When a vision design ends and gets handed off for set design, the lead vision designer creates a document called a vision design handoff document. It talks about the larger goals, themes, mechanics, and structure of the set to give the Set Design team an idea of all the work the Vision Design team did. I started showing these documents years ago, and you all really liked them, so I keep showing them. Here are the ones I've previously published:
- Throne of Eldraine (Part 1 and Part 2)
- Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths
- Zendikar Rising
- Original Zendikar (Part 1 and Part 2)
- Strixhaven: School of Mages (Part 1 and Part 2)
- Future Sight
- Original Innistrad
- Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty (Part 1 and Part 2)
- Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur's Gate
- Original Ravnica
- Phyrexian: All Will Be One (Part 1 and Part 2)
- March of the Machine (Part 1 and Part 2)
- Wilds of Eldraine (Part 1 and Part 2)
- The Lost Caverns of Ixalan (Part 1 and Part 2)
- Outlaws of Thunder Junction (Part 1 and Part 2)
As with all my vision design handoff articles, most of what I'm showing you is the actual document. My notes are in the boxes below the text. This document was long enough that I've broken it into multiple parts. While normally the documents I show you are written by me, I did not lead the vision design for Bloomburrow. Instead, vision design was led by Doug Beyer, the author of this handoff document.
"Rugby" Vision Design Handoff Document
By Doug Beyer – June, 2022
"Rugby" is a set meant to capture the feel of a charming, pastoral fantasy world of heroic anthropomorphic animals and the threatening predator animals they face. It's a light, appealing setting that gives some lightheartedness to the release calendar, falling in between the villain focus of "Quilting" and the horror plane of "Swimming." It's also the start of a new Standard year, with opportunities to acquire or reacquire less-enfranchised players.
For regular readers of my vision design handoff articles, you'll notice that this write-up is in small ways a bit different than mine. Doug used my documents as a guideline but changed things up where he saw fit. For example, I always lead with a list of members from the design teams and Worldbuilding team, but Doug started with the short overview. All the same content is here, just presented slightly differently to match the tone the lead vision designer was trying to create with the document.
Team Members
Vision Design Team
- Doug Beyer (Vision Design Lead)
- Mark Rosewater
- Jeremy Geist (Strong Second)
- Dan Musser
- Daniel Xu
Worldbuilding Team
- Emily Teng (Vision Worldbuilding Lead)
- Zack Stella (Lead Art Director)
- Neale LaPlante Johnson
As always, the vision design handoff document lists the people involved in the vision design and worldbuilding that happen at the beginning of the process. Sometimes the teams have a bit of flux, but Bloomburrow did not. The teams were mostly constant throughout. The Vision Design team was the Exploratory Design team, save Dan Musser who joined during vision design.
"Rugby" Goals
#1 – Focus on the fun of animals.
This genre uses animals to tell all its stories. We want this set to have the most emphasis on real-world animal species of any Magic set. We looked for any opportunity to bring greater focus to a wide variety of animals and their ways of life. All of "Rugby's" creatures are animals, all its heroes and villains are animals, and we even coined the new Magic term "animal." It's the animal set.
For every set, we want to understand the resonance center of the set. What is the set doing that the audience will have a connection to? For Bloomburrow, we went into the design knowing the resonant center—animals. Everyone has had some interaction with animals: with pets, at zoos, seeing animals in the wild, etc. Animals were such a familiar thing that we tried something bold with the topic, making what we called a mega-batch. I will get more into that as it's touched upon later in the document.
#2 – Be the most charming Magic set.
The appeal of the anthropomorphic animal genre is its simple storybook charm. It's a world contained within a single valley, about rural life, neighbors, and rising to the challenge of fending off the occasional wolf or snapping turtle. The animal protagonists are physically much smaller than we humans are, which makes the struggles they face seem quaint to us, even though they loom large to them. We looked for any opportunity to layer in as much of the charming, pastoral feel of this genre as we could.
The tone of the set was also something we understood from the beginning. Some Magic worlds can be a bit harsh, but not Bloomburrow. A lot of its appeal was going to be on its friendlier tone. Yes, there would be conflicts and threats, but the larger overall feel of the set would be one on the lighter end of the spectrum. A lot of this was based on the anthropomorphic animal genre space that inspired us.
#3 – Learn from past challenges with typal gameplay.
