Odds & Ends: 2024, Part 2
Last week, I began my yearly mailbag column where I answer fan-submitted questions about the premier sets of the year. I had so many good questions that I decided to make it a two-parter. So, let's get to some more questions.
Here's the answer I got from Roy Graham, Magic Story lead:
"Yes! We absolutely considered featuring Ashiok in Duskmourn—like you said, the idea makes a lot of sense. We ended up pivoting because we wanted the House to feel like a terrible, genuine threat to anything within its walls, Planeswalkers included, and frankly, Ashiok would have enjoyed their time on the plane a little too much."
Q: Of the four sets, which do you wish you'd done a second set of immediately?
Likely none of them. As I stated last week, the data clearly shows players prefer variety. If I was told I had to have a second set, there's an obvious answer: Bloomburrow. Of the four premier sets of the year, it was clearly the one that resonated with the most players. (Although I should stress at the time of writing this article, we don't have much data on Duskmourn yet.)
Bloomburrow to Duskmourn is probably the sharpest creative shift we've done. The key to Magic though is that you can play with whatever feels comfortable to you. If you're enjoying Bloomburrow, you can keep playing with Bloomburrow. If a new set is not thematically to your liking, we have over 30 years of cards you can go back to and explore. On the flip side, there are players who didn't enjoy the vibe of Bloomburrow and might find Duskmourn more their style, and they can play with Duskmourn. Then, there's a third group who really enjoys both and will have fun mixing and matching them.
Q: How does releasing two bangers in a row with Bloomburrow and Duskmourn: House of Horror feel?
It feels good. The coolest thing about it is that it shows how flexible Magic is as a game system. You want to play with cute little animals? Magic can do that. You want to play with creepy modern horror? Magic can do that. You want to mix the two? Magic can do that. Magic's greatest strength is that it empowers the player to make it the game they want it to be. As I like to say, Magic is a game that makes everyone a game designer.
Q: Were any other names considered before settling on Bloomburrow?
The two other names we explored using were "Briarbend" and "Idyllwald."
This is a problem that we've identified and have taken steps to solve. Remember, we work far ahead, so any change we make will take a little time to come out. I can say that we're working on solutions to this problem now, but implementing them will take time.
We do have overlap of mechanical themes so that different sets can be played together in Constructed environments (such as committing crimes, outlaws, and Lizards overlapping), but the feedback from market research is that players like having a wide variety of different flavors and enjoy the fact that Magic keeps doing different things. The ever-swinging pendulum is a feature, not a bug.
I've been wanting to do a top-down cartoon setting for many years, but it requires some things that aren't a great fit for a premier set.
Yes, Outlaws of Thunder Junction, "Tennis," and multiple upcoming sets all make use of the Omenpaths to do some things that we couldn't do without them. Outlaws of Thunder Junction let us do a villains theme and bring appropriate characters from across the Multiverse to play into that theme. "Tennis" is a set stretched across three different planes. The unspecified sets examine the ramifications of the Omenpaths.
There's a lot of competition for every card slot these days. Vanilla creatures, in general, are hard to push because they don't have a lot of elements we can adjust to balance them, so they tend to lose out to cards with more functionality. In addition, tokens have absorbed much of the vanilla creature space, so there's just less of a mechanical need for it. That's not to say we won't make any more vanilla creature cards, but their need has gone significantly down, so yes, I expect to see them at a lower frequency in premier sets.
For those unaware, on my blog, I've created several scales to talk about how likely something is to return in a premier set. For planes, it's called the Rabiah Scale. I've written three articles about it (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3). The lower it is on the scale, the greater the chance of its return. If I had to grade the plane of Bloomburrow on the Rabiah Scale, I'd give it a two. If I had to grade the plane of Thunder Junction, I'd give it a seven. What this means is I'd be shocked if we never returned to Bloomburrow but feel a return to Thunder Junction is far less of a certainty.
