Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1158: Power Level

Episode Date: July 26, 2024

In this podcast, I examine what exactly power level is and how it impacts design.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work Okay, so today is a topic we were discussing on my blog a bit power level So let me first give a caveat before I get into this not my area of expertise Power level is much more about play design and set design I have an understanding of it. I will talk about it today. I just want to start by saying this isn't what I do day to day and while I have a decent understanding of it just from working on magic forever, I might be getting some

fine-tuned things wrong as possible today since it is not what I do day to day. Okay that said, let me sort of talk about what is power level? What exactly is it? Well, there's a couple different meanings of power level, or it can be applied a couple different ways. First off, it talks about you can apply it to a format, meaning that a format has a certain power level, which means cards have to be at a certain power level which means Cards have to be at a certain level to be powerful enough to be played in that format so levels have a power format and one of the truisms of Formats is the more cards that are available to the format the higher the power level is now

Magic tends to go backwards, meaning you tend to have formats, if they have more cards, they go more into the past, is usually how it works. Meaning there's a lot of overlap in cards between formats, but the bigger the format, the farther the back you go, is normally how it works. There's not many formats where like,

I'm this stretch of time in the middle of magic, right? It's usually, there's a time you go back toward. Anyway, power level there is talking about sort of how powerful a format is. And like I said, the more cards in a format, the higher the power level of the format. So what that means is there are cards that would be played in standard

that might not be played in pioneer or modern or legacy. That is you go farther back, the power level of the card you need needs to be higher because the overall power level of the format is higher. Okay, then you also could talk about power level as it applies to sets, meaning how much power is in the set. And I should stress, power level is not an average.

It's not like if I make very, very weak things, it lessens the very, very strong things. Power level looks at the top of the curb. What are the most powerful things? So when we talk about power level, it's sort of like, you can look at a set and say, where is this set at? Now, different sets can be set at different power levels

because different formats are different power levels. If we make a set that's primarily sort of looking at standard as premier sets often do, the power level is lower. But if we're talking stuff that goes directly into modern, the power level can be higher. And in theory, stuff that goes directly into modern, the power level can be higher. In theory, stuff that goes directly into legacy, often aimed at commander, has potential to even be higher than that.

But the other big thing is competitive formats care about power more than casual formats, meaning if the goal of the format is competitive play, I'm trying to win, at least in tournaments, people are playing the most powerful version that they can. In a casual setting, not that people don't play powerful versions in a casual setting, but they don't,

that's not their sole motivation, that I might play something that is fun over something that is the best that it can be. Now normally what the way that something like Commander will work is, people will pick their fun theme, and then within that fun theme, try to get the best cards they can. That often happens.

So power level does matter even for casual formats like Commander, but it matters even more if you're talking about a high level competitive tournament format. Like people are just fine tuning and there's a lot of information about what the best things are so the the meta game will push in certain directions. Okay. The reason I bring this up is how magic has handled power level has changed over time. And what we do with the power level has changed over time. So the point of today's podcast is to sort of explain the nature of power level, how

it affects how we make sets, and then how to talk about it. What I found in my blog is there's a lot of people discussing things that are using vocabulary that isn't quite from a game design standpoint what that vocabulary means. So I'm going to try to use sort of the game design vocabulary to explain what's going on and then I'll talk about what I think is frustrating people. But I will try to do through the lens of what is happening, the actual nature of what's going on.

Okay, first and foremost, let's go to the beginning of the game. Always like starting in alpha. So when Richard Garfield made alpha, as I often talk about, he was not making the game that magic would be calm. He was making the game he thought magic would be. And the reality is, as I often like to say, you can't design for a phenomenon.

Richard knew there was a chance that things he was doing could cause problems, but the only scenario by which that was true was the game was a runaway hit. And he's like, I'll solve that problem We get to it. That's awesome problem to have runaway hit. We will have time to solve that problem So early magic the idea was that your your play group was mostly your kitchen table group You would buy this game in a game store like you buy most games and then you go play with your friends And so in that world like you buy most games and then you go play with your friends and so in that world the amount of cards in any one environment was pretty small.

