Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1192: Stickiness

Episode Date: November 22, 2024

In this podcast, I talk about an important quality of Magic mechanics: stickiness. What is it and how do we use it? This podcast dives into the topic.

I'm putting my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work. Okay, so today I'm going to talk about a concept in design. I've mentioned this before called stickiness. So I will talk about what stickiness is, how one gets stickiness, how things are unsticky, all the sticky things you need to know today. Okay, so the idea of stickiness is, it talks about how easy it is for someone to process and remember something, usually a mechanic. So one of the things to keep in mind is that, there's many, as the designers of the game,

there's many balls we're juggling. One of the things we want to make sure is that what we're doing makes sense to the player, that the player understands it. And stickiness is kind of a sign of how much we are doing things that make it easy for the player to understand stuff. Now, not everything is sticky necessarily, but as things get less sticky and at some point you get to things that are what I would call unsticky.

So let's walk through it. What what exactly makes something sticky? Okay, first and foremost, I think is an intuitive sense. foremost I think is an intuitive sense and what I mean by that is that if I tell you something I give you some flavor I'll give a good example a lot of times when I'm teaching flying what I say to someone is this creature flies what do you think that means and most of the time they get it right like Like, Oh, well, it's up in the air. Okay. Well, what does it mean that they're up in the air? Oh, well, things that aren't up in the air can't block them. Exactly. Right. And that the more intuitive something is,

the easier it is to process the more that something does what you think it will do. So there's a lot of work on our end of making sure that what we're doing is what players expect it to be. A classic example of this, a story I've told before, but when we were making suspend, so suspend was mechanic in time spiral block. And so when you play it, it gets exiled with some number of suspend counters or time counters on it. And then each turn you take off a time counter and eventually it gets cast. And what we found was when we put it on creatures, let's say it had suspend to four. One turn, two turn, three turn, four turn.

When they would play it, they would want to attack with it. And the idea was, I think mentally is like, I've had this for a while. Finally, I can use it. Why do I have to wait yet another turn to use it? Um, that it just felt like it felt like they should be able to attack with it. So eventually what we did is we just let them attack with it. We added haste. We're like, if you get suspended, you have haste just because it was what people anticipated happening. So part of being intuitive is working with players and understanding what they think

will happen, but also of, you know, mapping to expectation. That's important. Okay. That's the next thing. Things are more sticky. The simpler they are, right? You know, on some level the best mechanics are just clean and simple. They do the thing they do and they do it in a short, easy manner.

And that one of the things that we're always striving to do is try to find the simplest forms of things that for example there's a very common thing that goes on where i'm trying to capture the essence of something and so i try to capture all the essence of it it does this and this and this and this and the problem is the more different component pieces you have, the harder it is. Like you want your, ideally you want your mechanic to do one thing. That's not true for all mechanics. Some mechanics do more than one thing. But the more that you are simple, the more that you do one thing, the easier it is to

understand because like, okay, I just got to understand what I do. What does the scripture do? Oh, it does this thing. Some of our least sticky mechanics are things that don't work the same. So one of the classic examples, one of the most unsticky mechanics we've made is a mechanic called Haunt. Haunt was from Guild Pact, the first Ravnica block. It was in the second set. It was tied to Orzhov, white-black. And the way Haunt works is, it works in two different ways. That it does one thing if it's on a spell,

and it does a similar, but slightly different thing if it's on a creature. So, for example, the way it works is, if it's on a spell, I cast that spell, I exile the spell, I then connect that spell to a creature. When that creature dies, the spell happens again. That the spell turns into a death trigger on the creature. But if we put it on a creature, then it has an enter the battlefield effect.

And when the creature dies, then it gets exiled and the creature connected to it when that creature dies It has the enter the battlefield effect of the of the haunt creature and the reason I think I think Conceptually the idea of haunt is pretty flavorful. Well, we'll get to flavorful in a second, but I think the idea that another good example is banding. Banding worked one way on attack and a different way on blocking. So the way banding works is if I'm attacking and I have a bander, I can make a party. And as long as one member of the, I'm sorry, as long as all but one member of the attacking

party has banding, it's a band. So let's say I have two banding creatures and four non-banding creatures. I can attack with a band of three. But on blocking, I can make a band out of any number as long as one of the creatures has banding. So the idea is banding works similarly but different. That becomes very hard and very complicated. You want things that in general,

when it's like it works this way here and that way there, that just adds another layer of complexity. The simpler you are, and some of the best mechanics, like I just do one thing. Here's the thing I do Another example where I think there's confusion the mechanic protection and One of the reasons protection is confusing its protection does four different things That it keeps you from being targeted. It keeps you from being blocked It prevents all damage dealt from the thing

