Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1265: Group Design

Episode Date: August 9, 2025

Magic is made not by a single designer but by a large group of people. In this podcast, I talk about how that affects game design.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time another drive to work. Okay, so today I'm going to talk about the dynamics of designing in a team. So one of the things that is interesting about magic design is it's not made by one person. I mean, obviously, Richard made the game in the very beginning. But even then, he had a lot of playtesters left that we worked with. but nowadays beyond the creation of the game every time we design magic it is not done by a single person it is done by a team of people

and it's not only done by a team of people at some point in the process that team of people passes it over to a different team of people so the idea is we'll have an explore design team and then it goes to a vision design team and that while there's overlap between those

they're different people Then it goes to a set design team And the lead The lead of the exploratory and vision Sometimes is the same But the lead of the vision and set Almost never the same So it's changing to somebody different

And then play design is also Again somebody different So the idea that making magic Is an act of group design Not an act of singular design So today I wanted to sort of talk about What is the nature of group design How does it differ from individual design

and then talk about once we understand the nature of that how does it impact how you do it okay so first let's talk about the I mean I have a nice vantage point which is prior to working at Wizards I was a writer and while I did do like

you know I was I worked in a sitcom room that's a group experience where you're bouncing ideas off one another so not all writing is solitary but before that I wrote a lot of scripts and writing scripts usually is a solitary thing, meaning that when I was writing a script, I had soul

saying what happened. I was, you know, I had every decision. I was the creative force of my scripts. Nobody else was telling me what I could or couldn't do. Now, obviously, I was writing for a certain medium, and not that there aren't restrictions outside of the individual person, but the point, though, is I had freedom to do what I wanted, that if I wanted some character on page 93 to do something, well, they would do it, because I was the sole, you know, creative force in making that script.

But in magic, magic is not made by a single person. No single element of it really is made by one person. That it's a group effort. Okay, so what is the advantage of sort of solo design and one is the advantage of group design? I think the biggest advantage of solo design is

there's sort of perfect communication, right, that you know what you want. Or at least, you know, even if you're, like sometimes when you're working on something, you might know exactly what you want, but at least you have a sense of what you want.

And that whatever vision you have, look, everybody working on the project gets the vision because it's you. You communicate yourself just fine. So the big strength about solo design, is there's a purity of understanding that everybody working on the project, which is you, is all aligned and you know exactly what you want.

And because it's just one person, there's seamless communication that, you know, there's not a need or a desire to do that. If we'll get into today, when you get to teams, it's not so. But that's probably the biggest strength of an individual solo design is there's a clarity. There's an absolute understanding of what is going on. The downside of solo design is that there's just one person. You know, you have blind spots. You have weaknesses.

You know, you as an individual, you're not good at everything. And so, you know, the things you're good at, you will excel at. But the things you're bad at, well, you'll do the best you can. But, you know, now, sometimes in solo design, you might get help from other people. For example, let's say I was writing a script on a material that I didn't know that well. You know, I would need to do some research. I would talk to people, you know, maybe I even have somebody who, when I have a question, I can call them up and say, oh, you know, a very common thing is a consultant.

Okay, I'm doing something in an area I'm not super familiar with. Okay, I call the consultant and say, here's what I want to do, what thing actually makes sense for this topic. And they go, oh, you know, here's what you want to do. So even in a solo endeavor, you can reach out to sort of help get expertise. But that expertise is not built into the system. There are inherent weaknesses that you, the individual, have. And it's not a knock against individuals.

All individuals have strengths and weaknesses. So the advantage of a team design is that you have access to a lot more different, a lot of more different strengths and tools and, you know, that you have more people that are capable of doing more things. In fact, one of the reasons magic design is done by team, A, it's a lot of work for one person, but B, there's so many different aspects to magic that no one person is good at them all. For example, I've gotten very good at the area of design that I do, and it's not that I can't do somewhat. You're like, if I had to do set design, I'm not, I could do set design.

I'm not as good as other people with set design. I'm not horrible at set design. but I mean a lot of the skills that come with set design I have less practiced that I'm not as established as those and then you get to play design like I might be better than random average player at play design

but I'm nowhere near as good as the play designers in play design you know so I have some experience and it's not that I mean I definitely could do play design better than random person but I can't do it better than someone that's good at it you know and so

the idea is because we have lots different people that we get to play the strengths the person that's very good at thing x does thing x um and the idea that you have different people doing different things like one of the things that's really fun about team about team design in general is that you your everything isn't relying on you that if you don't have a good idea well somebody else might have a good idea um there's a lot of pressure in solo design where it's all up to you now like i said there's some some fun of solo design is kind of cool that you get to design everything. One of the frustrations in teams is you don't get to decide everything.

And sometimes you really want something, but the group at large wants something different. Oh, that's another big difference between solo design and group design. In solo design, you, the solo designer, have total say. Whatever you want is what goes. In team design, no one person has say on everything. Some people have more say in certain aspects. And there are definitely people that have definitive final say on certain aspects. But the reality is, let's say I'm working on a team and I want to do something.

