Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1233: Arc Planning

Episode Date: April 18, 2025

In this podcast, I talk about the team that figures out what in-Multiverse Magic sets we'll be doing in the future.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work Okay, so today I want to talk about a weekly meeting I have called arc planning What is our planning? What do we do? Who's in it? All that and more will be explained today Okay, so if you've listened to me tell stories, which as regular listeners I assume you have, I used to talk about back in the day, like back when like Randy Bueller was my boss, that I would put together a five-year plan that sometimes would be a six-year plan or

a seven-year plan, but I would sort of map out where I thought we were going. So back in the days, it was mostly like me pitching it and then a few other people would sort of sign off on it. But that was the process back in the day. It's gotten a lot more evolved. There's a lot more pieces to it. There's a lot more people involved in it. So we meet once a week. So the arc planning team, the idea of this team is

we sort of decide what the upcoming sets are. And there's a lot, a lot that goes into that. So today is going to be me explaining sort of what the arc planning team does, things we think about and just walk through the arc planning process. Okay. So let me start by talking about the people on arc planning. Now this team has changed over time. I'm just gonna run through the people

that are currently on the team, but it is an ever-changing thing. So definitely people have been added and laughed and stuff over time. Okay, first and foremost is Aaron Forsythe, who is the Vice President of Design. Aaron is my boss. Aaron is in charge of both the design teams

and the creative teams, which are the brunt of what makes up this team. But anyway, so Aaron is there. Jackie Jones is the vice president of creative. She oversees the creative team. And there's a lot of creative elements that go into arc planning. Doug Beier is the creative team. And there's a lot of creative elements that go into arc planning. Doug Beier is the creative director

who is in charge of narrative and does a lot of the world building and overseeing of world building. Frida Cutler is the director of world building. Frida also is kind of the manager of the schedule for this team. A lot of what we do, and I'll walk into it is we have to figure out what's coming and then we have to present it to the right people and there's testing. There's a lot of moving pieces and Frida is a person that manages

all those moving pieces. Roy Graham is the senior story lead. He's the person in charge of story. Matt Danner is a senior creative lead who oversees the franchise team. Basically, the idea is Magic is more than just the game. There's lots of other expressions. Obviously, we're doing a Netflix show. There's comics. There's lots of different things that we do. We just announced an upcoming legendary pictures.

It said they were going to work with us to do movies and television. So anyway, there's lots of franchises, magics used everywhere, not just in the card game, but obviously they care about the card game. Andrew Brown is a game design architect. He's in charge of the play design team. And so a lot of planning of the future is making sure that sets work together organically and in a way that will lead to good environments.

And Andrew is in charge of making sure the environments are the best they can be. And then Mike Turian is an architect, an executive producer. The architects are the ones that each product from the very beginning to the very end has an architect, an executive producer. The architects are the ones that each product from the very beginning to the very end has an architect associated. It's the one person that sort of runs through the entire project.

They're in charge of all the business end of things. And they figure out lots and lots of different stuff, including printing and coordination between teams and working with marketing and lots of different factors. And then finally, I guess maybe this wasn't implied already, but I am on the team as the head designer. Okay, so we meet once a week for an hour a week. And the goal is, so Magic works roughly three years ahead.

Right now it is 2025 as I recorded this. The goal is, so Magic works roughly three years ahead. Right now it is 2025 as I recorded this and I am working on sets that come out in 2028. So I, and because I do exploratory design and vision design, we're at the very, very front of the process. So I work the farthest out of anybody other than our planning. So we are, I'm talking about, we're actually designing things in 2028, but our planning is talking about 2029, 2030, 2031,

2032. We've actually had conversations about 2033 in it. The other thing to explain here is we have a business team that does a lot of the work for Universes Beyond. So the art planning team is more about planning out the, you know, in multiverse magic sets. We obviously work with the brand team and understand what sets are, you know, what properties we're doing when. And there's a lot of, like, it matters what's when. And part of doing the schedule is looking at what Universes Beyond sets are where. Universes Beyond gets, it's even further planned out than the In Multiverse set.

