Last week we released Agent0 in Open Beta. Agent0 is the agentic AI woven into Dash0. It is a set of 5 (for now) AI Agents that support you in a variety of ways, from troubleshooting, to onboarding more applications into sending telemetry to Dash0, to creating Dashboards and Alerts, and more.
What is in a name
Our agentic AIs have… peculiar names: the Seeker, the Oracle, the Threadweaver, the Pathfinder and the Artist. And you may say “hang on a minute, that sounds like Dungeons and Dragons or Diablo classes”. To which I can only answer: yep.
You see, at Dash0 we have achieved critical mass on being nerds and loving it. As we have been building the foundations of our agentic AI, we realized we could achieve better results by having distinct, specialized agents, it was just a matter of time until somebody came up with “these sound like RPG specializations”. So Mirko, the CEO, started ideating names and posting mocks made with Midjourney in a Slack channel.
It spiralled out of control pretty quickly.
Magic the Gathering, obviously
I already mentioned that there is a significant nerd streak inside Dash0. I honestly think it comes with the territory. When we see high-fantasy renditions of epic characters like the Seeker or the Oracle, the natural response of people like us is to say “I have got to have a collectible card about it”.
But which card game should we tie into? Across Dash0 we have people that enjoy the Pokemon TCG, Yu-gi-oh, Lorcana, and of course, the one game that brought Trading Card Games mainstream all the way back in 1993: Magic the Gathering (MTG).
The high-fantasy idea of our Agentic AI characters fits MtG perfectly. And since I have spent significant amounts of time and (not so) disposable income as an adolescent and young adult collecting and playing Magic the Gathering, I think it took about 5 minutes from Mirko posting a Midjourney mock of the Seeker, to me creating a subscription on MTG Cardsmith and starting ideating the cards.
The process of making MtG cards
We knew we wanted MtG cards. We knew we wanted them playable. And we knew we wanted them absolutely busted in terms of power levels: that is due to lore accuracy, and we think Agent0 is pretty overpowered as well.
Before coming up with the card rules, however, we needed to establish themes. The flavor of cards comes mainly from the combination of three aspects: type, color and lore.
The type of cards
MtG has cards of different types, which are associated with different game mechanics: creatures, enchantments, instants, sorceries and so on. Given the fact we wanted to create cards about our Agentic AIs, the Artifact creature kind was an open-and-shut case.
Card colors
MtG has five colors arranged in the so-called “color pie” you see on the back of the cards: white, green, blue, red and black. (There is also a neutral color used by artifacts, we’ll come back to that.) Each color has a theme long established:
- White: Peace, law, structure, selflessness, equality
- Blue: Knowledge, deceit, caution, deliberation, perfection
- Black: Power, self-interest, death, sacrifice, uninhibitedness
- Red: Freedom, emotion, action, impulse, destruction
- Green: Nature, wildlife, connection, spirituality, tradition
(From the “Color” page of the MtG Fandom wiki.)
Colors form a complex structure of alliances and enmities based on their relative positions in the color pie: for example, white is adjacent to blue and green in the wheel, and opposite to red and black. So, white is allied with blue and green, and enemy with red and black. (See “Pie fights” by Mark Rosewater, MtG’s head designer since 2003.)
In Agent0 we currently have five agentic AIs, and there are five colors in the color pie, and we wanted variety. So we would associate one Agentic AI per color and call it a day, right?
Wrong.
In the color pie, there is red. In observability, errors are red and errors are never good. We did not want to have an AgenticAI associated with it. Instead, we went for one Agentic AI for each color except red, and one colorless (like artifacts usually are).
Which Agentic AI belongs to which color?
Next was deciding which Agentic AI maps to which color, and that was a surprisingly quick and intuitive decision.
The Seeker does complex divinations based on knowledge and deliberation to figure out where the problems are. Its job is to root out errors. Errors are red, and the archenemy of red in the color pie is blue. So blue it was. As a plus, there is something Djiin-like to the Seeker, which reminded me of one of my favorite MtG cards from back in 3rd edition: The Mahamoti Djiin.