You a player would own a couple hundred cards maybe and so in alpha Richard realized that there was a high variance in power but it didn't matter because in any one environment no one especially since a lot of the powerful cards were higher rarity, no one's going to have all the cards. You only have a couple hundred cards. So yeah, maybe you have a time walk or maybe you have all in such a recall. But it's not like you're gonna have all of them in the same deck. And once again, he, this was the model of how we expected magic to be because he was treating it like a normal game.

The idea that there would be people playing tournaments where they had the absolute best version of the deck, that was something beyond where Richard dreamed of the game being, only because it just wasn't how normal games function. So the idea early on was there was a widespread, the power level varied quite a bit, but the top level of the power level sort of,

like I said, a lot of times we talk about power level, it's the top end, right? The power level of Alpha was through the roof. There are many cards, for example, we have what we call the Power Nine, which is Timelock, Time Twifter, Ancestral Recall, Black Lotus, and the Five Moxes. Those cards are insanely powerful,

and there are other cards also really, really powerful in the environment, in Alpha. But like I said, the idea being that it didn't matter. In the way the game is going to be played, it wouldn't matter. That to Richard, High Variance just made the game fun and he didn't see tournaments, like all of that was sort of a little beyond

where he expected the game to be. The other big thing about Alpha is Richard, while he's an amazing game designer, power level, not his forte. And the one of the early sort of power level mistakes purely from a developmental standpoint. There's a lot to be said like, I think the fact that magic had crazy overpowered things in alpha probably contributed to a lot of the excitement of the early magic. So I'm not even saying that they shouldn't have been the way they were.

They should. I'm just saying from a modern sensibility, there are cards there. Timewalk is a great example. We've remade the ability of Timewalk and I believe the lowest we've done is five mana. Like Timewalk and Alpha was two mana. So like there's just some cards that are way over-reliant, just from a larger meta-game balance. Anyway, Richard and the Alpha Playtesters that were helping him really under-evaluated how powerful sort of non-creatures were, and overestimated how powerful creatures were, meaning that the creatures in Alpha are not that powerful.

There are a few that combined with things in Alpha, like hypnotic specters are great. For a long, long time, we really thought hypnotic specters were just over the line. And what it turns out is dark rituals over the line, that if you get a hypnotic specter, when you're supposed to get a hypnotic specter not nearly as scary or problematic but when you can get it on turn one that is scary and so it was the power of Dark Ritual that was the scarier part of Dark Ritual Hypnotic Specter than Hypnotic Specter. Hypnotic Specter is a 2-2 flyer that when it hits you you randomly lose a card because if you can get it out really early before they get defenses to stop it, it can hit you, you can lose land, it can just utterly wreck you in the early game.

So one of the things, so just to be aware, the power level of certain qualities of the game were a bit off. Some stuff was way too high, some stuff was way too low. Okay, so now we advance beyond sort of the early days into the second age. This is when I get hired Bill Rose, Mike Elliott, William Jocish, Henry Stern, Joel Mix becomes head designer. This is an era where like okay, magic is a couple years old. We understand what Magic is. Magic is not a game that's solely played on kitchen tables. It is a game where people play in stores and there's tournaments and people will acquire the cards they need to acquire.

So the idea that scarcity is gonna be the correction, the correction for power balance, that's not true. And there's a bunch of things that we start doing during this time period. That's when sixth edition rules get made, a lot of the early work on the color pie gets done, a lot of templating work gets done, and there's a lot of fine tuning of tournament play.

That's when the pro tour is beginning. But one of the things that happens is, we start being a little more conscious about balance. And I say a little bit, that group still makes Urza Saga, which is, for those that don't know the history, a broken, broken block. It turns out that Bill and I and William and Mike at least don't really have our skillset. We're good at making cards, but we're not the best at power balance.

Henry was the first step in that direction. Henry actually was a pro player. And what we found was that the Pro Tour was a great place to find, well, at the time we called developers, maybe we would call play designers now, but people who are good at play balance, which is, hey, part of being good at playing magic competitively is understanding power level. What are the good cards? You want to take advantage of what's good. And so they have a much better sense of where the power lies. So

starting around invasion, which is sort of beginning of the third age, we start regularly hiring pro players. We hire Randy Bueller, we hire Mike Donay, we hire Mike Turian, we hire Matt Place, we hire Brian Schneider. Like we start hiring people who have some expertise. Later we'd hire Eric Lauer. We start hiring people who really are good at understanding power level. For the first time, we start to get a better adjustment. I think one of the things that's true for early magic, and that includes the first and second age is... So one of the challenges of making a Magic set is we don't know how exactly it will get played.

