Thread by @EthanFleischer

#MTGKaldheim: Creature types, color combinations, and the Realms! This will be a long thread, so I may have to take breaks here and there to do the actual work I'm being paid for, eat, sleep, etc. #WOTCstaff 1/

For context, I led the vision design team. Our team collaborates extensively with the worldbuilding team, with ideas from one team inspiring more ideas from the other. 2/

I was so excited by Kaldheim as it developed that I asked Jenna Helland if I could help write the world guide. My main contribution was writing early drafts of the descriptions of Istfell, Karfell, and Surtland, 3/

One of the cool things about the origina Norse mythological source material that inspired Kaldheim is that it takes place in a Multiverse, just like Magic! Norse mythology has nine realms. 4/

Because there is no canon of this folklore, the Realms are described in inconsistent and contradictory ways be different authors through the centuries. 5/

The way the realms were described didn't always fit with how we would want to use them, so some of Kaldheim's realms combine elements from multiple Norse realms together. 6/

This is true of creatures, as well. The light elves are suggested to be the vanir by some sources, and the dark elves are suggested to be the same as the dwarves by some. Such ambiguity has little place in our game, where creatures have defined types. 7/

As someone who had worked on all of the Theros and Amonkhet sets, I had a good idea of how many unique concepts a culturally-inspired Magic planes would need to fill out a set (or block). 8/

The first hydra is cool. The second hydra is okay. By the third hydra, hydras are starting to get a bit old. This effect can be ameliorated by using tribal themes, where your DECK feels like a group of zombies (or werewolves, etc.). 9/

While I didn't want to make a set that was as tribally focused as Innistrad, I generally like to seed a few tribal decks into any draftable set I'm making. Early in vision design, we discussed which creature types felt particularly resonant with Norse mythology and culture. 10/

Elves, dwarves, giants, gods, trolls, and valkyries all seemed particularly Norse in character. Magic also has a Berserker creature type that we would be foolish to ignore, as the word berserker comes from Old Norse. 11/

Elves were an easy tribe to enable. They're small, they have lots of different jobs. In the original mythology, elves are divided into light elves and dark elves, who live in different realms. Those words suggested white and black, don't they? 12/

We wanted our elves to work in players' existing elf decks, so Kaldheim has wood elves and dark elves instead, so can have green and black elves. 13/

Dwarves were another tribe that seemed reasonable to implement here. They aren't popular among deckbuilders, because there aren't enough strong dwarves, but if we could remedy that, I'm sure they would increase in popularity. 14/

Dwarves were originally found in red in early Magic, due to the fact that dwarves live in tunnels under mountains, and due to their connection to the element of earth. More recently, we made many white dwarves, to emphasize their honor and traditionality. 15/

For those reasons, and because my Depala deck needed better cards, we put dwarves in RW. To give them a distinctive play pattern, many Dwarves care about artifacts. 16/

The most exciting jotun, (mis?)translated into English as "giant," were the frost giants and the fire giants. Those obviously had to be blue and red. Making tribes that can't have small creatures work can be a design challenge, but we thought it was worth the work. 17/

Those three tribes received the most tribal support. Not every deck archetype in Kaldheim is a tribal deck. We figured out the best colors for the other "resonant Norse types." Trolls had nearly always appeared as either red or green in Magic. No need to rock the boat there. 18/

We had made a single valkyrie before, Adarkar Valkyrie in Coldsnap. It had the creature type Angel. Angels are one of Magic most popular creature types. We put them in white and in black, to reflect their roles as psychopomps. 19/

Gods were tricky, as they only wanted to appear at rare and mythic rare. I'll do a whole thread about gods later, but for now let's just say that for a while, we tried to fit them into the structure along with the other creature types. 20/

And of course, Humans! In Norse mythology, humans inhabit the realm of Middenheim. There was a lot of flexibility in what two colors to focus Humans, but GW seemed best, as there were Innistrad sets looming on the horizon, and Humans have been focused in GW in Innistrad. 21/

At some point, we started thinking, "Seven is edging pretty close to ten, which is pretty close to nine." WHAT IF WE HAD TEN REALMS, EACH WITH AN ASSOCIATED RACE, EACH REPRESENTED IN THIS SET BY TWO COLORS?!? 22/

One obvious place to go was draugr. These undead creatures didn't feature prominently in Norse mythology, but they were a legit part of Scandinavian folklore, and had gotten a lot of coverage in Skyrim, making them recognizable. We put 'em in UB to fit into Innistrad. 23/

I think it was @SheppardArts we pitched over-the-top, death metal Viking demons. I'm more of a punk fan, but I appreciated the need to cater to the metalheads here. These could represent the fears of everyone on the receiving end of a Viking raid. 24/

Shapeshifting plays a major role in lots of Norse mythological stories, but a race of shapeshifters isn't present there. We found Scandinavian folk tales of näcken, shapeshifters who lure people to drown in streams, and adapted them into our GU tribe. 25/

This ten-element structure really wanted to be reflected in the set by a few cycles. One of these was a cycle of ten two-color uncommon legendary creatures. Our Gods were all modal double-faced cards, though, which caused a lot of weirdness with this cycle. 26/

For a long time, we had a single uncommon DFC. Finally, it was just too bizarre, and we decided that the spirits of the dead should be our WU tribe. 27/

Gods would exist outside of the tenfold structure, and their home would be displaced to one of the ten named realms as a result of a prank. 28/

This structure (ten realms, plus five monocolor Viking clans with distinctive cultures) implied quite a lot of concept art, more than we typically devote to a new place, especially now that we were making sets on three different planes per year! 29/

For a while, we tried to figure out how to imply the existence of some of the realms without having to devote concepting time to them, but eventually we decided to just spend more time, pay more artists, and do the extra work to do the cool thing in the cool way. 30/

I think that the investment will pay off in the long run. We now have such a robust, diverse setting that we could design many Magic sets on Kaldheim before we started to run out of new angles to approach them from. 31/31