Imaginary Worlds - Gathering the Magic

Episode Date: June 14, 2018

At its core, Magic: The Gathering is a card game and your goal is to knock your opponent down to zero points. But Magic: The Gathering also has a deep mythology about an infinite number of parallel worlds. As Magic celebrates its 25th anniversary, I look at why this handheld card game has survived the onslaught of competition from digital games, and how the designers at Wizards of the Coast create a sense of character and worldbuilding within a non-sequential card game. Featuring Mark Rosewater, Brady Dommermuth, Alii Medwin, James Wyatt, Liz Leo and Nataniel Bael. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Find Secret at your nearest Walmart or Shoppers Drug Mart today. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Molenski, and this is Nat. Hello, my name is Nat Neal-Bale. Nat is teaching me how to play Magic the Gathering at the Brooklyn Strategist, which is the same game shop where I learned to play Dungeons & Dragons a few years ago.

But where D&D is a role-playing game, Magic is very much a card game. And by the way, Magic is the shorthand that most people call Magic the Gathering, so I'm going to mostly call it Magic in this episode. At the simplest level, there are two basic types of cards in Magic, lands and spells. In some ways, Magic is like any card game. You need a combination of luck and skill to win, and it's usually played with just two people. But it is not a generic deck of cards. Each of the cards has a creature or a spell or a magical artifact on it that you can use to attack your opponent.

And some cards represent the source of your magic, which are lands. The more land cards that you have, the more magic you can wield against the person sitting across from you. And your goal is to knock your opponent from 20 points to 0 points. Sound simple? It's not. It's really, really not. So when you play, you always have 7 cards in your hand that you're taking from a deck of 60 cards. Well, that deck of 60 cards is something that you custom make because the company that

makes Magic the Gathering, Wizards of the Coast, has put out over 10,000 possible cards to choose from over the last quarter century. And there is a central mythology that unites those thousands and thousands of cards. Because Magic the Gathering takes place in a multiverse. And some of the cards represent planewalkers, the main characters of the game who can jump from one parallel universe to another. Now, I always knew that Magic the Gathering was huge. But I had never done an episode about it because I was kind of intimidated. but I had never done an episode about it because I was kind of intimidated.

Like when I used to go to the Brooklyn Strategist to play D&D, we'd all be role-playing our characters like we're in some kind of medieval improv troupe and then I'd look at the table where these people were playing Magic the Gathering and it was like they were speaking a whole other language. Now this year is the 25th anniversary of Magic the Gathering and it amazes me the game is still so popular. Not that there's anything wrong with the game itself, but it was developed by this mathematician named Richard Garfield in the early 90s, and there was very little competition from video games. And now so many analog games and toys that used to be pretty solid are struggling to compete against PlayStations and iPad apps.

And Magic does have an app, but the handheld card game is still the main focus. And they are not struggling to compete. I mean, Magic the Gathering has been on an epic run where each year is more profitable than the last. So I had two questions about the game I was really curious about. First, why has it survived the onslaught of digital entertainment? And secondly, how do you create a sense of story and world building in a non-sequential card game? And does all that mythology and world building make for a better card game? Or is it something that players ignore when they just focus on winning? game? Or is it something that players ignore when they just focus on winning?

Well, to answer those questions, I went straight to the top to the head designer for Magic the Gathering, Mark Rosewater. I'm pulling out of the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time to drive to work. By the way,

that is how he starts every episode of his podcast, as he drives to the office outside Seattle, talking about different aspects of the game. And he doesn't just do a podcast. Mark is out there on every media platform, talking about Magic, answering questions from players. Now, Mark has been with the company since the mid-'90s, just a few years after Magic the Gathering came out.

And I have to say, in all of my years of interviewing people, I don't think I've ever met anybody who so unabashedly loves their job as much as Mark does. My job is to come up with really cool things that will make players really, really excited, and then I have to not talk about it for 16 to 24 months, usually. For example, last December, we put out a product called Unstable, which is kind of like a humorous take on magic. I've been working on this project for seven years and I had to not talk about it for seven years.

And so when I finally got to talk about people like, wow, you're so excited. I'm like, I've been waiting to talk about it for seven years. Now, one of the reasons why Magic has stayed popular all these years is because the game never stops evolving. As I mentioned earlier, the premise of the game is that there are these parallel universes called planes. And the frequency in which Wizards of the Coast has introduced these new planes has gone from every couple years to every year to now sometimes twice a year. And, you know, in the beginning, Magic was relying on all the standard fantasy tropes that you would see in a game like Dungeons & Dragons. But as they kept introducing new worlds more and more quickly,

they kind of ran out of those fantasy tropes. And so they've also had to be more creative in terms of what they bring into the fantasy genre. Like in one of these parallel universes, everything's made of metal. Or another one of these parallel planes is like a steampunk version of India. But, as Mark says, A set of cards is a very challenging way to tell a story.

