Interview w/ Gavin Verhey of Wizards of the Coast

David Chapman

Welcome. We have an amazing show for you today. I am so excited to be taking the reins. We’ve got Gavin here from Wizards of the Coast to talk a little bit about the Doctor Who Magic, The Gathering set. I know a few of you guys have asked about it in the comments in previous shows, so we worked our little magic, if you will, ba-dum-dum.

Melanie Dean

Boo.

David Chapman

Let’s meet the rest of our panel starting with –because she always wants to be last– hi Melanie Dean. 

Melanie Dean

Yeah, hi. Hello everybody. So yep, we’ve got another interview this time around. More gaming stuff, hence why we get Dave, which means we get segues like this and they’re good, which is a miracle since Christian can’t do them. But yes, we’re excited to be doing this. So super excited. Who else is on the panel, Dave? 

David Chapman

Who else is on the panel? Why, we’ve got from Cosmic Masque, Mr. Nick Smith How you doing?  

Nick Smith

I’m doing great. I’m a Whovie, but a Magic newbie, so I’m excited to hear more about the game and get to know Gavin. 

David Chapman

Of course, we’ve got our usual host. Mr. Christian Basil. 

Christian Basel

Yeah. Welcome to this special episode. We’re going to be interviewing Gavin from Magic: The Gathering, from Wizards of the Coast. Dave is taking over because my first question is going to be, “What is Magic: The Gathering?” So, yeah, this is going to be great, because I know there are a lot of you out there who may not be familiar with this game. We’re going to make sure that we educate you and tell you about what’s coming up down the pipe down there. So thank you all for joining us, take it away to Dave. 

David Chapman

Excellent. And let’s bring in Gavin, because why not.

Melanie Dean

That’s awesome. 

David Chapman

Well you sent chills down my spine, Gavin. 

David Chapman

Oh, my goodness. So yeah, this is not the only one coming out. You said you just dropped Lord of the Rings, Warhammer 40000 won one of the Origins Awards this year. (Kind of jealous because I didn’t win my category.) You guys have just been rolling over everything with this new Universes Beyond stuff and I’m really excited to to learn about it. Why don’t we get started. We’ve got Nick who kind of ehhhh and then Christian, who is even farther back on the what’s what, what so let’s just let him kind of ask his thing.

Christian Basel

Okay. So, Gavin, I’m somebody who has heard of the game, but has never dabbled into it. Actually, I’ve got a roommate who knows about it pretty darn well, but I’ve just seen like, cards and that’s it. Could you explain to some people who may not be familiar what Magic: The Gathering is? How would you describe somebody off the street who is playing for the first time? 

David Chapman

Excellent. So, that kind of answers a lot of my next question, which was what exactly is the Commander format? But we kind of already covered that. You were well ahead of us. 

Gavin Verhey

Yeah. Commander, I’ll just say has grown. You know, this is Magic’s 30th year. When a lot of people think about Magic, they think of, like, two people across the table from each other, brows furrowed a little bit, you know, deadlocked and playing this intense game. Commander is the opposite of that. It’s like laughing around the table, having some pretzels and soda or whatever, and just enjoying being interested as each other’s company. Right? A Commander is sort of like Magic’s version of a board game where you go over someone’s house, you bring your Commander deck and you sit there; a game takes an hour and a half, 2 hours sometimes, and when it’s not your turn, you’re catching up with your friend or something like that, you know? 

So it really feels a lot different than traditional Magic. Which makes it such a great fit for this Universes Beyond line because “Hey, you don’t know Magic super well? Grab a deck, come on in and play, we’ll help you out.” It’s not super cutthroat. In fact, it’s pretty common for players to enter in through Commander so they can help each other out as you’re playing. “Oh, hey, you should do this.” There’s no stakes.Everyone’s just there to make sure everyone else has a good time. So it’s a really cool thing for the Universes Beyond Commander decks to kind of be a great fusion of those two pieces. 

David Chapman

30 years… Thanks for making me feel old. I started playing the tail end of The Dark. 

Gavin Verhey

Oh, wow. And that’s like ’94 or so. 

David Chapman

I actually kind of mostly retired around Mirage. So, I mean, there’s my timeframe of regular playing. I still have a deck. I still play occasionally, but I’ve never played Commander format. So I was really quite curious as to how this is working.  