Magic works numerous years ahead, so no set that we've been able to apply lessons learned this year or late last year have come out yet. The Big Score was a truly last-minute decision that involved us scrapping a product, Outlaws of Thunder Junction Epilogue Boosters, and folding it into the main set. That kind of change is a big exception to the normal timeline of our processes.
As I said in this year's "State of Design" column, I believe Murders at Karlov Manor focused too much on the murder mystery theme and not enough on Ravnica. With 20/20 hindsight, I probably would have cut Detective typal, the suspect mechanic, and the cloak mechanic, partly because the Detective theme was too high and partly because manifest dread was coming later in the year. I would have changed the template on Cases to make it clearer. And I would have started a discussion about whether disguise should be ward 2 or ward 1. I would then have added a mechanic or two, and probably a couple cycles, that felt very Ravnica-centric. Oh, and I would have changed the name. No "Murders" and no "Karlov."
The legendary mechanic is the downside. We don't have a history of adding additional drawbacks, as a general thing, to legendary creatures.
Q: Did you consider doing dogs for Bloomburrow at all?
Bloomburrow was designed to match a specific biome, so we mostly considered animals that lived in that biome, and dogs don't. Also, we were drawing from a specific genre, and dogs aren't used a lot in the genre. We did talk about including dogs, as well as cats, because they're so popular, but they just didn't fit the overall aesthetic of the world.
The initial two ideas that got the set greenlit were "modern horror inspired by media from the '70s and '80s" and "a plane that's an endless haunted house." We knew going in that part of doing a genre that we've touched upon before, horror, required us to be vigilant about how we've used it in the past and to try aiming the design toward new mechanical space. So, "a horror set that's not Innistrad" wasn't the original idea but was something we were conscious of early in design.
Q: Why wasn't there a Betrayal at House on the Hill tie-in for Duskmourn?
There was. At the Duskmourn preview panel at PAX West (where we first introduced all the mechanics), attendees were given a handout that was a haunt card for Betrayal at House on the Hill with a Duskmourn theme.
Any time we try something new, especially something that pushes in a direction we haven't before, there's risk involved. That doesn't mean we weren't optimistic that players would like it. We made it. It just means that the idea was met with the normal skepticism that comes with anything we haven't done before. To greenlight the project, we had to use existing data to prove it had potential for success.
A trope is "a common theme or device," meaning it's things people associate with a particular category. If we're doing a set with a theme, tropes are the things people expect to see. Obviously, we can surprise people and include things they don't expect, but if we don't reach a certain mass of tropes, the set won't feel like the category we're trying to be resonant in.
Every set has tropes. Every set. We're painters, and it's the paint we use. We make a lot of Magic sets, and we need for them to each feel distinct, so we use themes. And if we use themes, we have to use tropes. This year had three new settings, each with its own theme, and one returning plane that was a backdrop set for a new theme. When we tackle a new theme, we're most likely to hit the low-hanging fruit. That's what 2024 was—a lot of low-hanging fruit.
A separate issue is what we call an "allusion." An allusion is when you make a nod to a particular execution of a trope from a specific media source. One of the things that can happen when using low-hanging fruit is that you get a higher percentage of allusions. That was another issue with 2024: players disliked our execution of some allusions.
Now, in general, common tropes score well with players. Allusions usually score well, although it's more dependent on what's being alluded to. After talking with a lot of players, I have come to the belief that the number-one issue this year was one of volume. We just did too much of it. I think if the sets were spaced apart more this would have been less of an issue.
When I said every set does tropes, that doesn't mean every set does tropes everyone knows. For example, as you point out, Bloomburrow uses tropes as much as the other sets, but the genre it's tapping into is not as well known, so a lot of the tropes just comes across as "flavorful worldbuilding." When spacing out sets, I think we should intersperse ones using lesser-known trope space with ones utilizing better-known tropes.
In summation, I do think we made mistakes in 2024 that will inform how we plan out sets in the future and execute on tropes within a set. Tropes, though, won't be going away. The issue is how we use them, not should we use them.