So we have a good sense of things that are coming up for many, many years. So once again, this team is more about planning the In Multiverse magic stuff, but we are aware of the Universes Beyond and part of our job is interacting with Universes Beyond. And I'll get into that as we move along. Okay, so essentially our job is, so just a reminder, the In Multiverse Magic sets have an alphabet code name structure. The previous one was Sports, started with archery, ended with ziplining. The current one is cities around the world. And so we, in fact, today, today,

I'm starting exploratory design on Edmonton. So I could say the E is Edmonton. But so it's, So I could say the E is Edmonton. But so it's it's Amsterdam, Berlin, Cairo, Dublin, now Edmonton. And the idea is we sort of plan out roughly, this is I wouldn't say a hundred percent true, but roughly,

most of the time we alternate between universe is beyond and the in-multi-per-stuff. So we go back and forth. Sometimes universe is beyond and the in-multiple stuff so we go back and forth. Sometimes the properties get a little more locked in due to working with partners and stuff so we like to rotate between them most of the time we will rotate between them. We like going back and forth between doing sort of our worlds and other people's worlds and one of the things as we're making this is we do want to think about what worlds are

where. There's a concept that I use all the time that I call swinging the pendulum. And what that means is that one of the things that we like to do with magic is that magic keeps sort of changing up what we're doing. For many years, obviously, we had a block system where we would go to a world and then for the whole year for three full sets we would stay on that world. We took a lot of experimentation but we learned that what players are happiest is if we sort of bounce around and go to lots of different worlds so that in the context of a single year

there's lots of options of what, you know, the idea essentially is every year we want to find a world you adore, hey, every world might not be that world, but we want to have a lot of variety and change. So that's one of the big things is we're trying to make sure that we're doing different things. We are allowed to stay on the same world if there is a reason to do so.

We stayed on, we were at two sets in a row on Innistrad, we had two sets in a row on Dominaria, in fact at the very very beginning of this of this new process we were on Ravnica actually for a whole year even though we had gotten rid of the block system. And that was that we had two back-to guild sets and then War of the Spark, which was like the big finale set. But I will say the data is pretty clear. Players enjoy a lot more when we move around. So it's not that we can't stay in the same world, but I will say the bar keeps getting higher for staying on the same world because moving around seems to Seems to make more players more happy

and part of that I think is that different players really enjoy different things and so if in the course of a Year's worth of sex we get something that you really adore Versus something that some players really adore but other players aren't that fond of and it's the same thing the whole time. So anyway, okay, so there's a lot of things we have to think about. So first up, one of the big things is new versus return, meaning some of the stats and roughly half we like to be new worlds, worlds we've never been to before. Roughly half we like to be returns, going back to a world. Returns have the advantage that we've done work

on them already, and we have some confidence that players like them, meaning we're more likely to return to worlds that people liked the first time around than worlds that sort of fell flat. Now that doesn't say we can't return to worlds that obviously might not have been super successful. Kamagawa and Nihai dynasty is kind of a classic example where we went back to a world that actually did poorly on the first visit, but did very well on the second visit.

So a lot of it has to do with execution. So there's really nothing off the table, although the other big thing about going back to an existing world is if the world predates kind of what I'll call modern world building there's a lot of work to do because if we if we built the world through modern means hey a lot of the work is done if we haven't in a lot of ways it's like going back to, or is it going to a new world if it's old enough and we really haven't established

all the things we need for it. The other thing that was nice about Kamagawa was it was based on a real world source. So we had the opportunity to do some new influences that weren't there the first time, but were organic to what the world was. So some worlds are easier to do that for than others. But we do like to do returns.

Returns are a little bit easier on the system just because there's work. That doesn't mean there's not lots of work to do. It doesn't mean the creative team doesn't have to sort of, even when we go back to worlds we've been to before, even back to worlds that have sort of a modern style guide, we still need to flesh out and do new things.

And part of doing a return is we want something about the return to have a little, a little fresh feel to it. Most of the time these days, I think our lesson is we should spend a little bit more time before returning to something. So when we return to it, there's a lot of built up desire to return. That we wanna sort of go back to places when the audience is excited to go back to places.

And not when like, oh, haven't we just been there? So we're starting to delay when we go back a little bit more. There are some worlds that are very, very popular that we're willing to go back to a little bit sooner. But a lot of the deciding when to go back to things has to do with A, like how excited were the players the first time we went? So that is a gauge of how long it takes before we go back. And is there a new take on the world? Or is there a new element we can add? Or like, what are we doing that, you know, in any set we do even on return we want something about it that has some freshness to it so what

is that freshness booster fun did not exist on you only started at throne of Eldraine so things pre-throne Eldraine who haven't had a booster fun treatment there's a lot of new things new tools stuff, new toys that we get you with worlds that we have to incorporate. Okay, so we talked about whether it's new or return. If it's a return, we talked about what about the world like is that, you know, what's the core of what we want to return to it. Returns are a little easier.

