Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1113: Synergy

Episode Date: February 23, 2024

In this podcast, I talk about the importance of synergy in Magic design.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another Drive to Work. Okay, so today I'm going to talk synergy. So one of the things I do sometimes in the morning when I'm getting ready to plan out what I'm talking about in my podcast, I'll go back and look at previous Drive to Works to make sure that I haven't done the topic, because I'm over a thousand podcasts now, so a lot of times I'll come up with an idea. I'm like, oh, that's a good idea. Yeah, I did that two years ago. So anyway, when I first came up with the idea of doing a podcast on Synergy, my response was, I have to have done a podcast on Synergy, but I have not. At least to the best of my knowledge, I have not. So Synergy is a very, very

important of trading card game design. I guess it's important in other games too, but specifically in trading card games. So, let me explain. What is synergy? What does synergy mean? Basically, the idea is that the totality of the set is greater than the sum of its parts. And what that means is that you want things in the set that interact with other things in the set in such a way that they're stronger through their interaction. Now, Magic is a trading card game that means we make a lot of pieces and you, the audience, pick and choose what pieces you play with.

Well, one of the cool things about that is what we call combinatorics. The idea that you can mix and match lots of different things and that one of the fun things about a trading card game is finding the combinations, finding the synergies, figuring out what cards go well together. And so some synergies, so I will say there are what I call more plan synergies and they're like, some of what we do is we make what we call open-ended design, meaning I'm going to make a card. For example, I could specifically reference face-down creatures, but instead of saying face-down creatures, I could say colorless

creatures. Now, all face-down creatures are colorless, but you know what? Artifact creatures are sometimes colorless. We make other things that are sometimes colorless, but you know what? Artifact creatures are sometimes colorless. We make other things that are sometimes colorless, you know, Eldrazian things. So by, by, sometimes what we do is we just go a little bit broader and we refer to things and, and leave ourselves open-ended so that there are synergies that can be formed. And that's unconsciously. Today I'm talking a little bit more about open-ended means I'm just going to do something vague enough that I know I'm hitting upon elements of the game and that will be there. So that is synergy. That is sort of thinking about how to interpret. But

I'm talking a little more about in a particular set, sort of plan synergies. Meaning I'm like when we build a set, when we structure a set, we specifically want to pick components of the set that have synergies with other components of the set. In fact, it's an important part of how we build sets. So part of what I wanted today is walk through how we build synergies. Oh, but before we get there real quickly, why are synergies so important? What do synergies do for the game? Well, number one, in every format, the two biggest formats are, well, in limited, there's limited and constructed. In limited formats, synergy allows you the ability as you play more with the set to get better at it. You know what I'm saying? Synergy allows you

to find skill. It allows you to sort of fine-tune. You know, there's a lot of strategy in figuring out the synergy of a set. And so we build in synergies so that you all can find them. Limited is the one that most shows just within the context of one set because limited is only played with that one set. I mean, sometimes we've done limited where you draft multiple sets in a row, but these days mostly you draft one set. And Joe, as we build in sort of synergies, the fun part of limited is discovering those synergies. Now in constructed, there also is that. A lot of times what will happen is we'll introduce themes and we want to make sure there's enough depth of theme

that you can do cool things with it. Now, we do cross-set synergies. We do cross-year synergies. I mean, we do think about what else exists in the environment. So it's not as if when I talk... Today, I'm talking more about building individual set synergies, but part of building a set synergy is being aware of what is before it, what is after it, what's in it, what other formats, in different formats, what is with it. In standard, well, there's three years worth of cards to think about.

In modern, you know, pioneer, there's just a lot more. But it is something we want to think about. So skill testing is an important part. So skill testing is an important part. Building and strategy is an important part. And the other thing I think that where Synergy is very, is that one of the things you want to do as a game designer is you want to surprise your players, right? You want to, that, we can make cards that are just the strongest card, right?

