The Calm Before the Dragonstorm
For the past two weeks (Part 1 and Part 2), I talked about designing the set Tarkir: Dragonstorm. Today, I'm going to tell some card-by-card design stories from that set.
Stormscale Scion
In 2007, I started making little comics using an app on my phone. I would eventually name the comics Tales from the Pit. I stopped doing them regularly a couple years ago but still occasionally post them. Because I wanted a more stable place to put the comics, I asked around the Pit (the old nickname for where Magic designers worked) for a good site to do so. Ethan Fleischer recommended Tumblr. When I set up my Tumblr account, it asked if it would be okay for people to send me questions. I said, "Sure." Little did I know what I was getting into. Eighteen years later, I have answered over 160,000 questions. Once the questions started coming in, I changed the name of my blog to Blogatog.
On September 23, 2012, I received the following question:
"Where does cascade stand on chance of reprinted, on a scale of storm-10?"
And my response:
"On the Storm scale (the chance of being reprinted: 1 - cycling, 10 - storm): 3."
That answer prompted a flurry of players wanting to know how other mechanics and game elements ranked on the Storm Scale. Before I knew it, I was answering a huge number of questions about the Storm Scale. The popularity of the Storm Scale then led to a host of other scales:
- The Rabiah Scale – The likelihood of a plane returning
- The Venser Scale – The likelihood of a Planeswalker returning
- The Beeble Scale – The likelihood of a creature type returning
- The Gotcha Scale – The likelihood of an acorn mechanic returning
This led me to writing eight different Storm Scale articles:
- Khans of Tarkir block
- Ravnica and Return to Ravnica blocks
- Zendikar and Battle for Zendikar blocks
- Innistrad and Shadows over Innistrad blocks
- Mirrodin and Scars of Mirrodin blocks
- Kaladesh and Amonkhet blocks
- Theros block and Theros Beyond Death
- Throne of Eldraine through Strixhaven: School of Mages
I've also written three articles on the Rabiah Scale (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3).
Back in 2012 when this all started, the dividing line between what went into a Standard-legal set and what didn't was a lot cleaner. I had a decent understanding of what I thought had a good chance of returning. Since then, Standard has gone through a lot of changes. One of the biggest shifts for the Storm Scale are what I call cameo mechanics.
Because Commander makes use of most of the cards in Magic, we decided it was fine to create cards for our preconstructed Commander decks that were one-of appearances of past mechanics. This was popular enough that we decided to start doing cameo mechanics in premier sets, usually at rare or mythic rare. This was done very deliberately to make sure we understood the ramifications of the individual designs on Constructed formats, especially Standard.
The Storm Scale doesn't really address cameo mechanics, as one-of apperances have a much lower bar to clear than bringing back a mechanic as a major component of a set. I've decided to have the Storm Scale only rank larger, set-wide returns, as that feels more meaningful.
Now we need to jump back for a quick history of the storm mechanic, created by Brian Tinsman for Scourge. The set had a "spells matter" theme, and Brian was looking for a mechanic to capture that. How about a scaling mechanic that cares about how many spells you've cast this turn? What if it scaled by making copies of itself?
Storm went on to be a powerful mechanic that had a huge impact on Constructed formats. It was clear that we had underestimated its power level. For the Time Spiral block, we brought back a lot of mechanics, including storm. "We've learned a lot since Scourge," we thought. "Clearly we're better equipped to design storm cards."
History shows we were wrong on that, and the second wave of storm cards was also pretty powerful. We said, "Okay, no more bringing back storm."
The Time Spiral block ended in 2007, around the same time my blog started. Five years later, I answered the question from above. People had asked about storm coming back earlier, and I had stated that R&D had no intent on it returning as a major mechanic, which is why the question used it as the far end of the scale.
Interestingly, the first person to bring storm back following the Time Spiral block was actually me. I put
Then we made Modern Horizons, a set all about cameo mechanics. We only made one new-to-Magic storm card, but that reopened the door for storm in Eternal-legal sets. Modern Horizons 2 had four new-to-Magic storm cards, one of which was on creature permanents. Modern Horizons 3 would make one new-to-Magic storm card.
All at Once
Then Universes Beyond cards got in on the fun, making cameo cards with storm.
This led to the designers of Outlaws of Thunder Junction Commander creating two new storm cards for the set's Commander decks. As you can see, the dam is starting to burst.
Storm's return to Standard finally came in Bloomburrow on
This brings us to
Flash forward to a major Tarkir: Dragonstorm meeting where we reviewed the set in a massive slideshow. Here, R&D gets to see all the cards in the set and give notes. Here, we learned that the name of Stormscale Dragon was changed to "Scion of the Stormbrood." The main note on the card was "Change it back," which the Creative team did, though it kept the Scion part of the name. This has led to me getting a new popular question: "Did you name this card?" My answer: "No. It's just R&D razzing me."
The Uncommon Dragonstorm Cycle
We knew early during vision design that dragonstorms were going to play a big role in the story, so we were interested in finding a way to represent them. As I talked about in my first preview article, our favorite answer involved enchantment tokens that reduced the cost of your Dragon spells by
Set Design reevaluated how they approached dragonstorms and decided three things:
- They didn't want to use cost reduction as the mechanical throughline.
- They were interested in finding a solution that didn't require counters or tokens as multiple mechanics used those.
- They felt an uncommon cycle was about the size they wanted for the dragonstorms.
So, they needed to make an uncommon cycle of cards called Dragonstorms that synergized with Dragons.
Their first decision was to make them enchantments. The name pushed in that direction. The next question: how do they mechanically interact with Dragons? There were two obvious paths: affecting Dragons or caring about Dragons.
