Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1164: Stages of Design

Episode Date: August 16, 2024

Thus far, there have been seven stages of Magic design. In this podcast, I walk through each stage and explain the changes each brought to the game.

I'm pulling my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time to drive to work Okay, so today's podcast was Inspired by an article. I recently wrote called the stages of magic design So when I became head designer back in 2003 Two years later in 2005. I wrote my first state of design article And in it I talked about what at time, were the stages of magic design. There were only four. There were three, and we were starting the fourth at the time.

But I haven't really talked about that since then, so I wrote a whole article about it. So today, I'm going to talk about the, so far, seven stages of magic design. Okay, stage number one, Alpha Through Alliances. Okay, so the early stages are connected to a head designer. The first head designer is sort of a de facto head designer, which is Richard Garfield, the creator of the game. So, the first stage, let me explain something that's important. I've tried this before, but it's very important for this particular point.

Richard Garfield was not making Magic as it ended up being today. You know, nobody can make, no one planned for the game to be a phenomenon that changes the essence of gaming, right? He was just making a normal game that people would play. And a lot of decisions that went into things like okay someone's gonna go to the store they're gonna spend a certain amount of money like you were on a game back in the you know the 90s like 20 30 bucks and then you'd own those cards and you'd play with your friends at home and you know your environment was mostly you

and your friends so it was a lot smaller people a lot less access the cards yeah there were powerful cards But hey, maybe in your whole cycle of friends, you know one friend had an ancestor recall and Because of the ante remember ante was when the game was first built It was built with ante, you know, the cards had flowed of them. So different people would have the cards at different times And so a lot of what Richard did when he designed Magic was aiming at it being a normal game. Another good example of that is, I think Richard saw the idea that weird things would happen and the group would have to figure out what would go on as a feature.

You know, like one of the games that really encouraged or inspired Magic was Cosmic Encounter. And Cosmic Encounter has cards that do weird things in that one of Richard's fond memories is playing Cosmic Encounter with his friends and weird interactions would come up and then you and your friends have to figure out what's happening. And I think the idea that the rules were a little less defined and that there was moments where you and your friends could sort of piece together what was happening and argue about it and stuff Was something that he thought would be fun Once again that assumes that this is a game that you're playing with your friends at home

You know like the idea that you're playing in stores or there's sanctioned tournaments that requires a much stricter rule set than what Richard was imagining Anyway, what I'm trying to get to is the earliest version, the first stage, was all about maximizing each card, of making each card shine in a vacuum. And that meant using whatever rules were needed to make it work, doing whatever template was sensible for that card, choosing color and flavor for whatever just made that card in the vacuum shine. Now, for example, Tom Wiley, who was the first head designer, wrote an article in the Duelist where he explained,

he made a flow chart for the rules, and he made it look like a rat's nest because he was making commentary. As we will see in stage two, there is a problem when everything works independent of one another, which we will get to in stage two. But anyway, I think Richard was, it was important that Richard design things the way he did. If the cards weren't exciting, if the cards didn't stand out, hey, maybe magic wouldn't have gone on to become what it did. The fact that the power nine exists, the fact that there's these exciting things was really important. Richard was trying to get people

involved and invested in a game that wasn't tested and wasn't known. So the idea that the first stage was really through individual card design made a lot of sense. But it gets us to stage two. So stage two is mirage through prophecy. So the head designer for stage two was Joel Mick. So Joel's really his reign if you will as head designer was about trying to adapt magic not to what Richard imagined it could be but to what it became right. The idea that you would have cards that would just work differently even though they were similar or you'd have templates that were different even though the cards worked the same was not ideal. Joel understood that okay we're going to start building this such that we can have

sanctioned tournaments and people can come play together and you could play with strangers but for that to work there has to be a cohesive set of rules. You can't, I mean, in the early days every card was kind of band-aided with rules to make that card work. And you had a lot of just weird things happen when you did that. So Joel, with help from Bill Rose, set out to make 6th edition, the 6th edition rules. And the 6th edition rules added the stack, last in first out, did a lot of things that are just part of the game now, but at the time they weren't. Got rid of interrupts, cleaned up the rules, there are a lot of small rules that got sort of cleaned up. Artifacts used to turn off when tapped. If a creature was tapped when blocking, it didn't deal damage. Anyway, a lot of things, it cleaned it up and made it much more