But it's a lot easier in a vacuum to look at a card and understand its power level. Especially if you get better with the game, it's easier to do that. But synergies are harder to see. Synergies are a little more subtle. And so, especially when we're trying to build for the more enfranchised, more established player, build for the more enfranchised, more established player. Synergies go a long way to really let us put a lot of, weave the set and do, you know, have a lot more depth of structure. Okay, so how do we build synergy? Okay, we're making a set. So I'm going to use Murder is the Curl of Mander today because that's the set that's out right now.

But the idea is, okay, how do you build synergy? How do you do that? So the answer is, you tend to start with, anytime you're building a set, you tend to start with one mechanic, what I like to call the mechanical heart. Meaning, what does the set revolve around? Usually, by the way, the thing at the center of the set is something that's going to take a lot of support and or space. For example, since we're talking about Murders of

Harlov Manor, we knew early on that an important part of a murder mystery set is we needed the gameplay to have an element of mystery. Okay, well, how do we do that? Well, the low-hanging fruit was face-down cards. You know, so many years ago, Onslaught introduced the morph mechanic. Basically, what happened was Richard Garfield and Alpha had made two cards, Camouflage and

Illusionary Mask, that had face-down cards as a component. But the rules were very squishy at the time, and so the rules team figured out how to make face-down cards work. Once they solved it, they came up with the idea for a mechanic, which was Morph. And we have used Morph a bunch of different times. Now, obviously, in Murder's Crawl of Manor, we decided to sort of tweak Morph, so we made Dis we decided to sort of tweak Morph. So we made Disguise, which is basically Morph, except the face-down creature has Ward 2.

One of the things in general, when we first made Morph, it was many years ago. Creatures were a lot worse than they are now. So as we've made creatures better, Morph kind of got worse along the way. So this is just us cleaning up things a little bit. so as we've made creatures better, Morph kind of got worse along the way. So this is just us cleaning up things a little bit. And also, War 2 is nice in that the fun part of Morph is getting to turn your creature up. It just increases the opportunity that you get to turn the creature up. Okay, so we start by saying, well, and the reason Morph was sort of the center of the set was there's a lot going on with Morph.

It's complex. It uses up a lot of our what we call complexity points that, you know, there's a lot going on with Morph. Now, on the positive side, the way you figure out synergy, so the tool I'm going to talk about right now is what we call Synergy Tree. Now, as with the set skeleton, this is something you learn early on and then you can internalize a lot of it. So I don't make a lot of, I don't make a lot of, um, synergy trees per se, but I, I do it internally cause I, I understand the process of how it works.

So the way a synergy tree works is you take a piece of paper, you write your mechanic or the thing that you are trying to find synergy for in the middle of your piece of paper. Usually I circle it. And write it small. There's a lot of stuff you want to write on the paper, so don't make it too big. Or use a big piece of paper. And then the idea is you start thinking about what things are there that, you know, what does disguise care about? there that, you know, what does disguise care about? So, for example, I might say, oh, well,

disguise, the creatures are face down. So I would make face down a little, and then I'd connect that to, I draw a line between face down and disguise. And then I'm like, well, but face down is colorless. So maybe I put colorless on a bubble and connect that. I connect colorless to face down. 2-2, I connect that to face down. The idea that it has two states because you play it as a 2-2 and then turns into something.

So it has an activation to turn it face up. It can have effects when it turns into something. So it has an activation to turn it face up. It can have effects when it turns face up. And there are elements of the card. Another thing about face down is when you turn it face up, it gains qualities. Like face down is colorless. But when it turns face up, it's a color or colors.

When you turn it face up, it has a subtype. It has a card type, usually creature. But it has a lot of qualities that are hidden. So the idea there is that what the card is in other zones is not the same as what it is on the battlefield when you first play it. For example, it allows you to get higher cost cards. So all the stuff you're writing, higher cost cards, put in a circle, connected, you know, can have hidden colors,

can have hidden creature types. You write all this stuff down because all of this is something that is true about the card. So what you're going to do with your Synergy Tree is you're writing everything that this card has anything to do with, this mechanic has anything to do with. It costs three mana. It's face down.

