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Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast

#825: Strixhaven with Ari Nieh

Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast

Wizards of the Coast

Duels Of The Planeswalkers, Games, Magic The Gathering, Leisure, Game Design, Mtg, Ccg, Mark Rosewater

4.8743 Ratings

🗓️ 16 April 2021

⏱️ 31 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

I sit down with Magic designer Ari Nieh to talk about the design of Strixhaven.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

I'm not pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for other drive to work, coronavirus edition.

0:07.6

So I've been having different various R&D folk of present and past to come talk about sets.

0:13.6

And here's something I've never done before. Talk about the new set with somebody. So I have brought on Ari Me. So Ari, hi. Hi, Mark. How are you today? So we're going to talk

0:24.4

Strickson Haven today. So this was the very first set you worked on, correct? Yes, that is correct.

0:31.3

But not the first one to come out, right? No, I was on teams for sets that have come out before. Like I was on Caldheim, I was on M21, but when I walked into the building and you, you know, got pulled into meetings to start designing stuff like Strickshaven was the first meeting, the first set that I was working on.

0:52.1

Okay, so, and you were on, we started on exploratory.

0:55.4

So you were on the exploratory design team, you were on the vision design team,

0:58.7

you were on the set design team, right?

1:00.0

You were.

1:01.1

I was on set just for a little bit.

1:02.7

Just for a little bit.

1:03.2

Okay.

1:04.3

Okay, so let's.

1:05.6

All of vision and most of exploratory.

1:07.5

We're going to go way back to the very beginning. So what is your memory of the very

1:11.1

beginning of Strick-Saven? It's called fencing and design. Right. So we knew it was going to be

1:17.9

opposite color, enemy color schools, like five schools, mage factions within a university. We knew it was

1:26.3

going to be an instant and sorcery themed set,

1:29.3

because that was something people had been asking for for a long time, and it fit the creative

1:33.2

really well to have a wizard university that's about instance and sorceries. We knew we wanted

1:38.3

these opposite, the enemy color factions, to be based on the conflict instead of on the overlap.

1:45.0

So they were going to be pretty, pretty different from the corresponding

...

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