We fleshed out what they are. Returns tend to have a core, you know, both a mechanical core and a little easier, we fleshed out what they are, returns tend to have a core, you know, both a mechanical core and a flavor core, but what they are and what they're about. We do do these things that I refer to as backdrops, a Lost Caverns Ixalan and Merge the Coral of Manor are recent examples, War of the Spark also, where the set's not about the mechanical identity of the world, it where the sets not about the mechanical identity of the world. It's more about something else. Although what we've learned about backdrop sets is there is some expectation that some

amount of the world peaks through mechanically. We thought Lost Caverns did enough and Murderous Crows did not do enough. So War of the Spark was a little bit different because we were just there, the two sets before. So, there's a lot of lessons about how to do what we need to do. But anyway, we are constantly trying to figure out what, when we go back to a world, how much we can do that's new.

Backdrop sets do have a higher percentage of new things. Lost Canvas Ixalan was as much underground world as it was returned to Ixalan. But anyway, we're trying to strike that balance. And one of the things we've realized is it's possible we have a new concept that a new concept could be incorporated into an old world, something we're very conscious of.

A new world has a lot of the worry of is there something cohesive and compelling to the new world? One of the things about a new world we have to look at is a few things. One, do we think there's enough world building there? Are we, is there some cool element to the world, some inspiration that's a real source of inspiration, or is it playing in some genre space?

Like, what is it doing that we can build a brand? Now maybe, and the world team, the world building team will do what we call hackathons, where they come up with lots of cool visuals and try to figure out like what, try to pitch the idea for new worlds. The other thing that's a lot different from my days of like, here's the five-year plan, is we do a lot of testing now.

So if we have cool ideas for worlds, we will test them. And we really take the testing very seriously. For example, there was a world that we were pretty excited by that we did some external testing and the response we got for players was like, eh, let me realize we don't have enough to it yet. That the world, the concept we were playing with by itself wasn't exciting enough.

We think there's something there. It's not that we're necessarily throwing it away, but we pushed it back on the schedule or took it off the schedule for now. And like, okay, we got to read, like there's an element we like about it, but we have to, there's probably more that needs to be there.

Sometimes what we learn is there's not enough to a world and it needs a little bit more. Sometimes it's mixing and matching multiple ideas. Sometimes we have a real world influence that we like that's a real good visual, but we don't have the straight through line. Another thing that's important is we want to understand the mechanical ramifications of world. It's not that we have to solve it necessarily, but it's important. This is why I'm here, why Andrew's here, and Aaron, you know, is are we making a set that will make a good magic set?

Are we picking worlds, you know, it's a brand new world, but what's the magic set that comes out of it? What, you know, and we want to make sure that there's something there that we can build around. It's not by the way that we, the exploratory doesn't happen until after we lock in the set. Although we have, by the way, I have started to do what I'll call advanced exploratory, where is there's an aspect of the world that we're unsure of, and so I'll make a mini team so we can explore that.

And I've had a couple of mini teams this year, just looking at different facets. One time there's a facet of a world we were unsure of, another time there was sort of a story component we wanted to test out. So what we'll do is, I will just have some designers and I will just do some testing to get myself confident that we have what we need to do it. So there is a little bit of testing

that can go on with mechanics. Mostly what we wanna make sure is, if, is this new world is it something that we can make up for magic so like more important than anything else on making a magic set is are we making a magic that people want to buy. Part of that is theme and environment for example I think a lot of success of Bloomberg not that we did didn't execute well in mechanics, we did. But what excited players, like players got very excited before they even saw the mechanics,

that the concept of the world was exciting for them. We want world building to do that. There's something inherent about it. And then when we start doing previews and stuff, we want the mechanics of the world to really connect. And so we want to make sure those two things are together. There also are some larger sort of scheduling things. This is why Andrew's on the team.

Like, for example, if we're going to do a multicolor set or a faction set, there's the certain sets that have mechanical execution to them. And for example, we like to put certain themes like multicolor work better. Like some things work better near rotation. Some things work better right before rotation. And you want to sort of figure out where those things are. And that part of placing things is understanding

the context of how they relate to each other to make sure that we're maximizing what we need to do another thing that I'm that I think a lot about is we want a little bit of Continuation of theme mechanically we want We want to make sure that the sets that come out near each other play well together and are building on each other. We try very hard to not be, we don't do a lot of exact, like we've shied away a little bit from mechanic A is in both sets back to back.

But we do like mechanic A and mechanic B which are in sets next to each other, speak to each other and think about each other. And we also think a little bit what we call seeding, which is are we to each other, speak to each other and think about each other. And we also think a little bit of what we call seeding, which is, are we doing things here? Typal sets are a good example of this. I like Bloomberg. Well, if you're going to care about animals, we have to be very conscious to make sure that the animals are showing up ahead of time

so that we have some things that will blend in with what's going on. Some themes are easier than others. Like when we do typo that are more class based, like if I care about warriors or wizards, most magic sets have warriors and wizards. That's not that hard to set up. But if I want to care about rabbits, okay, that's a little more planning that goes into there. So a lot of what we're thinking about is we're trying to think like we want to have a mix of worlds.