cohesive. He also worked with editing to start getting templates. Like, if two cards work the same, they read the same. Another thing that he started to do, although I think more happened later, was I was at Wizards at this point and I was a big advocate of the color pie. Like meaning colors can do things, colors have strengths but colors have weaknesses and we can't undo the colors weaknesses. And so this is the earliest of us starting to at least look at the color pie and talk about what goes where and what things should and shouldn't do. I'll admit the color pie lags a little bit behind the rules and

templating, but it is during this period that we start even thinking about it. The other, and other big thing of Joel's reign, is the introduction of blocks. Mirage is the first set in which, I mean, alliances was sort of sold as a continuation of Ice Age, but it wasn't built that way. The people that designed the East Coast Playtesters that designed both Ice Age and alliances did not design them to go together. In fact, any connection they had was done after the fact, after they turned it in. Now Mirage and Visions in contrast were designed, they called them menagerie, they were designed together to be played together. And so this is the beginning of the block era,

of the idea that a year's worth of cards are being designed together, that they'll take place in one setting mostly, and that they'll have mechanics that run through the block. And Mirage was really the start of that, the idea of block. Like I said, there was an early attempt with Ice Age and Alliances,

but it was sort of after the fact. Mirage was like, from the beginning, that's what it wanted. And then a tie-in to that is this is also the stage where the limited starts, where the idea of sets are designed for limited. For those that have never played Ice Age or Legends, those were painful, painful, limited experiences. They really just weren't made to be played limited. Mirage was the first set that said, hey, know, what does it take to be played in limited?

What do we need to do? What are the curves we need to do? The different answers have to be there in different colors A lot of like the early idea of what we think of us as a set skeleton There's a lot of a set skeleton. It's for making things work in limited the earliest ideas of a set skeleton Okay That was stage two, which brings us to stage three. So stage three is when Bill Rose becomes head designer. It is invasion through saviors of Kamigawa. Okay, so the first thing that Bill introduced during his time as head designer are block themes

So up to that point before we got to invasion when you would make a block you literally would just have two mechanics Mirage and flanking and phasing tempest had shadow and buyback Urza saga had echo and cycling The idea was you just went up to did. Did the mechanics connect to each other flavorfully? No, not necessarily. Usually they didn't. And so the idea was, Invasion said, okay, we're not just a block. We are about something. Invasion is a multicolored block that cares about multicolor. Odyssey is a graveyard block that cares about the graveyard. Onslaught is a type of block that cares about multicolor. Odyssey is a graveyard block that cares about the graveyard. Onslaught is a type of block that cares about creature types. Myriden is an artifact block that cares about artifacts. Champions of Kamigawa is a top-down set that

cares about Chinese, not Chinese, Japanese mythology. And so really the idea, one of the things that Bill was big on is trying to get a larger sense of what was going on. And at this point, Magic is old enough that we're making a lot of sets. We need to make sure they differentiate from each other. And so the idea of, oh, another big thing that happens during this period is the idea of really making use of the multiverse. Early Magic, even though the multiverse existed,

and we went to a few other planes, although it was mostly because we decided they weren't on Dominaria. But other than a few things like Agrotha or Rabiah, most of the first, most of the first like seven, eight years of magic was all on Dominaria. Now we went to different parts of Dominaria, but it was all on Dominaria. Now we went to different parts of Dominaria, but it was all

on Dominaria. And look, we had a multiverse. Planeswalkers defined by the ability to travel between worlds. We'll have to go to other worlds. So under Bill's reign, we went to Myriden, a world made of metal. We went to Kamagawa, a world inspired by Japanese

mythology. We start making use of the multiverse and really the idea there is really giving blocks an identity. That it's more so than just more dominaria. It's something different. It allowed us to have different creature types and different just we can radically change things. It's a different world. We're not behold to the rules of the world before. We can do something new. Another big thing that Bill did during this time is early