And it can't be enchanted equipped things can't attach to it and there's a there's an There's an acronym for I forget there's a mnemonic for that. But my point is Hey, it does a bunch of different things. Are those things related? Yeah. Eye protection from red, red things kinda can't hurt me. I can't be targeted by red things. I can't be blocked by red things. Damage from red things gets reduced to zero and I can't be enchanted or equipped by red things. But each of those is slightly different. And there are some things, for example, if example by protection from black you

can't kill me with a terror but damnation which doesn't target does kill me so like it it gets it gets can get a little confusing okay another thing that we look for in stickiness is is it flavorful? One of the reasons, for example, like flying is very helpful is, okay, flying, you're matching a flavor. One of the evergreen mechanics we had a little more trouble with for a while was vigilance. And the reason was, what does vigilance represent? Flying, okay, I'm literally in the air, I'm flying, I got it, that's a flavor. Vigilance is like, well, what am I am I?

Being more defensive am I being more alert? Am I being what exactly am I doing in the end? We're like, okay I'm more alert. I'm able to attack but I'm so alert. I can jump back and be defensive And it's an answer but it's like vigilance is the kind of thing that when I say here's vigilance The name does not do much to help you with what it is. You have to learn what it is. And that's another important thing to understand in this whole category is when I make a mechanic, I have several things that help me. I get to name the mechanic.

I have reminder text for the mechanic. There's a play pattern and all these things come together for like can someone get it? And the name meaning that when I talk about flavor, I mean a concept of combination of what is the name of the mechanic and what does it represent? And the more it represents the thing that the player knows already, the easier it is. Okay, I've seen a bird fly. I understand the idea of flying. You said this is flying. Oh, I got it. Or I've I've seen a bird fly. I understand the idea of flying. You say this is flying.

Oh, I got it. Or I've read comics and saw Superman fly. I mean, I get the concept of something flying. But when I say it as vigilance, I mean, you have to be like, okay, it's vigil. What does vigil mean? It means it's alert. So, okay, if a creature was alert, what would happen?

So, for those that might not have heard, I did a podcast a number of years ago, five, six years ago. It was my, I was driving my daughter to high school and she's graduated from college a while ago. Rachel, my oldest daughter. So I did a podcast where I gave Rachel the names of evergreen mechanics, maybe a few decisions mechanics and said to her, okay, what do you think this does? And some of the mechanics, like flying, she got.

She's like, oh, okay, this. And some mechanics, like no idea in the world. Vigilance is that idea. There's no way in the world I tell you vigilance, you go, oh, doesn't have to attack. It's just you're not getting there. And now it's not that, so, I've talked about this in names in general. There is layers of flavor. The best flavor is I know what it means, I already understand what it means, and

when you tell me I can figure out from the flavor what it does, that's the best. But the next, and Vigilance falls in this category, where we give it a name that means something, and once you learn what it does, the flavor has enough help that can help you remember it once you've learned it. It might not teach it without someone instructing you, meaning I don't think you're going to figure out what Vigilance does in a vacuum, but hopefully once we explain to you what Vigilance means, that the name helps give some mental guidance in your head to remember it. So there's different levels of flavor.

I mean the best flavor is the flavor is so loud and clear that it communicates what it does. But second best is something in which, well, it communicates some flavor and once you understand what it is, the flavor helps you remember what it is. It might not teach you, but it'll help you remember. Okay, the next sense about a mechanic is just, does it sort of naturally make sense? Some of this is intuition, but some of it more is just,

is it worded in such a way that you get it? Like one of the big challenges in general is what we call templating. We have to write down the mechanic in a way that you get it. Like one of the big challenges in general is what we call templating. We have to write down the mechanic in a way and explain what it does. Now note that there is normal templating, magic has a certain technical language to it. And so in order for the game to understand what's going on,

there's a certain clarity of how things have to work. That we want, if two cards work the same, we want the same template. And so there's a very intricate way of templating work. Now, some cards have what we call reminder texts, meaning they're a keyword, and we get to define the keyword. Reminder text does not have, does not have to be quite as technically exact, because the way reminder text does not have, does not have to be quite as technically exact

