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Episode 207: Doctor Who and Tardis
214 Plays1 year ago
Hello, Podwalkers, and welcome back to another episode of the Goblin Lore Podcast! He's back y'all and this time he's explicitly talking about Time and Space. We're talking of course about Gavin Verhey! Taya and Hobbes sit down to discuss the design of the set from a color pie, mechanical, and lore perspective. Gavin provides amazing insights (evergreen) on how the design team approached this set knowing it would be Commander Decks. Learning about the decisions that were made and why (yes Hobbes complained A LOT about the Grixis Villains) provides brilliant insight into how Universe Beyond and Magic Cards in general are created.
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Opening and closing music by Wintergatan (@wintergatan). Logo art by Steven Raffael (@SteveRaffle)
Goblin Lore is proud to be presented by Hipsters of the Coast, and a part of their growing Vorthos content – as well as Magic content of all kinds. Check them out at hipstersofthecoast.com
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Transcript
Introduction with Gavin Verhey
00:00:29
Speaker
Hello Podwalkers and welcome back to the Goblin Lore podcast. Today we have a special guest Gavin Verhe on to talk about something that he knows a little bit about, Doctor Who. He's known to, I guess he studied up for it to do these sets. So he's kind of new to the fandom, so we're gonna take it easy on him. But yeah, welcome Gavin Verhe, nice to have you.
00:00:52
Speaker
Hey, great to be here, everybody. And great to talk to you today about something I'm very passionate about and so happy I got to work on Doctor Who Commander. And maybe even some normal Doctor Who too.
00:01:02
Speaker
Yeah, let's just talk even normal Dr. Who. I mean, this is something I've talked about in the past, but I actually met Gavin for the first time ever in person at Gallifrey One, the Dr. Who con. We were waiting for Sylvester McCoy to go on stage and regale us. And he's still one of my favorite people ever to see at cons. He does just an amazing interview. So yeah. So Gavin, welcome to
Favorite Doctor Who Characters
00:01:28
Speaker
the show. Back to a lot of promotional stuff as well for the 60th, which I think is so cool.
00:01:32
Speaker
You know, I was almost hoping he was going to like show up in Vegas for the Magic Con somehow. Well, the last, some other time, some other time. You know, we got Elijah Wood, now we need to work on somebody from Doctor Who. So, so we'll get started. My name is Hobbs Q. My pronouns are he, him. We'll just jump right into this. Let me introduce my co-host, Taya. Hi, Taya. My pronouns are she, her or they, them. And we've also heard from Gavin already, so welcome, Gavin.
00:02:01
Speaker
Hey, yeah, I'm Gavin. My pronouns are he, him. So we always like to start off with a question and we're going to start off with just let's just keep it simple. Who is your favorite doctor? And we'll let our guests take this away first.
00:02:14
Speaker
Yeah, my answer is exceedingly boring, but it is true, so it's what I'm going to say, which is the 10th doctor. It's my first doctor, so I started with, yes, I know he's most people's favorite doctor, or at least, I don't know how to say, most of everybody, but he is a pretty stock answer for favorite doctor, but I just love him. I thought he did an amazing job embodying the doctor as a 10th doctor. I think he has a number of my favorite episodes, and what's not to love? So I gotta go with David Tennant, the 10th doctor.
00:02:41
Speaker
So can you give us a simple why? Just to, you know, what is it about his personification of the doctor? I think to me he's the right mix of like
00:02:52
Speaker
fun and curious alongside dark and mysterious at the same time, right? He tends to be pretty fun. But if you wrong him, or if you uncover a time about his past, you might learn more than you bargained for. And just a number of his episodes are among my favorite episodes, right? Yes, of course, you can reference Blink, which is an all time, all time great, but also things like Girl in the Fireplace. Yeah.
00:03:16
Speaker
the waters of Mars, the sounds in the Library of the Forest of the Dead, stuff like that are just among some of my favorites. And I feel like when I think of the doctor, it's my first doctor, it's who I've resonated with so well. Plus, I cosplayed as 10 for a while. So obviously, I've got residents there. So yeah. Cool. Taya, how about for you?
00:03:36
Speaker
Uh, I'm going to go with a ninth doctor, Christopher Ackerson. Uh, you know, largely it's my, my main first doctor as well. I saw some of the, uh, Sylvester McCoy stuff as a kid and the, uh, the movie episode with the eighth doctor, uh, but I don't remember a whole lot of it. So I really started watching with the reboot.
00:04:00
Speaker
And I love his style with the leather jacket and everything and really enjoyed his season and a half on the air. And just kind of rebooting the whole series and bringing it into the modern air and giving us the doctor as we know him today. So that's my answer.
00:04:22
Speaker
So I, you know, I actually, you know, Christopher Eccleston is mine as well, especially, and I appreciate it more even as we've gone along. And I actually think one of the things that made me really appreciate him, and this is where I have what could be another favorite doctor, but there's really just not enough. And that's not John Hurt as the war doctor. Like I before he had asked, like I would have I would have taken a whole like side shoot of like what happened during the war. I've always been interested in the time war.
00:04:51
Speaker
And knowing kind of more about it because basically and this is why I love Eccleston is going back now We realized he jumped in basically right after right like the end of the time or that that would have been where Eccleston came from and Seeing that kind of like he's now on his own his people are gone that portrayal is amazing and to me rewatching that coming out strong with Everybody you know like the episode with everybody lives that being very early on
00:05:22
Speaker
in context now is just something that makes me really appreciate him as I've been doing a rewatch. I will also say I love Tom Baker.