Magic, most of the people who are working on Magic were just people that were fans of the game. And Urza's Saga kind of taught us that we needed, Urza's Saga kind of broke, that we needed, or the saga kind of broke, that we needed people that were a little better at gauging power level. And although we had hired one person off the Pro Tour, which was Henry Stern, or he was, he not really the Pro Tour as much as he went to the World Championships, but anyway I think he might have played in the first Pro Tour. But we started, starting with Randy Bueller, we started

hiring developers off the Pro Tour. And there was a whole string of people. We hired Randy Bueller and Mike Donay and Matt Place and Mike Turian and Brian Schneider, eventually Eric Lauer. We started hiring people who like had really experience showing that they understood how to find what was broken in a magic set and and take advantage of it and bringing those people in to really start to get sort of more actual developers more power balance stuff that was done during Bill's reign.

Another thing that Bill did was some Mercadion masks came out and one of the big negatives of Mercadion Mask was we didn't label the mechanics. Rebels and Mercenaries had a mechanic or had related mechanics. There were shapeshifters, not shapeshifters, spell shapers, but none of that was really labeled, per se. And so one of the big feedbacks we got from when the set got released was, why didn't you guys put new mechanics in the set? And so Bill became a much bigger fan of labeling, which that got more compounded over time. Like, hey, if we

have mechanics, let's put names on them. Ability words did exist before this time. But the idea of really understanding what ability words are, but anyway, labeling became much bigger. And then another thing that happened, it happened in Onslaught for the first time, but the idea of bringing back mechanics. Originally, the way mechanics worked was you would make a new mechanic, and then either

became evergreen or you threw it away. And it really was during this time period where like you know we made a lot of cool mechanics. Cycling was the one we brought back for onslaught. You know there's no reason we can't bring back mechanics. Maybe we can even tweak mechanics. Yeah cycling was always cycling for two but what if what about cycling for other numbers or other costs? And really the idea that the thinking of our old mechanics as tools that we could interact with and really started becoming, no, it's not a rule that every set has to use old mechanics, but most sets do. Most sets use mechanics that people know.

And it was just a shift in mindset, and that happened during stage three. OK, now we move on to stage four. This is when I become head designer. So this is back in 2003. Or, sorry. I became head designer in 2003. I think this is actually in 2005, because it takes two

years for things to come out. So anyway, stage four is Ravnica, original Ravnica, through Rise of the Eldrazi. So this period, my big thing was block planning, saying, OK, originally, like, Jill came up with the idea of having blocks. Bill came up with the idea of blocks having themes to them. I came up and said, look, we need

to be better in sort of figuring out. A lot of the problems early on was we would start with a large set and just let the small sets figure it out. But often they had trouble figuring out. Or like, Myrton had the problem of we kind of broke things. So the last set couldn't use our mechanics. So they had to shift.

The Saviors had to shift. Like a lot of the last sets,'t use our mechanics so they had a they had to shift the saviors had a shift but a lot of last sets scourge like just became about something different than black wasn't about and not in a way that felt organic or in a way that we had built up so that you could draft it like it just was causing problems so I said okay the goal of making blocks now is when we plan the first block of a set we're gonna plan all blocks of the first block site when we plan the first block of a set, we're going to plan all blocks, first block site. When we plan the first set of the block, we will plan all the sets in the block. Ravnik for example used a pie method where we had ten different

things and I chopped them up and the large set got four and each of the small sets got three so that we understood what the small sets were up to. That when you went to design the small set, you understood what you were doing, and there was something new you had to deliver that the audience expected and was excited for, and it wasn't just, what are we doing now? We're gonna have to completely have a curve ball and do something completely different.

