Building a Foundation with Wizards Designers

LAS VEGAS -- With Foundations on the horizon, developers of the newest Magic release have been showing off the fruits of their labor as card reveals roll out. But Foundations isn't just any set; it's a set that'll be legal in Standard for five years. 

That longevity has made the topic of balance very important: balance for Standard, yes, but also balance between different players and what they hope to see in a reimagined "beginner" set.

For Commander players, Foundations likely wasn't a release many had on their "most anticipated" lists at the start of the year, but as card reveals continue, initial reaction is overwhelmingly positive. It's not just a "beginner" set, but rather a set that satisfies all types of players, both new and old, fans of 60 cards or 100. 

How were the designers able to thread that needle? During Magic Con Las Vegas, I had the opportunity to sit down for a chat with some members of the Foundations team, product leader Max McCall, Senior Game Designer Carmen Klomparens, and Foundations Narrative Lead Ari Zirulnik. 

NICK WOLF: As far as Commander players go, how do you feel Foundations will catch on with the more enfranchised players?

MAX MCCALL: Good. (laughs) A challenge with making sets like Foundations, where we are making a concerted push to do better with people who haven't played much or any Magic yet, is that those kinds of sets tend to get labeled as, "oh, this is only for new players, and I don't need to care about it."

Usually the reason for that is, like, we put in a bunch of cards that only new players will care about. Like, it's really useful to have Siege Mastodons. That's a useful way to teach somebody Magic. But it is not a fun card to play with after you've played like, six games.

So we just took all of those cards out of the main Foundations set and put in cards that are cool and fun, and put the cards that we could use to teach people in the Beginner Box. So the main set itself is stuffed full of cards that are sweet, like Niv-Mizzet and all the homies. Those are cards that people are going to like.

Solemn Simulacrum is one of the most played cards in Commander, period, and that's in Foundations, and there's a bunch of new legends.

NICK: So do you see Foundations as a release that has something for every type of player? That anyone can find something to enjoy out of it?

ARI ZIRULNIK: Yeah! So the really big thing with the world-building is that we want each card to be a window into a larger part of the game, which works for both enfranchised players and for new players.

Like, if I'm new and I see Chandra, I'm like, "Hey, she's really cool. Let me go read about her. Oh, here's a ton of fiction she was in. Here's a ton of other cards she was in that I could be inspired to build with." So you have that door that's open.

And if you are an enfranchised player, you're like, "Oh, here's Chandra. First of all, this card is awesome. Let me figure out how I want to use this new toy. Oh, hey, you know, this reminds me of this other old thing. I really love the Kaladesh story. I really love to play this previous Chandra card in Standard or whatever." So it all connects you to that same like, feeling of enjoyment, but just through different paths forward.

MAX: That new Tinybones is also sick in Commander, that card doesn't mess around.

ARI: Commander-wise, there's a whole bunch of new crazy stuff.

CARMEN KLOMPARENS: We were very contentious about which creatures we "legended" and "de-legended." Like, I know Zul Ashur was actually a late promotion to legendary because we thought it was fun out of the command zone.

ARI: Yeah, fun fact: Herald of Eternal Dawn was, for a brief moment, that was Avacyn.

MAX: Oh, that's tight.

CARMEN: Very quickly we decided not to have a Platinum Angel in the command zone. Who knew? (laughs)

ARI: But that's what we were looking at when we were trying to play. 

NICK: How much did you take design cues from other more decentralized sets, like a Core Set. More "entry level" sets?

ARI: We kind of started from scratch in this approach. Doug Beyer, the other Narrative Lead, and myself, we identified the creature types that we want to be showing and how much, and the planes that we want to be representing and how much. And then we learned how to make pivot tables (laughs), and we had the pivot table spit out, like, what is currently in the file. And then we were able to compare that against what our goals were and get the levels of representation of things that we thought were cool in there. We didn't care how people did it before, we we came up with a new plan, and I feel like we executed it really well. 

NICK: I think that's something that a lot of people, especially older players who have been through these cycles of "starter sets," for lack of a better term, will find a lot more interesting about Foundations, to be able to see that idea being actioned in a different, new approach.

MAX: It was very important to us that an enfranchised player cares about this. It was very important to us that they wanted the cards for their own decks. 

CARMEN: And there are a couple layers to it, too, right? Where, ultimately, a lot of the goals of the set were trying to narrow the gap between "I'm a new Magic player" and "I'm just a Magic player" as much as possible.

And one of the things that's important in that regard is making sure that you can hang at a table with your friends and talk about Magic, whatever that means. And we wanted to make sure the cards in Foundations were cool. You're gonna fall in love with something, you're gonna take it to people at the (local game) shop, and they're gonna go, "Oh yeah, Ball Lightning rips, I love that card."

But also it means that if someone walks up and goes, "Hey, I'm kind of learning to play Magic, what should I buy? Maybe is there, is there something I should go get?" You're like, "Oh yeah, go get Foundations stuff, that's where you're gonna learn a lot about the game."

And getting this sort of buy-in from the community was something that we didn't try to bribe anybody (to get). We're just trying to actually make something that is good, that people feel good about. 

MAX: To that point, one of the things about the Starter Collection, we were like, "Oh, we want every card in the Starter Collection to be Standard-legal." Okay, well, one thing I'm not going to do is sell somebody something called a 'Starter Collection,' and then not put in Sol Ring. And everybody was like, "We're not gonna have Sol Ring legal in Standard." I understand, but it's got to be in the box.

CARMEN: The wrapper on it just says, in like 10 different ways in every language possible, "This is not Standard legal! It's just sweet."

