my drive to work, so about 30 minutes per episode. One of my recurring series on the podcast is "Lessons Learned." During an episode, I take a set that I led or co-led the design for and walk through the lessons I learned from leading it. Starting last year, I began doing a Making Magic version of this series, complete with podcast embeds, where I go into greater detail. Here are the previous seven "Lessons Learned" articles:
The last set I wrote about was Unfinity, which means I'm starting with Phyrexia: All Will Be One.
Phyrexia: All Will Be One
Lesson: "Mechanical themes are not beholden to execution."
The Phyrexians have an interesting history. They played a role in The Brothers' War, the decades-long fight between Urza and Mishra. That story was hinted at in the flavor text of cards in Antiquities. As we started producing novels about Magic's story, the Phyrexians played a larger role.
When Michael Ryan and I were putting together the Weatherlight Saga, we needed a larger villain behind our main villain, Volrath. Our initial storyline was set over three blocks, and we wanted the final block, and thus the final act of the story, to be an invasion of Dominaria. The obvious choice for an invading force was the Phyrexians. While the story shifted a bit from our original vision, the Phyrexians remained the main villains, and the end of the story did involve a Phyrexian invasion of Dominaria. At the end of the Weatherlight Saga, the Phyrexians were wiped from the face of the Multiverse.
Brady Dommermuth and I were both big fans of the Phyrexians, so we created a story that would bring them back. It involved Karn unwittingly bringing Phyrexian oil to Mirrodin, a plane he'd created. During the Mirrodin block, we hinted at the Phyrexians' presence but kept it subtle. Then, when we returned to Mirrodin during the Scars of Mirrodin block, we used the block to tell the story of the Phyrexians returning to power. We showed the Phyrexians growing in number and strength during Scars of Mirrodin, warring with the Mirrans in Mirrodin Besieged, and overtaking Mirrodin in New Phyrexia. The story ended with the Phyrexians becoming a multiplanar threat, with the one caveat being that they had no way to move between planes and were currently stuck on New Phyrexia.
We left that storyline on the back burner for a number of years while other threats like the Eldrazi and Nicol Bolas took center stage. Once War of the Spark wrapped up the Bolas arc, we were ready for the Phyrexians to make their glorious return. One of the challenges of telling a Phyrexian story is that they dip a bit into body horror, which is a divisive genre. We wanted the Phyrexians to be the main threat while limiting how much Phyrexia we would be included in any one set. Over multiple releases, we would slowly increase their prominence.
Kaldheim just had one single Phyrexian: Vorinclex. This was important as it was a sign that the Phyrexians had figured out how to get to other planes, but we kept them on just one mythic rare card. The Phyrexians showed up again in Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty and Streets of New Capenna. We brought them into the limelight with Dominaria United and The Brothers' War, although mostly keeping them to black. There are a lot of fans of the Phyrexians, so we wanted to have one set that was basically wall-to-wall Phyrexia themed. If you were excited to have the Phyrexians return, we'd give you one set that gave you that unfiltered. That set was Phyrexia: All Will Be One.
We started the design with a question: how do we make the most Phyrexian set? We did this by looking back at everything we'd mechanically connected to Phyrexia, most of which was established in the Scars of Mirrodin block. Here are the three mechanics that stood above the rest:
- Poison
- Proliferate
- Phyrexian mana
We referred to them as "the three Ps." There was one small problem. Well, actually three big problems. I'll go through each of them here.
Poison first appeared on two cards in Legends, Magic's third expansion and first large expansion. Antiquities spawned dedicated mill decks with the creation of
Scars of Mirrodin introduced infect, a riff on wither from Shadowmoor, where damage from creatures was dealt in the form of poison counters to players and -1/-1 counters to creatures. Infect was highly polarizing and caused several play-balance issues, the biggest being that it forced players to either be all in on poison or not use it all. It was also tied directly to -1/-1 counters, something R&D had soured on over the years.
Proliferate showed up in Scars of Mirrodin as a means to play into the disease metaphor we used for the Phyrexians. Initially, it just cared about poison and -1/-1 counters but was changed to include all types of counters later in design. The mechanic was a big hit with the players. We liked the mechanic and tried to bring it back numerous times, but we kept running into a problem: +1/+1 counters. Proliferating them was more powerful than any other counter, so we always had to account for that. In any other context, proliferate was too weak to be useful.
We finally found a way to execute on proliferate in War of the Spark. Because the set was about Planeswalkers, whose cards use loyalty counters, we could make that the focus of the proliferating. This led to the creation of the amass mechanic as a means to limit +1/+1 counters. Instead of spreading the +1/+1 counters around, most went onto an Army token, limiting proliferate's influence. But the issues were clear. We'd tried to use proliferate in five sets and ended up using it in one. This showed the challenges it brought to the structure of a set.
