Designing Magic: The Gathering® | Avatar: The Last Airbender™: Allies, Clues, and Lessons

The first time someone learns about Magic: The Gathering® | Avatar: The Last Airbender™, they always ask “Wait, what about black?” It’s a natural question; Avatar: The Last Airbender has four elements, Magic has five colors, and black is clearly the odd color out. In my last article, I covered how we tackled the four elements. In this article, I’ll dig into how all the other mechanics in the set came to be, along with how we approached the color black.

As the lead designer for the set, I saw this issue differently from others. While there are obviously four elements in the original series, they’re definitely not depicted equally. Even casual fans of the show could tell you that there aren’t very many Airbenders left in the world—it’s right there in the title! The only creatures that would be able to airbend would be Aang and Appa, but Aang was also the Avatar, which meant his cards should feature more than just airbending.

0004_MTGTLA_Main: Aang, the Last Airbender

0009_MTGTLA_Main: Appa, Loyal Sky Bison

No matter what we did, air simply couldn’t take up as much space as the other elements in the set. In my mind, this meant we had two problematic colors instead of just one. Both white and black needed some extra support to find their identity among the elements.

0225_MTGTLA_Main: Hei Bai, Spirit of Balance

The first idea people suggested (including me) was to showcase spirits. The spirit world is a cool and important part of the show’s worldbuilding. We meet a handful of memorable spirit characters, including some who play pivotal roles in the story. Spirits also play a very large part in The Legend of Korra, which featured spirits even more prominently than the original series.

0222_MTGTLA_Main: Foggy Swamp Spirit Keeper

However, that direction never felt right. Not only were we light on concepts for creature cards, we found that games involving a ton of spirits didn’t feel resonant to the show. Most episodes are about conflicts between people. Spirits were great to show up occasionally, but they weren’t the right choice for a main ingredient.

Meanwhile, the team was also investigating an entirely different direction: Allies. Originally seen in Zendikar, Ally is an existing Magic creature type that spans all five colors. Allies usually have abilities that boost or benefit from other Allies.

Allies were immediately appealing to us for a variety of reasons. They captured the feeling of characters from different nations coming together very well. They could show up in all colors but naturally leaned toward white, bolstering white’s mechanical identity. They gave more definition to the many non-bender combatants that were part of the war. And best of all, they were very simple to understand.

0011_MTGTLA_Main: Avatar Enthusiasts

0251_MTGTLA_Main: White Lotus Reinforcements

We knew our set would introduce four brand-new mechanics that all sounded similar but did completely different things. We also knew that this set was likely to bring in a lot of newer players, especially younger players. In our research, Magic players consistently said that this set was the most likely to get their friends and family to try out the game. Because of this, we knew we needed some simple mechanics that were easier to grasp. The combination of flavor and simplicity made Allies a slam dunk.

If the color white was going to be about the show’s allies, it felt natural for black to be about the enemies they’re fighting against. Black being relegated to “the villain color” can feel a little repetitive sometimes, but the show’s excellent writing creates a diverse cast of antagonists that help keep black from becoming too one-note.

0224_MTGTLA_Main: Hama, the Bloodbender

0252_MTGTLA_Main: Zhao, Ruthless Admiral

0233_MTGTLA_Main: Long Feng, Grand Secretariat

However, all that still didn’t tell us what the color wanted to care about mechanically. Remembering our learnings from why the focus on spirits fell flat, I started thinking about what would be resonant to the actual events of the show. In most episodes, what are the antagonists trying to do? Capture the Avatar, of course! The gang is constantly on the run, and in every season, there’s at least one party (usually multiple) trying to hunt them down, following their trail of clues. Hey, wait a minute …

0085_MTGTLA_Main: Azula, On the Hunt

0112_MTGTLA_Main: Obsessive Pursuit

Clues weren’t the most obvious idea, but once we tried them out, it became clear how great of a fit they were for the set. They play well with both the waterbending and firebending mechanics, the latter of which was especially important since the Fire Nation features more prominently as the main villain of the show. It also let us dip into sacrifice, which paired nicely with Ally tokens in white and earthbending in green. We also thought of a lot of fun Clue token art concepts. These iconic items from the show really help sell the flavor and get fans excited.