00:05:29
Speaker
So this has been kind of a, my grandmother is from England, my uncle grew up going to the UK. Basically, they went a lot of summers when he was growing up and he is the one who introduced me to Doctor Who. And because of him, I've been able to, you know, we even had some like before Brit Box or something allowed me to really dig deeper into the old doctors. I had seen enough Tom Baker to really kind of appreciate, like,
00:05:54
Speaker
why his doctor is so iconic and why it is so beloved now. It's still like I still need to watch so many of his episodes at this point. But I really just appreciate kind of what he brought to the wall. So yeah, he also did a phenomenal job. You really did a phenomenal job, right? Yeah. And I loved, you know, get it bringing him for the 50th anniversary, you know, at least getting to have a role for him being like the museum curator and being involved. So
00:06:23
Speaker
Yeah, so let's just talk about this project, Gavin.
Doctor Who Collaboration Insights
00:06:26
Speaker
I mean, this is like, we've talked about this with you on the show before. You have a dream job in some ways that you've helped manifest through your years and years. I cannot imagine the world where this came to you. Like how that came about, like, you know, was this, if you could say, right, is this something that the BBC approached? Is this one of the ones that Wizards went after? Is this, you know, these universe beyonds are something that we're so interested in.
00:06:53
Speaker
Yeah, so, you know, kind of where I came in, in the process is this. I was at work one day and I got, I was told this was, I was told that we're working on New Universe Beyond Set. And I was like, cool, what is it? You know, and they're like, oh, it's a Doctor Who. And I just burst out laughing because I was like, okay, funny joke. It's like my favorite, my favorite IP. What are we really doing? That's funny, guys.
00:07:22
Speaker
No, really, it is Doctor Who. And you're probably going to lead it. And I was like, what? That's bananas. So I was very excited. And that's kind of where I came into the process. In terms of how we determine what we're going to use, there's a whole team of folks that interface with outside IPs and work with them to figure out if they're going to work and so on, if we're going to do a thing with them, if they're going to be a good fit for magic.
00:07:49
Speaker
And then when it comes to vetting the size of the project, like secret layer, commander decks, full on set. That's where design tends to get a little more involved, because there's a lot of things that will impact how a set is made, or rather how
00:08:07
Speaker
properties used, that might not be immediately obvious. For example, there are some properties that just don't have enough for every color to do, right? You can imagine mini IPs are like, this whole IP is underwater. And you're like, Oh, it's really hard to make enough cards here. Or this IP doesn't have enough green characters or doesn't have enough material, right? There's only
00:08:29
Speaker
you know, half a season or a season of the single show or something like that. Right. And so I think it's like Firefly that people would love the idea of Cowboys in space, but we probably don't have, you know, like doing more than a secret lair would probably be very much struggle.
00:08:45
Speaker
Like how many things can you actually pull out to use, right? You certainly could not fill out a whole set with those concepts. So you have to be very judicious about that kind of stuff. And then, you know, Lord of the Rings, the Lord of the Rings has so much, right? That was easy full set. And then other things like Princess Bride, it's like, okay, that's going to be a secret lair. And there's a ton of room in the middle, right? Also, Commander Decks are really good for creating kind of a biodome, like this really bespoke experience. And for something like Warhammer,
00:09:11
Speaker
It's a phenomenal fit for 140,000. Having a faction you got to play as is so strong that it made a lot of sense to do those as commander decks.
00:09:20
Speaker
Yeah, that worked out so well. And I think it did here, too, with the split that you did across the errors of the storytelling. And I know Hobbs has opinions of about jamming all the villains into one deck. I do. I do. I don't worry. I got some stuff to talk about. I have questions. I just have questions. Yeah. Yeah. I'm kind of wondering, Gavin, was this a property that at one point ever had the potential to be a full set?
00:09:51
Speaker
Well, yeah, we talked about it. This piece was not ultimately my call, but it was pretty close between set or decks. But I think the decks are a little better expression probably. There's enough material across 60 years of the show, but it's like how much of it are people gonna recognize? A show is very unique. Like with The Lord of the Rings,
00:10:21
Speaker
all you have to do to having to know the Lord of the Rings is to read three books or watch three movies, right? And you're like, great, I got it all. I know everything there is to know. I've seen every piece of material there is no Lord of the Rings, more or less, right? You can talk about footnotes or other books or Hobbit references or whatever, but more or less, with a doctor who, yeah, there's 60 years of material, but the number of people that have actually watched every single episode is fleetingly small. And so
00:10:47
Speaker
Yeah, you could blow it out into a full set, but are you going to have enough material to do? Are you going to fill out enough common concepts? Are you going to be able to gameplay good for a limited format too? Like one of the big challenges we had, we discovered really early on, we were investigating.
00:11:01
Speaker
There's aren't a lot of good flying concepts, right? And evasion gets really, really hard in Doctor Who. So, you know, in Commander, we're kind of building up your own thing, it's less of an issue, and then you play your seven mana Huge Flyer, and it's fine. But just having your three mana 2-2 Flyer, it's actually gonna be a bit of a struggle in many cases. That's I think it could have been, I think it could have been a main set, or a, you know, whatever, a Lord of the Rings style set. But
00:11:25
Speaker
I'm happy we chose Commander Decks ultimately for it, even though we ended up with a ton of new cards and ultimately felt sort of like a full set that split out as for Commander Decks. Yeah, I was going to say, the amount of new cards was still – I mean, it was exceedingly high because of how many references you did want to be able to pull off.