The heart of "Rugby's" gameplay is typal gameplay, i.e., creature type matters. Gameplay that focuses on creature types is flavorful, thematic, and appealing to players. But it can also be challenging to execute properly, especially in Limited. We think we've found good tools for letting the set highlight a variety of animal types while enabling fun typal gameplay for Sealed and Draft. If this set is successful, learnings from it could pay off for future typal sets.
First, this was the set where R&D internally started using the word "typal." The typal theme is one of R&D's biggest challenges. It's very popular with the audience but super hard to build in such a way that it doesn't put Limited play on rails. The Bloomburrow Vision Design team spent a lot of time on this topic and even came up with a mechanic called fellowship to solve this problem. Obviously, fellowship didn't make it to print, but this document spends a bunch of time talking about it. When we get there, we'll go into greater detail with what problems fellowship was trying to solve.
#4 – Enable animal-themed decks in Constructed.
Typal sets can be insular, often working only with other cards in the same set. We tried to set up deck building in competitive and casual Constructed by one, seeding the "Rugby" animal types in the preceding NOPQ year so that Standard players would have deck-building hooks for "Rugby" animal decks already in hand, and two, creating the "animal" batch, which would let players benefit from any of over 50 creature types from any Magic set.
The "NOPQ year" was Wilds of Eldraine ("Netball"), The Lost Caverns of Ixalan ("Offroading"), Murders at Karlov Manor ("Polo"), and Outlaws of Thunder Junction ("Quilting"). While Limited has the "on rails" problem, typal Constructed has a different issue—volume. Bloomburrow was about animal creature types. A lot of them haven't shown up on a lot of cards, so there was a need to "seed" them,R&D talk for finding places to put them in sets ahead of the one being released, ones that would coexist with them in Standard. The four worlds of the previous Magic "year" luckily were varied and allowed us to capture most of the animal creature types we needed. Another solution to this was the animal mega-batch, which this document will eventually get to.
Categories of Animals
The main conflict of the "Rugby" world is between its two main categories of creatures: animalfolk and predators. Animalfolk are small anthropomorphic animals—they speak, have jobs, and wear clothes. Predators are the non-sentient beasts that try to prey on the animalfolk—they are Earth animals like wolves or bears, and to the small animalfolk, they are fearsome monsters.
The idea of animalfolk and predators mainly came from the genre that inspired us. The idea of scope, that in this world, the stand-in for humans (i.e., the base creature type in Magic) would be mice, and that everything would be scoped accordingly (Bears would be way bigger than 2/2, for instance) was key to building the set and world.
The Ten Main Animalfolk Types
While many kinds of animalfolk dwell on the plane of "Rugby," the set focuses on ten main animal types, which correspond to the color pairs:
- White-Blue Birds
- Blue-Black Rats
- Black-Red Lizards
- Red-Green Raccoons
- Green-White Rabbits
- White-Black Bats
- Blue-Red Otters
- Black-Green Squirrels
- Red-White Mice
- Green-Blue Frogs
These ten animal types are the most important in the set, and they're what we built as the backbone of the Limited archetypes.
On my blog, I get a lot of questions about the concept of top-down versus bottom-up design. Bloomburrow's structure started with the ten two-color pairs. Yes, they were tied to animals thematically, but the core structure was making the ten two-color pairs interconnect in a way that played well mechanically. That's a very bottom-up structure. We did do a lot to flavor things accordingly such that the set captured the animal resonance we were centering on, so I hope the finished product feels very flavorful. I spent my first preview article going in depth on why we chose these ten animals, so I won't go into it again here. I will stress the ten animal pairs we handed off stayed all the way to print. In vision design, we did try a few other things. The two major changes were black-red Weasels and red-green Badgers.
Animalfolk stats. We tried to keep animalfolk sizes in line with the animals they represent. Mice are usually from 0/1 to 2/2, Otters are around 2/2 or 3/3, on up to Raccoons that max out at about 4/4. To keep the animalfolk from feeling too monstrous and the predators from feeling too huge and overwhelming, we tried to minimize the number of animalfolk with stats beyond around 4/4 or 4/5.
While not every set needs to do this, some sets need to set power/toughness parameters to capture a certain flavor. This guideline between animalfolk and predators did shrink the set a little on average, as the set was more about the animalfolk than the predators.
Cameo Animalfolk
To evoke the feel of a diverse anthropomorphic animal world, the set also has "cameo" animals. Cameos are one-of top-down cards for animalfolk that aren't any of the main ten types (e.g., Salamander, Skunk, Hedgehog, Mole, Badger, Weasel, and Beaver). Cameos add enjoyable texture to the set and round out the feel of the world.