Phyrexian mana was first created in New Phyrexia by Aaron Forsythe, who led the development team. Ken Nagle, who'd led the design team, had tried an ambitious mechanic called link. It allowed you to connect two different creatures together and make one fused creature with all the abilities, but Aaron had to kill it for rules reasons. Phyrexian mana was Aaron's attempt at a splashy mechanic. His first pitch of it was colorless mana, and I convinced him we could do more with it if we used all five colors.
Phyrexian mana went on to be very powerful. In fact, too powerful from a play-balance perspective. The ability to trade life, a resource you start the game with, for mana, a resource that builds up over time, was potent. We underestimated that exchange when making the set. The usage of mana in different colors also caused a bunch of color pie breaks, though I should note that's an execution issue, not something intrinsic to Phyrexian mana.
So, infect felt imbalanced and used a play element (-1/-1 counters) that we weren't sure we wanted to bring back, proliferate had significant structural requirements, and Phyrexian mana was something we didn't want to do again for play-design reasons. These were the three things we identified as being core to the Phyrexians, and we had to find a way to make the Phyrexian element of the set stand out.
This brings us to the big lesson of Phyrexia: All Will Be One. The solution to all three problems was the same. When you are repeating a mechanical theme, you're not beholden to its last execution. The key is figuring out what core experience people liked most and finding a different path to that experience. Let's go through each of the three mechanics.
Poison – The "cool factor" of poison is that it's an alternate-win condition. It also has a different feel and flavor to it. The most important thing we needed to capture that feeling was the poison counters themselves. While the players connected poison with infect, it's not the only way to deliver poison. Before Scars of Mirrodin, there were poison cards, and even after it, we've done a handful of cards using poison counters without infect. We could find a new mechanic or, in this case, mechanics.
The first mechanic we needed basically already existed. When we teased poison on the two cards from Future Sight, we used a mechanic called poisonous. We ended up changing it to toxic to slightly tweak the mechanic (mainly so it wouldn't be a triggered ability for digital play), but it operated in a similar manner. Because creatures with toxic dealt damage and gave poison counters, it helped with the siloing issue of poison in the Scars of Mirrodin block.
Second, we created a new mechanic called corrupted that rewarded you for giving your opponent three or more poison counters. This broadened the number of strategies you'd use poison in and expanded how many decks could play with poison counters, especially in Limited.
Proliferate – In the Scars of Mirrodin block, proliferate mostly cared about poison counters and -1/-1 counters. When we brought it back in War of the Spark, it was mainly aimed at loyalty counters and the +1/+1 counters on Army creature tokens from amass. The key to solving this issue in Phyrexia: All Will Be One was to look for a different kind of counter. That led us to creating oil counters and removing +1/+1 counters from the set. This gave proliferate a strong purpose in the set alongside poison counters while letting us easily balance the oil counters from a design perspective.
Phyrexian mana – The solution to Phyrexian mana lied not in what it did but in how we used it. In New Phyrexia, Phyrexian mana was used in the mana costs of spells. That allowed people to play cards several turns earlier than intended, which was a big part of the play-balance issue. In Phyrexia: All Will Be One, we mostly used Phyrexian mana on activated abilities. This insured that you played the card fairly and only discounted the card once it was on the battlefield. Phyrexia: All Wil Be One also made use of the compleated mechanic from Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty on a cycle of planeswalker cards. Compleated lets you discount a card's cost, but results in that planeswalker entering with less loyalty counters, helping adjust for playing the card earlier.
All of these changes created an environment that felt quite Phyrexian and had a very different mechanical execution. That was my big design takeaway. You can make things feel similar without making them the same. Magic design is an iterative process, which means that with each new design, we get feedback from our players. Future designs have to take the feedback into account. Returning to settings or mechanics is not just about repeating what we did but finding new expressions that capture a similar vibe. I'm very happy with how Phyrexia: All Will Be One did this.
March of the Machine
Lesson: "A design needs a focus."
March of the Machine was our second capstone event set. That is, it was a conclusion to a giant multi-year storyline. The first capstone event set was War of the Spark. Nicol Bolas, intent on stealing Planeswalker sparks, brought several Planeswalkers to Ravnica. This would kill all of those Planeswalkers and allow Bolas to ascend to godhood. The set had to capture this epic war of our most prominent Planeswalkers against Bolas's army of zombies: the Eternals.
I remember when the set was first pitched to me. I was worried, saying that we "only get three planeswalker cards per set. How am I supposed to convey an entire Planeswalker war?" In the end, my team and I embraced the essence of what the story wanted, which was a huge amount of Planeswalkers, and made a set with 39 planeswalker cards. At the time, I didn't think we would ever make a set that had a larger scope. Well, I was wrong.
When I was first pitched March of the Machine, which was the ending of the Phyrexian storyline, I asked about the scope of the conflict.