00:11:41
Speaker
And I think one of the things that has been amazing was seeing the old doctors, you know, I felt at least they you could understand the doctor without having, you know, like you probably knew that most of the people were going to resonate with the the reboots. Those were going to be the references that were going to be easy for people to be upset if something was missing.
00:12:03
Speaker
If you miss something in the older set, I think you did some great jobs. Would I realize that Shada was going to be represented? I'm happy, right? But if that was missing, that's not like something that people, you're going to be hearing about online. Oh, why did they forget this? Whereas you would with the new ones. So the decks I think could do a good job that way. I think they did.
00:12:24
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and there's a lot of, I'll say that there's a lot of ways you could have split it up. And look, if we want to make a whole set out of this, having done the whole process, I think we could have, but especially, you know, you don't know that till the end of the process sometimes. Right. And we're doing the initial exploration. Yeah. Well, we haven't felt the set yet. So what do you think? And we had to take our best stab at the moment, knowing what I know now, I think we probably could have done an entire set based on it. Not that it would have had its challenges because it definitely would have had challenges. Um, but sometimes you got to just,
00:12:50
Speaker
you know, try stuff out, talk for a few weeks and see what you think your best guess is. And ultimately, I'm really happy with the four command direct direction. I think it was really nice one. Also, just you know, frankly, in terms of in terms of scale, right? Doctor Who is a well known property, but it does not hit the Lord of the Rings, right in terms of how widely known and understood it is. And that's another another factor for really
00:13:13
Speaker
How did you go about selecting like which moments out of a 60 year long story to turn into cards?
Design Philosophy and Challenges
00:13:22
Speaker
Yeah, that's a really great question. So.
00:13:26
Speaker
Kind of my philosophy was this. It's better to go wide for the most part. So what we want to do is try to hit as many different things as possible to increase the chance that someone's favorite thing will get a card. And then on a few specific places that are really beloved will go a little deeper and do three or four cards.
00:13:47
Speaker
So that's why, for example, there's a number of weeping angels, because that's so well-known. Players love them so much. Daleks, Cybermen did plenty of those, because there are so many of them out there. But for the most part, we just tried to go pretty wide on a lot of it and hit a lot of different stories. And especially when you get back to the classic stuff, it's like, OK, let's try and hit a lot of different places in different ways, because there's so much to cover. And that was kind of our philosophy, and that is
00:14:17
Speaker
Oh, not every single episode ever is referenced. But, you know, there's more episodes of Doctor Who than there are cars in the site. It would literally be impossible to do that. But a lot of them are. We had a lot of ones and a lot of the big ones, I think. So doing the older ones, I mean, I'm guessing I read the article where you kind of broke down a little bit of design so far a couple of weeks ago. And it seems like, you know, you probably had the most knowledge. I don't know about the rest of the team. Is that kind of one of the reasons why you did had a little bit more to do with that deck in particular?
00:14:48
Speaker
Well, yeah, at the very outset, so our teamwork was all who the right way. I was really fortunate that everyone on the team knew and loved Doctor Who. No one we had to explain anything to there, which is fantastic. I mean, it's a great place to begin. With that said, everyone's knowledge base, just like in the world, we talked to your friends about Doctor Who is going to differ. And, you know, basically outbreaks down as everyone knows the 9th and 11th Doctor eras, right? Because
00:15:08
Speaker
those areas are so popular and so beloved when a lot of us started watching the show. And then beyond there, the amount that everyone knows begins to differ, right? Some people had watched some old stuff, some people had watched the new stuff, you know, etc. And it kind of just said, okay, look, I'm the lead. I'll take whatever's left over. And I know probably the most about the classic stuff. So let's talk about what we all want. And Carmen wanted the ninth, 10th and 11th Doctor Deck, because they love that era.
00:15:35
Speaker
Chris, Chris's favorite doctor is the 12th doctor. So they wanted to try out that that era, once you know, once you figure out we're going to divvy them up this way. And then trick was like, I'm interested in the villains.
00:15:48
Speaker
And I was like, well, okay, if my initial estimation that no one wants to learn about all the classic Doctor Who episodes is true, I will take this. And you know, it was it was cool. And I gained such a deep appreciation. Like, I went back and watched a lot of the old episodes. And I gained such a deep appreciation for it. And I did a lot of research. Now, look, I'm not going to sit here and tell you I watched every single old Doctor Who episode, because one, that's impossible. Someone doesn't exist anymore. But also, um,
00:16:12
Speaker
We talked about that last time you were on the show. Actually, it's hilarious. I remember when we talked about March Gladness. Right. Yeah. You and I were talking about the last episode. Yeah.
00:16:24
Speaker
Right. So it'd be possible to watch every episode, but also there's, you know, just, you know, you can't, you can't watch everything. With that said, I watched a lot of them and I actually spent a lot of time on fan websites and talking with fans who love the classic era of the show about what they would expect to be there. What the favorite companions were. So even if I didn't experience everything personally, I got to experience a lot of it by reading that. And I remember I went over to the UK.
00:16:48
Speaker
during the time we were launching Streets of Nuka Pena to do a promotional thing over there for Streets of Nuka Pena. And while I was there, I stopped by actually the Wizards UK office. And just because they're having like, okay, I can talk to everybody about this. So I just talked with everyone was like, okay, if you're a Doctor Who fan, which many people live in the UK, of course are, and you've been watching for a long time, which many people over there had, what would you expect to be here. So that was a really good way of getting data as well. So I mean, I know Streets of Nuka Pena seems like a long time ago, keep in mind this design process took years. So
00:17:20
Speaker
How did you balance the flavor into mechanics? I think you did a great job. We actually had a discussion last week about mechanics and complexity, and I'll ask a little bit about the complexity after this, but the flavor, you just nailed out of the park, I think. And I've played with some people who are even more in a doctor who than I have, and they loved it.