It's a 2-2. It has an activation cost. It turns face up. It has qualities that are hidden. It can have a larger mana cost. It can have multiple colors. And as you start writing them down, what the Synergy Tree does for you is it shows you other things. And then what you can do from the Synergy Tree is you can start connecting.

So, for example, let's say I put disguise and there's a line to face down creature. And from face down creature, there's a line to colorless creature. Well, colorless creature can now connect to artifact creature, or Eldrazi, or, you know. The idea is that you keep branching out, and then what you do is you extrapolate. So you want to make connections. So the idea is, for example,

you want to make connections. So the idea is, for example, we want to care about the face downness in some way. Oh, well, we can care about the fact that it is colorless. We can care about the fact that it is small. We can care about the fact maybe that it, you know, it has other hidden qualities built into it. And so as you sort of extrapolate that out, it allows you to start figuring out where you might want to care about things. So for example, morph and disguise are very similar. So I'm going to talk about some earlier. Obviously, this is the first time we used disguise. So I'm going to talk about some morph sets.

So when we use morph in Onslaught, Onslaught's other big theme was typo. It cared about creature types. Okay. Well, there, when you turn things face up, one of the things Onslaught did is it did a lot of scaling effects. Oh, your things get stronger based on the number of this creature type you have. Well, all of a sudden, you know, your math changes when you turn a card face up. Oh, I get to do damage to you equals the number of goblins I have. Oh, but you assumed I had three goblins. I have four goblins. Or I get a tap for, you know, mana equals the number of elves I have. Well, I have an elf you don't know about. So what it allowed you to do with Onslaught is it

And what it allowed you to do with Onslaught is it allowed you to sort of mix and match with the theme that was going on. Okay, now we jump ahead to Time Spiral. And Time Spiral really was about trying to be nostalgic, right? It was about nostalgia and time. And so one of the tricks we learned with Face Down was, for example, we wanted to reference some cards from the past. Some of which we couldn't directly reference because it was on the reserve list. But one of the cool things was you could turn cards face up and they were things you knew. They turned into things from the past that you recognized. And so we got to combine nostalgia with the hiddenness of the face down.

Then we got to concertar-kir. We were messing around with the wedge set. We had multicolor. But one of the interesting things about face down mechanics, morph and disguise, is that in order to cast it, it has a colorless cost. So let's say I have a multicolored creature. If it has a morph cost, then I can play, even though if I don't have both colors, I can play the morph cost until I get the second color or both colors,

whatever. And so the idea essentially is it blended well with the way that multicolor worked. So the idea essentially is it blended well with the way that multicolor worked. And as you can see, each set that is used, a face-down mechanic, it blended into what that set cares about. It said, how do I interact with that set? And that part of what happens is when you're building out your set, you're looking for your synergies. You do your synergy tree. You look and you see, okay, what are other things that are connective? Now, one of the things that's popular to do is you can do, let's say, a giant piece of paper. You could do one synergy tree and just keep going until you start hitting things that the set might want. Or, you also

could do a Synergy Tree starting from, like, one of the things we could do is, we were set on Ravnica. We decided midway through Vision that it's going to be Ravnica. And one of the things we wanted is, we want the set to feel like Ravnica. Okay, what feels like Ravnica? Two-color gold cards feel like Ravnica. Hybrid feels like Ravnica. Okay, what feels like Ravnica? Two-color gold cards feel like Ravnica. Hybrid feels like Ravnica. Split cards feel like Ravnica. You know, guild mages, like, you know, guild-ish things. You can name different things that are reminiscent. And then, when you sort of take it and you do the, when you do out your synergy tree, you'll start to see the overlaps. Now, if you have a giant piece of paper,

you can also do all this on one paper and sort of have them start linking in the middle. It just depends how you want to do it. The idea is a lot, a synergy tree is a lot of what they call a mental chart where you're flowing ideas and letting ideas blend into other ideas. Okay, so now you have disguise.

You have a general sense of things disguise can do. So now you want to build other mechanics in the set. So, for example, we're trying to build collect evidence. We want to call it collect evidence, so we want you to collect something. Well, what can you collect? And like I said at the time, if you listen to my podcast on Merge of the Car of the Manor, we said, okay, there's a couple different places you could collect things from.

