Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1263: Flux

Episode Date: August 1, 2025

The very nature of a trading card game is that it's always evolving. In today's podcast, I talk about what that means for Magic design.

I'm pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time to their drive to work. Okay. So today, I'm going to talk all about flux. What is flux? I will explain. So one of the things about magic that is, it's not unique to magic, but something that magic does that's unlike a lot of games, is that it is constantly changing. It is a game that evolves. And so, for example, I have a thing I call the crispy hash brown theory, which is one of the reasons I think magic is successful. For those who have never heard it, I've told it a few times, but I haven't told it in a while.

So when you eat hash browns, the most awesome part of the hash brown is the crispy outside. And at some point, once you eat the crispy outside, we'll eat the inside. And the inside is okay, it's good, but it's not as good as the crispy outside. And in this metaphor, in games, I believe there's a period early in the game of discovery where you're trying to like learn and understand the game that to me is the most exciting part of a game. But eventually what happens is you get past that discovery portion and you start getting into more memorization. If you play Scrabble, for example, you get to a point where you start memorizing two and three letter words. If you play chess, you have to get to the part where you start memorizing chess opening.

that it's less about sort of discovery and more about learning kind of the people that have mastered it, what have they done and what are the things you have to learn and that it leaves its discovery phase. And it's not that the mastery phase can't be fun. A lot of people enjoy it. But it's more of like just learning what others

before you have learned and just sort of ingraining that. But one of the things that magic does which is really interesting is because magic keeps putting out new cards, it keeps evolving. It keeps changing. That a strategy that might have been dominant one month

might not be the next month because new cards come out that undermine that strategy. And so the idea is, in this metaphor of hash browns, magic grows back. It's crispy shell. And that you, that magic,

and one of the reasons we do a lot of data on magic and that the average magic players plays magic a pretty long time, especially compared to most games. Now, part of it is magic has existed a long time. That helps. But in general, because magic keeps reinventing itself, because it keeps changing, that it's not like it gets boring

because, you know, you learn something and you figure out of some strategy, then all of a sudden it gets upended. And that this constant flow, this flux of change, really is a dynamic part of the game. And in fact, I think it's a big part of the game of why people will stick with the game for so long is it is this kind of living, breathing thing. And that's what I want to talk about today,

that what exactly is the flux in magic? How does the flux happen? You know, how does, how is it an ever-changing game? And the other thing that my big sort of lesson of today is, I think there's a popular belief that sort of R&D was the one that chooses what the game is and I will say today that it's not true

so I'm going to walk through sort of what we do on the R&D end of things and then what actually makes the change what actually how does the game evolve that is today's topic of flux okay so first and foremost let me just sort of explain

the importance of flux to the game of magic. When you sit down to play another game, you're playing monopoly. Let's say I play Monopoly, and I pull the pieces out of my Monopoly board. Well, guess what? They're all the same pieces. The properties are the same. The values are the same. The railroads are the same.

I mean, and even the stuff that's random, like the chase and the community chess cards, they're the same cards. And so the idea is that it's not that games can't play out different. because every game has built in it some amount of randomness, some about, you know, like, I'm going to roll dice monopoly. Well, that determines what I land on.

And then as the game progresses, different people are going to buy different properties. And so if I own park place or a boardwalk, hey, it's not a big deal to land on them. But if my opponent owns them, oh no, that could be super dramatic. And so, you know, games are set up such that from game to game, there is, you know, different things can happen.

And that's exciting, and that is cool, and that any game has some amount of variance to it. That is fine. Any game, you know, I should take that back. There are some games that have less variance to them, chess being a good example. Now, there is variance to chess. It's a little harder to understand the variance to chess just because chess doesn't have a random element. Like, magic, you shuffle the deck. Monopoly, you roll dice.

Scrabble, you pull letters out of a bag. Like, those have built into them a sort of a random element, meaning that from game to game, you'll have different decisions to make because you have different choices presented to you. We're in a game like chess, the games will be different, but it has to do with choices made by your opponent. And there is some variance in that.