One of the tensions with the set was that it had typal themes, which meant we needed to have a certain as-fan of each animal creature type, but the worldbuilding also needed to have one-of creatures to capture the feel we wanted. We didn't want a Skunk archetype, but not having a Skunk in the set would lessen our ability to capture the feel of the genre.
How important are cameo animals? No one cameo animal card is crucial to the set, but the feel of some being in the file really helps. Cameos give worldbuilding a way to showcase other charming animals in art and conjure the diverse feeling of the genre.
The key answer to this problem was one-of as-fan. The common creatures mostly had to be one of the ten archetype animals, but uncommons and up had more ability to do the cameos.
Cameos as sideways strategies. While the cameo animals are mostly there to show off the diversity of the world, they could also create cool sideways quests for drafters and deck builders. We worked on some uncommon cameo animals that have build-around lines of text that don't fit directly into any of the main ten animal strategies to create some diverse experiences with the set.
Because the cameo creatures only had one card to shine, we tended to spend extra effort to make them as top-down as we could. We also realized that they thematically made the most sense for the uncommon build-around designs we like sets to have to give advanced drafters other options.
Predator Animals
Predators are the threats that the animalfolk defend against in this world. They are big snakes, huge snapping turtles, destructive moose, horrendous owls, or other animals that traditionally eat or kill smaller animals. Since animalfolk are the POV characters of this setting, the predators loom huge in comparison. If you're a little mouse, a bear is an epic monster!
The contrast in stats and scope was something that most excited us when we first decided to do Bloomburrow (at least the take-one version as I talked about in my first preview article).
Predator stats. Predators are supposed to feel huge and threatening to the animalfolk, so they tend to be at least 4/4, ranging up to huge stats like 7/7 or 10/10.
All the predators in the set have at least 4 power or 4 toughness. While a couple have variable power/toughness, we didn't end up making any that had base power or toughness 7 or higher.
Still all animals. Note that while predators feel epic and monstrous, they are still just regular animal creature types. They are Cats, Bears, Wolves, Elk, etc.
During set design, the Creative team came up with the concept of Calamity Beasts, which were elemental forces responsible for seasonal change, essentially living weather events. To capture this flavor, all the predators, save one (see below), were given the Elemental creature type.
One Dragon. Story Lead Roy Graham wants there to be one Dragon in the file for RSTU story reasons. The dragon originates from out-of-control dragonstorms on Tarkir (UXX is return to Tarkir). Dragon doesn't count as an animal, but creatively, any being that travels to the "Rugby" world becomes an animal. So we've represented this as one red "Creature – Bird Dragon" in the file.
RTSU is the next Magic "year": Bloomburrow ("Rugby"), Duskmourn: House of Horror ("Swimming"), "Tennis" (i.e., the death-race set), and "Ultimate" (i.e., our return to Tarkir). This is a good example that we sometimes have to think forward for various reasons. Just as we had to seed animal creature types in previous sets to mechanically help this one, we need to seed a story point in this set to set up the larger storyline
Bugs and Fish
World-wise, insects, spiders, and fish are non-sentient creatures, even though they're generally not huge predators. There are references to fishing and 1/1 blue Fish tokens in the file, so it's presumed that animalfolk eat (non-sentient) fish as a food source.
What do the animalfolk of the world eat was a question that came up early. Just as the predators weren't sentient, it made sense that some food source had to also just be normal animals. Fish tokens would also become a big part of the gift mechanic.
Creature Mechanics: Animal, Fellowship, Offspring, Duos, and Predators
Animal Batching
"Rugby" is a typal set—it focuses on creature types. To match the pastoral storybook feel of the anthro-animal genre, all of "Rugby's" creature types are real-world animals that can be found on Earth. We found it useful and charming to batch all Magic creature types that are real-world animals into the single term "animal."
It's time to start talking about the animal mega-batch. Batching first appeared in Dominaria with historic. It's proven to be popular and useful (party, modified, and outlaws are some examples), so I was interested in taking batches to the next level. A normal batch has between two to five items. Could batching be bigger than that?
We stop at five because it becomes too hard to remember what's in the batch when it gets too big. What if we used a term that was so intuitive that the audience could figure out what was in the batch? That was the idea behind "animal." The players know what an animal is, so asking "is this an animal" seemed straightforward.