00:17:46
Speaker
a friend who has seen basically every episode available and they haven't played Magic in 20 years and they bought the deck just to have. It's like a game night thing because they love Doctor Who so much and they thought the flavor was fantastic from some of the preview cards I showed shared with them. So you know how did you really balance that?
00:18:09
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, it's, you know, one of the great, one of the great things about having a really long design process is you get to really hammer on the cards and try and get the flavor as resonant as possible. Um, and you know, we not, I mean, not going to say every card is like a hyper flavor slam dunk, but a lot of them are. And you know, people love these characters. They love these, these places. They love this world or worlds.
00:18:35
Speaker
case of Doctor Who. And like we spent a lot of time just trying to come up with really resonant designs for them and transit them into magic ease. You know there's sometimes we did cut things down just because of complexity or things like that we actively like okay this is too much but you know kind of like I think I thought a lot about is how can you get at the core of what something is without
00:18:57
Speaker
having to with using as few words as possible, right? So there's some very simple lines you can write on cards to talk about like the star whale, for example, is an example of like, well, it gives yourself a word to is that describing everything that the star whale does? No, it's complicated and only exists really in one in one episode. But
00:19:16
Speaker
Hey being? Putting a city on its back and being a little protectory sure war two works for that right and so Even in the tiny nods like that we could do it then we can blow it out even further on stuff like master multiplied Everybody lives River song, you know that kind of thing and we just look for a lot of flavor ones I mean fortunately like I said, we had a bunch of super fans making the products we kept hammering on it for a long time and trying to make it as resident as we could I May still think
00:19:42
Speaker
I know you mentioned like trick I know stepped on kind of was like early on with the villains and I believe is responsible for this the Cybermen, especially the flight of the face downs. And that since that to me is brilliant. Like that is probably one of the biggest home runs for me for to represent a whole entire like category. The villains is something that I am very interested in for a couple of reasons. Number one was the fact that
00:20:11
Speaker
You touched on this a little bit, which I was really glad in your article because this is where I was struggling.
00:20:17
Speaker
it becomes that thing with universe beyond where where where color pie fits for i think me thinking about this in in the sense of like color pie for magic versus needing a balance for something like only having a villain deck right like having to get it down into one deck because missy to me completely reads is grixxis so does you know i would say even
00:20:42
Speaker
Some, you know, some of the Davros, like, well, okay. This is where I start struggling. I see a lot of stuff to do with Daleks and I think Cybermen in general that bleed into more of the Esper realm or at least some white elements that is more of the, you know, assimilation or the purity type stuff. And I'm wondering how difficult it was to kind of make this as you mentioned, right? At like one point, you would kind of looked at
00:21:09
Speaker
robot-ish or more artifact-type things being separate from some of the rest of the villain pieces. I don't know where I'm going with this other than I struggle. And part of this is Grixx's default tends to be villains, and that's something that I personally always want to see expanded upon. But within Universe Beyond, it was a really interesting thing to me to see so much of an artifact-heavy deck
00:21:37
Speaker
with Daleks and Cyberman. Let's just face it, Hobbs, you're tired of bolus being associated with villainy all the time. It's Grixxis. It is Grixxis in general. But yes. Okay, so I got a lot to say about this. So let's start. Let's start from the place where I will ask you back a bit further. So when we started working on the product,
00:22:04
Speaker
The thing we spent the most time on, or at least the most mental energy, the one single task, was figuring out how to divide the decks up, and then what colors they were going to be. This took so much time and energy. Originally in our first draft, we had a doctor deck, and a companion deck, and a Dalek deck, and a master deck. Maybe it was Daleks and Cybermen and Master, right? And we had mechanics like a mass Cybermen, and we tried a bunch of stuff like that.
00:22:31
Speaker
you know, the dollops I think were abzon as the colors we chose for them and um
00:22:36
Speaker
We tried a bunch of different, we tried like Esper Cyberman. We tried Red Black Master or Grixxis Master. We tried a lot of that stuff. But eventually, like none of the ways we're divvying up was working because Doctor Who is just such a show that does not get divvied up by factions. It just really doesn't. And there's not, and there also is enough to pull from. If you were to do a Dalek and Cyberman deck, it's like, well, there's a decent number of cards, but like you're gonna start getting really repetitive after a little while. And not having the Doctors and the companions in the same deck was a huge issue.
00:23:05
Speaker
So, um, eventually work. Okay. We, we, we, me and Chris Mooney have locked ourselves in a room for like 90 minutes and we're like, we have to solve this problem. And we came up with the era direction.
00:23:17
Speaker
Which we're like, okay, this cracks it. This is how we're going to crack this nut. We're going to do three separate eras and then a villain's deck. And that's how we're going to do it. Villains deck is important. So for a couple of reasons, one thing we found is that having the villains fight alongside the heroes was really jarring, right? If you ever like the 10th doctor, a doll run in together. Yeah, it might happen in an episode, but if it kept happening, it felt really strange.