For example, if I play chess and I'm good at a particular move, there are things that are good and bad against that move, and if my opponent is proficient in one way to play versus another, that is adding a random element not quite in the same way of rolling a die, but it is one of the things that can make chess games very different from game to game, both in who you're playing or just what strategy someone's employing. So games do, built into them, have some amount of variance built into them, that every time I play a game, you want the experience to be somewhat different.

And it varies. There's some games like chess, where in some level, it's the same pieces every time, and it's just the choice you make with those pieces that make the variance. Or other times, there's actual elements. You have a deck of cards you shuffle. You roll die.

You do something in which it gives you some input that varies from game to game. Okay, but flux goes a little beyond that. That's not really what flux is. I mean, there is variance in magic, and, like, you know, even if you take your deck and play against your friend's deck

and let's even say we're talking like standard 60 card four of deck if you and your friend play with the exact same deck there still is variance in play just because of the randomization of the cards and you know deck a versus deck B you could play that same match many times and it's not always identical

now there are things that will come out there are definitely things that will be similar between games probably you have a strategy, your opponent is a strategy, and your strategy against the specific other deck you're playing. It's not that there isn't some familiarity and some, you know, like, yes, eventually the more games you play against the same deck, the more you will start to understand the gameplay

and the variance will lessen to certain extent. Not zero, you have a de facto of the deck. But the flux we're talking about is a little larger than that. And the idea is that most games, what options that are available to you, even though there might be some randomization in those options, is a locked thing. For example, if I'm playing Scrabble, look, I can pull different letters, but there's only so many of each letter that can I pull. Once I pulled all the L's, no more Ls are going to come out.

And that as you get really serious about a game, you start tracking things like that. you start figuring out what exists, what's left. And that, you know, when you first start a game and you're more casualable at the game, you don't spend the time and energy understanding all the information. In fact, one of the things when you first start playing is you kind of are very in the moment. Like when you start playing magic, beginning magic players are like, what can I do this turn? They're not thinking about next turn. Like, as you get more advanced, you're like, oh, well, let me think what my opponent will do next turn

because their actions might dictate what I want to do in my turn. And if you get really good, maybe I have a card in my hand that says, oh, knowing my strategy and their strategy, this card is the route to victory. So I need to start setting up things now that won't pay off for six, seven, eight turns, but it'll

help me win the game. That's very advanced. But in any game, as you get more advanced, part of what happens is you start having to absorb what is all the information I can learn and know. And when you're playing scrap, probably at a low level, you're not worried about what letters have been pulled from the bag.

But when you're playing at a high level, that is something you think about, you know, that you have to sort of go, what information do I have and how do I maximize that information? And magic has lots of that. Like a lot of high-end magic play comes from me understanding what my deck is and what strategies it has, what tools it has, and then what I'm playing against and what their strategy is. and what strengths my deck has against their deck. So the reason that is important is at some point, as you get more knowledgeable about a game,

you start absorbing more and more information, you track more and more thing. To the point where, in theory, you're tracking as many things as can be tracked. Now, there are some games where that becomes beyond the human brain to track. You know, one of the reasons chess is a very fun game is

while there is only so many, your opponent can only make 16 moves on their next turn, assuming no pieces have been captured. They, you know, once you start extrapolating two, three, four turns, the amount of combinations of moves they can make

is probably more than most people can map. No, really good chess players have shorthands to understand and, you know, you recognize strategies. So there's a lot of short-handing that happens in advanced play where you can take you can learn how to eradicate the noise as they say well yes there's all these moves they could make but only these moves that make sense only these moves that would help them win so I can ignore these moves that won't help

them win so I have less information that I can look at and I can it allows me to sort of granularly understand what I'm looking at okay but magic goes a step beyond that and the idea there is the mere components the mere strategy For example, before alliances came out, for a long time in magic, it was true that if your opponent was tapped out, they couldn't cast a spell. So if my opponent had no manna available, I knew that I wasn't going to be interfered with. I wasn't going to have a counter spell. No one was going to destroy my things. Like, I knew that for that turn, until they untapped, there's nothing they could do.

In fact, it's kind of funny. I used to do a puzzle column for the duel. It's called Magic the Puzzle. And at one point, I made a book. I made a book of magic puzzles. And one of my editors was a guy named Chris Page, who is a magic designer. He is part of the East Coast Playtefters. And Chris noticed that I always tapped up my opponent just because I didn't, I wanted it to sort of be absolute like, hey, you know when you're doing your puzzle, your opponent won't mess with you, right?