See this page for a full list of what counts as an animal:
████████████████████████████████████████████████
The censored item is a link to our internal database. On it, we listed what we, the Vision Design team, had decided counted as an "animal." Here's the text from that page:
"Animal is a giant batching of creature types. It includes any creature type that exists, or has existed, as a real non-human animal on Earth.
Count as animals (including creature types new to "Rugby"):
Antelope, Ape, Aurochs, Badger, Bat, Bear, Bird, Boar, Camel, Caribou, Cat, Crab, Crocodile, Dinosaur, Dog, Elephant, Elk, Ferret, Fish, Fox, Frog, Goat, Hamster, Hippo, Horse, Hyena, Insect, Jackal, Jellyfish, Leech, Lizard, Mole, Mongoose, Monkey, Mouse, Nautilus, Octopus, Otter, Ox, Oyster, Pangolin, Rabbit, Raccoon, Rat, Rhino, Sable, Salamander, Scorpion, Serpent, Shark, Sheep, Skunk, Slug, Snake, Spider, Sponge, Squid, Squirrel, Starfish, Trilobite, Turtle, Weasel, Whale, Wolf, Wolverine, Wombat, Worm
Acorn/silver-bordered animals:
Beaver, Chameleon, Cow, Deer, Donkey, Kangaroo, Lobster, Penguin, Pig
Do not count as animals:
- It's a fictional creature that is no part real-world animal.
Aetherborn, Angel, Archon, Atog, Avatar, Azra, Basilisk, Beeble, Beholder, Blinkmoth, Bringer, Brushwagg, co*ckatrice, Cyclops, Dauthi, Demigod, Demon, Devil, Djinn, Dragon, Drake, Dreadnought, Dryad, Dwarf, Efreet, Eldrazi, Elemental, Elf, Faerie, Fractal, Gargoyle, Giant, Gnoll, Gnome, Goblin, Golem, Gorgon, Graveborn, Gremlin, Griffin, Halfling, Harpy, Hellion, Homunculus, Hydra, Illusion, Imp, Incarnation, Inkling, Kavu, Kithkin, Kobold, Kor, Kraken, Lamia, Leviathan, Lhurgoyf, Licid, Merfolk, Metathran, Myr, Nephilim, Nightmare, Nightstalker, Noggle, Nymph, Ogre, Ooze, Orc, Orgg, Ouphe, Pegasus, Pentavite, Phelddagrif, Phoenix, Phyrexian, Saproling, Satyr, Scion, Servo, Shade, Shapeshifter, Siren, Skeleton, Slith, Sliver, Soltari, Spawn, Specter, Sphinx, Spike, Spirit, Surrakar, Survivor, Tetravite, Thalakos, Thrull, Tiefling, Treefolk, Triskelavite, Troll, Vampire, Vedalken, Volver, Weird, Wraith, Wurm, Yeti, Zombie, Zubera
- It's a fictional creature that is part real-world animal.
Camarid, Centaur, Cephalid, Chimera, Hippogriff, Homarid, Kirin, Lammasu, Manticore, Masticore, Minotaur, Moonfolk, Naga, Unicorn, Viashino, Werewolf
- It's a role or job.
Advisor, Ally, Archer, Army, Artificer, Assassin, Assembly-Worker, Barbarian, Bard, Berserker, Carrier, Citizen, Cleric, Coward, Deserter, Druid, Elder, Flagbearer, God, Hag, Knight, Mercenary, Minion, Monger, Monk, Mystic, Ninja, Noble, Nomad, Peasant, Pilot, Pirate, Praetor, Processor, Ranger, Rebel, Rigger, Rogue, Samurai, Scout, Serf, Shaman, Soldier, Spellshaper, Warlock, Warrior, Wizard
- It's a real-world thing but not an animal.
Construct, Drone, Fungus, Germ, Juggernaut, Orb, Pincher, Plant, Prism, Reflection, Sand, Scarecrow, Sculpture, Splinter, Thopter, Wall
- While related to real-world animals but not a specific animal.
Beast, Egg, Eye, Horror, Human, Mutant, Pest, Tentacle"
We had to answer a lot of questions. Some of the major ones:
Is a Human an animal?
We said no. Filling your animal deck with Humans felt wrong.
Is a Unicorn an animal?
We thought fictional animals muddied the waters, so we defined "animal" as something that lives, or had lived, on Earth. The core idea was that if you asked an average person, "Is ________ an animal?" they would say yes.
