Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1102: Play Design Changes with Ben Weitz

Episode Date: January 12, 2024

I talk a lot about all the changes cards go through early in design. In this podcast, I interview Play Designer Ben Weitz to talk about the types of changes the Play Design team makes to cards late in the process.

I'm not pulling my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another Drive to Work at Home Edition. So on a lot of these home ones, I like to do interviews. So I have Ben Weitz with me from the Play Design team. Hey, Ben. Hey, Mark. How's it going? Okay, so today's topic. There's something that I don't think players really understand well that I wanted to talk about, which is I talk a lot about very early in the process and how we change cards, and we radically change cards early in the process because it's very early on, and we'll throw whole things out, but I want to talk about the end of the process, where you and the play design team are the most involved, which is, okay, you're actually in play design, you know, you're actually testing, we call

it the future future league, you're actually testing, we call it the Future Future League, you're actually like literally having playtests with cards. What actually changes during this last final part of the making of Magic? And I want to talk today about sort of what play design changes to cards mean. Yeah, and you know, those changes can be very different from the ones you have early on in the process, like you're saying. I think in general, we have a few different categories of changes we like to make. So the first is the most obvious one, where play design, one of our mandates or one of the things that we own is the balance, right? So exactly how strong are these cards? You know, we want to shoot for, like, a particular band of power levels

so that, you know, it's not an exact science. Cards go out the building and we don't know exactly how strong they are because if we did, the game would be too simple, right? Like, if this room of five people can accurately figure out all the power levels of all accurately figure out all the parallels of all the cards, then the, you know, millions of people who play Magic the Gathering are going to figure it all out like lickety-split. So we work with a lot of uncertainty. And so we've got this like particular band of power that we're aiming at. And so one of the main ways that we

change cards is that, you know, we look at them and we play with them and we think to ourselves like, oh, like this card could be a little bit stronger or, oh, this card is like too strong. It's ending the game too quickly or it's drawing too many cards or whatever. And so we'll change. Usually these are like numbers changes. We'll change the numbers on the cards in order to make them more appropriate or to fall closer to that power band. Just to clarify, when you say number changes, that's not just the mana cost, although it could include the mana cost. Yeah, so the mana value is like the hammer.

That's like the biggest change that we can make to a card. There's all sorts of numbers on the cards, right? We call them knobs. Sometimes it's the number of cards you draw from a draw spell. Sometimes it's the power and toughness of a creature. Sometimes it's how many cards you look at when you scry. All these sorts of things are knobs that we change a lot. And when you change the mana value of a card, for us, that's like a huge change.

Because that like changes the turn that you play the card on basically um which really matters for shaping the way that the games are played um so for us when we change the mana value of a card we will always look for compensating we will almost always look for compensating changes so like if we push the mana value of a card up, we will often then be like, okay, well, how much power and toughness should it have now? Maybe it should get an extra power. Maybe it should get an extra toughness. Maybe it should get both.

Something like that. Or maybe an ability that was originally conditional now becomes an enters the battlefield ability or something like that. Because when we change that mana value, that's just such a large change. And just something i wanted to throw out there for the audience i talk a lot um one of our jobs in the beginning part of the process is help you guys at the end part of the process and so the more knobs we put on cards we build into mechanics the more

sort of numbers that we build into it, the more flexibility you guys have downstream. Yeah, I mean, that's often a double-edged sword, right? Because there's always a trade-off involved. And the more knobs there are, the more complexity there is. You know, some cards have a ton of knobs, but are appropriately, you know, but in compensation for that, they do like four different things or whatever.

And that can be, it's not always a good thing to build in more knobs. I think some of the best work y'all do is finding like low complexity places to put knobs in. So like kicker, for example, like, you know, adding any kicker could have been, oh, you always pay two or whatever. And it would have been a simpler mechanic, but it would have been less interesting and there would have been less ability to balance it. So adding those costs there is super helpful for late stage changes, late stage number changes. And kicker is nice also because it's a one-time decision

where an activation is every turn. So there are knobs that matter at different points and the more often you have to refer to them the more complicated it gets yep absolutely but yeah we have a lot of like internal heuristics for like okay approximately how much power and toughness should cards have at each mana value in each color and like approximately you know what sort of cards should go at each mana value. And we follow those heuristics, but often they are heuristics and it's important to know when to break them and when to follow them. It's really, yeah, balancing is very difficult.

