- How do you encourage
Magic: The Gathering players
to play D&D and how do you
get D&D players interested
in a Magic: The Gathering setting?
It's a challenge.
- It is.
I think because they are different games.
Magic: The Gathering is
head-to-head, very strategy.
There's a barrier to
understanding how Magic works,
but I think there's kind of...
I like this beautiful cross pollination
because I think that the D&D
player who is cooperative,
story-driven is going to be interested
in Magic: The Gathering and
will bring something to that.
And Magic: The Gathering
being very strategy-driven
and player versus player,
is gonna bring something to a D&D table.
And I think, they make both games better,
is kind of like the bottom line of it.
I feel that if I'm playing
the Mythic Odysseys of Theros
in a D&D game and I'm like,
"This is such a cool setting.
"What is this Magic: The Gathering thing?"
And then I go to play it,
the more D&D players that
get into playing Magic,
I think it just makes the
Magic community better.
I think D&D brings that kind
of story sensibility to it,
they bring the cooperative nature,
that sense of like, I'm playing it.
Like when I played Magic:
The Gathering as a kid,
I was...
I would make my goblin deck,
and it was a terrible goblin deck.
It had no strategy.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah. (laughs)
We didn't have enough goblins.
- Yeah, it was fun, you know?
And I made up stories about it
and my friends would beat me mercilessly,
but I had a blast because
my little goblin was doing,
and it took the edge off
of their competitiveness.
They're really hard like, "I'm gonna win."
It, took the edge off of them,
and it also gave them
an insight into like,
"Wow, I can really have fun
with the story of Magic,
"rather than just coming
in and just beating you."
And as a D&D player, as a story guy,
I got to see from my Magic friends,
"Wow, they're really using
the strategy of the card.
"They're really reading that card."
And they're using the mechanics
and the numbers to create
these combinations.
And I was like, "Oh my gosh."
When I learned about combos, it was like,
boom, a whole world opening.
So it made me a more
critical strategy player
and more thinking about
like the brilliance
of Magic as a game.
And when I got how brilliant
of a game Magic was,
I was just like, "Oh my
this thing is amazing.
"And it's a different animal."
So I think there is that
kind of mutual appreciation
that can happen.
It can create a more
strategically thinking D&D player
and it can create a more fun,
story-driven, collaborative Magic player.
So, that's my big theory about this.
(both laughing)
I've been thinking about that a long time.
Yeah, 'cause I've been on
both sides of the wall,
so yeah, it's been fun.
- How would you as a Dungeon
master who wants to run
in this universe convert
Magic: The Gathering players
to D&D, and convert D&D players
to Magic: The Gathering?
I know it's a horribly tough question.
(laughing)
- It is a horribly tough question
and not so hard a question really,
'cause like both of them are fun games
and it's not hard to get
people excited about either one
if you sit down and play
with them, and really,
the philosophical
approach that we've taken
with both Ravnica book and
this one is not to try to...
It's basically to treat them as D&D books,
not as crossover products.
There's no knowledge
of Magic game mechanics
or the philosophy behind
them of the color pie.
You don't need any of
that to approach this book
as a D&D setting and play in
this world as a D&D player.
So, you don't need to understand Magic.
You don't need to play Magic,
if you wanna play in Theros
and get the full enjoyment from this book.
I guess probably that
my corporate overlords,
and to an extent, I,
hope that reading this
book gets you curious,
and gets you excited,
and it makes you want to
go and look at these cards,
learn it, learn more
about the other cool game
and vice versa if you're
a fan of the card set,
I mean, there's a ton of world information
in this book that you
can't get anywhere else.
So for that alone,
Magic lore groups should
get kick out of this book
and hopefully if they're
not already D&D fans,
then there will be some amount of,
"Oh wow, you mean I can be this character
"that I see on the card?"
- Yeah, I think there's
stuff here that if you...
I'm not interested in playing
in the Magic: The Gathering world,
you can take all of this stuff
and do your own top-down
Greek-inspired world.
It's just, It's made for that.
Or if you wanna play True too,
like I wanna make sure
I have all the palais
which is plural of palace,
now once you have all of those represented
properly in Theros, you
get a map of Theros.
And Magic: The gathering
up to this point...
We have not seen what
Theros looks like on a map.
And so this is something
that Magic players will get to enjoy
and so if you wanna properly
represent that in your game,
you get to do all of those things.
Or there's also, or you can just take it,
"And you know what, I wanna
make my own build a chimera,"
you get to do that in this book,
'cause that's something
that exists in our bestiary.