00:23:40
Speaker
So we didn't want to do that, and we want to put all the villains in one place. Also, frankly, letting us do a villain's deck, let us double-dip on the most popular era of the show, right? So if you get to do a villain's deck, you get to do more 9th, 10th, and 11th Doctor stuff, because you just get more cards to access that time. Okay, so once you decide, you're going to do the four-deck setup, where you've got the three eras of Doctor Who, and then one villain deck, then it comes time to choose the colors.
00:24:07
Speaker
The doctor is we decided that like blue is just such a core part of the doctor's identity. So okay, we're gonna do blue for all three of them. We thought that was just gonna be needed. White also makes a lot of sense, but we could probably just define not doing one of them as white.
00:24:21
Speaker
And so, you know, and he's not a doctor. We also, yes, I know some people can tend me on this. There are moments in the doctor's story where he feels black, or does, you know, things that are a little more nefarious. But A, those moments are often fleeting. B, certainly the rest of the deck does not have enough of that to contain an entire black deck, right? Like it's, you might say that the 10th doctor or the 9th doctor have their black moments. But like,
00:24:45
Speaker
You're not going to have 20 different black cards. I think you're going to want to put in a deck that's aligned with the good forces of Doctor Who. Right. So, okay. So once you determine that, then you get to the villain's deck. The villain's deck is definitely going to want to be black. So you're going to want to have black in there so that black is represented. That is for sure going to be true.
00:25:03
Speaker
So we talked about a lot of things from this point. And really what it came down to was Esper versus Grixis. That was the big discussion. That was the discussion we had over and over again about should it be Esper? Should it be Grixis? Because you do get, like you're saying with the Cybermen, that like, and endollics too to some extent, the like, impose order, the we will all be equal, that kind of thing, right? And so there is there is really white aspects to those villainy.
00:25:29
Speaker
On the flip side, you get like, you know, the master almost certainly wants to have red in their color identity, at least in some of their incarnations. And a lot of villains also want to have red in their incarnation, like the, you know, like Sontarans certainly want to be red. Things are about war definitely want to be red. And we talked about, like I said, for a long time, we went back and forth on Ezra versus Grixxis, and
00:25:52
Speaker
We settled on Grixxis because you could definitely justify the Daleks and the Siremen, both as colorless cards, which allow you to get some of those white aspects in there that happen to put the white color pie in there, or as blue or black cards. But you really could not justify a lot of the red stuff as white, blue, or black. It really had to be red for what we wanted to do there. Plus, white was going to be overrepresented among the doctor decks. We just knew that going in.
00:26:21
Speaker
So that's how we set it up there. You could make an argument. I mean, there is maybe some argument to be made that the villain's deck could have been four colors, like non green. I was going to ask about that. Yeah, but four colored decks are really hard to make successfully. A, the mana base gets pretty messy.
00:26:42
Speaker
B, they get defined by what they aren't more than what they are. And doing three other three-color decks, it made a lot of sense to just do four three-color decks. It was just so much cleaner. So that's how we ended up on three colors and those three specific colors. I agree. You definitely can make arguments for the Dollox and especially the Cybermen being white. But ultimately, it felt like Drixis would be the way to go. And it's the kind of thing where if you're making,
00:27:10
Speaker
One of the constraints of Commander is color identity. If we were making a full on magic set, one of the bonuses we would have is we wouldn't have to worry as much about this. We could just do white, blue or white, black, Cybermen and call it a day. But then Commander, you have to make these tough choices. It's funny. Yeah, I mean, my initial question about set versus.
00:27:30
Speaker
Dex was kind of prompted by this, right? And I think it is too, even for me, for potential for some of the doctors to have different color identity. I know that for me personally, like I said, we don't have enough information, but I would love I think that the War Doctor could have ended up having potentially some black in there just more because of what ended up doing. I don't know.
00:27:55
Speaker
You know, so I kind of had that as like a Mardu-ish potential. And I actually have the ninth is potentially into Grixxis just because of now that he's the only one, there is a different like sense of self. But these are things that can't be done in a pre-con anyway. I mean, you can easily tell me I'm wrong too, right? Like that's not how people would identify these doctors colors. I just, I like love the incarnations of the doctors where I would like love to see more ability to have
00:28:26
Speaker
more than kind of like the doctors being all similar colors. Yeah, I mean, well, you know, there's four colors in magic and the doctor or sorry, there's five colors in magic and the doctor span four of them. So I got four to five. I think there's something to keep you have to keep in mind, which is there's two things. The first is that
00:28:47
Speaker
a well-written character at all points, at different points in their story, could be any color. I think in a good story, most characters at some point can show elements of all five colors. So you can justify a lot of things in a lot of ways. We tried to focus on specific moments for characters,
00:29:07
Speaker
and show off them in that moment. Because the Doctor can be all five colors at different points, 100%. But that ties into my second point, which is, I agree that you and me and Taya, like super fans of the show, we can sit here and be like, well, okay, he's coming off fresh from the time war, and so he's got some black to him, and that all plays out. But to like an average Doctor Who fan, who just sees the cards, I think that it's unlikely they would peg black as the color of the Doctor would be.
00:29:35
Speaker
It wouldn't work, and I get that. Part of this is the coming off of the – I guess it's the identity, and I guess this just might be part of – and the tale's right. It's not just – I fully admit, I am a Volus fan. I don't think Volus is actually a hero, and I will say that on the cast as much as I joke about it.
00:29:56
Speaker
But Grixxis, I think, it's always struggled to have an identity beyond villain. And when we're having Universe Beyond, it does seem like, maybe this just is the nature of how villains are written in other IPs too. It defaults back to almost to Grixxis. So we get multiple commander decks for Universe Beyond in a row that are all Grixxis, all villains. Yeah. A whole E2 so far, right?
