In a press panel at MagicCon Amsterdam, Magic: The Gathering’s product architect Ben Bleiweiss revealed that a lot of work had been put in to ensure that, in upcoming MTG set Kamigawa: Titanbreach, it didn’t feel like the mech theme was tacked on.
“I think what is really going to make the set work is a lot of our learnings from sets like Thunder Junction and Karlov Manor,” he said, citing the two releases most commonly referred to by fans as ‘hat sets’. It’s always been a little unclear and amorphous what that popular term actually means, but a key factor is the shoe-horning of characters into roles that don’t seem like a natural fit, creating a sense of playing dress-up.
I don’t know that I’ve seen anyone speculating that Kamigawa Titanbreach would suffer from the same problem, at least not at this early stage, but Bleiweiss clearly wanted to nip the idea in the bud.
“In Kamigawa, we wanted to take special care that if we had someone who’s piloting a mech, It was someone who was a pilot in the original Kamigawa, and it’s not just random people jumping into mechs, that you’d seen before, that would make no sense to be a mech pilot,” he said.
Wizards of the Coast knew early on after the release of Kamigawa Neon Dynasty that this was a plane that it needed to return to again soon, and the monsters vs mechs set idea was a natural fit. But head designer Mark Rosewater says that while the concept came easy, designing the actual cards was much harder.
He joked that the big picture idea is very ‘mythic rare vs mythic rare’, pointing out: “I got to make commons!”
“Sometimes you have designs and they come straight,” Rosewater continued. “These were very complicated. We did come up with really elegant solutions, but elegance takes time in design, so it went through a lot of iterations.”
The head designer also revealed that Titanbreach “is more a Kamigawa set than an Ikoria set”.
“Ikoria’s presence is felt, I mean, there are giant monsters attacking, but it’s not fifty fifty.” He points out that the set takes place entirely on Kamigawa, and says, “emotionally you’re on the side of the Kamigawans a little more because their home is being invaded.”
Source: Wargamer