The Oracle helps you understand complex queries. It heals you from your state of confusion when beholding arcane PromQL constructs. That is as white a theme as we have ever seen.
The Pathfinder helps you find ways of onboarding your applications to OpenTelemetry to send data to Dash0. There is something of an explorer’s theme to it, navigating forests of documentation to find the right thing to help you. It made us think of Dungeons and Dragons Rangers (incidentally, my favorite class to play), and Rangers are green due to their contact with nature.
The Artist creates for you Dashboards and Alerting rules. It is a craftsman. In Magic the Gathering, there are recurrent themes, and one that stood out in my memory about creating artifacts is Urza. (I loved making snow-bally Artifact decks using Urza lands.) The Artist quickly became an artifact creature that creates other artifact creatures or makes them stronger (“buffs” them).
The Threadweaver analyzes traces and, among other things, explains to you where errors originate and spread. It hunts errors down. That is a bounty-hunter theme, and it reminded me a lot of the Royal Assassin card from 3rd edition, which is a black card. It also happened to be the last color to fill out in the color pie, so that was just perfect.
What would the cards do?
At this point, we had the card names, we had card illustrations through Midjourney, we had card colors, we knew they were artifact creatures. On to the card rules. This was very much a team effort, with a Slack thread in our #general channel hitting triple digits in terms of message count. We wanted the cards powerful. That, in our simplistic understanding of game design, means they need to combine:
- Low mana cost
- Having good stats (attack and fortitude) compared to the mana cost
- Have absolutely busted in-game effects
The low mana cost was easy to justify: Agent0 is always there for you, any time of day and night. In terms of MtG, it is like cards you can almost always play. We decided that each Agentic AI would cost two mana of their color.
Agentic creatures, like all creatures in MtG, need stats (statistics): Each creature has Power and Toughness. Power is how much damage the creature does when it attacks, and toughness is how much damage it takes in one turn to destroy the creature. (Damages dealt to a creature without destroying it are reset at the end of the turn.) We went with good stats based on the low mana cost, but decided that, to make the cards fun to play, their power would generally come from the card-specific rules, which means the game effect the cards have beyond their stats.
With mana cost and stats settled, onto the rules text.
The Seeker finds you the solution to the problem. In MtG, being able to draw more cards is a very powerful mechanic, as getting the right cards from your deck is how you win. Also, we wanted to give you a reason to keep the Seeker alive, and make it feel important, so we gave it a mechanic to allow you to screen your deck to get faster to the right cards.
The Oracle heals your confusion, which in MtG means gives you back life. and we wanted it to snowball when not adequately countered by your opponent. So we made it in a way that, if the Oracle got you way above your starting 20 life points, it would also start buffing the other artifact creatures you control. Because synergy.
The Pathfinder helps you monitor more applications. In a sense, it brings you applications “into the observability game”. So we made the Pathfinder allow you to play “for free” more cards from your deck every time it attacks your opponent. Cards tend to be stronger the more mana they cost, and we do like cards that get stronger in late game. Mana is generally given by lands, a particular card type, and players can usually play up to one land per turn, which is a mechanic in MtG that keeps the game more balanced, preventing you from playing a game-winning card on turn 1 if you get the right combination of lands and cards in your hand. So we made the Pathfinder allow you to play stronger and stronger cards as the game progresses. This reflects our experience about the observability of complex systems: you get better insights, the more applications you monitor together.