00:30:24
Speaker
Well, three, Lord of the Rings, Warhammer. I mean, I would consider the Warhammer. Warhammer, they're all villains. They're all villains, I guess. Fair. But I will say, Hobbs, we're very aware of this. We all know internally. It's like, hey, we did the villain deck as Grixxis twice. What's up? We don't want to pigeonhole the Grixxis into being the villain. So I would expect that to always be the case. And we talked about that as a bonus too for breaking the trend here. But it just ended up being the right call to make.
00:30:53
Speaker
and sometimes you gotta make a tough call like that, you know? And I played the deck, like when we played it, and it was fun, when we played it, it turned into Arch Enemy. I played it with time, some of the other people on the show. I have played an all-up pod a couple of times, and it has turned into Arch Enemy against the Grixxis deck. Three of the times I have played the pod so far. Missy just does nasty things to the table, and everyone has a gang up on Missy.
00:31:24
Speaker
But.
00:31:25
Speaker
Yeah, as it should be. Which leads me to another question I had, which was just about the overall complexity of how things worked out. So far, the games that I have played with the four commander decks have been some of the most complex commander games that I have played. And these are pre-cons right out of the box. They're decks that are built to possibly pull in people who are familiar with the Doctor Who IP, but not with magic, and pull them into the game.
00:31:55
Speaker
played them with people who are magic veterans that have maybe not played for a while and have come back to play and we played together with these. And they were like, I have no idea what's going on in this game. And so I think the complexity personally, I think it's really great and it was flavorful, but did this end up where you wanted it to for playing these together from a complexity point of view? Yeah, so there's always
00:32:25
Speaker
There's always a push and pull with flavor and complexity to some degree, right? Because if you want to make the most flavorful version, you can. You've got to put more words on the card or it can make things more complicated. So there's kind of three things, three axes here. One is the flavor bit. And we want to make some really cool flavorful cards, but the result is someone ended up with a lot of stuff going on.
00:32:45
Speaker
Two, and also on one, Doctor Who is a show that wants a lot of zany stuff happening. So for us in many places, it was kind of upside that it feels like zany stuff is going on. And when you play a game of Doctor Who Commander, you're like, wow, some wacky stuff happened that game. Like that had never happened before. And if it was more tame, I think you would lose a bit of that. Not saying it couldn't be a bit tamer, but you do lose a bit of that. The second thing, and this is really subtle, but I think really meaningful,
00:33:12
Speaker
is you just really feel the lack of evasion. Yes, we got some flyers in there. We try to get ways to break through. But part of the reason why I think it begins feeling complex at points is because it's just hard to attack. It's hard to know how and who to attack because you don't have free attacks. And that was a bit of a constraint of the IP. I mentioned earlier, flying being a big challenge. We tried everything we could. We put in some flyers. We put in island walking. We put in horsemanship. We're trying to find out. Yeah, the island walking is nice. And the horsemanship was too.
00:33:42
Speaker
quite a few ways to give unblockable and I also think that is one of the reasons that Missy ends up being arch enemy is because there's so many ways for her you know her ability to do direct damage to the whole table makes her really powerful.
00:33:57
Speaker
We also tried to make it so the villain deck wanted to attack a lot, so they were at a good attack. Like, oh, myriad will keep the game moving. Life totals will get assaulted and so on. And then the third thing is I think, and this is one thing I would change if I was to do the project over again and know what I know now. And obviously you always finish your project and you're like, oh, I would change this thing. But this is the one that I kind of realized toward the very end. And it was like, well, we're way too late to fix this now. Which is, I think that our, the four deck themes, I think we should have made
00:34:27
Speaker
the paradox theme, the cast not from your hand theme, something that was just a little more straightforward, for example, just incident or sorcery matter, something like that, not because I don't enjoy actually really enjoy the mini in the paradox creates the like, find all the weird cards and magic to cast up from other places. But I think just having one more that was a straightforward would have helped out because where it kind of stands right now is
00:34:51
Speaker
The wildest mechanic one is certainly the timey wimey deck, right? Because time travel vanishing, that's all pretty wild stuff. Yeah, so many, so many triggers, so many triggers. And people love it. It's really fun. It's really unique. It's super novel, but there's a lot going on there.
00:35:07
Speaker
And then the most straightforward deck is probably the villain deck, I think, in terms of how it plays, because there's a lot of attacking, a lot of, hey, I'm going to play my spells and blow your stuff up or whatever. I think you can play it because of complicated moments, but I think it's one of the more straightforward ones.
00:35:23
Speaker
And the historic deck is sort of in the middle somewhere. And then it's a pretty straightforward thing. Just play your creatures, pump them up, and be better. But because a lot of it involves navigating combat, and combat can be very tricky in a four-player game, I mean, there's a lot more than we would have thought, just complexing and figuring out how the ear packs are going to work. And there's also a lot of sagas and a lot of one-off legendary creatures with weird abilities. And then the paradox deck, I would put kind of the next run up of underneath time travel.
00:35:52
Speaker
but, um, but above historic. I think if we just got that down into more of the middle range of like, I'm an instant, a sorcery matter deck or whatever, that would have just helped create one more like easy on-ramp for people. Cause I, when you're making four commander decks, you always want like a,
00:36:07
Speaker
a range of like, so one is like, hey, I've never seen this before. It's really unique and different. And you want one that's really approachable. And then you want the rest to be kind of in the middle. And I feel like one of ours was a little too on the high end there. But you know, ultimately, like, you know, we made the decks with with the resources we had and it does feel like a lot of Dr. Who and I am proud of them. There are a few things that would change in retrospect. That's how it's gonna be.