because the way reminder text works is that mechanic has an official wording in the rules, but we give you a more casual wording on the card. Usually because we don't need to tell you everything, we'll just tell you the basics, and I think you understand the gist of what you need to do. There might be some corner cases like every rule has to work completely within the rules, every mechanic. So sometimes in

the actual technical rules it's pretty long because we're figuring out all the component pieces how to make it work. But when we're explaining to you in reminder text it's just sort of giving you the gist. So it doesn't have to be quite so technical. So if we're using a keyword one of the advantages of keywords is we get a little bit more vernacular, if you will, in reminder text, a little less technical and that can help people understand things. But in general, one of the things that we test all the time is we have a mechanic, we'll make a template. We'll then show it to people and we say to them, what does this do? And see if can they understand from the template. The easier the template is to parse, the easier

it is for the player to understand what's going on. And so another big thing of stickiness is just how good is the template? And the classic example, just to show how things can get confusing. So there's a card called dead ringers, and this is not a mechanic. It's a singular card but the idea of dead ringers is I Wanted to make a card that said destroy two creatures that are the same color the same you know combination of colors Oh, I can kill two mono white cards, or I can kill two white green cards But the idea is I have to kill I have to kill two creatures. They're the exact same colors And and so like I think originally I wrote something like destroy two creatures that are the same color

But that's not technical enough because if one creature is white green and the other is white red They're both white. So they're both the same color But it's not quite with the card meant the card meant was the same combination of colors that white green and white red are different combinations, so We ended up having to write a template I don't have a top my head but it's like Destroy two creatures who don't not share a color. I forget how it was worded, but it was worded in such a way that very few people understood what the car did.

That it was trying to hit all the technical cases, but in trying to make sure it was technically correct, it became very hard to parse to the point of which people are like, I don't understand what's going on. Another good way to tell about your mechanic is, have someone read a mechanic and see how many times they have to read it. A good sign that you're on the right track is players read it once and they understand it.

Usually to me, if I have to read a mechanic a second time, I'm like, okay, this is more complicated than I like. Now sometimes we want to do things and the things we want to do are cool and fun, but there's some complexity to them. So a lot of what I'm explaining is how to make something sticky. We do have some things that aren't super sticky. It's not ideal, but I'll let me finish getting through these and then I'll talk about sticking this. Okay next, you want to be not wordy. One of the things that we've done, we've done a lot of testing, one of the most intimidating things to

players is volume of words. So if I have a brand new mechanic and it is three words or six words or nine words or twelve words or fifteen words or eighteen words or twenty one words, you know, the how short and snippy we can be has a lot to do with how easy it is to understand. And then once again, there's a lot of technical things. If we're not in reminder text, but actual text, we have to make sure we follow the technical guidance of what is happening. And a lot of times, things that seem like

they cover the bases don't. Like, oh, well, if we don't say this, then this corner case happens, and you have to understand the corner cases. So one of the things that happens early on is usually in vision design we will have the once we know we like a mechanic we'll have an editor do like a light path like give us a working a working thing that is in the ballpark it's not exact. Oh and the, by the way, is sometimes you make a new mechanic and the language needed to make it exists already. Oh yeah, we've done that before.

We've done something similar that there's language to be had. Other times you make something in which the language doesn't exist yet. You are doing something the game hasn't formally fit into the rules yet. So we have to rearrange the rules to make it fit. And when we do that, we're gonna try to make it intuitive as we can. We're gonna try to change the rules such that maybe if you aren't paying attention the rules, you know, a lot of times the change in the rules is not something that most players need to be aware of, but we need to change it so it does technically work. For example when we when we first made double strike so first strike is

when I attack somebody before normal damage is first strike damage. Double strike means I do both first strike damage and normal damage. That seems really easy. Well it turns out when we first made double strike, the rules were not completely set up for double strike. It wasn't that it wasn't intuitive. It wasn't that people didn't understand it. It was just the rules weren't written such that you could do damage multiple times. And so we just had to say to the rules, oh, you can do damage during the first strike phase or combat phase or both.

You can do both. It's kind of like for those that play Unsets, we have last strike in Unsets, a last strike and triple strike. It's not hard to understand. Well imagine, much like there's a first strike damage phase, there's a last strike damage phase that happens after the normal damage phase. And triple strike just means you have first strike and normal strike and last strike.