Not everybody sees every card and they don't see them in the same order. So what we've done is we tend to use our cards to build the environment, to build the world, to flesh out the world and hint at the story. And then we tend to tell the story through other means. Like on the Magic the Gathering website, there's a lot of extra material

explaining what is going on in these different worlds. But eventually they decided to up the ante on the design of the cards. So when you encounter a new deck, you automatically feel something about this world without having to read the backstory behind it. We want to figure out what the emotional core of the experience is going to be. That the mechanics aren't just about doing something, they're about making you feel something. And it really got into the idea of, we're going to go to a gothic horror world and we're going to make you afraid

because it's a gothic horror world. Or we're going to go to a Greek mythology world and you're going to be a hero and go on adventures and make something of yourself. Now there are three basic elements to each card. First, there's an illustration, which is about two by two inches. But there's so much drama and story going on in those little paintings. I mean, looking at them, I get sucked in like it's a movie. The second element to every card is the statistics as to how this creature or spell or artifact will function as a card.

And I did not realize how many different ways a card could behave in a game. I mean, it is endless in terms of how many points you gain or take away from your opponent, whether this card is better used on the offensive or the defensive, how many times you can use the card. And the game mechanics aren't random. They reflect the personality of what's on the card. And the third major element to every card is something called flavor text, which are basically a few lines of poetic description. But even the flavor text has gotten more ambitious over the years. Not in terms of how many words they can cram into a card,

but how succinctly they can paint a picture of a broad story beyond that one card. Back when I used to write flavor texts, one of the things was, it was a lot like poetry. It was a lot like, how can I convey as much as possible in the smallest amount of space? And one of my favorite pieces of flavor text, there's a card in a set called,

we went to this icy world that's called Ice Age, and there's a card in a set called We Went to This Icy World that's called Ice Age, and there's a card in it called Lurgoyf, which was this horrible monster loosely based on some Norse stuff. The flavor text on it was Ak Hans Run It's for Lurgoyf.

Last words of Safi Eriksdottir. And somehow, just like this idea that this poor, this poor woman that like the last thing we learn about her is she's scared to death because she knows how horrible this creature is. And she is right because that's the last thing she ever says. And as much as Mark loves to talk about the game, there's one aspect that he's actually the most passionate about.

It's called the color pie. And when I first read about the color pie, it just seemed like sort of an esoteric part of the whole game mechanics. But then I realized it is the lifeblood of the game. It is the thing that makes you feel like you're actually wielding magic when you play with the cards. Because all of the cards in Magic the Gathering are divided into five colors. The cards are either white, black, blue, red, or green. And each color represents a different philosophy of magic. So white magic is about control, order, and whatever works for the collective good.

Black magic promotes ruthless individualism. Red magic is fiery and passionate. Blue magic is brainy, intellectual. Green magic is in harmony with nature. One of the neat things about the color pie that I love is it explains motivations in a way that doesn't demean the motivations. Like one of the things that's really interesting, it's made me think about life a little differently is nobody's right or wrong. They just have a reason for doing the things the way they do them. And it's like, oh, well, what are their motivations? And well, if you're motivated by this,

then it makes sense you'd come into conflict who's motivated by that. I can argue, and I have, I can argue any color from any perspective. Like one of the things I did for Faunet, because I'm a writer, is I did an interview in my articles where I spent a whole column with each of the colors, interviewing the colors, having the color explain from their perspective

why they do what they do. So how did this all play out back at the game shop when I was learning how to play from my instructor Nat? Each color has a very distinct personality in gameplay. Like the colors you use tend to define what your deck does. Now in my first game, I played with a deck of cards where everything was red. So the magic I was using was fiery and impulsive. And that's my natural instinct when I play games, which is why I often lose,

because going on impulse is my downfall whenever I'm supposed to be thinking strategically. Meanwhile, Nat was playing with a deck of black magic, which is all about sucking away your opponent's energy and using it for yourself. And you're going to take one damage from the tattered mummy. Well, I only have one point left, so I'm dead? Yep. Oh. Brady Dommermuth was a lead writer on the creative team of Magic, and he says when he would work on developing a new set of cards,

he always thought about how the story they're telling with the cards should reflect the experience of people playing with the cards. Magic defies one of the most common ethos prescriptions in fantasy. And by that I mean, what's the basic moral message of the story? In fantasy, a lot of times is, sure, you're the chosen one and you're destined to save the world, but you're going to need your friends

to help you out in doing so. But in magic, I felt like, in terms of the story and the world design, that form needed to follow function. And in Magic, the vast majority of games are played one versus one. It's you versus me. It's my deck versus your deck. And either you're going to win or I'm going to win, which to me suggested a different ethos, which is, sure, of course you have to have friends.