There's a lot of nuance involved for every change and it's a lot more art than it is science, I would say. But the numbers changes, honestly, are probably the easiest ones that we do they're like often pretty straightforward and it's just about finding the right slice like uh andrew often likes andrew brown uh often likes to say that you know cards that are just a pile of numbers are the easy cards for play design okay so that's category one. What's the next category? Yeah, I would say so the next category is we will look at packages of cards,

and we need to make sure that those packages of cards work well together. So, you know, every set has a bunch of content in it, and a lot of the times sets will say, like, oh, you know, every set has a bunch of content in it. And a lot of the times sets will say like, oh, you know, we want, we have a theme about the graveyard, you know, so we want you to play the graveyard cards together. And a lot of play design is managing those slots that we, so we sort of inherit this from set design where this is, this is a thing that set design works on making sure that there's enough enablers and enough payoffs for the graveyard. But when we get to play design, we sort of do a lot more focused play testing and we really figure out the fine-tuned details on that sort of thing.

So making sure that the mana values of the different cards form a curve is important because if every single card in the package costs two mana then your deck is just a pile of two mana cards and it's way less interesting than if there's more varied mana costs so maybe you have like a really powerful payoff at five mana and like more of your enablers fall at two and three mana and stuff like that so a lot of play design is saying like okay like this package of cards we want it to look roughly like this and then we need each card in its mana value to be strong enough or whatever so that's like another reason why when we change mana value it's like a big hammer because often it makes cards conflict with other cards so then we have to move other stuff around and it

it can be a lot more complicated that's's the way that the cards are most correlated, I guess. But yeah, these different packages, it's very similar work for both constructed and limited. In limited, we try to make sure that there's a good spread of commons, a good spread of enablers and payoffs, and there's powerful uncommons for every strategy. For constructed, it's honestly very much the same. We just try to make sure that there's enough stuff that works with the cards so i guess a good recent example would be godric cloaked reveler which is a card from wilds of eldraine which is a three three haste for three mana and then it has the celebration ability so if two non-lands have entered the battlefield under your control this turn, it becomes a 4-4 Flying Dragon.

And that is a, it's a really cool card, but it's heavily dependent on other cards, right? Because the Celebration ability is something that needs other cards to work. So part of our job is just making sure that there's enough other cards at other mana costs that are going to work with Godric in order for it to be successful in Standard, for example. So, you know, making sure there are cards like Kumano faces Kakazan, you know, if any of you have played Mono Red on the Arena Ladder recently, you've probably run into the combination of those two cards, where Kumano flips on the very turn that you cast Godric, and the cards work really well together. So a lot of play design is finding, like those cards are from two different sets, but a lot of play design is finding the card, making sure that the cards work well together

as a package in order for them to succeed. And how often is the package within the set, and how often do you think the package is between two cards from different sets for Constructed? Yeah, we prioritize within the set, though we just understand that Magic is a huge game. We make a lot of Magic cards. You know, different formats that people play with have a lot of different cards from a lot of eras of Magic. So we sort of expect there to be random cards that work with the cards we make, sometimes more powerfully than we expect them to be random cards that work with uh the cards we make sometimes at like more powerfully than we expect them to um and sometimes uh you know we can lean on those if we identify them but we prefer to work within the set itself because that's sort of the context that

we have and we like to make sure because that at least guarantees that there's some amount of support like there's probably support in older magic but this way we it guarantees that the cards work together and also it's better for the you know the more casual player who you know maybe that person doesn't open up a lot of neo booster packs because they only started playing recently and so if they just open wilds of eldraine packs making sure that there are cards that uh work well together within the set is a lot more important yeah one of the things i like to remind people is that a lot of our limited play testing is also for casual constructed play testing meaning there are a lot of players who are a little bit less enfranchised but they just play with what they open and by making sure that the set sort of plays well and limited it plays well for that player usually honestly mark i think the same is true