The challenge was that Dragons, in general, are large creatures with high mana costs. This means that a card that interacts with Dragons has to be good even if you only ever get one Dragon. Ideally, the card would have value even if you never got a Dragon, otherwise it wouldn't be worth putting in your deck.
Whenever a design team is trying to solve a problem, we like to look back to see if an old set had the same problem and look at its solution. It turns out we did have a set trying to tackle a similar problem, Amonkhet.
An important story point about Amonkhet was that Bolas had turned the plane into a means to create a zombie army. To do this, he created the Trials of the Five Gods. Because the trials played such an important role in the story, the Design team made a cycle of uncommon enchantments that cared about another part of the set, the Cartouches. The solution was to give the enchantments enters effects so they would act like sorceries. Then, they returned to your hand when a Cartouche entered, letting you replay them for the sorcery's effect.
The Tarkir: Dragonstorm Set Design team borrowed that structure and made their cycle. Because having a Dragon enter is a little tougher than a Cartouche, they had a little more room to make the enters effect strong. The team looked for generally useful effects that Limited decks would want to play. In addition to the clan's archetypes, they were interested in creating decks that focused on Dragons to allow for some variety in play, especially for more experienced players who would draft the set a lot.
The Common Devotee Cycle
The Devotees touch on two different aspects of the set's design: how we made multicolor themes work and how the clans have changed since the Khans of Tarkir block.
I'll start with multicolor. Multicolor sets are difficult to design for numerous reasons, but one of the biggest challenges is ensuring players have access to the mana they need without making it too easy to access all the colors. This gets harder the more colors you expect decks to have. Three-color sets are the most challenging, as I believe designing around four or more colors puts everything at risk of becoming five-color soup.
Sets have to solve this problem both for Limited and Constructed formats. Limited is more challenging, as players have less control over what is in their decks. You have to include mana fixing in a high enough as-fan so that players will have access to it on a regular basis. To help with this, the set has two common cycles. One is a ten-card cycle of life-gain lands that enter tapped and give you 1 life. The other is the Devotees.
The goal of the Devotees is to help your three-color deck when you're missing one of your colors without making it too easy to splash a fourth color. Also, Set Design was interested in finding ways to provide mana that played to the board, meaning they helped you advance toward winning the game rather than taking a turn off to play a mana source.
After trying various things, the Set Design team discovered that once-per-turn color washing (turning one color of mana into another) did the best job. These cards help you fill in the gap of a missing color or play cards with multiple mana symbols. Play Design would go on to put more mana symbols of a color on cards they don't want easily splashed.
Set Design made each of the Devotees a strong creature for their given faction so that you're more encouraged to play them in the right color combination.
The other interesting story of this cycle plays into one of the biggest changes of the clans since their first appearance. Magic's first three-color set was Shards of Alara. That set taught us that three-color factions need to have a focus. The obvious choice for an arc-focused set like Shards of Alara is to center the faction in the color that's allied with the other colors. Bant, the green-white-blue faction, is a white-centered faction.
For a wedge set, the obvious choice was to pick the color that is the enemy of the other two colors. Unfortunately, that wasn't an option for the clans in Khans of Tarkir. The Khans of Tarkir block had three sets, and it was important to us to have a version of the clans throughout all three sets. Since the third set was an ally-color set, we couldn't make the center of the clans their enemy color because it was removed in the third set. Instead, we chose to focus on one of the side colors. The Abzan, a white-black-green faction, was centered in white rather than black.
Tarkir: Dragonstorm no longer had that restriction. As the clans were being reformed in the story, it gave us the freedom to change how we designed them. In the end, we made the decision to shift the center of the faction to the shared enemy color. This is reflected in the story, showing how the former dragonlords' factions adopted their missing color to reclaim the clan. You can see the shift throughout the set, but it's very visible in this cycle because the Devotees are in their returning color.
The one caveat I will make is that we kept the clan's identity and symbol the same. Those attributes are tied to their former central color. While the set focuses on the enemy color as the faction's center, there are still a few nods to the old center.
Zurgo, Thunder's Decree
Zurgo's design does two things that I enjoy. First, it taps into the history of the mobilize mechanic. You see, the earliest version of mobilize, then called horde, didn't force you to sacrifice the tokens at the end of the turn. They were forced to attack, but if they survived, you got to keep them. That proved to be too good, so we had you sacrifice the tokens at the end of your turn.
But the original version of mobilize was fun, if a little too powerful. That made it a great candidate for an individual card design. What if we pick one member of the Mardu—like their leader, Zurgo—to use the mechanic the way we created it? That would allow players to experience the early version of the mechanic without getting too frustrated by it.
The second thing I enjoy is that it allows us to write weird words on cards. I refer to this as "good teaser text." Before each set's release, I do a teaser on my blog, which I share on other social media, where I give hints about cards in the upcoming set. Here's the one for Tarkir: Dragonstorm. For one section, I list snippets of rules text. Things like "Warrior tokens you control have 'This token can't be sacrificed'" make for great teasers because, in a vacuum, it's not clear why we'd write that on card.
That type of text is fun to write because it shows the breadth of what we can do with card design. We can take something that seems like a negative and turn it into a positive. I believe there is an art to designing Magic cards and part of that is getting to make cards that look unlike any other card we've ever made. So, for many reasons, Zurgo's design makes me very happy.
Eye of The Dragonstorm
That's all the time I have for today. As always, I'm eager for any feedback, be it on today's article, any of the cards I talked about, or on Tarkir: Dragonstorm in general. You can email me or contact me through social media accounts (Bluesky, X, Tumblr, Instagram, and TikTok).
Until next time, may you create your own stories with the cards from Tarkir: Dragonstorm.