That it felt organic to what was going on. That was followed by Time Spiral, where we had a time flavor, a past, present, and future. And then followed by Time Spiral where we had a time flavor of past, present, and future. And then followed by Lourwen which was our, not Lourwen, sorry, Time Spiral, yeah, it was followed by Lourwen which did our two mini blocks. So as we get into Lourwen, another big thing I did was not just block, block planning was not just figuring out what you were doing, but we also started experimenting with blocks. Lorwin and Shadamore were big small that then were sets that mirrored each other. That was the same world but shifted

indifferent. We tried doing large sets in which the third set was a large set. Maybe the third set was large set but that was drafted apart that had its own mechanics. Maybe we did large small large and the middle that was drafted apart that had its own mechanics. Maybe we did large, small, large, and the middle set was drafted with both sets. We started experimenting. A lot of Stage 4 was really trying to get as much experimentation with what we could do with blocks. And the idea, a lot of the idea when I became head designer, and this is just the trend you'll notice, is just thinking bigger picture right trying

to think about how um you know stage one was about the card stage two was about block stage three was about themes stage four was about just mechanical cohesion okay that gets us to stage five stage five was scars of mirdin through rivals of xxalan. So obviously for stage four through seven, I remained the head designer. So while the head designer changed for all the early stages, at some point I'm the head designer. So there are different sort of stages of meeting head designer. Okay, so Scars of Mirrodin was a really troubling set. We were bringing back the Phyrexians was the idea.

They were one of Magic's earliest villains. We were bringing back the Phyrexians was the idea. They were one of Magic's earliest villains. They were just a perfect villain. We wanted to bring them back and we were trying to figure out how to do it. We actually set the seeds for it in our original trip to Mirrodin and we knew when we go back we would realize that the Phyrexians had invaded Mirren. So one of the things that happened, so before I was a game designer, I like when I went to college I studied communications. I was planning to be a writer in Hollywood, which I did a little bit, but one of the things that going to school for communications is I took a lot of classes on communication, on writing.

So there is a concept that goes on in writing, what they call the emotional center. So the idea of emotional center is, let's say I have a scene where a man and a woman, a husband and a wife are having breakfast, okay, and they're arguing while having breakfast. The idea of the emotional center is what is the argument about? Probably it's not about the breakfast. The breakfast is the means by which they're having the argument, but the idea is probably argument is about something bigger. Is there something that one of them is mad about the other? Is there problems in their relationship? Like something is going on and we're going to see this larger problem through this smaller discussion. And the idea is in

real life, oftentimes when people are upset, they don't come right out and say what they're upset about. They argue through other things. That's sort of how people function. And so the idea of an emotional center is what is your scene actually about? Not what is it about on the page, but what is it? And the idea is when you talk about emotional center you're talking about sort of universal feelings, emotion. You know, maybe for example the wife feels abandoned by the husband or maybe you know one of them cheated on the other and so there is a sense of betrayal. The idea though is there's some theme, some emotional theme running through your scene.

And if, let's say for example it's betrayal. Let's say the wife feels betrayed by the husband. So the conversation they're having has to mirror that, right? Is there some mini sense of betrayal during breakfast? You know, maybe she made food and he ate food that she prepared and it's like that was for me. You did not ask, you just took it or whatever. There's a sense of betrayal and that mirrors what's going on. Anyway, in trying to understand the Phyrexians, I had a lot of problems. The way we had to structure the block,

I have a whole podcast on this, but originally New Phyrexia was the first set in the block and you didn't learn until the third set that it used to be Mirrodin. And that wasn't really working. I really wanted to show the fall of Mirrodin. I felt like that was the important story. And I was really trying to tap into the Phyrexians.

And so one of the ideas I had at the time was, what if we use the concept of the emotional center in the design of the set? That like, OK, I want to show you the Phyrexians, but what were the Phyrexians? I needed to have the Phyrexians be something you can connect to. And that's when we got the idea of the Phyrexians,

the motif of disease. that they're viral, they're relentless, they're adaptive, they're toxic, right? And a lot of mechanics and a lot of the identity of the set came out of creating that feel. That there's a sense that there's emotions that come up when you're fighting disease, that there's a hopelessness to fighting a disease. Like what do you do? You can't punch the disease, you know what I'm saying? And it makes people

around you sick and then people that I care about now are a danger to me because they're sick and I could get it from them, you know. There was a real ethos and emotional underpinning to how disease worked and that what we realized and this was the big idea of this of the stage is that it's not it's not just enough to say hey here's the theme but like what are we trying to make the opponent feel what are the things there's a big play up on resonance in this stage the idea that that let's tap into things that people already have emotional connections to. And another big shift in this period is trying to think of mechanics as paint, if you will. Like, it's not that the whole set's about the graveyard,

it's that a component element of the set could have graveyard. For example, when I did Innistrad, what I realized was I really was trying to work through the idea of fear, that it was gothic horror. Well, how do I make you afraid? And I used graveyard as a component of it. I used typo, monster typo as a component of it. I used like death matters. There are different things that were elements, but the idea was that we are trying to build sets in which the totality of the mechanical experience is itself part of the flavor.