If our environments are simple enough that we, with the handful people we have and the amount of play testing available to us, can completely understand the environment, it would get cracked in two seconds. Like remember, we are a handful of people, Magic players are millions and millions of players. More Magic gets played with a set in the first five minutes of a set being released than in the entire time we're play testing. There's just so many people.

So one of the things that we need to do is we're not trying to solve the environment. We're just trying to push it in a direction that we think will be fun. And we try to figure out what cards we think are the fun cards, what elements of the environment are the fun of element, what are the themes we're pushing.

And we want, so here's a way to think about it. It is, I want to stress, this is not technically how we do it. I just found this to be a good mental way of thinking about it, okay? So imagine that there were PowerPoints, that there's so much power that you can put in a set. And roughly, we want the power level of each Premier set

to be roughly the same. We want the same number of power points now when we make cards We can make cards so we talking cards as far as being full and half a full card means We really think this card is probably going to see some constructed play You know, we think that there's a really good chances card card will see constructed play. That doesn't mean 100% it will, but it means that we're confident there's a good chance that it will. I don't know the exact percentages, but there's a good chance. A half card means, hey, if the environment is right, this could be a player, but it depends on certain

things being right. So half cards are sort of like shots that we think have a chance. So we make so many full cards and so many half cards. And the idea is we are trying to seed the environment. Usually a set is about something and we don't just put the PowerPoints anywhere. We put them toward what the set is about. We lean into the set.

We lean into the mechanics. we lean into the mechanics, we lean into the theme, because what we want to have happen is, hey, there's a new set, here's its themes, its mechanics. Hey, now this affects the format, especially standard. And oh, now I can go play the new thing. So we create this thing we call the Escher Stairway, I talk about.

So Escher is an artist known for drawing optical illusions. One of his famous optical illusions is called the Escher Stairway in which it's stairs that keep going up. Once again, it's illusion. And normally there's people walking on them and it'll twist and turn. But the idea is it looks like each step is above the step before it. Once again, an optical illusion. But the reason we bring that to, one of the things we try to do is we only get so much power in a set. So the trick we've learned is people focus on the high power of the set. They don't focus on the low power. We make cards that are worse than cards we've made before. Magic always does that. But the focus isn't there. You might get something

complaining like this card is worse than an existing card. But all Magic sets does that, but the focus isn't there. You might get someone complaining like, this card's worse than an existing card, but all Magic sets have that. What the focus is, is what are the good cards? Cause people wanna, what am I gonna play? So what we do is each set, we put our power level, our power points, conceptually, toward the things that the set is about. And we sort of take away power

from things the set's not about. So that there always is this upward slope because you're always focusing on the things we're pushing. So it creates this sense of every set being powerful without us having to race. So let me talk about power creep for a second. It's a term that gets thrown around a lot, and I need to explain what power creep is. So one of the ways that you can sell a set is let's say you make set A and you set it at a certain power level.

You then can make set B and put it at a higher power level. The cards in set B are on average more powerful than the cards in set A and so people buy set B because they're excited. B is more powerful. Then you make set C. Set C is more powerful than set B because they're excited. B is more powerful. Then you make set C. Set C is more powerful than set B and set A. And the idea of power creep is each set, at least on a slope line, meaning each set gets more powerful over time. The problem with power creep is it just obsoletes the stuff that comes before it, meaning that at some point if you keep raising the power level, set A is nothing of value from a competitive standpoint. And so the idea is power creep is bad. You don't

want to sell sets throw to power. You don't want to say, well, you want to buy this set because it's just more powerful than the set that came before it. And so there's a lot of things we do, like I said, so the actual stairwell, we try to make each set roughly the same in power level. Now when sets come out, once again, we're trying to predict the environment to a certain extent, but there's a lot that goes on. And all it takes for us to miss one thing, oh, this card combines with new things in a powerful way. That's the most common thing we'll miss. There's an old card that isn't powerful but in conjunction with new stuff becomes

powerful. That, for example, it might have been one of those half cards that ended up not playing out. That not, you know, like we thought this could be a contender but then it ended up not being. But two years later, the things that it needs show up and it becomes a contender or maybe there's a car that we never even thought was a contender that just the stars align and it does something that really helps the current environment. It doesn't take a lot for us to miss something to miss what is going to be. Honestly, we can miss one combo and that really can change the shape of what

things are. So every set, while we try to set the power level at roughly the same level, there are some variants, not because we weren't aiming at the same place is that, Hey, we'll aim somewhere, but we can miss by some because it's not an exact science. Balancing cards is insanely, insanely hard. My job is taking an absolute blank piece of paper and making things out of it. And I think I have the easy job.

