Robin Herbert

Robin Herbert is a former Magic designer. He particularly contributed to the Legends set.

Biography

In the early 90's, Robin lived in Vancouver, Canada where he met Steve Conard who was one of five founders of Wizards of the Coast. They immediately hit it off. They were both young software developers, who loved computer games, and were both avid Dungeons & Dragons players. Soon they became good friends. One day while at Wizards in Philadelphia, Peter Adkison introduced Steve to Magic. The next trip to Seattle, Steve took Robin with him and by the end of the weekend, the game had their in its grips.

They quickly became addicted and started making their own cards for fun on their own time, based on the epic fantasy that both of them enjoyed. A few months later Steve and Robin began designing their own set, but still on a casual basis. Many of the ideas for Legends came from notes taken by Steve on Wizards's Christmas recreational outing to Mt. Rainier. Many of the ideas used for legendary creatures came from the D&D campaigns enjoyed by those involved.

The expansion was originally named "The Legend Continues", in order to pay homage to the original game, but it was shortened to just "Legends" by those involved. Peter Adkison later asked to review the set they had created, and it was quickly accepted because the upcoming Ice Age was delayed. Peter and Skaff Elias came to Vancouver to discuss Legends. A playtest system needed to be established. Skaff was to be the liaison between the design team and the "East Coast playtesters" in Philadelphia. Development of Legends followed, which was complicated by communication issues. As the language found on cards was not yet standardized, it was sometimes difficult for the developers, who were across the country in Philadelphia, to understand what the cards were intended to do. After a face-to-face meeting between the design and development teams, however, many cards' intentions were clarified.

In one of the many emails from Skaff, he said they needed more Legendary characters. They went through their campaign notes and began pulling character names. It was suggested that Steve also would also include his personal player character, but Wizards frowned upon vanity publishing and so he decided against it. Too many people knew his characters. On the other hand, no one knew Robin’s D&D character (Ramirez DePietro) or any of the other player characters from his campaign (Ramses Overdark, Marhault Elsdragon) and so they were included.