That how you experience the play and what you feel when you're playing is as much of the creative as the art or the names or the flavor test. And this stage really started to hammer that home. That we are working in conjunction with the creative, that the mechanical is an element of the creative, and that what you experience and how you play and what you feel is part of building the world. Okay, which leads us to stage six, Dominaria through Innistrad. So if stage five was experimentation with blocks, of trying everything we can do with blocks, the lesson we learned from that was, you know, maybe blocks aren't what we should be doing. We had tried large, small, small.

We tried large, small, large. We tried large, small, large, small. We tried large, small. We tried everything. And no matter what we did, with very, very little exception, every set on the same world just sold worse than the set before it. And so stage six is really the beginning of Dominaria. It's like, OK, let's try something radically different.

Every set is on its own world. I mean, we can stay on a world for more than one if there's a reason to do so. We're going to go visit Ravnica. So OK, we want to stay to do the guilds. But then we're going to have a big finale. We want that on Ravnica. OK, we can stay on Ravnica.

Or we can have two sets back to back on Innist we can we can stay in places that we need to, but A, all the sets are drafted by themselves, we're trying to draft sets together, we realize that the sets are, it's easier for us to make really fun draft environments if we're not trying to have to mix and match different sets. That made it much, much harder. Another big thing, and this is pretty key, is we overhauled how we designed sets. Early Magic had two components. There was a design component going into a

development component. Then we switched to a three-tiered system. That first you do vision design, an exploratory sort of part of vision design. Then you do set design. Then you do vision design and exploratory sort of part of vision design then you do set design then you do play design and just having more breaking up into more pieces with more expertise in different areas really allowed us to shine and do stuff we hadn't done before. The other thing that was really big in this stage is commander started becoming the dominant force that it is. And the idea of

designing for eternal format, the idea of backward compatibility started becoming important. Dominaria for example introduced batching. There's a bunch, I mean a lot of backward compatibility is how do we find ways to make themes that are new themes but make use of old cards and that became something we spent a lot more time thinking about. So that was stage six, which brings us to stage seven. That is the stage we are currently in. So stage seven begins with Kamigawa and Nian Dynasty. And in a lot of ways it was a very eye opening set.

So what happened was for years, I have a blog I've been running for many years, people always said to me, hey we should go back to Kamagawa. And I would say to them, guys here's the problem, Kamagawa the set did very poorly sales-wise, financially, and from a market research standpoint, when we polled people they didn't like the world, it was the worst polled world that we had. And so I said look that's a hard sell. If I go to my bosses and say, let's go back to Kamigawa, they're like, didn't that do horribly? Aren't there worlds that did well that people would like to go back

to? But then what happened was, we got this idea to do a world based on Japanese pop culture. The original Kamigawa was more about mythology, but the problem with mythology is not enough people knew about mythology, but the problem with mythology is not enough people knew Japanese mythology. So it wasn't that resonant, or wasn't as resonant as it could have been. So anyway, the idea is we were going to do a new Japanese world.

Now I was well aware from my blog that there was this contingency that really wanted us back to Kamagawa. So what I said is, hey guys, how about this? Let's build the new world. Let's not say whether it is or is not Kamigawa. And then part way in, let's reevaluate like whether or not it could be Kamigawa. We won't let Kamigawa get in the way.