You could collect things in your hand. You could collect things on the battlefield. You could collect things in your graveyard. You could collect things in exile. Like, there's different places. Or you, the player, could collect something. You have counters or something. But one of the things that was interesting was that one of the things that Collect Evidence pushed toward, just the flavor of it is that a lot of what we're trying to do in this set

is detective work. It's a murder mystery. Well, what do you collect evidence on in a murder mystery? Well, there's a case, there's a dead body, and you're looking at the past to understand what happened, right? How did this person die? Well, dead bodies, the past, the graveyard really is the place that embodies that. So we were looking at sort of what, you know, if we did the graveyard, what could we do with that?

Okay, now this is where the synergy trees become. So let's say you want to collect things out did the graveyard, what could we do with that? Okay, now this is where the synergy trees become. So let's say you want to collect things out of the graveyard, right? You want to say, okay, how can we care about the graveyard? What is interesting about the graveyard? Where is there something that we can do that might be different than what we've done before? So one of the things I talked about in the synergy tree for disguise is that it allows you to get backsides that may or

may not be relevant to the play, but are still there. Because in any other zone, the card is the face-up card, right? So now let's think about the graveyard. The card is face-up in the graveyard, so what does that mean? Well, for one thing, disguise let you get creatures that have much higher mana value in your graveyard than normal. How does that happen? Okay, well I have a creature, like one of the things we like to do is, in some ways, disguise creatures are two level creatures. Much like monstrous, much like level up, much like transform, that like I have one state and then I become a second state. I'm a 2-2, but usually, I mean, you can

get smaller, but usually you get bigger. And the idea there is disguise goes really well in larger creatures because earlier in the game when you normally can't play them, there's something you can do with them, and later in the game when you have the mana, you can turn them face up and give a larger creature. But, one of the

things that happens in sets with face-down mechanics is that there's a lot of trading that can happen early on. You attack with your face-down 2-2, and I've got to decide whether or not I want to block. And, hey, maybe I know my face-down 2-2 is not that good, and your face-down 2-2, I don't know what it is.

Maybe I want to block. Or maybe, maybe I have a creature that's expensive that I'm not going to get to do a while. And maybe I'd rather trade that now to stop you. But when I do that, when I make that trade, my disguise creature goes to the graveyard and it now is face up in the graveyard. So it has a large mana value. And what we realized is that disguise allowed us to get more mana value into the graveyard. What does that mean? Well, when Collect Evidence is looking at things to care about, now all of a sudden there's synergy.

That disguise gets you more mana value in your graveyard than you traditionally get. And that's why Collect Evidence started looking at mana value. That it was something that was, it was a different thing to look at. It was something that normally grows with time, but could be sort of circumvented with this mechanic. So now on the surface, if I say to you, disguise and collect evidence, that might not, you might not right away go, wow, those go well together. Because what makes one synergize with the other might not always be so loud. And that's another fun thing about synergy. There's very blatant synergy, you know, meaning I can make artifact matters and then put artifacts in the set. That's pretty loud. You're not going to miss

that. But it's also fun to do things that have a little bit more subtlety to them. Once again, one of the advantages of Synergy is that there's strategy, there's discovery, that there's something in which people get to learn something about. And that is very compelling. Once again, regular listeners will know, one of the big signs that you're doing something right is people finish playing the game and they want to play again. And discovering things and learning things really is impactful, right? Oh, I've learned something. Oh, I want to play again so I can use what I've learned. Now, the other thing about Synergy is once you do your Synergy trees, you'll start to realize that you can overlap in different places. So for example, I talked about how there were three different synergy trees we

were looking at right now. One was disguise, one was collect evidence, and one was Ravnica. Okay, so we found a place to overlap collect evidence with disguise. Now let's talk about how do we overlap disguise with Ravnica and how do we overlap collect evidence with Ravnica. Okay, so first, sometimes you have to reinvent the wheel, right? Sometimes you have to figure something out for the first time. We hadn't done collect evidence before, so that synergy we had to figure out. The next synergy, trying to find synergy between disguise and Ravnica, we didn't need to figure it out. It was given to us already. So in Khan's Artic here,

