Finally, it had a lot of individual cards played in numerous formats that we knew players would be happy to see reprinted. (Remember the whole idea was pitched as Time Spiral 2.) The denseness of the sets would also give the designers more options of how to refine it. Modern Horizons had shown us that there was an audience for more supplemental sets with complex Draft environments. It was the most complex Standard-legal Draft environment we'd ever built. It was a popular Draft environment with the enfranchised player base. Of the five sets Gavin asked about, Time Spiral block was far and away the first choice. I don't know if it is right or makes sense, but I love it, and it's so wacky to put it all in one place that it sounds amazing. Mark Heggen: I give that one million out of five. Mark Heggen: Okay, but it's going to be hard to top the last one-I already gave that a five out of five. To give you a sense of how that went, here's a conversation Gavin told me about having with product architect Mark Heggen. Gavin came up with a list of five candidates (I'm not allowed to tell you what the runners-up were, as they're the most likely choices for the next Remastered product if Time Spiral Remastered is successful) and started asking around The Pit for people's preferences. They also normally can't add in old cards that weren't part of that block, but as you'll see, the Time Spiral Remastered design team figured out a way around that. Remember, Remastered sets can't create new cards, they can only make use of cards that were already part of the block. The one big question remaining: which block should they use? Ideally, Gavin wanted a three-set block, as that gave the designers the most room to maneuver and build something new. (I should note that this happened before Amonkhet Remastered and Kaladesh Remastered-the different timelines just resulted in those two products releasing before Time Spiral Remastered.) It was time for tabletop to make a Remastered set. By taking all the cards of a block and condensing the block down to a single draftable set, you got to revisit highlights of old drafts while reconfiguring in a way that could take advantage of modern design tools. Gavin ended up combining these two ideas into one (revisit an old set, but update it in some way), at which point he realized that he had stumbled onto what Tempest Remastered had done. One of the ideas that came out of this project was "redo a set." I think the impetus was to take a set that we felt wasn't as successful as it could have been and take a second attempt at it with all our modern tools. Meanwhile, we'd started a project, codenamed "Canoe," where a bunch of designers (myself included) would meet once a week for two months to spitball big-picture design ideas for the future. Why don't we reprint old Draft environments in their entirety so that players can draft that environment again? Gavin was trying to figure out how to make this happen. One germ of an idea came from a frequent piece of feedback he got from players. Years later, Magic: The Gathering Arena had a similar issue and chose to make Amonkhet Remastered and Kaladesh Remastered, released in 2020.Ī couple of years ago, Gavin Verhey was put in charge of coming up with new ideas for supplemental sets in tabletop. Tempest Remastered was released on Magic Online in 2015. While I wasn't part of the design team for that product, they did come and talk to me because I'd been the lead designer for Tempest (my very first design lead) and had been on the design teams for Stronghold and Exodus. It would let players get access to cards they were interested in having.Īfter much searching, they decided the block they would use was Tempest (aka Tempest, Stronghold, and Exodus).It would capture the essence of the block.The solution they came up with was to take three sets from an old block (this was back when three-set blocks were the norm) and boil them down into a new large set that would do a few things: The new content had to come from using cards already programmed. This desire came with a lot of parameters, but the biggest one was that it couldn't create any new cards. Magic Online was therefore looking to create some additional content. Players tend to run through content faster in digital than tabletop because it's much easier to get in a lot of games digitally. Magic Online had a problem it was trying to solve. Welcome to Time Spiral Remastered previews! I'm going to walk you through the story of how this product came to be and then show off a few cards from the set.
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