Gavin Verhey’s Good Morning Magic video series continued today as he interviewed Dave Humpherys about the mechanics of Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths. Humpherys led the set design on the expansion and gave some insight on how each mechanic was planned and changed as his team developed the set.
The two kick off the show discussing the most controversial mechanic, companion. Humpherys said the team was cognizant on replayability across games, the format, and within games while attempting to make cards that would create new decks and not just allow them to slot into pre-exiting archetypes.
He also addressed Lutri, the Spellchaser, specifically, and how they designed it with the expectation the card wouldn’t be legal in singleton formats that already adhered to the restriction. Verhey and Humpherys wrapped up companions by touching on a few designs that didn’t make the final file.
They moved on to cover the wedge design philosophy and how they planned to take advantage of having Ravnica and the shocklands in the format at the same time. Design worked knowing that with rotation in Standard coming, they weren’t overly worried with a wedge dominating too long with easy mana and that the wedges would have more time to shine after the rotation.
Humpherys mentioned how the team plans lands way ahead of time and that they knew they wanted trilands. They knew adding the land types to the Triomes wouldn’t add too much power to Standard while making them exciting for eternal formats.
The two moved on to talk about mutate and keyword counters. Humpherys goes over the many changes to mutate over time and how the ability went from only being able to target creatures that shared types to any non-Human, all the way to allowing the player to choose whether the target goes above or below the card with mutate.
Verhey and Humpherys wrapped up the video by acknowledging the higher than usual level of complexity in Ikoria. Humpherys reassures that the mechanics and cards were all tested and developed in paper and felt reasonable despite pushing the upper bounds of complexity. He did end by saying that this level of complexity isn’t the new normal, but the team wanted to go all-in on making monsters all they could be.