And so Chris, this inspired Chris to make the pitch cards and alliances. The pitch cards are cards Force of Will being the most famous where instead of paying the man a cost you can pitch or discard another card of the same color. Some of them like force will also require a life payment of course of what you pay one life in addition.

But the idea essentially is Chris was taking this given. If you are tapped out you cannot do anything and saying well that doesn't have to be true. And at the time I've told the story when I talked about alliances is, customer service was really freaked out by the pitch cards. They thought we were breaking a rule we shouldn't break,

that that was an absolute of magic. But that's one of the cool things about magic is it can kind of keep breaking its rules. And, you know, before pitch cards existed, that was a hard and fast rule. If your opponent was tapped out, you knew they couldn't do anything. And all of a sudden, not true.

And that is what we talk about by flux, where you can learn something, something can be true, but all of a sudden, magic can turn that on its ear. And that one of the things that is, so let's get a little into R&D. So obviously we make changes, the game changes, it evolves. My example here is I'll use the color pie's example. The actual philosophies of the color pie have not changed since early days of magic,

what white means, white means. But what does shift over time, is our execution of the philosophies through mechanics. For example, for a long time, white and red were not good at drawing cards. Just we were playing into different weaknesses, and then along comes Commander, which is a little more, you know, the games last longer, and that card drawing just became really important. And Commander ended up becoming the number one played tabletop format, right? So we had to go look at red and look at white and say, okay, we think,

For the game health, for where the game is at right now, we need red and white to have some card drawing. How do we do that? We came up the idea of impulsive draw for red. Okay, red gets card drawing, but it's impulsive, right? You have to use it now. So the idea is that certain styles of gameplay will be good for red, but other kinds of things where you're planning ahead,

which isn't red, stressually, aren't that good. And so it allowed red to draw in a way that leaned into what it did, but didn't give it things that it didn't. It didn't shore up its weaknesses. it. Likewise, for White, we made the strategy we called sort of long draw, meaning that white can do stuff and set of situations where it gets a card, but only one card per turn. So the idea is, it's not getting a lot of cards at once, but if it creates a strategy, if it sort of it can set the tone of what's going on, if it can make a structure that it

controls, it can get advantage over time. So it sort of draws cards, but not quickly, like blue can, over long periods of time. and so things change things evolve and that the color pie that is part of the nature is things happen and then we adapt to them and then commander is a great example where commander was not a format wizard's made it was a format made by some players in alaska i believe and then Sheldon Menry played with them and then took it and really sort of

spread the gospel of the joy of commander and it started becoming started gaining some popularity. We made a product for it and then that sort of fueled the flames and now it's the number one play table top format but its existence then change things about magic, right?

So then we adapt to the color pot we adapted how we make sets we adapted mechanics like the okay so now they get into the idea explaining that magic changes the things are not the same that something that might have been true 20 years ago just isn't true today you know once upon a time there was a magic front and a magic back and all cards had magic backs and then one day we made double-faced cards and that wasn't true um okay so how exactly does flux happen and and that's here's where i think there's some R&D is in charge of experimentation, meaning it is our job to push boundaries and find new space.

Much like Chris Page said, oh, well, what if you didn't, what if you could cast cards when things were tapped? One of the things that we always do on every set we make is we, there's a certain amount of bringing things back, right? Certain amount of, oh, you know, we're doing this cool theme, and here's something we've already done, And that fits our thing. We should bring that back.

But there always is a little bit of something new. Okay, I want you to care about something that maybe you haven't cared about before. Maybe you care about it in ways you haven't cared about before. Or maybe we have themes that blend in a way that you've never seen them blend before. That we are always trying to find something new. And that new can be on many levels. It could be an individual card. It could be a cycle.

It could be a theme. It could be a mechanic. It could be an entire sort of. of structure for a set. There's lots of things we can do. And part of my job and the job of all the designers is to do that experimentation. We, in fact, have exploratory design where we really push boundaries and try things and go, okay.