Let's make an awesome world. Now secretly, because I just was aware, like I said, I knew there was an audience that really wanted to return to Kamigawa. So in building the design, one of the things we looked for was, was there a way to make it a world where it kind of had to be Kamigawa? And that's when we came up with the modernity versus tradition theme, right? That half the set was brand new, that's the new thing we were building, but half the set was old. In order for that to work, we had to be able to tap into some actual thing. Well, if Kamigawa is the world, we had our tradition. That set existed both within the

world of Kamigawa, within world, and within the game of magic, because people played that, people remember that set, or that block. And so we did something we don't normally do. We did something I didn't really think we'd ever do, but we did it. And to giant success. And so I think what that really did is, it was really, stage seven is a period of us like rethinking things.

Of really saying, hey, there's a lot of stuff in Magic that we did and became kind of muscle memory and we just always do. And that as we're looking for new spaces, as the game gets 30 plus years old, you know, we have to question things that, and maybe when we made the decision, we were right to make the decision. Maybe earlier in Magic this was the right call, but we need to reevaluate. Another good example of this is we had dipped our toe into the ideas of doing real-world properties.

Obviously, Rabian Nights was based on an actual book. Portal 3 Kingdoms was based on an actual thing. And I think Aaron sort of brought back the idea of, you know, we had done, we had early on, it wasn't magic exactly, but it was like a, um, what was it called? Uh, we had a whole series where we had Xena and Hercules and, um, the Arc System. I had done a podcast on the Arc System if you want to hear more about it. Anyway, uh, um, Aaron came and pitched the idea of Universes Beyond. Let's do other properties. And it really came from, uh from a watching sort of people talk about

magic. And like I spent a lot of time on my blog, people would say, oh, what color would this character be in that color? You know, that there was a lot of desire for people to sort of mix magic with the IPs they love. And that was something we said we would never do, right? Like, but a lot of the stage is us looking at things and saying, hey, you know, we made a decision back then and maybe even the decision we made was right when we made it. But look, magic's magic's magic's matured. Let's reevaluate our decisions. And then a lot of this stage is us looking at things. We reevaluate a little bit about how we handle complexity. We reevaluate the idea of what we call call cameos, we started doing

things where commander depths would use one of old mechanics and that was really fun and we're like hey maybe familiar sets could do that if we do it at high rarities like low as fan so a lot of state 7 is us looking at things that we hadn't done and saying hey things have changed. Another big thing is we had been designing magic for standard, and we had shifted and designed magic for an eternal set. Just doing that really changed how magic functioned. And so a lot of what we said is, hey, what we're doing, magic itself has evolved.

If magic has evolved, we, the people making magic, should also evolve. And that as we were doing different things and the audience was expecting different things, we had to be more open. And a lot of what stage seven is, us really re-evaluating what we can and can't do, what we should and shouldn't do.

And there's things that we hadn't done in the past that we said, you know what, we're changing our mind. Or the environment is different, so it's okay for us to do something where before it might not have made sense. But anyway, that is stage seven. So quick overview, stage one, Alpha through alliances, focused on individual car design. Stage two, Mirage through prophecy, focused on larger systems, on blocks, unlimited.

Stage three, invasion through saviors of Kamigawa, about block themes, about expanding in the multiverse, getting more developers, starting labeling mechanics and bringing mechanics back. Stage 4, Ravnica through Risa Yaldrazi, about block planning, about block experimentation, really pushing the boundaries of what we can do with sets. Stage 5, Scars of Meriden through Rivals of Ixalan, playing around the idea of the emotional center, of resonance, of mechanics as paint, of really rethinking and reshaping how we make sets and how the audience will receive the set we make. Stage six is Dominaria through

Innistrad. It was the end of the blocks, the change to vision design, set design and play design, and a lot more of backwards compatibility and thinking in a more eternal way. And finally, stage seven, Kamigawa Nian Dynasty, till question mark, really a period of rethinking, of universes beyond, of cameos, and really sort of evaluating things in a way, of doing things that we might have decided not to do before,

but really opening up and questioning ourselves. Anyway guys that is the seven stages. I have a whole article you can go read if you want more detail although in some ways maybe my half hour podcast is more detail but if you want to read the article I have posted the article. Anyway guys I'm now at work so we all know that means instead of talking magic it's time for me to make it magic. I'll see you all next time bye bye