We want new, we want old, we want to have exciting themes. Oh, another thing that I pay close attention to is making sure the worlds don't sort of go aren't too similar. For example, there's two sets that were coming up that were originally back to back. And I said, can we space these apart a bit? On the surface they are very similar. And yes, I can work to make sure that the teams keep off each other. But you kind of want to make sure the sets that have a similar core, like how you would

intuitively build them isn't too similar to each other, just so we're not making extra work for ourselves. And so there's a lot of mix and match you know I mean part of what we're trying to do is make a suite of worlds that are exciting and like I said some of it is oh we're going back to this world people love and if we have a cool element that's new we're doing brand new things and when I say brand new by the way there's actually a couple different levels of brand new one brand new is it's new you've never heard of it another thing is it's brand new themes and when I say brand new by the way there's actually a couple different levels of brand new. One brand new is it's new you've never heard of it. Another thing is it's brand new but we've hinted at it. Maybe another set is

make reference to it. Maybe there was a battle to it in March of the Machine. Maybe it's one of the worlds that we visited. You know we've done a bunch of sets now with the Omen Pass where we're seeing visitors from other worlds in different places. And so maybe it's an old throwback, you know? Like when we first did Zendikar, the Kor were one of the races that were pulled into wrath way back in Tempest.

And we paid that off saying, oh, well, it turns out the Kor are from Zendikar. So there's a lot of stuff like that you know we have a lot of irons. The other big thing going on here is story. This is why Roy's on the team. We like to have smaller like each set has its own individual story. Usually a year has a small arc to it and then usually three or four arcs make up sort of a larger arc story. Bolas, you know, War of the Spark, that whole storyline was a three year story.

The Eldrazi, the Phyrexians, the Phyrexian War, that was a larger story. We're in the middle of a larger story right now. I can't get too many details because part of the fun of this story is it's, you know, people are slowly piecing together what's happening. But anyway, we want to think about those larger structures. Now, usually what happens is we tend to build the schedule before the story is completely ironed out that the story somewhat reflective of the worlds we choose. But usually there's some larger stuff going on and we're making sure we think about sort of the larger story beat arcs as we make things.

There are some other factors that is not the only factors. Another thing that we have to worry about for example is marketing. We have to make a set that somebody, our marketing team, has to sell. So a lot of what we do when we make worlds is we wanna make sure that there is sort of what we'll call a hook to it. What's the, what we call it, the elevator pitch. What's the elevator pitch? We're going to this new world, okay,

in one sentence, sell me on that world. You know, can you combine, you know, oh, it's this meets that, or you know, something about it that really sort of speaks. this meets that or, you know, something about it that really sort of speaks. Um, and a big part of this team is there is like, what we've learned over time is a lot of the success of the set has to do is do people like the core concept? Um, and the other thing that happens is things change over time. Like a lot of the challenge of doing our planning is we will make things and choose things and

then over time the center will change. As a good example, when we made Kamigawa Nyan Dynasty, that was a big hit, very successful. And one of the things that it did was it started really pushing in some new directions. It was a much more futuristic set. It really was playing into some pop culture meme or not just meme, genres and memes and stuff. And it was very popular. So there was a push there to say, okay, we really wanna expand the boundaries of what magic can be. That's why we're going to space.

It's why we had a death race. It's like, we really were starting what, how can we expand the nature of what a magic set is? But since that time, Universes Beyond has become a really big force. And Universes Beyond very much sort of fills the void of magic pushing in spaces you haven't seen before. So the response to Universes Beyond is kind of pushing us back in the other direction,

which is, hey, let's make sure our magic sets feel more magic-y, and that we have this whole series that's really pushing the boundaries of what a magic set can be. So in multiverse magic sets have less of that role now because the universe is beyond. So that's one interesting thing about sort of doing this advanced planning is as the nature of magic changes, the nature of what we need to plan changes. And you know, one of the things about this team is there is flux. We will decide on something.

We will pick something. Oh, but the idea is once we think we know what, okay, we plan ahead, we will user define one year at a time. Normally when we, we figured out, we'll figure out one year or more in cement is it right but a more concrete plan for one year and then a rough idea for the following year. The rough idea being a little more have some flux in it and then what we do is we talk to all a lot of different people. What we call the stakeholders which are people high up on magic that have to sort of green light it. We talk to the people right below,

sort of the leads of the teams, the people that are gonna have to make the products and get their feedback on it. So we're just talking to some sort of people that are at different levels, but people either who have to sign off on it or are responsible for making it and get a lot of feedback. And based on feedback they give us, we will change things.