And one of the things we try a lot in exploratory design is say, okay, let's try some real out there things. Let's try some thing, you know, and that sometimes things at first blush seem like we'd never do that, you know. Like, when, I remember when Tomlapeli brought double-faced cards for the first time, we were trying to make werewolves work in the original Innestrade. And my first thought was like, okay, you know, maybe that's a bit too far. But, you know, I'm like, okay, but we're trying things.

We should experiment with it. And we played with it, and it was really fun. And I'm like, okay, you know, and then I realized, the reason we looked at it in the first place was another game we make dual masters had done double-faced cards. Like, well, we know we can print them. You know, are they fun? We're magic like them.

And so it is R&D's, job to sort of push the boundaries of experiment and try new things. But it is not that experimentation that really determines the flux. A little bit. I mean, there's a little bit. Chris Page making pitch cards change magic in a certain way. But, and this is sort of the big thing about today, we are just making things because essentially we're trying to see, does this add something fun to magic. Now, we do a lot of playtesting. And so if we playtest and discover we don't think it's fun, we won't put it in the product. So obviously, there's a certain bar we're trying to hit, meaning if we print something, we think it's fun enough to print.

No, that doesn't mean we don't push boundaries. Like, there are certain things that we can't test. There's certain things that we playtesting at Wizards cannot know. For example, one of the big things about something is how much does the audience accept something? We will try things. So like we do market research, right? And we ask people, we have them rate the mechanics and they rated it on a scale of five. Oh, it's five or is it seven? No, it must be seven. Must be out of seven. Because I know there's things about five. So we have them rank it. I think it's out of a scale of seven. And basically it's like, this is amazing. This is you know, unplayable. Where do you find it? And then we sort of get ratings on how people feel

about things, right? And so we can get data on, did people like it? Now, there's a lot of hard crunchy Dan, we're literally asking people in the rating. And then there's sort of what I'll call anecdotal data, sort of soft data, where, hey, I have a blog. People will write to me. I can look at social media. Like when I can get a general sense of whether the audience likes something by kind of watching people talk about it. You've got to be careful. Um, extreme opinions are a little bit louder, meaning, um, when we made double face cards is my example. There are people that really, really disliked them, much like the people that dislike the pitch cards. Whenever we push boundaries, you get a stronger reaction because you're sort of breaking a rule. Um, and a lot of people are like,

oh, I've gotten comfortable. I consider this to be a known quantity. And so when you disrupt the apple cart, there are people that are like, I liked my apple cart. What are you doing? Um, but you sort of watch over time and see how people you know how it goes with people and that we can monitor things over time but so that so the true thing and this is the big point of today is um r and d fundamentally makes choices of what to try but as far as what we what becomes regular business what becomes something we do again has a lot to do with the reception of what we did the first time meaning we will try things. And there's a scale from, I absolutely adore this.

I love it. I want you do it as much as you can to, I hate this with a burning passion. Don't you ever do this again. And no matter what we do, there's people at all ends at the scale. Literally, there's no mechanic we can make that somebody doesn't adore and someone doesn't hate. But it's not a matter of one individual. It's a matter of the group. And that's a big point of today is

the way I like to think of it is there is all of magic players make what I'll call the consciousness that it's sort of a unified sense of what magic players as a whole want and the consciousness is what determines whether or not we do more of something. It doesn't determine whether we do it in the first place

although the more of something successful the more we play in that space, meaning when double-faced cards were popular when we put them out for Innestrade, which were transforming double-faced cards, that encouraged us to try a modal double-face card. If transforming double-face cards had not been popular, we might not have ever tried mortal double-face cards.

So I do think the consciousness can influence even new design, but on some level, our job is to try things, to test things, and to sort of see what people like. And then the consciousness judges them. The consciousness says what it likes and doesn't like. And I know as a designer, I've tried to go up against the consciousness. For example, my story is two things. First was walls.

I'm not a fan of walls. Not that I dislike their gameplay. They're fine. I have no problem with Defender. I just think the idea that this is a creature. it's a living breathing creature. Oh, what is the living green creature? It's a wall made of stone.