for a lot of the standard constructed that the ffl team does like we work a lot more in the regime of okay like you have as many rares as you want to build your deck how do you build your deck but i mean the simple truth is the the formats are so large like we can't predict everything we don't know all of the interactions that are going to happen we simply can't um look at every combination of cards so like a lot of what we do is like localized within like a set and the like two sets surrounding it basically um and that think, is a pretty close simulation of what some of the more casual constructed decks are going to end up looking like. Like, we play a lot of uncommons in our deck from the same sets. And, yeah, I just think, you know, as Standard has gotten bigger, as Pioneer gets more popular, it becomes harder and harder to identify all of the things that are going to be for sure strong in those formats.

So I think a lot of what we do is sort of more indicative of casual constructed as well. Yeah, one of the things that's interesting is, so Richard Garfield, when he was a math teacher, he did combinatorics, which talks about sort of. when he was a math teacher, he did combinatorics, which talks about sort of, and it's really interesting when you get into the math of like, it doesn't take a lot of sets before the combination of cards hits giant numbers. And I believe like all of magic,

like 30 years of magic, there's like more combinations and there are like planets in the entire galaxy. You know, you know, it's just such a giant. If you're talking about the numbers, I mean, you're talking to a mathematician right now. If you're talking about just, you know you know it's just such a giant there's way if you're talking about the numbers i mean you're talking to a mathematician right now so if you're talking about just you know

like the number of different 60 card decks there are yeah there's way way way way way more than that well yeah i think they told us we looked into this at one point for like an ad for magic online and there were more combinations of 60 card decks at the time than atoms in the universe, I believe is what they told us. Oh, yeah. By a lot, probably. Yeah, it's exponential growth. And even if you're only considering, like, pairwise card interactions, it's still quadratic. And, like, yeah, it's really tough to try to look at every pair of cards together. And that's why, by the way, a lot of the focus for play design is on smaller formats like standard because something like legacy it's a hopeless task i mean it's oh yeah yeah

i mean that's what we ban we ban in legacy because it's there's no way to like anticipate the interaction of 27 000 cards yeah okay so that's number two what is the next category yeah so the next category is, I would say, I would call it maybe hole-filling to some extent. So play design will just redesign cards sometimes because sometimes we decide, look, this card isn't working. It's either too complicated to play with or not very fun, or we need some sort of effect, like the environment needs something in order to be a more fun environment,

like maybe we need a Stormhate card, or maybe we need to be able to interact with enchantments better, or something like that. And so what we'll do is we'll just, if there's that card that's being unfun, we'll just delete it, basically. Or if, you know, we have a hole that we need, we'll ask the set lead to, you know, pick their least favorite card or whatever and delete that card in order to make room for the hole. But yeah, we will design a lot of cards from scratch actually um play design does a fair amount of that uh and most of the time it's for to fill a very specific purpose relating to do with playing the game so i think for set design or for earlier design my

understanding is when y'all design cards it's for a lot more like oh we want to experience the world this way or you want it um to hit these particular story notes or like character beats and stuff like that uh for us it's very much more like a mechanical like we need a three mana card that kills an enchantment or you know we need this strategy is under supported and we need to uh it needs like another slot in order for it to be a successful theme and so you know we need very specifically a card to support this this theme yeah i think the interesting thing is like the earlier you go in design kind of the more open-ended we want it to be we want to make things and all sorts of things you can you know like it's very open-ended we want it to be. We want to make things and all sorts of things you can, you know,

it's very open-ended and you do lots of things and as you get farther on, right, it gets much narrower. We need this card to do this very exact thing. Yeah. And so that often comes up where you just,