Those are very easy ideas. Changing the rules so that those ideas are embedded in the rules is complex. And so that's another big thing when you're making stuff, you need to cover your bases on what you're doing. And sometimes to do that, it adds work. So one of the things that's very common for us is we want to do something and we go, okay, what do we have to say to

do that? And some things to say just are wordy. For example, if I want to look at the top card of my library, pick one of those cards out and the rest of cards go to the bottom of my library in a random order Um, that's a lot of words that that what we call impulse Impulsing is not hard in concept. We do it all the time And we might keyword or one of these dates is because of this very reason But it has a lot just a lot of text there I have to tell me how many cards I look at. I have to tell me what I do with the cards I look at. What one of them goes where goes in my hand.

The others go where go to the bottom of the library. Okay, what order do I put them in? Oh, random order. Cause when it's even more words to say that you order them in the bottom of the library. And sometimes when we're making mechanics, you don't always control the wordiness. I mean, here's what I want to do. Here's the utility I need. Well, if you want to do this utility, here are the words. The less

wordy the better. The more wordy you are, the harder it is to parse. Another thing has to do with sort of memorization, slack logistics. Meaning, okay, if I want to do this, what does it entail for me to do? Do I get to just do it all at once or do I have to remember something? Memory is a huge issue. For example, the suspend mechanic. So, suspend mechanic is the one I talked about earlier. You take it, you put it away, you put so many time counters on, you count it down. It requires you every turn to remove a time counter. And it really is not optional. You have to do that.

So it's just now, hey, when I play a suspend four card, for four turns, I have to remember to do something. There's similar on vanishing slash fading, where a permanent comes with so many counters and you remove one each turn, and then it goes away when you remove the last one or vanishings last one, I guess fading when you can't remove one. So they're all, or sometimes there's just, there are play aid issues.

Like I made a card in a Unfinity, Jace, Space Jace, what's he called? What is Space Jace's actual name? Anyway, it's the Jace in Infinity. It's kind of divides up the board into three segments, three quadrants, alpha, beta, and gamma. And then different creatures are different ones, and when you attack, you're only blind like it there's a lot going on um and so it has a lot of logistical weight so a lot of times when you're doing something how much memory is it how much manipulation um usually if we give you a

play aid meaning hey um this is something complicated enough that we think would be advantageous for you to have a play aid. Maybe the mechanic requires you to get something. Energy as a counter, poison as a counter, roles makes, you know, little token things, token auras. So we will do things to help you, meaning we will do things to help you meaning we will make tools to help you when you make a token will give you a card that can represent that token but the reality is usually as a sign if i'm doing something where i'm like hey maybe i should give you something to help

you that means there's there's a bunch going on there and we have to be conscious and aware of logistics. Another big thing has to do with vocabulary. Like, am I, are all the words I'm telling you something that you know or are there words you don't know? One of the things about making a keyword is the keyword has a name and yes the name has some ability for flavor and maybe the flavor helps but it's also a new vacate now the other question is whether or not it's an existing word or not an existing word existing words are nice because they come with meaning that you already know meaning now once again in vocabulary a couple different types of vocabulary there's existing vocabulary

where I call something I call it flying and flying means something until you know what it is. There's mechanics, there's mechanics in which the name is a real word, but it's more metaphorical like flashback, like flashback is a thing. A flashback is me remembering a previous memory. So it is a real word. So flying, like, legitimately, that's what it is. It's flying.

You got the flavor of flying to help you. Flashbacks, not exactly that. It's in the ballpark and it's a real word that will help you as an aid to remember what's going on. But it's still, you still have the challenge of, it's not exactly what the mechanic is. You have to sort of piece together the mechanic. Next is something in which,

usually they're like compound words. A good example might be buyback. Or maybe buyback's a real word, I'm not sure. But the idea is we combine two words to make something that sort of communicates what something is. In other words, another good one is... I'll use bye-back for now. The idea is we're using real words.

Together, maybe it's a word, maybe it's not. Oh, like metal craft. That's a word maybe it's not oh like metal craft that's a good one metal craft metals a word craft is a word I don't know if metal craft necessarily the word maybe it is but but it's not a word most people use in regular-day basis but hey it says metal you know trying to connect metal to artifacts and I mean like it gives you some some to help you with. Then there is we made it up. This word doesn't exist. It's a sliver. What's a sliver? We made it up. Or actually, okay, people will point it sliver is a real word, but the context of what we meant, I guess sliver