Me: Okay, the Phyrexians invade the Multiverse. How many planes do they attack?
Them: All of them.
Me: All of what?
Them: All the planes in the Multiverse.
Me: Aren't there an incredibly large number of planes in the Multiverse?
Them: Fine, they attack all the planes we know about.
Me: But how many planes will we see in the actual set?
Them: As many as we can.
Me: So, it's like War of the Spark, but instead of almost every known Planeswalker, it's every known plane.
Them: Exactly!
Me: Okay.
While the Phyrexians didn't invade every single known plane, they got fairly close, so there was a lot we had to capture.
The big lesson of this set was how to tackle such a massive concept. Obviously, we couldn't show the entirety of every plane. The team had to pick and choose what would fit in the set. The trick I've learned is to condense your design to a single concept. Start by finding a word that embodies what you want the set to be. This takes the design from being absolutely anything and turns it into something concrete. That's super important when you're faced with too many options.
The word I chose for this set was "Multiverse." During War of the Spark, the big realization I had during the design was that I'd picked the wrong focus. The set was about a war between Planeswalkers. We'd focused on "war" instead of "Planeswalker." But, midway through working on the set, we realized that there's nothing that new about war in a Magic set. Magic, by virtue of its mechanics elements, is about conflict. What made War of the Spark stand out was its inclusion of so many Planeswalkers. Once I had that focus, I asked: how many planeswalker cards could we put in one set? That sent the team down the path we needed to make the set.
This all made me realize that the importance of the Phyrexian invasion wasn't the conflict itself. Again, Magic is always about conflict. The most attractive element was the breadth of planes we were showing off. If War of the Spark was about the Planeswalkers, March of the Machine was about the planes. Everything in the set wanted to be seen through that lens.
The set obviously had a conflict. It was a war after all. We needed to show off both sides of the war but through the lens that this set was about showing off the diversity of the Multiverse. Each, the Phyrexians and the non-Phyrexians, had their own focus word. The Phyrexians were about "corruption." They wanted to turn every inhabitant of every plane into one of them. The denizens of the Multiverse were about "cooperation." The fate of everything they loved was on the line. Everyone had to forget their differences and unite against a common threat.
Because the core concept was about the Multiverse, we didn't need to divide the set in half, something we often do when the set is about a battle between two sides. In the end, the Phyrexians would make up about a third of the set. The rest of the Multiverse would make up two thirds of the set. This was done partially because we'd just released Phyrexia: All Will Be One, which focused on the Phyrexians, but more importantly, we had to show off the Multiverse, and the non-Phyrexian side just did that better.
Early on, we decided a mechanic should show off each plane, similar to how War of the Spark's planeswalker cards showcased the Planeswalkers. I wasn't sure what form those cards were going to take, but I knew it needed to be splashy, so my team and I investigated creating a new card type. The final version, created by the Set Design team, was the battle card type. There were 36 battles in the set, with one appearing in every March of the Machine Draft Booster. Each battle represented a different plane. We also used a naming convention that allowed the name of each plane to appear on the card.
Another splashy thing we did was team-up cards that depicted two legendary creatures from a plane on one card. Like the battles, we limited them to one per plane, allowing us to maximize how many planes we showed off. Whenever we made a cycle of cards representing the defenders of the Multiverse, we stretched the cycle across five different planes.
We also made a new mechanic called backup and brought back convoke to capture the concept of cooperation. Again, we made sure that as many different planes were represented as possible. Ensuring cards represented their plane well was important, so we labeled playtest cards with the name of the plane they were from to reinforce it.
The Phyrexian designs were geared toward capturing the flavor of corruption, but even those were designed through the lens of the Multiverse. For example, we wanted to show iconic creatures from various settings being turned into Phyrexians. To do this, we used double-faced cards that started as non-Phyrexians and eventually became Phyrexians. Like the battles and the team-ups, we made sure that each Phyrexian transformation represented a different plane. We used Inctubator tokens, Phyrexian typal, and "transformation matters" to add to the Phyrexian corruption theme but spread each of these across a wide variety of planes.
The result is that the set does a good job of showing the breadth of the Multiverse. Yes, the conflict of the war comes through, but it's ultimately a backdrop against the expansiveness of the Multiverse. Having this focus was key to keeping the set centered even though its scope was as big as it gets. This was an important lesson I've carried over to other designs.
"And That's the Bell"
When I started my "Lessons Learned" columns last year, I said I would do further ones as I had additional sets and podcasts to reference. I assume I will do my ninth chapter of this series sometime next year, as I still have a handful of sets to talk about.
As always, if you have any feedback on today's column, any of my lessons, or on any of the sets I talked about, feel free to email me or contact me through any of my social media accounts (X, Tumblr, Instagram, Bluesky, and TikTok).
Join me next week for another installment of Making Magic.