Gavin Verhey

Definitely. I mean, Commander’s really unique. I’ll just say a few other things in case folks don’t know some unique things about Commander is that A: the games are longer because you start with 40 life. B: your deck is 100 cards instead of the normal 60 cards and you can only play one copy of each card, so there’s a lot of variance. Every game is a little bit different and really makes these different stories kind of happen. Then the big thing about Commander, and why it’s such a great fit for Doctor Who, is you build your Commander deck around legendary creatures. So in Magic, you have like your normal goblins and elves that are hanging out. Then you have your named characters, right? So in The Lord of the Rings, that’s Frodo and Gandalf and Sauron and whoever. Well, in Doctor Who it’s going to be your Doctors and your companions and The Master and so on and so forth. So you actually build your deck around a specific character that you kind of always have access to. You could build your 10th Doctor deck, or you get to build your Davros deck or whatever. And it’s cool that you actually get to be like, “this is my personification of this character” and I think that’s rad. 

David Chapman

Perfect. So what are the decks? Just very brief, because I know there’s more information coming in over the next few weeks, what’s the basics of the four decks that you’ve got? 

Gavin Verhey

Yeah. So this was really interesting. When we build Commander decks, we try and figure out ways to divvy them up, right? We’re going to do four Commander decks. We knew we were going to do four Commander decks, and we usually find like some kind of faction or something. For example, with Warhammer 40,000 we did four different Warhammer factions. Makes a ton of sense, right? With Lord of the Rings, we did kind of different areas of Middle Earth. So you got like your elves and your forces of evil, all that kind of stuff. With Doctor Who we’re like, okay, well, we’ll try the same playbook. We’ll try to divide it up by what these things are. So we’ll have like a Doctor deck and a companion deck and a Cybermen deck and like a Dalek deck or something like that, which was okay. But we found it just wasn’t really gelling. First of all, it was weird that the Doctors and the companions weren’t being played together. Second of all, we, I mean are there really enough different Daleks to fill out a whole deck based on it? There are all these challenges, and we could not find anything that worked. Then one day I was like, we’ve got to get this figured out. So I took one of the other designers, after work, we locked ourselves in the room for like an hour and a half and we hammered on it. What we realized was there’s one question that almost all Doctor Who fans ask each other, and once we figured that out, it all came together. That question I’m sure you of all asked each other before is “Who’s your Doctor”, right? 

Melanie Dean

Yep. Ding ding ding ding.

Gavin Verhey

When did you start watching the show? Who is your Doctor? And we’re like, this is it. So what we did is we divided the four decks up into different eras of the show. That way no matter when you started watching, you’re like, “Oh, this is the one for me.” We’ve got one deck that’s the classic deck, which is the First through Eighth Doctors. We’ve got one deck, which is like the relaunch deck which is the Ninth, Tenth and Eleventh Doctors. And we’ve got one deck that is the Twelfth and Thirteenth deck. So the newest Doctors, the newest material. Then there’s the fourth deck… 

What about the fourth deck? Well, of course, just as well known as the heroes of Doctor Who are the villains. So we have one deck that’s dedicated to all the villains from across space and time. From things you’re going to expect to be there like Davros and the Master, all the way to some pretty deep cuts. So there’s all of that too. I’ll also just call out really fast that I didn’t mention the upcoming Doctors at all. I’ll just say that we do have a plan for that, but I can’t talk about that quite yet. 

Christian Basel

Oh wow. 

Melanie Dean

That’s typical, and I mean that nicely not mean, but that’s a very… that’s very… NDAs will make you go <slightly crazed laugh>.

Gavin Verhey

I mean it’s one of those weird things where with Magic we work on our sets years in advance, right? So, you know, we got to work with the BBC on this, which was incredible. Talk about a dream come true, to be on calls with them, to have them telling stuff about the future. It was really amazing. Normally I’m the one to tell people about the future. So someone told me about the future and I was “oooo this is super exciting.” But you know, even with our timelines, we had to be very careful when we did certain things where. So the decks only comprise up through the Thirteenth Doctor story. But like I said, we’ve got some plans for some future stuff, so you’ll find out more about that down the road. 

Nick Smith

I’d love to know more about how this game came about. Did the BBC approach you to do it? Did Wizards approach the BBC. How did that work? 

