Magic: The Gathering’s New D&D Set Was Almost Not Nearly D&D Enough

This week noticed the discharge of a Magic crossover actually many years within the making: Adventures within the Forgotten Realms, the collectible card sport’s first main crossover with its gaming sibling Dungeons & Dragons. But the lengthy highway to what may really feel like an inevitability to followers, because the two gaming legends have been introduced underneath the identical firm, was truly marked by a couple of moments of hesitance.

Magic: The Gathering’s San Diego Comic-Con @ Home 2021 panel was completely timed with Friday’s launch of Adventures within the Forgotten Realms, as Head Magic designer Mark Rosewater sat down with the set’s lead designer, Jules Robins, to carry the lid on why it took so lengthy for Magic: The Gathering and D&D to workforce up in such a serious means—and what it took to beat what was initially a way more distant relationship. “In 1998, Wizards of the Coast purchased TSR [Gary Gygax’s original tabletop company that published Dungeons & Dragons]… and one of the big worries at the time when we bought the company was, both of our big properties were fantasy properties, and we were a little bit worried that they might get confused with one another,” Rosewater stated on the SDCC digital panel.

It was that worry, at first, that led to Magic and D&D establishing a considerably unstated entente cordiale—“don’t cross the streams,” as Rosewater put it. But over time, issues slowly modified—Magic would make a reference right here and there, and finally, D&D sourcebook author James Wyatt would come over to the Magic workforce and work on the cardboard set artwork books that finally paved the Planeshift collection of digital dietary supplements, transient guides to setting D&D campaigns in Magic’s myriad multiverse of existential planes. But even because the D&D workforce dived even additional into offering Magic-themed content material, the Magic workforce itself stayed distant. Not out of an absence of need, it might appear, however a craving to go as all out as they presumably may.

The announcement of the Universes Beyond challenge—a brand new, separate department of Magic merchandise revealed earlier this 12 months that may embrace crossovers with different media properties like Lord of the Rings and Warhammer 40,000 (that, satirically, Adventures within the Forgotten Realms shouldn’t be truly a part of anymore)—was the ultimate push the Magic workforce wanted to truly simply do what had been desired for a very long time: a Magic/D&D set. But even then, the method was a studying expertise for the workforce. “At the very start, we were like ‘Alright, we’ve got Core Set 2021 the year before, and this’ll be Core Set 2022’,” Robins stated. “Instead of a different [Magic] mechanic returning, it’ll be a Dungeons & Dragons setting… we started in on that, we made a bunch of simple Magic cards capturing elements of [the setting], and it just felt too much like a normal Magic set, and didn’t reward people who were long-time D&D fans… it felt like it wasn’t paying off enough.”

It took the Magic workforce going to the D&D workforce to get the ball rolling on Magic actually embracing the crossover: identical to many Magic units are themed to a selected aircraft inside the setting’s multiverse, a D&D set ought to, effectively, be set in the world of the RPG. With the setting in place, the Magic workforce received experimental, pushing the mechanics of the sport to include as many D&D trappings as potential—from playing cards which might be framed like a Dungeon Master establishing a situation for an adventuring occasion to enchantments that enable gamers to undertake a D&D class, leveling as much as grant extra themed talents, and playing cards that ask gamers to carry out essentially the most primal, easy of D&D duties, like roll a D20.

Putting their experiments in entrance of playtesters of various familiarities with both Magic, D&D, each, and even by no means, the workforce rapidly found that it wasn’t essentially the tabletop sport’s guidelines that wanted to be introduced into Magic. “The throughline [from player feedback] was that we needed to capture the ethos of D&D,” Robins concluded. “The reading and playing of these cards needed to feel like the emotions that you have surrounding Dungeons & Dragons.” Rosewater added, “It was okay if it played like Magic, but it had to be really evocative—it had to feel like D&D.”

You can discover out for your self simply how far the workforce went in capturing that really feel now—Adventures within the Forgotten Realms is accessible for buy now. You can watch the complete Comic-Con panel embedded above.

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