#1361: Rivals of Ixalan

Mark Rosewater· Host0:00

I'm pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time to drive to work. Okay, one of my ongoing quests is to record a podcast on every episode. I continue that today with Rivals of Ixalan. Okay, so in order to set this up, let me talk a little bit about Ixalan in order to set up Rivals of Ixalan. So Ixalan was dur- during a portion where we did, um, blocks were two sets, a large and a small set. Uh, in fact, this would be the very last set, and we'll get to that, of this model. Um, so Ixalan, uh, w- the, the, the place got inspired, uh, 'cause Jenna Helland, who was on the creative team, came up with a cool idea for a world, uh, where it had kind of a, um, uh, I don't know what, how to say it, like a Mexo-American sort of flavor to it. Um, and it, the idea was it was a world where the natives dealt with the outsiders, but the outsiders, uh, from the new world were vampires. Uh, and so Jenna pitched this idea of it's kind of this conflict between the natives of the world and the outsiders who were vampires that came from, you know, quote, unquote, "the new world." Um, and so that is where it started. That was the initial pitch. Uh, the creative team really liked the world. We hadn't done