Giving the Players an Edge, Part 2

Welcome to the second week of Edge of Eternities previews. Last week, I talked about the set's vision design. This week, I'll introduce the Set Design team and Commander Design team, then I'll tell the story of Edge of Eternities's set design. I also have a fun preview card to show off before I'm done.

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Living on the Edge

As is custom, I've asked the set design lead for Edge of Eternities, Andrew Brown, to introduce their team.

Also, before we get to today's story, I want to introduce the design team for the two Edge of Eternities Commander decks. These introductions are done by the Commander design lead, Cameron Williams (who writes about himself in the third person).

Last week, I explained the state of the mechanics as they were handed off by Vision Design. Today's story will pick up from the handoff and walk through the changes each mechanic went through during set design.

Cosmic Cards

I'll start with the meatiest story. During vision design, we were trying to figure out a way to capture the scope of science-fiction media. The stories are about huge spaceships and giant planets. How could we capture those things in card form? Vision Design spent a lot of time on the problem and came up with a solution called cosmic cards. Cosmic was a supertype that could go on various permanent cards. It was represented by a giant card. We had done it for the Transformers Trading Card Game and wanted to bring it to Magic. The idea was that the set's boosters would be larger than normal and each include one cosmic card.

Cosmic cards all had a track on them. The card would tell you how to advance on the track and at what point it would generate certain effects. This design was inspired by one of our early takes on Sagas, cards that Richard Garfield designed which had board game-like tracks on them with squares having icons representing specific effects.

At the Vision Summit, we made mock-ups of giant cards and had everyone use them to get a sense of the logistics of playing with them. Because they were so big, they didn't go into your library. Instead, other cards from the set brought them in from outside the game. Everyone liked how they played, and we felt they were fitting for the big, splashy component of the set.

But many months into set design, we learned that these giant cards weren't feasible. Because we produce so many cards for each Magic set, there are limitations that smaller games don't have. So, Set Design needed a new way to depict space opera scope in the set. They'd have to find another answer.

Whenever we have to solve a problem like this, the first thing we need to do is figure out the constraints. What exactly was the problem we were trying to solve? Here were the design constraints:

• The cards had to represent items enormous in scope, primarily spaceships and planets.
• The cards had to be the standard Magic card size.
• The cards should be of varying mana values and incorporate progressive mechanics.

The Set Design team had enjoyed the design of the cosmic cards and liked how the cards slowly evolved over time into their final forms. Was there a way to keep this progression? They looked at existing mechanics that played in this space—level-up creatures, Classes, and transforming double-faced cards.

Each had multiple states that the card went through. Most of the time, the way to evolve them was mana, so we were interested in seeing if there were other types of inputs other than mana.

The earliest versions of our cosmic replacement depicted locations that creatures went to. This new mechanic let players get on a spaceship or visit a planet. One way we depicted this was by having you tap an untapped creature. Tapping creatures played nicely with warp, and the team started exploring a mechanic that used tapping creatures as a cost.

Eventually, they landed on cards that you built up over time. Tapping creatures felt like they were building spacecraft or visiting a planet. It tapped into a similar resource to Vehicles but felt more like a long-term quest.

After some experimentation, the Set Design team made the station mechanic:

Station (Tap another creature you control: Put charge counters equal to its power on this Spacecraft. Station only as a sorcery. [It's an artifact creature at N+.])

Cards with station are all permanents. In Edge of Eternities, we used station on Spacecraft artifacts and a cycle of mythic rare Planet lands.

Some cards with station have an effect outside of station, either an enters ability or an activated ability. Cards with enters triggers have a spell-like effect, which justifies their mana value and makes it easier to include in your deck, as they have an immediate impact. Cards with activated abilities allow the permanent to tap for an effect, sometimes with a mana cost.

Permanents with station would then have one or two levels of progression. Each level would add a static, triggered, or activated ability. As they progress, Spacecraft become creatures and Planets gain activated abilities.

I'd like to walk you through a station card. Luckily, my card preview today happens to be one.

Warp

Here was how warp was worded following the vision design handoff:

Warp COST (You may cast this spell from your hand for its warp cost during your precombat main phase. If you do, exile it at the end of combat. You may cast the card for as long as it remains exiled.)

Magic design is a lot about iterative loops, where you try something, get feedback, and then change it based on the feedback. The changes to warp during set design were quality-of-life improvements, little tweaks to maximize how well the mechanic plays. When we make those changes, we question decisions from earlier in design. Is this effect happening at the right time? Does the gameplay encourage the most fun play pattern? Are there changes we can make that might allow for more interaction? Can we tweak things to get a better and more understandable template?