So balancing is super hard. Okay. Now there are a couple other factors going on that muddy thing. Number one, as I said, early on we were off on things. For example, we were too low on creatures. Creatures just weren't powerful enough. The line I like to say is, other than other reasons, you know, it's on the reserve list or it doesn't work well in the rules or whatever, other than other issues, just from a power level issue, I don't think there's anything in alpha,

no creature in alpha we can't reprint. There are some that are the top like Birds of Paradise and Alenor Elves that I think like we have to be careful when and how we would put them in standard, but we could. Where there are plenty of spells that aren't even in the ballpark is something we can do. You know, things that are banned in Legacy. Like, that's nowhere close to what we put in a Premier Set.

So one of the things that's happened over time is we've had to adjust the power level of different effects. Some effects we made too powerful. And, once again, it also has to do with what the audience likes. For example, early magic land destruction was plentiful and powerful, and it just didn't lead to fun gameplay. That what a land for those that did not play in early magic, what early land destruction deck just did is it destroyed all your lands, sometimes destroyed a lot of your hand, and there's just nothing you could do. There just was no, you had, you just couldn't play land, you couldn't play spells, and your opponent beat you

with whatever, because you had nothing. And that was just very unfun. So we really dialed back on land destruction. So we figured out what effects were not fun, or caused it like not good gameplay. We lowered the power level on those, and some we lower the scarcity of it. Other things that were that were fun, we've pushed boundaries

and raising the power level. So over time, we're constantly adjusting what we think the right power level is for certain effects. So there is for certain things creatures being one of them, there's an upward slope. Over time, we've made them more powerful, we realize we're able to make them more powerful. So there is like when talking about power level there's certain aspects that have come up but that had a lot to do with they were below the line of where they needed to be and we were trying to get them to the right line. The other thing is creatures there's a lot of answers to creatures so what we have found over time is making powerful creatures and making powerful answers in general makes for a more fun game of magic.

Rather than everything is just weaker, it is fun to get out powerful creatures, but then there's answers to the powerful creatures, so there's back and forth. The other thing that happened is we designed for standard for a long time. That was our core thing we were designing for. And that magic, the focal point of magic from a competitor standpoint was standard. And that was sort of the key when we were designing what we thought about. But along came Commander, probably the biggest, but modern to a second, then Pioneer a little bit. The focus of magic moved from standard to more what I call an eternal focus.

That more formats were played with more of the older cards. And that, as that becomes the dominant way people play, we needed to shift the power level of Premier Sets. It was a little on the low side. That if you're aiming for Standard, we were fine. But if you're aiming for the mix of things, we want people to have cars from premier sets that go in the commander deck, that go in pioneer, in modern, maybe

at once in a blue moon in legacy. And so in the throne of Eldraine, we consciously raised the power level. Now, the reason that is not power creep is it's not that we kept raising it every set. We realized that our goals had changed and so we made a one-time shift to raise the power level. Now anytime we do something for the first time there's a greater room for error just because we haven't done it before. We spent many many years at a certain line power level and so raising it it took us a little while to get our feet. That is why I threw an Eldrin it was a little more broken than we intended because we were playing at an area that's a little different. Okay, the second thing we did is we started making products that were aimed

at a different format, modern being the choice. We also made stuff for Commander. Because Commander is not a competitive format, the stuff we make for Commander is a higher in power level but it's a little competitive format, the stuff we make for Commander is a higher in power level, but it's a little bit different than the stuff we aim at modern. Okay, so now I have to introduce a different concept, card influx. Okay, so what card influx is about is it says, a format is defined by the amount of powerful cards in it.