0018_MTGTLA_TknBstr: Clue Token

0015_MTGTLA_TknBstr: Clue Token

0014_MTGTLA_TknBstr: Clue Token

The only thing playtesters didn’t like about Clues was the word “investigate.” The flavor of hunting down the Avatar worked, but “investigate” was too associated with detectives and mysteries in their minds, and it didn’t feel resonant to the setting. I suggested we simply cut the word and write it out like normal, and everyone was back on board!

Personally, I’m a big fan of this change anyway. Investigate (originally created for Shadows over Innistrad) was the first mechanic we ever made that created a specific artifact token. But over the last ten years, we’ve created many new artifact tokens, including some we use quite often like Treasure and Food. None of these tokens have a special word to create them, so the word investigate feels a little outdated and sometimes even confusing. I was happy to remove the word while keeping the flavor and gameplay of Clues.

With Allies and Clues added to the set, we had a solid foundation that gave each color a primary mechanic to blend with the other colors in different ways. But the team felt there was one last thing missing from the set to truly capture the essence of Avatar: The Last Airbender. We covered the four elements, the setting-wide conflict of allied nations against imperial invaders, and the antagonists hunting down the gang. The thing we were missing was the journey of learning, growth, and mastery that the main characters experienced throughout their adventure.

0074_MTGTLA_JmpNew: Aang, Airbending Master

0006_MTGTLA_Main: Airbender Ascension

Cards like the experience counter cycle from Jumpstart Boosters or the Ascension cycle from the main set were designed to hit this note, but I wanted something that could show up at lower rarities and be a bigger part of the Limited play experience. It would be especially useful if it could go on instant and sorcery cards, since so many of our mechanics focused on permanents. If we wanted to make cards that featured our characters learning important lessons … what if they were just Lessons?

0008_MTGTLA_Main: Airbending Lesson

0080_MTGTLA_Main: Waterbending Lesson

0138_MTGTLA_Main: Firebending Lesson

0176_MTGTLA_Main: Earthbending Lesson

I’d always been interested in trying out more subtypes on spells. With typal being such a popular part of Magic, spell subtypes can add some texture to the classic spellslinger archetypes. It was especially cool to be able to make various mentor characters that called out Lessons, which makes the cards read far more charming than our usual templates.

0169_MTGTLA_Main: Bumi, King of Three Trials

0248_MTGTLA_Main: Uncle Iroh

Let’s address the elephant koi in the room: where’s learn? When the Lesson subtype was introduced in Strixhaven: School of Mages, it was directly linked to the learn mechanic, which let you fetch Lessons from outside the game. If we’re doing Lessons, why wouldn’t we also bring back learn?

Learn is a tricky mechanic to work with. While it introduces some interesting and unique dynamics to a draft environment, it can also feel repetitive and is difficult for newer players to understand. It caused issues for Play Design when balancing for Standard, and it simply does not function in Commander. It’s also a very high complexity mechanic that requires a lot of attention and infrastructure to support. I knew that learn was not a good fit for our overall goals with this set, so why did we pursue Lessons?

Pictured: Me leading vision design.

I lead a lot of vision designs. Vision design is the part of the design process most open to experimentation. If you don’t experiment, you’ll never find the diamonds in the rough.

At first, I was extremely unconfident in the idea of Lessons. Would the gameplay be different enough from typical instant and sorcery themes? Would the flavor justify the added complexity? Would players find Lessons without learn too weird and distracting? Would we be able to find enough concepts to make cards that felt like Lessons? Would making more Lessons upset the balance of learn cards in older formats? I didn’t know. (I still don’t!)

0044_MTGTLA_Main: Accumulate Wisdom

Game design is an iterative art form. You create, you test, and you improve based on the results. I didn’t know if Lessons would work, but I felt they were worth testing. And through testing, we learned that Lessons landed quite well with the audience. Our playtesters enjoyed the flavor a lot more than I expected and were unbothered by the absence of learn. Over time, I became more convinced that Lessons were a cool, thematic addition to the set. Now, I love the Lessons and couldn’t imagine making the set without them.

A common piece of advice for artists is “Kill your darlings,” which means you shouldn’t be afraid to throw out something that isn’t working, even if you love it. I will say that the opposite is also true. Don’t be afraid to try out an idea you’re skeptical of at first. You never know, it might become your new darling!

Those are all the mechanics in Magic: The Gathering | Avatar: The Last Airbender. In my third and final article, I’ll share some stories about how we designed legendary creature cards for the main characters of the show.