For example, recently we pitched the sort of next year and then pitched the year after that, sort of ideas for the year after it. And one of the ideas for the year after was so popular, we ended up moving it up. Because everyone was so excited about it, we're like, okay, let's just get this, let's get to this quicker. Sometimes, and like I said, we get feedback. We also get feedback from the market research we do. There's a recent set that was on the upcoming year plan that we said, oh, wow, the feedback we're getting

from both internally and from the outside research both internally and from the outside research, is saying, oh, this isn't ready yet. There's something missing here. So we moved one set up and moved another set back. So the idea is that there's a lot of flux to what's going on and that the core idea of the team is not just we have to figure out what's coming up, but we wanna then get a lot of data

and get a lot of input, and that affects what we're doing because we want to make something that everybody at Wizards is excited by. And so there's a lot of fine tuning. Then, once we sort of get the stakeholder buy-in, we get all the people working, the leads on all the teams buy-in, we get all the people working, you know, the leads on all the teams buy-in. We then have a meeting where we announce what we're doing so that everybody in, at Wizards,

we do this in a magic, we have a Monday magic meeting. Well, at the Monday magic meeting, we'll do an official announcement and talk about the next year worth of Sats. So everybody's on board in what we're doing. So another thing to realize is the vast majority of people in R&D do not touch every set. In fact, most people touch a couple sets and they're what we call blind spots, meaning it's set that, wow, now did I not work on it?

Maybe I did a play test or two, but I don't know a lot about that. It's not something I had any involvement with. And so one of the reasons to have these meetings is just get everybody sort of up to speed. We also do meetings individually as we get closer as we move through the set so people have a better idea what an individual set is doing. We'll have presentations usually after a vision design handoff while it's in set design. And that's when we walk people through sort of individual choices about a set. But anyway, the idea of the advanced planning team is there are a lot of moving pieces that go into figuring out what our sets are. There are a lot of teams downstream of us and sometimes we'll bring like we'll have

individual people we bring in. We regularly have meetings with the business team. They're the people that sort of put together the universes beyond planning. And we talk to them with them about because one of the things we need to do there is we want to have what we call soft landings, which for example, we did Lord of the Rings and then after Lord of the Rings, we did a wild wild of estrange wilds of wilds of Eldraine. And it's not that Lord of the Rings and fairy tales are exactly, different. I mean, Lord of the Rings. But what we discovered was if you got in during Lord of the Rings and the next set was sort of this Camelot fairy tale feel, it was close enough that was what we call soft landing. That odds are if you like one you have an inclination to like the other.

And it is tricky even though we have a schedule of universes beyond they can shift and change. There's a lot going on there. We're working with partners and so there's a lot of moving pieces. One of the big things about arc planning is when you are planning things out three, four, five, at plus years in the future, there is flux. Another thing that can happen is sometimes we plan on something and we get feedback in the real world. The classic example of this would be, we were planning to do a bunch of mini sets.

So March of the Sheep Aftermath was our first one of these. And the idea of it was, oh, imagine a set that has less cards in it, that's not about playing limited with it, doesn't have commons. Like it was a new idea for a booster and we made one in Aftermath and it was part of our schedule. We were planning to do a bunch more of them and then all of a sudden the audience is like man We hate this with a with a passion We do this thing where people are right then it's like the top two boxes and normally in top two boxes when you do badly Like you know, it's 50 45 if you really badly it's like I know 25

This got a five. It's the lowest we've ever seen So we quickly said okay players do not want to do this. We were going to do it for all of the Thunder Junction. We sort of incorporated, made a big score out of it. And there were a lot of things down the road that we had to adapt and change because we decided that wasn't a shape the players wanted. And so there's a lot of, we do plan, but when the rubber hits the road, hey, we got to get the feedback from the players

and we will adapt. So the advanced planning team does a lot of work. And like I said, it's, there's a lot of like doing things in pencil and walking through them and then testing things and planning things and making sure that the story and all the different elements work, working through mechanics.

And anyway, there's a lot that goes in to try to make things work. And there's a lot that goes in to try to make things work. And there's a lot of work that each of us do for it. But it is a fun team. I really enjoyed doing our planning. It's neat to sort of see where we're going and what we're doing. There's a lot of cool ideas.

And so anyway, that my friends is arc planning. So I hope this was informative to you, but I'm now at work. so we all know what that means. It means the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. Hope you guys had a good time today, and I'll see you next time. Bye-bye.