And what I mean by that is, by the amount of powerful cards in it. And what I mean by that is, every time we add a card, or we add cards, every time we add a set, some number of cards are high enough power level that they're impacting to different formats. And the more cards you have that are impacting, potentially impacting to a format,

that essentially, so here's the, let's think of it this way. Any one format can only have so many cards be viable in it. There's a point at which you just like, imagine for example, a format is robust, a normal 60 card for a format is robust. Imagine for the hypothetical, imagine a format where there's 10 viable decks and those 10 viable decks are singleton.

They don't even repeat cards in them. And there's no overlap between the 10 decks. All the things I said are almost impossibly true. But imagine a scenario where all these are true. I'm trying to find the upper limit, right? So we have 10, 60 card decks. So if you strip off a land, which is 24 lands, we're talking about 36.

So 36 by 10, and I'm saying no overlap, no fours, no overlap between decks, that's 360 cards. That is about the highest you could possibly, so let's say between 300 and 400 cards is about the most that a format can hold as far as the top end competitive decks. There might be second tier decks that have other cards in them, that's fine, but as far as the utmost like if you're playing at the pro tour, these are what's going to get played. And 10 different decks in the metagame, that's an

amazing metagame, just a little side note. That means that you can have between 300 and 400 cards in a constructed format, roughly. That matter at the highest level. You can have some stuff that matters in the next tier. So maybe there's another 100 or 200 cards that can matter. 200 cards that can matter, you know. So, okay, we're talking, let's say 500 cards, you know, maybe 600 if I'm assuming, but anyway, it's in the hundreds, it's in the mid hundreds. We make more than that a year, we make a lot of cards, and the power level of each format is higher

as you go back with more cards. So what card influx says is, as you add more cards to the format, the average power level of the format will go up. The reason being is, so let's say we start with alpha, or not alpha, we start with set A. Alpha's really high.

Let's say we start with set A. A has so many cards. And when you first start with set A, let's say set A has 300 cards. Probably not all of them are viable. Some of them are just weak, but let's say half of them are viable. But then we make another set of 300 cards.

Now, between them, there's 600 cards. All of them can't be viable. Probably once again, you know, maybe half of each are viable. Maybe there's 300 cards or half of each set. Then we make a third set of 300 cards. Okay, so every time we make a set, less of that set is relevant for the format

because the power level keeps going up. We're not raising the power level per se of the sets, and so fewer and fewer cards get into that system that uses everything. fewer and fewer cards get into that system that uses everything. But anyway what it shows is that card influx affects power level but if you keep the same power level if you keep sort of the premier set power level the number of cards that go into the format slow over time so the format's rotation or rotation is a bad word because rotation means something. The format's evolution will get stronger over time. The power level will go up over time

because every new set that enters, there'll be some cards that are a better choice than cards that exist in the format. And once again, that is not power creep. There are a lot of different things going on. And if you make sets at the same power level there will be things that fit some of them might be situational some might just be hey this is where we put the power points in this set oh or maybe we're playing in brand new space we've never played before and it's powerful and there's things that lets you do that we didn't have you know part of magic design is exploring new space and some new space is powerful you know or does things that are better than we think and also like I said early on we

miss on things sometimes we make a card we aim at it and we think it'll be a certain power level and it's more powerful than that a lot of cards that get played in the larger formats are sort of mistakes on our part that was more powerful than we expected it to be anyway Anyway, the reason card influx is important is the number of cards that get added to a format change the format. And the more cards that get added that are relevant, the quicker it changes, the quicker it evolves.

Okay, so we start making sets for modern. The idea is we start making sets with a higher power level. Once again, it is not power creep. We're not slowly incrementally making sets more powerful over time. We are choosing for a certain subsets of sets to make a power level that is the same power level, just a higher power level. Now A, as I said before, anytime we do something for the first time, we will mess up a little bit.