Khan's really described the value of multicolor and a face-down mechanic. So we wanted to be in Ravnica, we wanted to have multicolor and a face-down mechanic. So we wanted to be in Ravnica. We wanted to have multicolor, multicolor, especially two-color multicolor is sort of definitional of Ravnica. And we realized from our concept Tarkir experience

that there's great synergy between gold cards and face-down mechanics. Now, the next place we looked at to sort of extend even further is, are there other tools available in Ravnica? Are there other Ravnican things that we can make use in a different way in working with this guys?

We already knew that the synergy between multicolor and that, like I said, is where you take your synergy tree. So another thing that we were looking at for Ravnica was hybrid. Hybrid was introduced in Ravnica block, and every returning Ravnica block has had hybrid in it. Hybrid is a tool. Other sets use hybrid. But hybrid very much has a Ravnican feel in the sense that Ravnican sets use it. And so one of the things we looked at is said, okay, is there any synergy between face down and hybrid? And in fact, there was.

So one of the things we could do is we could make multicolored creatures that are two color, but when trying to turn them face up, the disguise cost, we could make use of hybrid mana. And what that did is it said, okay, I can play this face up if I have both colors, but if I don't have both colors, I can play it face down, and there's an avenue to getting it face up even without both colors. Now, the nice thing about that is it makes the card useful outside of just,

so let's say I have a red-blue-gold card. Yeah, I can put in my red-blue deck, and hey, I draw blue but not red, or I draw red but not blue. This helps me get it up and helps me turn it face up. But let's say I'm playing blue-black or playing blue-white. This card has some value, not as much as in a blue-red deck,

but not no value, because the point is if I'm willing to go through the disguise, hey, this card can go in a mono-blue deck or go in a mono-red deck, but not no value. Because the point is, if I'm willing to go through the disguise, hey, this card can go in a mono-blue deck or go in a mono-red deck. And so hybrid was a tool that we could make use of that gave us some different flexibility that allowed us to design disguise in a different way. And that's a lot of the layering of synergies is not finding one synergy, but finding a group of different synergies.

And a lot of that, like I said, is understanding what your set needs and then being able to go broad within that area. That's why the synergy trees are so valuable. Okay, now let's talk about Ravnica and Collect Evidence. collect evidence. Okay, collect evidence. The thing we learned with disguise is it's cool if you can get cards in your graveyard that have a high mana value, but it didn't require you having to cast them because you can't cast high mana value so late in the game. How do I get high mana values out easier? Okay, let's go back and look at our synergy tree for Ravnica. So there's gold, there's hybrid, there's split cards. Okay, now another important thing about working with a lot of different tools is understanding there's a lot of little nuances that you need to know. So

important thing to know about split cards is a split card in any zone other than the stack is the combined mana values of the two cards, the two split cards. So if one split card costs two and another split card costs six, the mana value of that card is eight. Now this means a couple things. One, you can cast, if one side of it is small, you can cast that early because it's a cheap thing to cast, but you get the whole card into the graveyard. So one of the things we did, so what we ended up doing was we made split cards with a small, a cheap side and expensive side. The cheap side was usually one, two, or three. So you cast it relatively early. And the expensive side was six,

always at least six, usually six. The reason we did that, by the way, is understanding the rules for how split cards work with mana value can be a little confusing. So we said, okay, if one side is just six and at common, the collective evidence at common is collective evidence six. It's like, okay, hey, I can see that there's a split card in it that has a six. Even if I don't know I have to, I get to add them, just I assume I just pick one. Well, it still works. And so split cards, you know, bring this energy and bring something that we haven't interacted with before in this context and give it extra value. Now, that's the other neat thing about synergy is, and this is one of the things about open-ended backwards Synergy,