might be an example of us taking a real vocabulary word, but giving a completely new definition. And then there's, I'm trying to think of what we're making then most of the time we try to use things that are somewhat real words. We do occasionally make up things. You know, we do occasionally make up things that are Eldrazi is okay, Phyrexian. Those are, we made them up. They don't, they're not existing words at all. But anyway, the vocabulary is very important, meaning if I read something and I don't know what something is, or I have to piece something together, like the more I have to parse it, the more I have to go, what does that mean? Once again, I have to read it a second time, the harder. So all these things come together to make sort of a quality and the reason it's important

the idea of stickiness the reason I'm doing a podcast today on it is it is a little higher concept right it has to do with how easy is something for somebody to sort of mentally grasp and usually the way we talk about it is there are three states essentially. There is sticky. What sticky means is you read it once, man, it stays with you. Oh, flying is this, got it. First strike is this, got it. That you read it, you understand what's going on, and a good sticky mechanic will kind of

cement in your brain. Meaning once you sort of got out of the hoop of understanding it man locked in I got it I know I know what it is. I don't got to read it again I know what it is. Then there is what I'll call neutral. What neutral means is it's not like it's locked in but there's something about it next time I approach I have some working knowledge you know probably maybe I need a prompt or something but I have a general sense I'm going to it's not like it's so good that I just automatically go oh I know what that is neutral is more like okay I have something helping me you know if I I got to see it a bunch of times eventually eventually I'll learn it, but it, it, it takes a little bit of repetition.

Unsticky means, holy moly. I can't remember this. Uh, ha ha. It's a good example of just an unsticky mechanic where, um, I know people who have played with haunt many, many times who played in guilt back who like lived with a mechanic existing and you say to them, what did, they're like, okay, and even me, I'm the fricking head designer of magic. It is my job to understand mechanics. I have to have a comprehension mechanics

way beyond the average magic player. And even I have to go, okay, how does it work? Like I have to mentally run with every once in a while. I have to like remind myself how it works. And I, in my core, I do know how it works. That's unsticky. Unsticky is just like, there's something about it that works against remembering it.

And like I said, the reason I gave you all these component pieces, it's not as if it's one thing, whether sticky or not. And some things can not have all these things but be sticky some can have a lot of them and be unsticky It's not it's more art than science. It is not like if you do a B and C then for sure It's sticky it just it's just a confluence of different elements and like I said, there's layers of things There's how good is the template how good is the flavor you know there's a there's a marriage of things that makes it there but the thing that's important and the reason it's a whole

topic today is one of the things that's really important when you make a new mechanic yes does it play well super important does it blend into the set does it have the right synergies? There's a lot of things you have to care about. But one of the things that we have to never forget is, and this just comes back from my communication roots, I need people to understand what I'm doing. I need them to get it. And that means there's a lot of things we do when making something that we keep in mind. And that is not that we never make things that are, I mean, I would love for every mechanic to be sticky, they can't. We do cool things that are a little complex and you know, I don't think we should never make mutate. Mutate is a good

example of a very complex mechanic. And the reason mutate just isn't sticky is there's just so much going on and there's so many corner cases and it's just a hard mechanic. I do think Magic, like I don't think, I think complexity is one of Magic's competitive strengths. Like there are a lot of things, if you wanna go play tic-tac-toe,

you can learn it quickly and you can keep it all in your head. Magic is not a game you can keep in your head. Magic is not a game you can keep on your head. Magic is a game where you have to reference things and ask things and work things out. But that's one of the strengths of the game. Like the reason we can have thousands and thousands and thousands of cards is because the game can handle the kind of complexity. And the reason we can keep making new mechanics and new sets is the game can handle that. But as one of the designers, something I have to always keep in mind is the ease of which the player can handle it.

That one of the things, the more and more I do design, like I said, next year's my 30th year doing this, one of the things that I really realize is you, the designer, work in service of the things that I really realized is you the designer work in service of the player. You are trying to make the players experience the best it can be. One of the ways you do that, and one of the ways is making a fun game experience, but the other one is thinking about how they interact with what you're making and ease that interaction as much as you can. Sometimes, you know, you can, I mean,

you can do it sometimes better than others, but you really need to always consciously think about that because that is important part of your job. Making playing the game as easy as you can. Not always easy, easy as you can. But anyway guys, that is stickiness. It's an important concept. And that's how complex magic is. I haven't got, I mean, I've that is stickiness. It's an important concept and that's how complex magic is.

I haven't got, I mean, I've talked about stickiness in previous podcasts, but I could be a thousand podcasts in and not talk about a very important thing for a whole episode. So anyway, I hope you enjoyed today's episode, but I am at work. 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. See you guys next time. Bye bye.