We're new to it. We're aiming at a new power level that happened in the throne of Eldraine that happened in modern horizons one and two. We're getting our feet under us. We, you know, the more training we have in something, the better we are at it. Um, so what happens is we make stuff for modern. There's a little more give because we're learning the system. And this is the important thing. The card influx goes way up

that when we make a premier set, the number of cards at the power level that are relevant for modern are pretty small. You know, maybe a handful of cards, maybe even we're doing a brand new thing that ends up being powerful, 10 cards, 15 cards, but now comes sets that are made for modern. The power level is higher. The number of cards that go in There's just a higher amount of them. This is just pure card influx. It's not power creep It's just we're making more cards at a power level that are relevant to the format more cards are entering the format the format changes faster and a lot of the complaint I'm getting is hey one of the things I liked about Pick older format. I'm getting is, hey, one of the things I liked about pick older format,

I'll pick modern, you know, one of the things I liked about modern is it was stable. It didn't change too much. I can make a deck and then a year later I could come and play in a tournament and that deck is viable. And the reason for that is because the card influx was so small, it changed at a slower rate. But as we start making car or sets for modern at a modern power level, it changes the card influx, a lot more cards enter the system, things change faster. And that that is what I think people are complaining about. And once again, there's fine questions to be had. Should we design things straight for modern? I will say those sets are very popular. The best selling set of all time was

Lower of the Rings made for modern. The best selling set, second best selling set is Modern Horizon 2 made for modern. Modern Horizon 3 is looking like it's gonna be up there. Like, there is something about having the higher power level that attracts people. But there's the fine question of, like making sets at the higher power level that attracts people. But there's the fine question of like making sets at the higher power level has implications and has effects. It is going to increase card influx. It's going to raise the power level of larger formats

faster than during the current system. And so anyway, I do hear what people are saying. I understand like I understand the effects that are happening. Some people like it, some don't. And the people who don't communicate, both are communicating with me, but I'm hearing that. But part of what I'm saying is it is not a power creep thing where we're just incrementally making every set better than the rest. What is going on is we are making a bunch of stuff specifically at a certain power level,

always aimed at the same power level. In In fact as we learn from making modern sets We we've been going down a little bit because we realized that we are we were trying for something and ended up being higher than we Thought so we're aiming a little lower to get to where we want to be And look magic has evolved certain qualities of magic like we will make a card better than an existing card That's just the nature of making a card game in which we constantly make cards. Not every card is the best that it can be. And so us optically making a card is not power creep,

it's the nature of the thing. It's the nature of what we do, that we're gonna keep making new cards. And that we can make cards that are better than other cards, we do that all the time. It just gets noticed when the card we make something better at was itself played. But that doesn't mean it's the top end of where it could be it does you know and there are things sometimes that are

powerful that is environment change it's not that they're not powerful in a vacuum it's just they need a certain environment and then environment shifts so that's another thing that goes on is as environment shifts cards can get dropped out not because they're of a low power level, but they don't fit the larger metagame. Anyway, this is me trying to explain, like I said, power level is a tricky thing. I have great respect for our play designers, not my area of expertise, not remotely my area of expertise. When I have to cost a card, I can get in the ballpark because I can look at magic cards

that we've done before, but just knowing, especially when I'm doing new things I can be way way off. I classically have done some costing in playtesting in early playtesting where the card was many many men off which means I'm not good at it so but anyway the goal of today is to give you some mindset of of the things we're trying to do it like I said it is our goal we want premier sets to be of a certain power level we aim there we want straight to modern sets to be of a certain power level we aim there those are different power levels because they're aimed at different things um that one other thing is we make stuff straight for commander that goes

straight for legacy that also has allows us to do some power level things a lot of what we're doing in commander is very different it's a lot of what we're doing in commander is very different It's a different vector because we're doing this but it does let us make powerful cards and those go straight to legacy And like I said that that's its own ball wax but anyway, um, I hope today gave you some insight to understand the things we care about and that There are a lot of moving pieces and you know, there are trend lines to go up over time There are different effects of moving pieces and there are trend lines that go up over time. There are different effects that we make stronger or weaker.

We have the one time upgrade in Throne of Eldraine. There are things like that that go on. But in general, it is our goal to make every standard set have roughly the same power level, to have every straight to modern set have roughly the same power level, and every straight to legacy set roughly. That's a little, power level is a little different there because the factors of casual play make us push different things but anyway that is our intent that is our goal there is variance it's

it's it's a hard it's a hard hard thing to do it's a moving target there's lots of factors it's super complicated but that is our goal so many guys that is power levels I hope this was informative to you and I will... Anyway, I'm not at work. So I guess that is all I have to say on Power Level. Since I'm at work, we all know what that means. It means it's the end of my drive to work. But instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic.

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