is that Magic has 27,000 plus cards. So whenever I make Synergy within the set, assuming I'm thinking about the past, meaning I'm trying, like, instead of saying, instead of saying, for example, I could say Face Down Disguise card, or I could say face down card, or I could say colorless card, right? I could pull back in scope, and the more I pull back in scope, within the context of that set, there's really no difference between disguise card and face, well, there's cloak, I guess. well, there's cloak, I guess, but if I say Disguise or Cloak card,

or I say Face Down card, or I say Colorless card, in the context of Murders of the Call of Manner, there's not a lot of difference. Maybe there's a few artifact creatures. But if I say Colorless card versus all of magic, all of a sudden, a lot more synergies. And that's why, for example, we don't really call Disguise out by name much, so that, hey, if you're playing it with Morph cards, hey, all the cards that care mostly care about colorless cards. Or the other thing that we did is the white-black draft strategy cared about small creatures.

So there's a little theme about caring about things power two or less. Well, one of the neat things about that is face down, disguise creatures are power two or less. And so that was a theme we hadn't done as much with. That was something new that we could do. And one of the cool things, by the way, is the more you use a theme, like one of the interesting things about disguise, now given disguise is slightly new because of the ward,

but we have a lot of experience with doing face down sets. Onslaught was a face down set. Time Spiral was a face down sets. Onslaught was a face-down set. Time Spiral was a face-down set. Concepts of Kier was a face-down set. In each one of those sets, we learn stuff from it, and then we bring that to the table. Understanding face-down with multicolor,

Kahn sort of invented the idea, but we make use of it because we now are aware of it. And so some of Synergy is stuff like the Syner the synergy tree where you're sort of mapping things out. And some of it is just understanding from past experience. Like one of the advantages of doing this job, this is my 29th year of working on magic, is hey, I've had a lot of opportunity to mix and match things and see the synergies. So the reason I kind of don't have to write out the synergy tree is I've internalized the synergy tree. That when I look at something, it's a lot easier for me to understand where the synergies lie. And the thing to understand is that different designers like a different level of synergy.

Every designer wants some amount of synergy. You want your set to work together. I, along with some other designers I'm a high synergy person I really, really like baking synergies into my set now, there is such a thing as slightly too high a level of synergy what happens sometimes is you make such a jigsaw puzzle connected piece that when it goes to set design and play design,

you lock their hands a little bit too much, that you make it a little too interconnected. You need some flux so that they can sort of make the set. And so you can be too synergistic. You can make something that has a little bit too much going on. You need some flexibility. And so that's something that people think about. Anyway, guys, I'm at work. So I'm almost done. The real point of today was I like sometimes to talk about larger concepts, but then get in the nitty gritty. Like, yeah, it's nice to know why synergy matters in the big picture. But how do we make synergy?

What do we do with synergy? I'm trying to get a little more in the dirt of talking about sort of how we make use of it. So I hope today was useful in that, like I said, synergy is, I mean, there's many things that make magic magic. But I think synergy is an important part of really making a trading card game sing, making magic sing. Synergy is an important part of really making a trading card game sing, making magic sing. And one of the things that's a lot of fun for me in vision design, synergy is a... Obviously, set design and play design have to worry about synergy quite a bit. But a lot of the crafting of the synergy is structural. A lot of...

You know, you can make individual cards synergistic, which set design and play design does. you can make individual cards synergistic, which set design and play design does. But from a structure standpoint, you really need to build the synergy that wants to be built into the structure. And that is vision design's responsibility. So there's a lot of time spent in vision design when you're trying to figure out what the suite of mechanics are. You really want to find that synergy sweet spot. So anyway guys, I hope you enjoyed my jaunt into Synergy, a fun topic of mine.

And I honestly, I am shocked that I got a thousand plus, for how much I love Synergy, because I do love Synergy, the fact that I got a thousand plus podcasts into the topic of designing magic before I talked about, uh, um, before I talked about this is kind of mind-boggling to me. But anyway, guys, I'm now at work, parking as we speak. So we all know what that means. It means it's the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic.

I'll see you guys next time. Bye-bye.