And what? What? Like, you know, and I get the flavor of walls in the sense that, you know, we want the idea that I set things up and they protect me, but they don't attack. I understand how Richard got to make them creatures, but it always irked me a little bit. And that, you know, from a flavor standpoint,

like we could make artifacts or stuff. Like, we can make other cards maybe that have a similar or function that aren't creatures, you know. And so I tried, I tried to stop making walls. I definitely sort of pushed my influence, and I tried to encourage. And Brittany Diamondeth, who was a creative director at the time, agreed with me. He didn't think walls creatively were that great. So we stopped doing walls for a while.

But you didn't know what happened? People missed the walls. We kept getting feedback aware of the walls. I want my walls. Walls are cool. And so we eventually brought walls back. There was enough pressure from the players that, like, we couldn't keep walls away. Same with Murfolk.

Brady tried to stop Murphoke. Brady's like, well, their water-based creatures were a land-based game. It's kind of odd. And so for a while, we didn't do Murfolk. And then, basically, the consciousness were like, we want Murfolk. And that is the interesting thing. The consciousness is not any one player. It is just a general sense of what the players as a whole enjoy.

And then the consciousness is what dictates whether or not we do something, meaning we'll make a mechanic we will see what the consciousness thinks. How generally is this? And the more favorable, the consciousness of it, the more, you know, if something is really beloved,

maybe we do it more often. Maybe it becomes deciduous. Maybe it becomes evergreen. You know, like Scriy started as Aaron Forsy's making mechanics that started as a little spiking that helped you with car selection. And it sort of was popular enough that we sort of brought it back.

We started using it more. And then we realized it was so popular that we just made it every green. It was a good tool. Now, there's some influence, you know, whether something is every greener and citizen also has, I mean, R&D does have some of influence in that how useful is it? Meaning the audience might love something. If it's not useful, it's hard to use as much as it's very useful. Things that are practical get used more. So there is some utility that affects things.

it's not, but the consciousness really figures out whether they like it or they don't like it. And if the consciousness likes it, you'll see more like it. If the conscience hate it, you will see less. Now, every once in a while we make something, the consciousness doesn't like it, and we realize, oh, maybe we did it wrong. You know, the classic there

is Croma, brought back his devotion. Chroma was what I thought was a really neat idea. It just didn't go well with the players. But then we're like, well, maybe we did it bad. Maybe our execution was bad. We tried it again. We made devotion. And that time, it went over great, which is another interesting note about the consciousness, which is execution matters.

That is not just a matter of, you know, the consciousness doesn't understand conceptually if it likes the idea. Either it likes what we made or it doesn't like what we made. And that part of our job in our need sometimes is to figure out when it doesn't like it, why doesn't it like it? And that's, that is in, like, I would say a big part of my job is reading the consciousness, is understanding the consciousness. And like I said, some of that is hard and fast data. But a lot of that also is just sort of interacting with the audience and getting a sense. Like, for example, when we put something out, I pay a lot of attention to what excites people.

What do people talk about? You know, what are people drawn to? And that a lot of my job as head designer, I've been absorbing the consciousness for years. For 30 years, I've been absorbing the consciousness. And I've gotten pretty good at it. Like, I have a pretty good sense of understanding what players like and don't like. Just because when something comes out, I communicate with the players, and I've learned over time, you know, how they communicate when they generally like something. And so a lot of when I'm plotting out the future, when we're making mechanics or making sets, I'm always sort of keeping the eye on, okay, are we leaning into things that we think they'll like.

And sometimes hypothetical. The other big thing for R&D is a lot of what we're doing is not necessarily known. Some of it is sometimes we're extrapolating and then we're playing in known space, but sometimes we're really playing in sort of unknown space. But we still can use

our knowledge of the consciousness to extrapolate what we think will be. And so, anyway, the reason my talk today about the flux is trying to explain that I think there's a lot of people like to get mad at wizards because we make decisions because we do things and I mean obviously we the makers of the game are making decisions my point today though

is while we make the decisions it is based on the consciousness of you the players that is based on what all the players together as an entity enjoy and like and that by the way is something really interesting. For example, I, you know, my former life, I was a writer. And there's something about writing. Now, there are things like I worked on a sitcom where, yes, I would write lines, but other people would edit them, right? Where there's a whole group trying to find the best joke for something.