MAX: It's the kind of thing where if your friend was like, "Hey, what should I buy?" You would say to go buy this Commander deck, but it doesn't have Sol Ring in it, you would tell them to buy a different Commander deck. 

These Foundations products have to be sweet, so that when somebody's asks what they should get, you're like, "Oh, like, this thing is actually good." Not like, "Oh, they make this for new players. But it's kind of not that good."

CARMEN: The Starter Collection was kind of almost meant to be the like...you know the appetizer platter you see at every American chain restaurant, where it has like three or four different things? You can try the mozzarella sticks, the tacos, whatever. It's doing that in a lot of ways, where some of the stuff's probably gonna be really awesome, and some of it is there to just kind of give you a taste of what you can do. Where you do have that Sol Ring.

I did put a five color legendary creature in it, that I can't say which one it is, but it was to say, "Hey, if you want to build a five color commander deck, because you want to be able to hang with your friends, you can try that out."

It might not be the strongest -- like I would guess that a Commander pre-con is going to be better than anything that we can give you in perma-legal Standard cards. But you can have your cats deck off to the side, and then you also can throw together your redacted-name, five color deck.

NICK: Atogatog?

CARMEN: Of course.

ARI: Which cards are the mozzarella sticks, and which are the tacos?

CARMEN: Are we talking like a good mozzarella stick? 

ARI: I don't know, this is your platter metaphor.

CARMEN: Well, ideally we don't have any where when you bite it, the whole cheese comes out of the breading.

ARI: I think every mozzarella stick in the box is amazing. If we could just sell mozzarella sticks, I also think that would be a really neat crossover. 

CARMEN: T.G.I.FNMs?

NICK: How much did seeing other "new player" products come and go influence how you wanted to really make this stick and thread the needle, as far as making sure Foundations is definitely something that can stand the test of time?

MAX: One of the things we've been talking about a lot is Universes Beyond, and we're doing a lot to bring people into Magic through Universes Beyond. Perhaps you've heard of Final Fantasy?

NICK: I've seen it being talked about.

MAX: You are not the only person who is familiar with this property. And you know, similarly with Spider-Man, like, if you're a human, you've heard of Spider-Man. So all these people are going to like, hear about Final Fantasy Spider Man, and they're going to be like, oh, "What's Magic?"

Foundations is a place for those people to be able to come into Magic. And so as we're acquiring all these people via Universes Beyond, we need a baseline experience as just like, "Welcome to Magic, here's what we have."

NICK: So Foundations is like a Magic splash page.

CARMEN: I think that actually touches on something that is connecting a few dots here. For a lot of people, Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth, those are going to be their first games of Magic, no matter how cool we make Foundations, and we're going in knowing that, eyes open, that all of this big push for Universes Beyond is gonna get a lot of new Magic players who their first games aren't always going to be with Foundations.

But if they go "That prerelease was sick, I want to come back to that game store," or "I made a new friend," whatever it is, Foundations is going to give them the vocabulary. It's going to give them the tools that they need to be able to come back for weekly Standard or whatever.

NICK: I think that's a really important part -- having something where new players can learn the vocabulary of Magic, the concept of just sitting down and playing Magic. I think one issue that we've seen in the past couple years is that a lot of those new players, like you're talking about, end up playing Commander first, and that's probably arguably the worst place for a new player to start.

MAX: It's definitely complicated, but the fact that it's multiplayer and you can play with your friends is actually... it is true that commander is the most complicated way to play Magic, but you're playing with your friends and it's multiplayer. Your friends probably aren't going to be like, "Welcome to Commander!" Attack.

ARI: My friends actually did do this.

CARMEN: We've all played Magic long enough that we're thinking "your friends didn't do that?" (laughs)

MAX: The thing is, if you're learning Commander with your friends, your friend is already teaching you Magic. Your friend is a better teacher of Magic than any booklet or YouTube video or whatever, both because you like your friend and also can ask follow-up questions.

And if you start doing something wrong, your friend will be tell you. One of the other problems with teaching players is there are so, so many things. Like with the booklets in the beginner box, we have to we specify "put the cards (in your library) face down on the table," because otherwise people put the cards face up, because the interesting part of the card is face up. So we have to teach them how to construct everything, and we've run several tests, but I'm sure people will think of things we didn't think to specify.

CARMEN: We also don't think it's wrong if players do try out Foundations and decide 100-card Magic's for them, right? That's all we're trying to do, is get people to find things in Magic to fall in love with and reward them for that affection. We just want to path people into whatever kind of Magic they want to play, because Magic has been an awesome part of so many of our lives, and we want to be able to give that to other people, too.

It sounds so corny, I know we're all on the payroll we're supposed to say all of this, but like, it's like a chicken and egg thing, right? Like, it's how we got here.

ARI: My first game of Magic was in 1998. 

NICK: Was there anything that was left on the cutting room floor that you can share, as far as card inclusions, designs, anything like that?

CARMEN: There are some cards I could tell you that we tried out that aren't in there. Like at one point we had Monastery Swiftspear in there. That's one of my personal favorite cards of all time.

But that was kind of in a bad place in terms of making games really repetitive, where you always kind of know when your opponent casts a Monastery Swiftspear you're going to know what kind of deck they're playing. Maybe the details change, but it's pretty aggressive. Llanowar Elves, on the other hand, is one where they play it, and the star of the show is probably going to be a different card, different three drops as sets rotate, right?

So figuring out where we wanted to distribute our power points in game design, and what cards we thought would be fun to be legal for over the long time, was pretty interesting. For Swiftspear, that's just like, "Oh, damn (snaps fingers). This close."