yeah, the set team wanted to push this theme, but they didn't allocate enough rare slots for it. And so we're just like, look, we need another rare. We needed to do this. We'll just design the card from scratch. So how often do you say, hey, looking at the environment, there's this other deck that could use something,

and this set could offer something for that like how often are you looking outside of the set for stuff that goes in the set yeah i think that's mostly up to the set leads like they will look for opportunities like that i think for play designers it's on more of like an individual person basis like i will occasionally just message set leads especially the of the upcoming set if i'm like trying to build a deck for ffl and i'm like dang i really wish that i had like another three mana dinosaur or something like that then i might message a set lead and just be like hey ffl could really use a three mana dinosaur if you find space for it in your set and that's just something that happens more organically i think um or like some set leads like really prefer to will like

specifically design some rares to try to tie into some previous set themes and that's just like a choice that they made uh as part of trying to build their set. But I wouldn't say play design as an institution does that very much. Okay. Okay, so you change numbers, you look at packets of cards, you make holes to fill sort of needs. What else? Yeah, I've got probably one last category which is we will make play pattern changes on cards so this these are changes that are often not relating to like the raw strength

of a card but rather i played with this card it was unsatisfying to play with for like some reason and i would like to make it more fun to play with can you give an example yeah so like putting vigilance on a card that wants to get into combat but also has a tap ability for example um you know maybe it maybe it grew maybe it grows somehow and so you want it to to so you want it to fight, you want it to attack with it because it gets kind of big, but it also has this ability that you want to use every turn. That's a good candidate for gaining vigilance,

so you get to have your ice cream and eat it too sometimes. Have your cake and eat it too, I suppose. Yeah. Another example might be like trigger timings where it's just like oh this card you know triggers at the end step but it's kind of hard to remember and confusing why it triggers at the end step so we'll try to make a trigger on the upkeep instead um or we'll play against a card and it just like sits in play threatening to kill your opponent's creatures and we can just be like well that this just like isn't fun it has too much power in like like stalling

the board and just killing creatures and we needed to have power elsewhere like the card itself might not be too strong but the things it's strong at cause like unfun game states to happen and like when that happens we need to change some stuff on the card maybe push it in a different direction allocate some power somewhere else or you know sometimes just kill flat out kill the card yeah i think there's a misconception that play design i mean obviously play design does care about balance, for sure, but a lot of your job is also just, like, are things playing as fun as they could play? That I, I don't, I think people very much think of play design as being, like, balance focused, and don't realize that, like, you guys are the end of the process, you are putting the final touches on things, and, like,

hey, are the cards playing as well as they can play? Can we change them to play better? cards playing as well as they can play can we change them to play better yeah my my main thing i say when people ask what i do is uh or what play design does is i say we try to make the fun cards strong and we might try to make the strong cards fun so you know we we care a lot about making sure that cards that are fun to play with will also show up a lot because people like playing strong cards. That's just what they do. People respond to incentives and they'll try to win the game. And no matter how strong you – people will play the strong cards no matter what.

So we have to make sure that those cards are fun because otherwise the game is not going to be very fun because people will play the strong cards and then no one will have any fun. Yeah, you hit upon one of my 20 lessons from my speech at the GDC a couple years back was talking about how players will do what helps them win, and it's our job to make sure that that's fun. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. And, you know, people have different definitions of fun one one thing that i try to do is like

there's a lot of people that that really enjoy certain strategies that are maybe like not fun for the general populace but are fun for like those specific types of players and we try to make those cards like strong enough that you can play them but not strong enough that they're the best thing to do, which is kind of a harder power band to hit, for sure. But that way, the person who enjoys that experience can build that deck and bring it to FNM or play against their friends and get that experience for themselves 100% of the time

because they're always playing that deck. But everybody else, because the deck is not that strong, it's like a fringe deck, they only have to play against it 2% of the time because they're always playing that deck. But everybody else, because the deck is not that strong, it's like a fringe deck, they only have to play against it, you know, 2% of the time or whatever. So they get to have most of their fun as well. And so that asymmetry can help us a lot. Try to make... You hit upon something that I think is important, which is...