Is a Dinosaur an animal?
It was a real Earth animal, just one that went extinct, so we said yes. Being alive on Earth wasn't key to being classified as an animal.
Is a Beast an animal?
We decided the creature type had to be an actual animal and not a grouping that animals could fit in.
The Vision Design team was open to some of the questions being reevaluated, but we wanted to turn in a definitive list because the rules manager told us it would only work in the rules if there was a hard-and-fast list.
Example uses of the "animal" term:
Gregarious Duo (Common)
2W
Creature — Mouse Rabbit
3/2
Whenever CARDNAME attacks with at least one other animal, CARDNAME gets +1/+1 until end of turn.
Animal Cleverness (Rare)
2U
Enchantment
When CARDNAME enters the battlefield, the animal type of your choice joins your fellowship. If an ability of a fellowship creature entering the battlefield would trigger, that ability triggers an additional time.
Fellowship is a mechanic coming up later in the document that I will talk about when we get there.
The role of "animal." Although all the creatures in "Rugby" are animals, the "animal" batch still does two things for the set. First, it adds charm—it's delightful to read "animal" in text boxes. We put it in a few spots on cards that didn't lose much functionality by saying "animal" rather than "creature." Second, it gives the set some designs that look outward beyond the set so that players will look back through their collection in a new way. We think "animal matters" could be a cool tool in the toolbox to let players build animal-focused decks in kitchen table or competitive Constructed.
One of the biggest issues with animal typal is that it isn't as backwards compatible as we hoped. Of the ten animals with an archetype, only two had 100 or more cards prior to Bloomburrow (Birds and Lizards). Two additional animals had 40 or more (Frogs and Rats). Three additional animals had 10 or more (Bats, Rabbits, and Squirrels—and Rabbits just barely). Two last animals had less than 10 (Otters and Raccoons). Our hope was that the animal mega-batch would help tie the set together to allow various animals to play together in the same deck. It also allowed a swath of older cards to have relevance in larger formats. And finally, it just was something that we felt would be received well. We liked the idea of certain Constructed decks being "animal decks."
When to write "target creature" rather than "target animal." We initially started with a lot of "animal" in textboxes, since it's synonymous with "creature" in "Rugby" Limited and it's cute. But we think that makes a lot of cards somewhat useless in larger formats, particularly removal spells.
We did a lot of experimenting with when to use "animal" instead of using "creature." What we found was that it was fine for cards aimed at Limited but problematic for cards aimed at Constructed if being part of an animal theme wasn't core to the card.
Animal for Constructed. The handoff file has a few designs that focus on animal batching, but many of them in the file are also tied to fellowship, which isn't really hitting the full potential of "animal." We think there's potential in nice, enticing animal build-arounds that don't mention fellowship. For example:
Animal Resilience
1W
Enchantment
Animals you control get +1/+1
It was our hope that had the animal mega-batch stayed in the file that Set Design would have designed more high-rarity cards meant for an animal-themed Constructed deck. We also assumed at least one of the Commander decks would be animal themed.
So, what happened to the animal mega-batch? The biggest strike against it was a big ask. For the rest of the life of the game, the animal list would require upkeep. Whenever a new creature type is introduced, we would have to identify whether it was an animal. This meant we were making work for every set that followed. It was doing something we normally didn't do. Magic sets introduce new mechanical components, but once they are defined, they exist, as is, in the rules. The animal mega-batch was asking for continual upkeep.
The next big strike against it was that there were a lot of arguments about what should and shouldn't be on the list. Yes, 95 percent of it was intuitive, but the last 5 percent wasn't. Is a Germ really not a creature? Magic represents Serpents as sea monsters, but serpents are Earth animals. Should they count? Some animals were listed through larger groupings like Beast. Wouldn't it be confusing if a card that was clearly an Earth animal wasn't in the animal mega-batch?
Finally, there was debate on how charming it was. I found it endlessly charming and thought it would connect with a certain portion of the audience, but there were many other R&D folks who didn't feel that way.
In the end, all these factors led the Set Design team to remove it.
That's all the time I have for today. As always, I'm eager to hear your thoughts on this article, the animal mega-batch, or any other element of Bloomburrow we touched upon today. You can email me or contact me through any of my social media accounts (X, Tumblr, Instagram, and TikTok).
Join me next week for part two.
Until then, may you find the animal that speaks to you.