00:36:28
Speaker
I love them. We did an entire episode talking about the overall complexity of Magic today last week and just where it is. It feels more complex than a lot of ways lately. It does.
00:36:42
Speaker
It's, uh, but, uh, you know, I, I enjoyed them and the timing, why me and the paradox deck are my two favorite decks out of this, but that's just, I'm also someone who's been playing magic for most of the 30 years that has existed. So I'm not too surprised that the two complex decks were the most interesting to me personally. Right. And that's a tough balance, right? It's like, okay, how can these be super appealing? And there's just a lot of stuff there to figure out. Um,
00:37:08
Speaker
It's tough. It really is a tough balance. And especially with the universe to beyond, where you're going to get eyes on them and people who have never played magic before. Personally, I would not recommend anyone that starts by playing Commander. It is a great landing pad for a lot of people. And for a long time in magic design, we're like, never, if you're newer to magic, never go touch Commander. But eventually, we're like, that just doesn't mimic how people actually
00:37:39
Speaker
Well, with it being the de facto casual format these days, right? It is – a lot of times it's replaced kitchen table, at least in my experience. Like where I learned with 60 card, whatever people had, that's just not – that doesn't happen as much anymore.
00:37:58
Speaker
Well, imagine that a new player starts playing there like, Hey, Hobbs, I can't wait to come play magic with you. And you're like, and you're like, cool, come back in a year. And as I say, well, that's not a very satisfying answer. Of course, you're like, Oh, yeah, come join us right now. We'll make it all work. And, um, you know, I think while we're learning the games, your commander is not the right way to go. I think like you want your decks to be able to be like, Hey, I played a few games with the intro games. I played a tiny bit on arena. I know the bare bones of what's going on. Right. Yeah.
00:38:27
Speaker
I and that's that's something that then who will start playing commander from there because you can't just can't fight against that You know rotter water runs downhill
00:38:36
Speaker
I just want to say something, you know, one last thing about the complexity, but also what I think was a huge win was adding Planeschase into this, which when I saw it announced at Minneapolis that this was going to be a Planeschase thing, I was over the moon because I'm like, this is the perfect fit for Doctor Who.
Integration of Gameplay Elements
00:38:56
Speaker
I was, as someone who's always been a Planeschase fan, getting two Planeschase commander sets in one year was like a gift from the gods for me.
00:39:08
Speaker
You should have given me schemes for the villain to deck though, Gavin. I want to say I really appreciate that even though I love the complexity even more, but the planes were super flavorful and I love that you added them to this product.
00:39:27
Speaker
Well, and yeah, and as I would tell anybody, right, if you're newer, do not start by playing with the plain chase version of it, right? Plain chase is a, it's there to be opted into, right? And it's fun and a lot of people like it and it's wild, but you are going to, you want your mind to get a little melted sometimes, like plain chase will, will do it to you. And that's regardless of any, that's going to be a normal game of magic. Plain chase can make wacky stuff happen. So at what point did that come in then? I mean, cause I mean, obviously you want a way to, to denote
00:39:55
Speaker
travel and time and space, right? I mean, like, we got cards like the TARDIS, obviously, but at what point did you say like, I want planes or like that, that's a way to add locations and references that is different than having a crime to cram them onto a card. Before the team began, I was like,
00:40:17
Speaker
we should do plane chase. And I expected there to be a lot of resistance because we had just done a march to the machine. I kept pitching it to people and putting my hands up shielding my face like, Oh, what do you think? Everyone's like, Oh, yeah, that makes total sense. And so there is basically no resistance to it. And there's like, let's just do it. Because it is such a great way to show you traveling, literally travel through time and space. And you know, the kind of phrase that some people started using
00:40:41
Speaker
was like, if plain chase didn't exist already, we might have invented it for Doctor Who, right? That is how perfect of a fit it is. So it was a total stomach there from the very beginning truly. Okay, cool. That makes complete sense. Because I mean, like I said, I love the ability to
00:40:58
Speaker
Right. Like it's giving you free ways to get extra references in that you don't have to play the game with. You can have them off to the side. You don't have to do it, but right. Like you, you can. And I, and I just, I really appreciated that. I think as Taya was saying, once I saw the plane Jason, and then once I saw a couple of the planes, I, I can't imagine it without it. So.
00:41:19
Speaker
Yeah, it's a, it's a real win. Like I said, totally opt-in, don't have to do it. We, all the cards we made that reference plain chase are really functional on their own, right? They all do other things than you have. It's like on Misty, it's like the card is just great. And at the end chaos ensues, but that may or may not matter in your game. Right. So yeah. Same thing about the TARDIS. I mean, you get cascade, whether you're playing plain chase or not. It's still a really good card. Exactly. I'm curious what a couple of your favorite either interactions or designs are.
00:41:47
Speaker
Yes, so my favorites are River Song, The Master Multiplied. Those are two really cool. River Song is my favorite card in the set. I don't need another Is It Deck, but I am going to get one for me.