Gavin Verhey

You know, that’s a great question. So we have a whole team that’s like a Universes Beyond licensing team and they are always reaching out to folks, or having people reach out to them, about the connections. I don’t know exactly how this one came about because I’m on the design side, but I believe it was us reaching out to them. We looked at properties we thought would be a good fit for Magic and I think, I’m not sure on this, we reached out to them. 

One thing that’s really interesting is when I was first told about doing Doctor Who, obviously I was very excited. I’m a huge Whovian, so yeah, thumbs up, I’m on board. But I was like, that’s kind of strange fit. My first thing was that feels kind of weird, right? Magic is a fantasy trading card game. This is a real world show, does that really fit? But then once I started designing, it was clear to me. Oh no, this is actually a really good fit. I’m super glad we chose it because we go with new sets all the time and each Magic set goes to a different world with a new cast of characters. The world has some new problem that our heroes have to solve. Sound familiar? You know, like every episode of Doctor Who? You go to a new world and there’s some people that the heroes have to save. So, it really lined up nicely. When working on the set, I was like, “Oh, this is an amazing fit for Doctor Who.” 

In fact, I mean, maybe skipping ahead a little bit, but whatever, it’s a time travel show. I’ll skip ahead to one of the things we did that was really cool. There’s a variant of Magic, a special kind of way to play that doesn’t happen very often –or we don’t have many products for rather– but is very popular, called Planechase. The way that Planechase works is along with your decks, you bring these oversize cards that are about twice or two and a half times the size of a normal Magic card and these represent locations. So in Magic, they represent the different worlds of Magic. Then over the course of the game, basically you will flip them up and you will be in that location for a little while. 

Before design on the Doctor Who decks even started, I was like, this is perfect for Doctor Who. What better thing for Doctor Who? You know, literally travel throughout space and time as you’re playing your games. So we got the thumbs up on that before we even started the design process and we baked it in from the very beginning. So, as you’re playing these Commander decks, every game you’ll start off in a different place and you’ll travel to many more places as the games go on. You might start on Earth and then go to the Lux Foundation Library and then go from there to the Dalek homeworld and who knows. So it’s very, very cool and it really makes you feel like you’re part of the show. 

David Chapman

Everything kind of ties perfectly together there. 

Gavin Verhey

I think the game is great, I love Magic. Obviously huge Magic fan, you’ll see no disagreement with loving Magic here. But, if you’re just a fan of the show and you just want some cool Doctor Who collectibles. Not only is the art amazing, but the art on these Planechase cards is especially cool because they’re over double the size of a normal card and the art piece takes up most of the card. You get these great panoramas of landscapes. We showed off one already. We showed off the Library from the Silence in the Library episode and it’ just so cool. I want to get that art piece, put it on my fridge or something because it is, it is awesome.  So you get to see these things from Doctor Who fully realize like this in the Lux Foundation Library, and you know, there’s a lot more a lot more where that came from. 

David Chapman

We’ve played Worlds Apart on the show a few times, that’s a digital card game, sometimes kind of compared to Magic. You guys have your own digital format, so are any of the Universes Beyond, but especially Doctor Who, going to be going online to Magic Arena?

Gavin Verhey

Yeah, it’s a great question. So, Commander, which is what these deck are, and this way to play is not something that’s on Arena. Arena is more about one on one play. It doesn’t really have that multiplayer element as much. But also in part because so much of the multiplayer nature of Commander is sitting around the table and laughing with your friends and making jokes and kind of wanting to have that like communal board game experience. So it’s not going on to Arena, not say that it couldn’t ever some day if there was a right reason to. But for now it’s going to be paper only. 

David Chapman

Okay, that’s fair. 

Gavin Verhey

Which is nice because there are some very strange things I did with the cards would be very hard to code. So there you go. 

David Chapman

Oooo I like that. Can you play regular Magic with this? Like, are these cards going to be tournament legal?

Gavin Verhey

Oh, yeah. The way our Universes Beyond cards work is they’re just like normal Magic cards. You can play them and mix and match them with your other decks. You know, one of the great things about Magic is it’s something that you get to take all the pieces you’ve collected over the past 30 years and tell your own stories and build your own decks with them. So you can absolutely take these cards and put them in your other Commander Decks. What we found with the Warhammer 40000 decks that I thought was really interesting is some people took their favorite cards out, put them in their other decks, but a lot of people just kept them together as this perfect little capsule. Right? “Hey, we’re gonna play Warhammer 40000” I think with Doctor Who you’re going to see a lot of the same where there are some cards players take out, putting them in their decks, mix and match. But also a lot of people are just like, “this is my Doctor Who Magic. This is perfect. I want to keep these together and play with them.” And that’s really cool. But yes, and they can be played in tournament play in some of the older formats and playing Commander as well. So you never know. Maybe the Tenth Doctor is going to be the hot new tournament card. It is possible I guess. 