Okay, obviously there are players that are the best players, the pro players, and the people that are going to optimize everything and play the absolute best possible deck. But that's not the majority of players. Hey, you want to make sure that people who go to their FNM and are playing decks that are good enough, you guys are designing for all different skill levels, not just for absolute top skill level yeah yeah for sure um you know if you look at the lost caverns of ixalan uh you know the the there's a bunch of dinosaurs uh we tried to make a dinosaur aggro deck or like kind of a dinosaur mid-range aggressive deck uh deck package work. And, you know, it's not the flat-out strongest deck. Like, people don't play it in, like, high-level tournaments or anything like that.

But we know it's very popular on Arena. A lot of people play it on Arena. And that's great. Like, that strategy exists. And, like, it's definitely a huge win if people can enjoy that strategy, even if they're not at, like, the very top levels of play or whatever. And dinosaurs, you know, are very beloved by a lot of people. And I'm, yeah, I just think we will very, very frequently make decks for the whole spectrum of, you know, from casual constructed to full-on tournament shark.

Yeah, here's an important thing to understand psychology thing to me is very fascinating is when you play a game you prioritize what you want to prioritize um and different players will prioritize different things some players for example will like i want to win that's the most important thing i will do whatever it takes to win but that is a one mindset that there's a lot of players that are not at all like that. A lot of players are like, I want to do the funnest thing that I can win enough, you know, that I can go and I do well enough that I feel like, hey, I get to play the way I want to play.

And that is actually a larger swath of players that I will do whatever it takes to win. Yeah, for sure. And those players exist in all the different Magic play formats. They exist in Standard and Moderate and Commander and Pioneer and like, yeah. And I think a lot of that is, right, are there themes in the set

that we can make good enough that we can hit a certain threshold so the person that just wants to do that can do that and be happy like i yeah that's big that's basically our goal is to make sure that the cards are for someone um and make sure that the people who you know like those kinds of cards can enjoy playing them yeah i a lot of the reason i wanted to do the podcast today is I think there's a lot of just sort of stereotypes and stuff, and that competitive magic, I mean, there is, we have pro tours, and I mean,

there are things in magic that push at the absolute, like, I'll do whatever it takes to win, but that's not the majority of magic play, it's much more of, hey, I want to win, But that's not the majority of Magic play. It's much more of hey, I want to win. Winning's important, but I want to win my way. I want to win in a way that means something to me. And I always talk about how design

for Magic is tricky because, hey, so many different people want so many different things. And I think play design, that's the same challenge, which is there's a lot of different players that want to play in a lot of different ways, and you guys have to balance for all of them. Yep. Yep. And that's hard.

I have great respect for you guys because that is so outside of my wheelhouse. Yeah. I mostly think our job is literally impossible, and we just do as best we can until the deadline runs out, and then we ship the set. We just do that. We could spend a literally infinite amount of time improving the set, but we've got to make more magic cards, so we only have a finite amount of time to do it. Yeah, and you talked about this point earlier,

but I really want to hammer this home. There are a million magic players, and in the first five minutes of the set being released, they're going to play infinitely more magic than the playtesters during every playtest we do for the entire run of making the set. There's so many players, they're going to capture what we do instantly.

So making something that is beyond what we know, but what we sort of are hoping, like, it's a very delicate thing to build something in which we're making something that is not solvable by us, but we believe will be somewhat solvable by the larger group. It boggles my mind. That seems so hard to me. Yeah, the play design team functions in a very probabilistic space. Like, we are very uncertain about everything we believe, and it's important to recognize how uncertain we are

and, you know, attach, like, confidence intervals to, like, different things we believe. Where it's like, do you think this card is strong enough? Well, it's like, well, I think it's, like, probably strong enough, and I think it's like do you think this card is strong enough well it's like well i think it's like probably strong enough and i think it's like you know i'm like 80 sure someone will enjoy playing it and you know a lot of a lot of you know we don't use hard numbers or anything like that but like a lot of our communications are the way we think about cards is very much in a probabilistic way where it's like, okay, we think, you know, half of these, of this pool of cards,

we think half of them will be strong enough to play in this standard deck or whatever. And we don't know which half that's going to be. But we think it's going to be about half. Yeah. It's interesting. You guys like, you talk a lot in percentages. You know what I'm saying? Like, here's the percentage chance we think that maybe this, you know, and it is very, like, the world I work in is much more, like, it's much more absolute.