That's super important. But in the final fight, when it matters, you're going to have to fight alone. In fact, he thinks that Magic is often misrepresented as a fantasy game, because traditionally, fantasy has been pretty black and white in its morality. But when you play Magic the Gathering, you're not automatically a villain if you use black magic, and you're not automatically the hero if you use white magic. In that sense, he thinks Magic the Gathering actually reflects science fiction, which has a long history of being morally ambiguous. Mark Rosewater and I have talked about that many times, about how

Star Wars is a fantasy story in sci-fi clothing, whereas magic is a sci-fi story in fantasy clothing. Back at the game shop, I used red magic and I lost. So I started using a deck of blue cards, where the spells and creatures are brainier and trickier. And by the way, when you play the game, you actually can play any combination of colors, but since I was a newbie, Nat felt that I should just play one color at a time. And when I switched from red magic to blue magic, I couldn't believe how differently the cards worked. And I felt like I was relying on a different part of my brain. And my teacher, Nat, had also switched from black magic to white magic, and I felt like I was playing against a different opponent.

I feel a little overwhelmed right now. I know. Sorry, magic can do this. No, it's fine. It's just like there's so many, every card has so many levels to it. Yep, it's all good. This game takes a long time to learn. It's a very, very complex game. But that's when I realized how story can come into this. Because to be a good magic player, you need to know why your cards behave the way they do.

And to do that, it's really helpful to go on the Magic website and read the lore behind your cards. One of the pushes in the stories in the last five years or so, I believe, was to make the cards reflect story events more aggressively. So that just by playing the game and watching what the cards do, you can effectively learn how the story went. In fact, online, I found that some magic players had created fan art where they imagined, what if Harry Potter or the Marvel Cinematic Universe were cards in Magic the Gathering? In these characters that we know so well, like Harry Potter or Thor, it's kind of cool to see how they could be condensed into a single card and summarized with an illustration,

a bunch of statistics about their strengths, weaknesses, and powers, and a few choice lines of flavor text. But when he was working on the creative team, Brady Dommermuth always kept in mind that magic is not a movie or a book reverse-engineered to be a game. It is, first and foremost, a game. One of the challenges for me in designing Magic Worlds, one of the reasons why I undervalued plot is because I think that plot and games are not friends. Your ability to self-direct,

your ability to make the choices that you want to make, your ability to explore the world how you see fit, or to choose the cards for your own deck, or to decide how you want to win the game through finesse or through stealth or through brute force. Those are super powerful things, and plot subverts autonomy. And I learned in my second round of playing the game that this blue intellectual magic was a good fit for me. I avoided all my worst impulses, and I became a better strategist. In fact...

But we also have this issue of I take eight damage from Sphinx of Magosi to my two life. So you're dead. Yep, a little bit. Wow. So game over then. Yep. Oh my God, I can't believe it.

Yeah, I'm definitely quitting at the tie. I'm not going to go for best of three. But Magic's evolution has not been entirely smooth. The game has hit some growing pains. Liz Leo used to work as a graphic designer on Magic the Gathering. And this was a dream job for her, but it also meant a lot of scrutiny. When I had, you know, millions of people see my first expansion symbol or my first card frame design and then consequently complain about what they didn't like about it, I had to remind myself that millions of people were playing with this thing I designed.

And yeah, some people are going to be vocal and not like it, but it just shows how much they care about the game that they're playing. But I can't sugarcoat it either. I mean, there are certainly some toxic players and Wizards has banned them, or at least been working on their terms of service in terms of what they can do. Now, overall, Liz loves the Magic community. She even went on a magic cruise once. But then she has moments like this, where she once went to an event and sat down to play a game. The guy across from me while we were drafting asked how I got into magic. And I thought that was a nice question. And I responded and told him the answer. The answer is that she learned to play from an all-female group called the Lady Planeswalker Society. But the guy didn't seem to care. He just said, huh, I didn't think girls were into magic.

And that was the end of the conversation. What a small innocuous comment. Like in his head, he probably didn't even think it was anything, but I still remember it because it just made me feel even more a little bit like, wow, should I not be here? And when you're already playing a game where you have to be 100% on your A-game in terms of your mind and strategy, it can be a hurdle to overcome. As sci-fi fantasy spaces have become more inclusive over the years, there's been an ugly backlash in video games, the Hugo Book Awards, cosplay, Star Wars fandom, and a huge community like Magic the Gathering

has not been immune to those problems. But that said, the game has always gotten praise, since the beginning, for having diverse characters on the cards. But over time, the creative team realized that they needed to be even more inclusive. Allie Medwin is an editor and designer who mostly works in Magic's digital division.