Gavin Verhey

Well, there’s something funny, you know. To be to throwing in your classics, you know, Serra Angels and Shivan Dragons and Dark Rituals next to, whatever, an Adipose. But that’s the delight of the game I think. 

David Chapman

We’ll just Tim David Tennant to death. If you know, you know… So let’s look at some of these questions from the audience. I want to start near the bottom here with Scott. “If the next Doctor was chosen from a Magic: The Gathering character who would make the best choice?” 

Gavin Verhey

Wow. What a great question. So Magic is full of these characters called Planeswalkers and Planeswalkers are like our title characters. In fact, they’re like our Doctors because they have the ability no one else has, which is to travel between worlds. So for a Doctor, I think they would come from Planeswalkers So I’d guess one of our most popular Planeswalkers, maybe someone like Jace, who’s a very, blue thinky kind of wizard. But definitely I think one of our Planeswalkers would be the choice there.

Christian Basel

Mark Robinson: “Will the Doctor still have a Mana element?”

Gavin Verhey

Yes. I’ll kind of explain this for a second. In the game of Magic, The Gathering, there are five colors, right? You’ve got white, blue, black, red and green. And this is like the building blocks of our game. White is about community and working together and healing and angels and soldiers and that kind of thing. Blue is about knowledge and learning and air and water and deceit and trickery and cunning, that kind of stuff. Think, merfolk, that kind of thing. Black is about ambition and death and zombies and swamps and noxious fumes and that kind of stuff. Red is like passion and lightning and fire and quick and impulsiveness and, you know, your goblins, that kind of stuff. And then green is about forests. You’ve got like trees and elves and elementals and nature and nurture and growth. So these are the five colors that Magic is built on, and I think if you take away nothing else, knowing about those five colors is really the key part of Magic. Because all of our cards, or most of our cards, fall into one of those colors. 

One of the things that our fans love doing are debating which colors are certain characters going to be because, you know, what color is the Doctor? Are different incarnations of the Doctor, different colors? What color is Davros? So, yes, of course there’ll be mana in the Magic: The Gathering Doctor Who experience and I think it’ll be a lot of fun if people try to figure out, try to guess which colors certain characters are going to be. What color do you think the Tenth Doctor is?

Look at all the Doctors, right? You can look at each of them, and some of them are probably the same. But also, if you look at the War Doctor, that’s a very different kind of philosophy. So there’s a wide variety of things you can pull from, and it was really fun trying to put that into Magic. In Commander, as I mentioned before, you can only pick one legendary character to be your Commander. So you have a Thirteenth Doctor here to be your Commander or the Tenth Doctor or so on and so forth. But one thing that we found is in Doctor Who, there’s nothing more iconic than the Doctor and their companions together. Right? That is what the whole show is built around. So we designed a special mechanic that allows you to actually use two Commanders. You get to have what’s called a Doctor’s Companion, fitting enough, you get to use one Doctor and one companion as your Commander. So if you want to play Sarah Jane Smith alongside the Fourth Doctor, you can absolutely do that. But once again, tell your own stories, right? So if you want to build your deck, have it be Sarah Jane Smith and the Tenth Doctor. You can do that if you want to. Sarah Jane Smith and the Thirteenth Doctor? Go nuts, you get to build your own deck, tell your own story. Which is fantastic. 

The way that we built that is, is the companions in the decks are all one color and the Doctors are all two color. That way you get up to a three color deck and you get to see how the companions augment the Doctor. So for example, the Fourth Doctor we announced is blue and green, and then Sarah Jane Smith is white. So you get that kind of blue green from the Fourth Doctor, plus the kind of like investigative journalism, like the core of good from Sarah Jane Smith, and that makes your white blue green back. It’s really fun to kind of make that all come together.

Melanie Dean

Well, okay, every artist, has their own process. But what is the process behind the design and art direction? I mean, is it all original art? 