Like, I'm just trying to find things that are fun, and, you know, early design is a lot more about just finding pockets of cool things. And, you know, early design is a lot more about just finding pockets of cool things. But downstream, you guys are trying to, like, trying to finalize things and put them in a state that, look, you know, we're going to try to get as close as we can, knowing that it's an unknown. Anyway, I'm fascinated by it just because I have no idea. It's so outside of my wheelhouse. Yeah, and I want to stress, like, you know, we don't actually... The actual number of percentage

is not, like, something that we... It's an estimation. It's not... Yeah, it's just an estimation. It's a framework for conveying how confident we are about certain things. And there's certain things that we know that we shouldn't be confident about, and then there's

other things that, you know, the more you play with a card, the more confident you get, but you can never be 100% certain and stuff like that. And the other thing to remember is it only takes, like, missing one combination to completely miss large swaths of the metagame.

Yeah, yeah. Definitely true. A lot of times, for example, it's like, oh, this new card with this old card that's still in standard is the powerhouse thing that people start building decks around, and maybe you guys just didn't catch that because there's so many different combinations of things. Yep. I mean, there's no way we ever could,

and there's no way we'll ever try. Yeah. But anyway, so, I mean, I hope today's a little bit of insight to the audience in that on some level, this is a dauntless task you guys have. You know, make something that you don't have the certainty of to try to get the best you can. But I'm impressed. I'm impressed with what you guys do. but I'm impressed I'm impressed how well you guys do

you know it is it is it is very impressive to me to watch you guys work and then see the sets come out and you know

how often you guys hit is very impressive to me thank you I appreciate it yeah one of the other things hopefully the reason I like doing interviews with other people is

there's so many different parts of making magic. What you do day in, day out is a really different reality than what I do day in, day out, and we make the same game, but it's just such different facets of the product. Yeah, it's wild. You could probably spend, you know,

20 years going up and down the whole funnel, and you probably still wouldn't learn everything there is to learn about making magic cards. Or you could spend 28 years just doing one part. But anyway, thanks Ben. I mean, I hope the audience is very eye-opening and just hear the

kind of stuff we do and I know when a set comes out, it's so easy for the audience. Once you see something, once someone proves something, or someone makes a deck, once the combination is found, yeah, it's very easy to see it. And there definitely is this belief,

how do they not see this? But it is such a daunting task. And on top of all that, by the way, the other factor that people don't think about is, while you guys are doing all your work, things keep changing. Like it's not even like the audience plays with constants, right? The cards are printed. They're never changing.

These are what the cards do. You guys are doing all the work you're doing and cards keep changing while you're doing them. Yeah, the dance between the play design team and the casual play design team has been a very interesting one that we've sort of had to learn over the last few years. Because, you know, previously it used to be that play design is the team that owned the end of the funnel. And, like, we would always make the last changes. Now there's, you know, multiple teams that are sort of owning that part of the funnel. And, yeah, it's just interesting to, we like go into negotiations with them sometimes.

Like, ah, we need this card to be stronger. And they're like, we need this card to be weaker. And it's like interesting to find, like we have to find a way to make the card stronger for us that doesn't impact them as much. And they will make the card weaker in the ways that matters for them. And it's just, it's actually very interesting.

Yeah, no, no, no. It is fascinating. So I want to thank you, Ben, for being here today. This was great. I loved talking with you. Yep, yep. It was great. And so to everybody else, I've reached my desk, I guess, so this is the end of my

drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. So thank you, Ben, for being with us. Yeah, thanks for having me on. And see you later, everybody. And I'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.