And a few years ago, an intern came up to her with an idea. What if they created a trans character for a new deck that they're working on? I realized this is what we want representation to look like. This is a pretty natural flow. This is not shoehorned in. This is not tokenized. This is a natural extension of already established things about this setting.

They brought the idea to James Wyatt, who was a senior creative designer on the story team. And this turned out to be a personal project for both of them. Allie is trans, although she wasn't out at the time. And it's for James. My daughter is trans, so I said, I need to write this story for her sake. Allie and James really wanted this character, who's called Alesha, to be a fierce warrior.

In fact, the card's official title is Alesha Who Smiles at Death. And the illustration on the card shows Alesha in full armor, leading the charge with her army of the Marduk clan. One of the things in Magic that I love about our game is that we don't tend to put boob plate on our women. So you can't really tell what her physiology looks like. James wrote the backstory for the website, and the biggest plot point that they argued over was whether an antagonist should confront Alesha about her identity. There was some sense, and I've heard some people say this since the story was published,

that maybe it would have been better if Alessia was just accepted for who she is with no question at all. But we did end up with a character in the story who challenges her and says, you're just a boy who doesn't know who he is, which is a terrible, awful thing to say. And to my daughter, it was really important that that was there because she wanted to have a character come to realize Alessia's worth and value and identity as who she is. A funny little thing I remember discussing early on is that Alessia was a good fit for the Mardu for two reasons.

And one is that idea that they claim a war name. And the other is the fact that they don't use blue magic. Because in the world of magic, the gathering, if you have access to blue magic, blue is partially about transformation. And so it would actually be really easy to change your identity, change your appearance, change your body. And we wanted her experience to reflect better the experience of real trans people in this world without access to blue magic. Yeah, I'll tell you what, if I had blue magic, my life might have gone a little differently. A lot of people's lives might have gone a little differently.

My daughter has actually designed a D&D spell that will allow that as a permanent transition. Nice. When they finally put the card out there, they were a little nervous about how the magic community would react. But. There was so much positive reaction that I still cry thinking about it. It was overwhelmingly positive. Maybe one comment in 50 was negative.

overwhelmingly positive. You know, maybe one comment in 50 was negative. The overwhelming majority, overwhelming majority was positive. The creation of this character, Alessia, also had a big impact on Allie. I lived what a lot of trans people call stealth for a long time. That is, I didn't talk about being trans. I didn't let people know. I kept it a secret without, you know, actively lying about it. You know, I came out about halfway through the process and it was incredibly rewarding. It was incredibly relieving. Without Alessia, I would still probably be stealth, which, look, I'm not going to say doesn't work for some people because it does, but I felt it as a burden, and Alessia was able to save me from that.

But Alessia isn't just a character in a story. She's a character in a game. And her game mechanics are cool. I mean, she can help you resurrect other cards that you've already used up. And that's something that Allie really appreciates about Magic, the way game mechanics inspire character development and vice versa. It takes the design and directions that we wouldn't necessarily ever get to without the desire to figure out how to express an idea through the mechanics of the game.

I think that it would be possible to put different stories on, although I really love the stories that we've got, but if you didn't have any story on these cards, you'd be missing the soul of the game, really. So I came into Magic the Gathering wondering two things. Why is this game still so popular 25 years later? And what is the role of storytelling in a card game? And I think that the reason why Magic has been so popular

isn't just the story within the cards or the story about the cards, but the brand new story that emerges every time someone plays the cards. The real story of a game is what happens to the player. And Brady Dommermuth says that is increasingly rare. I mean, so many video games today are behaving like five-hour movies that give the player very little autonomy. In an era where so many games are played alone in front of your PC or in front of your console, magic requires this community,

it requires this human presence. It's compelling enough in its mechanics and its gameplay and systems that it wants to hold on to your brain. It wants you to explore its complexities. But in order to do so, you have to interface with other humans. And because of that, it ends up being this naturally viral thing where if I want to see if my new deck works, I'm going to have to find somebody to play it against.

In other words, the magic of the game is real-world human interaction. And real-world human interaction is in short supply these days. Well, that's it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Nat Bale, Mark Rosewater, Allie Medwin, James Wyatt, Brady Dommermuth, and Liz Leo. Magic has some of the best fantasy art out there, and I don't even feel ashamed saying it.

I asked Liz if she has any favorite cards. I love the card Hydra Doodle. It's this hydra, but it's also a poodle. And all the heads are off doing weird, crazy things. And the flavor text is less housebroken than housebreaking. That's good. It's a good card. It's really cute. Imaginary Worlds is part of the Panoply Network.

My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. You can like the show on Facebook. I tweet at emolinski and imagineworldspod. And as you probably heard, we have Imaginary Worlds merchandise available, which is really cool stuff to own. And also, it's a great way to help support the show. You can get to our merch

store through the website imaginaryworldspodcast.org.