To answer this question, I went to Ian Duke, the lead set designer for Bloomburrow. Here's what he had to say:
"Bloomburrow has a lot of focus on small creatures that lean toward banding together and helping each other. Calamity Beasts were our worldbuilding solution for having solo large creatures, often with splashy, destructive powers. From a gameplay perspective, we wanted to make sure we had some especially large creatures at lower rarities to make sure we had variety in creature size appearing frequently enough in Play Boosters. While we do uncommon legends in many sets, uncommons appear more frequently in Play Boosters, so we didn't want them all to be legendary.
Also, from a worldbuilding perspective, there are some Calamity Beasts that are particularly more well known and feared by the inhabitants of Bloomburrow, as well as some that are more important to the set's narrative, like Maha. So, it made sense for some to be highlighted as legendary. Early in set design, all of the Calamity Beasts were nonlegendary, but after discussions with our Worldbuilding team, we liked the idea of having some legendary ones. We decided to pick out a cycle of them to be legendary to have representation across all five colors."
Hybrid has proven to be a very useful tool. It's deciduous and available to any design team who needs it. I don't expect every set to use it, but its overall use has been trending up.
I passed your question along to Ben Weitz, one of our play designers. Here's what he said:
"We think Magic is more fun when the main focus and interaction points of the game are on the battlefield. The flow of the game is more gradual and predictable and less abrupt. This means that we always want creature-based decks to exist and be strong. However, we also really value diversity of gameplay and showing off all the different strategies Magic has to offer. This means that we think it's most fun when spell-based decks are jockeying with creature-based decks over control of the battlefield. Control decks need to stabilize, and combo decks need to assemble their engine while still surviving. We definitely like control and spell-based decks, we just want the focal point of most games of Magic to be the battlefield, not the stack or the graveyard."
"Enchantment Creature — Nightmare" doesn't leave room for more creature types. Often questions about why we didn't do something can be answered with "typography."
In early design, we had a list of fifteen animals: five monocolor and ten two-color:
- White – Fox
- Blue – Otter
- Black – Skunk
- Red – Mole/Lizard
- Green – Turtle
- White-Blue – Bird
- Blue-Black – Rat
- Black-Red – Weasel
- Red-Green – Badger
- Green-White – Rabbit
- White-Black – Bat
- Blue-Red – Raccoon
- Black-Green – Squirrel
- Red-White – Mouse
- Green-Blue – Frog
As you can see, all ten of the final choices existed here, but not necessarily in the colors they ended up in. Many of the animals that didn't make it became cameos.
The set has an enchantment theme, which required enchantment creatures. It has several top-down artifact creatures. The set also has the manifest dread mechanic which allows you to discard cards at the top of your library, which greatly increases lands getting into your graveyard. The flavor is a slam dunk, and having a graveyard component in a horror set is very on theme. How did an eight come back? The stars aligned, and it was a perfect fit.
Q: Bloomburrow felt like an opportune set to introduce some new tribal spells … why not?
We recently renamed the tribal card type to kindred. We haven't changed our intent on how often we want to use it. We generally don't think the gameplay is worth the addition of the words on the card, so our bar to using it is high. We did use it in Modern Horizons 3, so it's not off the table for future use, but the reason to do so must be high, and Bloomburrow having a typal theme wasn't high enough.
That type of decision was made over a year ago. A lot of logistics come along with moving things in a schedule, and it's not something that can be done last minute. Also, Duskmourn as a normal premier set has more play events associated with it, which we want earlier in the year.
I honestly enjoyed making all of them. That's one of my favorite parts of my job. Each set is different to design. It has different needs, and different constraints, and is its own unique puzzle to solve. That's why I've been able to do this job for almost 30 years without getting bored.
You've Got E-mail
And with that, I must end this year's mailbag column. Thanks to everyone who took the time to send in a question. As always, I'm eager to hear any feedback on any of my or my co-workers' answers. You can email me or contact me through any of my social media accounts (X, Tumblr, Instagram, and TikTok).
Until next time, may the game keep surprising you.