But the rest of my team does not want to do it. You know, there's most likely, I mean, if I don't get my team on board, I'm not going to do it. You know, and even if my team agrees to something, the next team we pass it over, if they don't like it, they could take it out. So like the nature of the magic process and the reason that we do, we do. The reason you have multiple eyes on things and multiple leads is we want to make sure that everything is tested as possible. And like I said, one of the weaknesses of a solo design is the idea of weak spots, right? For example, let's say you're making something and you start your design in a certain place. And then as the design evolves over time, you move and change things.

But there's some elements of the design that's very core to where it started. And you, as a person who started it is very emotionally tied to that thing and so sometimes sometimes you have things that linger just because you make associations with it and it feels right to you but with a fresh set of eyes comes along and goes okay why is this here does this add to anything you know and the fresh set of eyes really has the ability to not have that emotional connection in a positive way so one of the things in general about design is to be creative to make things there is an emotional connection that comes. If you are not attached emotionally to the things you are making,

you are not doing your best work. That there is a lot of putting yourself, a lot of ego. Part of creating something is really investing part of you in it. And that's a very emotional thing. There's nothing wrong with that. I think that you end up making things that really mean something matter. But the downside of that is it can color your perception, it can't blind you to certain things,

and having multiple people look at it and oversee it really allows sort of a clarity of, not clarity, I mean it, the right word, but allows you to sort of make sure that everything is truly serving what it needs to do and that it helps check biases. I mean, that's the better thing. A team helps check against biases to make sure that you're doing things for the right reason

and not because, you know, it's not a carryover for something that doesn't matter anymore. That's a real common design problem. Where something matters, you build around it, That thing goes away. It doesn't matter anymore, but remnants of it still stick around, and you have fondness to those remnants, and maybe they're not fulfilling the purpose like they once did.

Okay, so what I want to do now is talk through, I'm running a team, how do I play into the strengths of the team, and how do I help work against the weaknesses of a team? So a lot of team design is that element of, okay, how do I play into the strengths? How do I help play against the weaknesses? Help against the weaknesses. So first, let's start with the strengths.

The strengths of team design is that you get to play to lots of individuals' best abilities. So one of the things you want to do in a team that's very valuable is understand who on your team is the best at doing the things you need to do. I will just use vision design since this is what I do all the time. So one of the things we do in vision design is we definitely have roles for the team members, meaning that when we put the team together, we specifically make sure that certain skill sets are on the team. For example, you know, I'm the lead of the team. I'm going to make decisions when I'm, you know, I'm the vision lead.

I want a strong second. I want somebody that is able to sort of do all the, look, you know, keep the file in check and do notes and all the process stuff that needs to happen. Normally, that person, the strong second, is somebody who we're training because being a strong second is the best thing you can do to learn how to be a lead before actually being a lead. And it is nice in that it gives you a lot of responsibility without a lot of pressure. That when something goes wrong, the lead designer is the one that everyone focuses on.

The strong second is not. But, like, for example, especially on my teams, I give the strong second a lot of, a lot of responsibility. You know, I really want them to take ownership, you know, normally I give them, you know, pretty full ownership of the file. I mean, I'll give them notes of things I care about. But the reality is I let them make final calls on the file so they can adjust the file. And there's a lot of busy work in a file. They get to own that, you know. And another part of this, by the way, is part of my corollary.

of this is not only does everyone have their roles but you want to make sure that people you allow them the ownership of the role give them the responsibility of the role we'll get to more than that a second um so the strong second for example is somebody who's training and learning but it's somebody who has enough chops that they can you know we believe they're capable of doing this that's why you make a strong second um normally i want a couple people that i think are just strong um i call them uh fire hydrants that They just pump out design. You just want a few people that are just really good at just mass design,

meaning, you know, they're good designers, they have strong skills, and they can just design a lot of stuff. One of the things you really want on a vision design team is just people that can just pump out designs. And you normally want a couple of those. Then you want a play designer. You want someone whose expertise is balanced. You want someone who can cost the card.

So when we make a card set before each play, you want someone that's going to look at all the cards and just do a sanity check. Make sure that we don't have costs that are going to like disrupt the play tests. In general, in a play test, cost don't need to be perfect, but you don't want to disrupt the play test because you don't want, there's a lot of data loss. If what do we learn today? Well, that one card's too good. That's not supposed to be a lesson of a play test. So you want someone to do a sandy check, so that's the play designer.

And when you're in the room and you're trying to cost off, that's the person you turn to. You also want somebody that represents the creative team. Usually there's a liaison. And so you want somebody there that when you're making decisions, you can bounce off, you know, are the decisions the creative team are making or just make sure there's an understanding. And there's a lot of back and forth between design and creative.

So having someone there in the room is super helpful. Usually the creative team finds it just understanding what's going on in the design. Also, it's very helpful for the creative. So there's a back and forth. But if you're making creative decisions, hey, you have a creative person in the room. If you need to name a card or figure out a creature, that's not, you know, mechanic-dependent.