Warp is a good example of this process happening in set design. Vision Design developed the core of how the mechanic worked, but there were a lot of small details that had to be figured out. During vision design, you could only warp a card during your first main phase because the card would get exiled at the end of combat. You were then allowed to cast the exiled card whenever, including during your second main phase.

For play-balance reasons, Set Design didn't want you casting the card twice on the same turn, so they added a restriction that you couldn't recast the card the turn it had been warped. They then started questioning if the card should be exiled at end of combat. Letting it stick around until end of turn allowed you to interact with the card during the second main phase. It increased the mechanic's flexibility while cutting off the gameplay patterns we thought were less fun. Here is the final wording of warp:

Warp COST (You may cast this card from your hand for its warp cost. Exile this permanent at the beginning of the next end step, then you may cast it from exile on a later turn.)

Void

Here was how void was worded following the vision design handoff:

Void — If an artifact or creature was put into a graveyard or exile from the battlefield this turn, EFFECT.

Void's evolution is another good example of the difference between Vision Design and Set Design. To use a house-building metaphor, Vision Design creates the blueprints while Set Design builds the actual house. Because of this, Vision Design tends to design cards to make sure potential exists. Their mechanical designs are a proof-of-concept that there's interesting design space available. Set Design, in contrast, has to design all the actual cards that will see print. When doing so, they want to find the limits and restrictions inherent in the mechanic.

For example, Vision Design illustrated interactions between warp and void. Warp exiles cards, and void cares about things being exiled. There are synergies there. The problem comes when you start designing a full set's worth of cards. The final version of warp exiles the card at the beginning of the end step. Exiling the card at that part of the turn limits the effectiveness of void. For instance, let's say you wanted a void effect to reduce the cost of a spell. You can only do that on an instant spell or a card with flash, because you can't cast anything else during the end step. Set Design solved for this by calling out warp by name rather than just relying on waiting for it to exile.

Vision Design is also more focused on creating the set within its own biome or in relation to itself. Set Design has to start thinking about how the set interacts with other sets in Standard and other formats. As such, they reevaluate if a set's mechanics are compatible with the entirety of Magic. Void led Set Design to expand from void caring about artifacts and creatures to caring about any nonland permanent.

Lander Tokens

Here was how lander tokens looked at vision design handoff:

Create a Lander token. (It's an artifact with "{o2}, {oT}: Transform this artifact." It transforms into a Settlement artifact land token with "{oT}: Add one mana of any type that a land you control could produce.)

The Lander tokens are a good example of how sometimes functionality beats novelty. The Vision Design team was trying to capture the discovery aspect of the space opera genre. Inspired by March of the Machine's incubate mechanic, Vision Design made a ramp mechanic that didn't require shuffling. Instead, the mechanic used a double-faced token. Because the land was on the back of the token, the lands that the Landers transformed into had to be the same. Our solution was a land that tapped for any color your other lands could produce, which we modeled after Reflecting Pool.

Set Design needed the mechanic to help with "mana fixing," or getting you the colors of mana you don't have. That meant the Reflecting Pool land didn't work, which made the double-faced token problematic. The solution was to have the token just fetch a basic land from your library. While it required shuffling, it did a better job of accomplishing what the set needed. Yes, you want some splash in your design, but not every mechanic needs to be splashy. Some are "workhorse mechanics," which provide a practical role without drawing much attention.

By removing the double-faced Landers, Set Design was able to add a small theme that cared about differently named lands you controlled. Also, removing the Reflecting Pool-style lands helped address some digital concerns, as Reflecting Pool and its siblings have historically caused problems in digital Magic. All in all, it turned Lander tokens into something that better served the set and design's needs.

The Returning Mechanic

Vision Design handed off modified as a returning mechanic. We thought that a space opera having a lot of Equipment felt reasonable. And since Vision Design had added a +1/+1 counter theme, it tapped into how we implemented modified in Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty. But after much testing during set design, they realized that the set wasn't supporting modified as its own mechanic. It required a different structure that wasn't suitable for the rest of the set.

They tried another theme to replace modified's focus on Equipment: exploration. Space opera media, thematically, is about adventurers traveling through space and discovering new locales. The mechanic that best captured that feeling was landfall. Landfall was a flavorful addition, played well, and was synergistic with the rest of the set. The set design added landfall to the set and centered it in green.

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Over the Edge

That wraps up the story of Edge of Eternities's set design. I think it's a good demonstration of how set design works. They take the blueprint created by Vision Design and figure out the nuts and bolts of building the set. Most of the key components remain, but they get put through the wringer of playtesting to help Set Design best understand the optimal way to build the set, thereby creating the best play experience for all of you.

You can email me or contact me through social media (Bluesky, Tumblr, Instagram, TikTok, and X).

Join me next week for the first part of Edge of Eternities's vision design handoff document.

Until then, may you have fun exploring space.