Gavin Verhey

Yeah. Yeah. So it’s all original art. I feel like with this product, we’ve probably created some of the coolest pieces, or the biggest collection of Doctor Who like official art and probably anywhere. I don’t know. But there’s so much good stuff here and it was awesome. We have a very deep process in house. It’s all done bespoke for the set there’s we’re not grabbing from anywhere else really. We don’t use anything AI-generated, this is all from our awesome stable of Magic artists. So, it’s a very long process. 

First in the design process, we decide what each card is going to be, what character it’s going to be, or something like that.We work with the team on that. Then a writer writes a description for the artists like a quite a long description of here’s what we want, here’s what it looks like. Keep in mind that not every artist is going to be a Doctor Who fan, so we need to make sure to get all the elements of that in there. Then it’s a long back and forth process as the artist starts working. They send us sketches. We send the feedback on the sketches. We go back and forth for a while, and also we send it over to the BBC because they’ll have notes on them too. So it’s a very long, iterative process but ends up with incredible pieces. And this has so many cards in it. I mean, each deck has 100 cards. There’s a couple that overlap, but not many, so, you’re looking at almost 400. You know you’ll get a ton of unique Doctor Who artwork. 

As we all know, early Doctor Who used whatever they had access to. It was very low budget and one of the things that we took great joy in, and that made us really happy, is we’re able to take some of those really early Doctor Who episodes and illustrate them. There’s no special effects budget when you’re illustrating, right? You just draw whatever you want. So, we got to really bring some of those early episodes and early aliens to life. There’s there’s a couple in particular –actually one in particular– that is so cool. We got to make them look awesome because they’re a very early alien you find in early Doctor Who and they were very janky looking on the show. You know, with respect, given the budget. We were able to make them look really cool, or at least I think pretty cool. So there’s some cool stuff that we were able to update and do. I was really glad to bring that kind of modern art sensibility of, “Hey, we can draw whatever cool stuff we want” to make this stuff look really awesome. 

Melanie Dean

I just want to see the artwork for the Sixth Doctor –for every piece– because bless whoever was tasked that… My Lord, I hope that something was shown in the blue coat. 

David Chapman

So many options. 

Melanie Dean

So, there’s a vast array of lore in Doctor Who and clearly a lot of it’s canon, some of it less so. Some of it kind of has an asterisk mark on it, like Titan Comics. They’ve got Jo Martin’s Fugitive Doctor that they are running and it’s supposedly canon. The upcoming Star Beast special is, as you know, in part based on the older comic story of the same name. Night of the Doctor references several Big Finish Audio characters. So have you kept to just the televised work or are we going to see some other easter egg surprises from other areas? 

Gavin Verhey

Here’s what I’ll say. I’ll say it straight, it’s all from the televised show. Okay? So if you are in the world of, you know, Big Finish and comics, we already can’t cover everything in the TV show. There’s so much to cover. We don’t go further than that. But what I will say, is I certainly looked into all that stuff and there’s probably a few characters that I chose to include in the set who might have not been as popular in their initial runs, but have a had a great second life in other places. So I guess that’s what I’ll say there. So it has to have shown up in Doctor Who and the TV show to be eligible. But you know, sometimes you put the thumb on the scale a little bit for people who are going to be popular later on. 

Melanie Dean

Okay.

 

David Chapman

I wonder if Mags is going to be in there…

Melanie Dean

Frobisher, damn it…

David Chapman

If you ever do a Marvel set Death’s Head has to be in there just to connect back to the Doctor Who set. That’s all I’ve got to say on that. Gavin, we’ve only got a couple of minutes left here, so what else do we need to know? 

Gavin Verhey

Be sure to be following social media. As we show off more, I hope you all get the chance to enjoy it. It’s a real labor of love for me and my team of Doctor Who fans at Wizards. I think it’s going to be really special and whether you play the game or not, just looking at the cards is a real love letter to Doctor Who. 

I also have to say that I have –just for a shameless plug– I’ve got a YouTube channel that I post to two or three times a week covering Magic design. Of course, I’m going to have Doctor Who stuff on there as we get closer to the decks releasing on October 13th, 2023. So feel free to go check it out. It’s called Good Morning Magic and just Googling that will get you there. 

Thank you all so much for the great time today and see you elsewhere in time and space. I’ll try to catch up again, maybe closer to the release. We can talk to some of the art in the stories that we did. 

David Chapman

Thank you, Gavin.

Gavin Verhey

See you all soon. Take care.