So that's writing, like, writing isn't always solitary, but I've done plenty of solitary writing where I'm writing my thing. And there's something really interesting about a game where, like, I'm used to when I'm writing my story or whatever. I, the author, have a lot of control. But magic is interesting because it's this ever-evolving, changing thing that I'm very beholden to understanding the general consciousness and that it is not...

So, for example, universe is beyond, another touchy topic amongst some people. That is a good example of exactly how a process will work. We come up with an idea. Aaron came up with the universe is beyond. although once again if you didn't even go back to stuff like the arc system the idea of having other properties intermingle is something we've talked about forever

I think Aaron recognized that it was time that we could do it but the idea is we started small we started just doing a little tiny bit you know we did the Godzilla skins we did like we started small and we sort of watched to see what would happen Either players would embrace it or players wouldn't.

And I guarantee you if we had done our first forays into Universes Beyond was not well received. Now, be aware, I'm not, and this is important, there's a difference between the consciousness and just loudness on the Internet. For example, when we introduce Universes Beyond, the first product that Universe is Beyond, was Walking Dead, Secret Layer Walking Dead. There were a lot of people that were very vocal about it. Once again, people don't like change, especially when you change something's fundamental. And Walking Dead did two big things

that people really had issues with. One was Universes Beyond, and the second was we were making unique content through Secret Layer. So there was a lot of response. But when we actually looked, it was the top selling Secret Layer of all time. When we did market research on it, people were excited for it.

You know, as we dipped our toe into universes beyond, what we discovered was the consciousness likes it a lot. And the point is kind of where magic steers is a lot on the consciousness. If the general magic consciousness likes something, and they have really liked universes beyond, I'm not saying there's not a vocal minority, I'm not saying there's not people complaining about it, but if you look at the actual, all the feedback and all the you know, all the metrics, players really like universes beyond. As a whole, there are individuals that don't, and that is always true.

Once again, the flux is not based on individual decisions. It is based on group decisions, on the group feelings, on the consciousness. And as people like things, they grow. As Commander became more popular, it grew. That affected thing. And that that is a big part of flux. is, like, one of the things that, to me, is very interesting is, on some level, the game becomes the thing the players most wanted to be. That is the most amazing thing about Fluss, is that magic keeps evolving what it is.

But it doesn't evolve randomly. It doesn't evolve because R&D just does things. It involves because the players, like, on some level, I like to think of this as survival of the fittest. right we make mechanics and we do things but only the strong survive only the mechanics that the consciousness likes is what thrives and so we put things out there we try new things but some of them do not survive and they die off and not to be seen again while others thrive and duplicate you know and that that is what is going on that is what flux means flux means that you the players as a whole, as a consciousness,

the game becomes what you want it to be. It's not what R&D chooses it to be, not what Wizards chooses it to be. It's not what any one player chooses it to be. It's a conglomeration. It's the consciousness. And that is something that is really neat to me. The idea that there's this game

that becomes what its players want it to be is fascinating. From a game design standpoint, and I understand that I'm there my job is to understand what the consciousness wants and try to make more that's my job is to try to read the consciousness

understand what they like and try to make new things that they might like and then I mean another thing that's fascinating another reason my job doesn't get boring is I try new things and some things I think you will like you do some things I really like you don't

although having done this a long time I'm getting better at better at sort of recognizing what the consciousness likes. It's one of the things that I, it's a good skill I have. I think I can see the consciousness farther out than most people, just because my job is to sort of find the unknown. And so I've trained a lot of my skills to sort of figure out whether the unknown is something people will like.

Or to figure out what is, it doesn't exist yet, but the consciousness might like. But anyway, guys, that is flux. That is a core aspect of magic, something that makes magic very unique and different from most other games. It is a game that is constantly living and breathing. It is a game that is constantly adapting. And it is not just adapting willy-nilly.

It is not adapting just because of R&D whims. It is adapting because you, the players, in together, as a consciousness, are dictating what the game is. and that, you know, we will give you things to test out what you like. But in the end, it is really what the consciousness wants that drives the game. And that, my friends, that is what Flux is. And that's really exciting.

You know, there's a lot of things that I enjoy about magic. But this idea of magic being this thing that responds to its players is really cool. And that's why I decided to talk about it today. But anyway, guys, I am now at work. So we all know what that means. It means this is my end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. So I will see you all next time.

Bye-bye.