The Artist rules “happened” at its inception and required neither research nor thought: it creates Dashboards and Alerting rules, which feels very much like creating other creatures in MtG. When cards create other creatures, the latter often are tokens: they do not usually have dedicated cards, have no mana cost, and tend, by themselves, not to be too strong in terms of stats or game rules. But they can still block attacks, and if you have a way of making them stronger as the game progresses, they can overwhelm your opponents and get over their defenses. (In MtG, when your creatures attack the opponent, they can block the attacks by putting their creatures in the way; but if you have more creatures than them, well…)
The Threadweaver is probably the card that required the most thought in terms of game rules. It is about analyzing traces to root out errors. Errors are red. And despite red being an allied color to black, I had this idea about a red mist spreading in the city bringing pain and suffering (like your errors in production tend to do), because errors in traces spread “backwards”, from server to client. We want errors to go away, and in MtG there are mechanics to exile cards from your opponent's library (i.e., their playing deck). Exiled cards cannot generally be played, and removing key cards from your opponents deck will disrupt their game plan. One card with this effect is the Sadistic Sacrament, which is expensive in terms of mana, and so it tends to be played too late in the game to have a strong effect. But if we make it playable early, it can wreck absolute havoc. So we took the exile mechanics, gave them to the Threadweaver, which like all Agentic AIs has low mana cost, and focused it on absolutely wrecking opponents relying on red cards.
Putting the cards together
We wanted the cards to feel real. Wizards of the Coast have an excellent “Fan content” policy that lays out clearly do’s and don’ts when making content based on their intellectual property. We spent quite some time with that text, and realized that:
- Should not use the normal back of MtG cards, as it contains trademarks and logos. So our Petr made us a new card back inspired by the original, but without using any trademarks and logos.
- We could also not use the original mana symbols, as those are listed in the “Fan content” policy as stuff we should not include. Luckily, we already had the in-product icons for the Agentic AIs, and we replaced the mana symbols with them, making sure to match the color schemes.
We also wanted to make “our own set”, and Simon came up (in probably seconds, given the timings in the Slack threads) with an excellent Expansion Symbol based on the Dash0 logo that would also mark the rarity of the cards to Mythic. Mythic rare cards have symbols with a color scheme incredibly close to Dash0’s logo, which we of course decided to interpret as predestination, rather than lucky coincidence.
There is more to it in the fine details like the set identifier, year of production and the other data you find in the lower part of the card. After checking that there was no overlap with existing expansions, we gave our set the D0 identifier (because what else could we have picked, really), and then it was time to print the cards.
Printing the cards
It turns out that printing Magic the Gathering cards is not easy. In order for them to feel like real cards, they need to be just right: printing on the right type of paper (the so-called card stock). MtG’s famous card stock is called “Black core”. There is also the waxing, the fine patina on a card that prevents it from getting dirty, and getting that right is also incredibly important.
We knew we needed to work with professionals. There are services that print proxy cards for personal use if they do not have the original cards for their decks. Proxy cards are a good way to test out your own deck ideas, before sinking a significant amount of money and time into getting the real cards.
And in yet another stroke of luck, we found out that the excellent Liberproxies is based not far from where I live. Liberproxies’ Christian has advised us in many ways to make the cards feel better and more realistic, the correct DPI to print cards with (around 300), and how to make the text look super sharp (vector text overlaid on the card with empty rule text, and all exported to a PDF). The typesetting was exactly the kind of thing that I could enjoy over a train ride. After that, printing the cards was quick and effortless.
Dashers get a first taste
A couple of weeks before KubeCon NA, we had a Dash0 offsite in Solingen. I brought test prints along, around 50 cards per type, and they disappeared so fast that it was clear we had something pretty cool in our hands.
Hitting the floor at KubeCon
The reception of the cards has been stellar. Seeing the smiles of people getting their custom cards has been a real joy to behold. We also brought penny sleeves (think sleeves made of transparent plastic), to protect the cards, because nobody likes to find out that their precious cards got damaged when staging in a pocket or backpack sleeve.
On Day 2, somebody even sent me through my colleagues a Pokemon card in trading, which absolutely made my day. If you are that person: thank you, that was amazing and made me genuinely happy!
Are we going to do more stuff like this?
Eh, something tells me that this is not the last time we are doing swag like this. We have lots of ideas, and we will start experimenting the moment we are back from Atlanta.
When you see Dash0 people going about a conference in our red suits, come up to us and figure out what deliciously nerdy stuff we are up to this time. We have tons of nerdy hobbies, and we cannot wait to share them with you ;-)