00:42:03
Speaker
Yeah, I love those. I love the war doctor. I love how that turned out. I love everybody lives. It's just so fun just to throw down and, you know, get up and do a dance. There's tons. I mean, I can go through the whole sentence to tell about all the great flavor wins and the hours we spent making them. You know, when you make a set like this, the set really is more than mini a baby because it's like,
00:42:21
Speaker
the the hours and teeth gnashing and trying to solve problems because you're not trying to make magic cards. You're trying to make magic cards that also represent something that people love. And, you know, when we do a universe magic set, don't be wrong, a lot of care and a lot of love goes into them. Do not get me wrong. I'm not trying to discount you about it all. But like with you, hey, we're gonna make a legendary creature that's a
00:42:44
Speaker
or make this legendary creature, and you get to download from creative or whatever. But to the players, whatever you make that is what it is, right? It's like, okay, well, this is what Jace means is this, the slam text you put on here or what have you. This is what this new legend means is what Captain Admiral brass means or whatever. With Doctor Who people come in with a love they've seen every episode they've spent, you know, 30 hours of their life with this character.
00:43:10
Speaker
They, you have to nail it. You have to make sure the flavor is good.
00:43:15
Speaker
a lot of energy goes into making sure that happens. And I'm really proud of how it turned out. I mean, there's so many that like, literally, when they were spoiled, it was like, thanks a lot for punching me in the gut, because that's what I needed today, right? The emotional beats were captured. I mean, I hear four knocks is an example of something. And farewell. Yeah, yeah. We haven't even talked about the sagas, right, which are like this amazing representation of showing off the episodes. I mean, it's such a such an excellent way to get at the core of that, too.
00:43:45
Speaker
Yeah, the fireplace, I mean, the girl in the fireplace, the saga from that with the horsemanship, because Taya used that to good. That, like, it did, right? Like, being able to represent the weeping angels on, you know, going through mechanically.
00:44:00
Speaker
So I'll get to some specifics, and Carmen did a very nice job of discussing this actually when I had brought it up in a thread. But even hitting something like the partner you're bringing back partner with, having to make that decision to then I guess not have Rory be a companion, I do appreciate even if I didn't want it initially.
00:44:26
Speaker
Like, we knew we wanted you to be able to do Rory, Amy, and the 11th Doctor all together. Like, that was so important, right? And so we talked about some options, and we decided after chatting that just three cards in the command zone was not gonna cut it, right? That's just, we didn't wanna uncork that bottle. So given that, how can we get it to work? And we ended up with where we are. We gotta play Amy and Rory together, or you can play the Doctor and Amy together and Amy can go find Rory. And that's kind of our solution.
00:44:56
Speaker
It's cool. It is cool. It's just a bummer to not get to see that companion ward on Rory. You know, I mean, that's that's me. See, once again, we're getting too deep. Also, I mean, I think I can make it. Yes. Oh, yeah, I don't think there's any question there. Yeah, yeah, I'm being difficult at this point.
00:45:19
Speaker
And I do appreciate that you did. You know, I really liked Clara to give us that option to make the doctor right to like, to be able to dip into the timelines and actually to give us black if we wanted to write like I did think about that when I was trying to make the war doctor into the you know, the Mardu that I wanted the war doctor to to be in my mind, right? I do appreciate that there is an option for me to do that if I was building my own kind of Clara was a really neat design.
00:45:44
Speaker
Yeah, I wanted to make sure that that was really Carmen pushing for that, and I'm so glad that she did. Clara is a great way and also visor to lesser extent too. I wanted to make sure you could build a black deck and giving you two options there was a nice little touch.
00:45:59
Speaker
The visor was funny because I realized as I was building the villains deck and deciding what I was gonna play that I couldn't actually like pair that with anything that I was building or like when I was making a decision of who I was going to play as the face for the game we were playing I was like wait a second I can't even do this in the deck so that's a little confusing but yeah
00:46:17
Speaker
Well, Evan, we know you have a hard cutoff. We really appreciate you coming on the show to talk with us about this. This has been a fantastic time. Thank you so much for coming to talk Doctor Who with us. Thank you for the set. It's been one of my favorite products that you've released in a while. Absolutely love it. Oh, it's my pleasure. Thank you for having me on. You know, I'm very passionate about this. I'm just glad that as Doctor Who fans, you both really enjoyed it as well.
00:46:47
Speaker
And I just appreciate you coming and talking to us in general, because we just really enjoy talking to you. Definitely. It could be about anything. Well, that's always lovely, too. Yeah. I want to talk with you all as well. Cool. Well, have fun at your next meeting. Thank you all so much for having me. And everyone out there, hopefully you enjoy. If you're curious for any more, you want to set me up on Twitter or follow me on Good Morning Magic, my YouTube show. And I'm always talking about design stuff. So I'll see you around there.
00:47:13
Speaker
And that's our show for today. You can find all of the hosts on Twitter for now. Hobbs can be found at HobbsQ, Tay can be found at Tayatransends, and Alex can be found at Mel underscore chronicler. Feel free to send us any questions, comments, thoughts, hopes, and dreams to the Goblin Lore Pod on Twitter, or email us at goblinlorepodcast at gmail.com.
00:47:34
Speaker
If you would like to support your friendly neighborhood Gob's Hugs, our link tray can be found on our Twitter account and in the description of today's show. This has everything from various discount codes to the link for our Patreon. The music for today's show was by Wintergotten, who can be found at vintergotten at bandcamp.com. The art was done by Steven Raphael, who can be found at Steve Ruffle on Twitter. Gob and Lore is proud to be presented by Hipsters of the Coast as part of their growing forthos content.
00:48:02
Speaker
Check them out on Twitter at hipsters MTG or online at hipstersofthecoast.com. Thank you for listening and remember goblins like snowflakes are only dangerous in numbers.