You have somebody there that can do that. And so you normally want a creative person. And those are the major roles, for example, in vision design. You want the lead the second. You want people that are capable of pumping out designs. You want a play designer. You want a creative representative. Now, when you get to later teams, what you need is different.

Not all teams are exactly the same. But so here's the key. You want to understand what you're. your team needs, what are the, what are the skills you're going to need? In order to do what you need to do, what are the skills you're going to need, and then make sure that you have people that fill those skills. And the reason that's stronger than solo design is usually, you know, if I want to find, if I want to find someone who's good at all the things I just named, not that there's no people that could do that, but nobody's, you know, somebody is always better at

something than others. You know, I'm really good at pouring out designed. I'm good at leaving sets. Play design, not my thing. You know, I've some chops with creative. I've just done a lot of interacting with them, but not as strong as the creative member is going to have. You know, and a lot of the creative stuff I've done was many, many years ago. Like, I've done card concepting. I've done art descriptions. But it's been a while and magic has evolved a lot since then. So the reality is, hey, there's some skills I have, and I can do some of it. Some of it like play design, I'm not even good at. You know, I'm not great at balance. And I'm particularly bad at balancing things in which there's nothing to judging

it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but we're making a kicker spell. I can look at all the kicker spells and I can make an educated guess by looking at what we've done before. But when we're playing in space that I haven't done before, I don't know. So the key is you want to make sure that your team, that you have roles for your team members, you want to make sure that those team members know their roles, and then you want to make sure you give them ownership of that role. Okay, you're my play designer your job is to cost cards whenever there's a card to be costed you're the person I go to you're the person responsible you know and that person feels like okay I got to do my job this is my job I have to do this and

that one of the things that really plays well in teams is if everybody knows their role and know you know and the roles play to their strengths you have something that's greater than the sum of its parts that a team working all together in you know in harmony just has more strengths than an individual okay so that you definitely want to make sure that everyone knows their role knows their place the other thing that you want to do is make sure to delegate make sure like you the person running the team should not cannot and should not do everything the the people there aren't like what

makes a good team is that you're using the team as a team that the team as a whole is designing the set. Not that you're designing the set and they're helping you. It is important, and this is something that's really key to running a team, is that you,

it's important that the team feel, and they should feel this because it is true, that the team is designing. It is not you, the lead designer designing, it's everybody designing. And, I mean, one of the roles of the lead of the set

is you're going to push the team in directions, you're going to give the team goals to accomplish You are going to guide the team, that's your role, but you're not making all the decisions. Now, there are some decisions that need to get made. For example, sometimes, like in the end, the lead is going to make the final call on things. But that final call should come from the team getting to a place. And that's another really important part of having a team, that you want the whole team to see that the design is a group effort,

that all of their inputs affected what the design was. And for example, one of the things I've learned is, let's say I have a really good idea where we want to go. It's important not that we just go in that direction, but that I get the team on board in going in that direction. That I sort of pick the issues that matter, go through them, get the team to weigh in on them, and then make sure that, you know, like a lot of times, for example,

I've been doing this forever. I have a good sense for design wants to go. But it's important, and I'll take extra time to make sure that the team is on board and the team is all, you know. And sometimes, by the way, when I involve the team, I realize that, oh, maybe what I thought was the right way, isn't. Because the team makes me realize

that I've not thought of something. But even when I know where we want to go, it's important that you want the team to get there. You want the team as a whole. And like I said, be open to the idea that maybe what you think will happen won't happen. That's another important thing of leading a team is allowing the team to like actually design the set

and that sometimes what you anticipate isn't going to be what's best once you get the team involved. The other cool thing, let me get into the flip side of it. Where do teams suffer or what's the, you know, play into the weakness of teams?

And that is the lack of unified vision. When you're a solo designer, you know what you want you don't have to worry about it on a team that is not so and in fact one of the most important things about a team lead like the number one job i believe of a team lead is communication it is your job to communicate and not just to your team you need to communicate to everybody downstream you need to communicate to future teams like if you're the lead of vision you've got to communicate with the lead of set set design that a lot of what you're trying to do is saying, hey, here's what we've done to help set you up for success.

Here are the blueprints we've made. And in the hand-up documents, and I've published a lot of these, a lot of what you want to do is walk through your thinking with the set designer. We did this for this reason. Here's the things we tried. Here's the realizations we came to. Here are the backup plans. If that doesn't work, here are the different ways you can do this.

Sometimes, for example, I like, let's say we come up with a new mechanic, and there's like four or five different ways to use it. I like listing all of them. Not the set design will necessarily use all of them, but it's valuable to set design to know what they are and to know the exploration. And so a lot of what you want to do, like a lot of team design,

because the weakness of a team is people don't know what other people are thinking, you have to spend a lot of time in energy making sure that is true. You want to spend a lot of time in your team talking about what you want and walking through decisions. Like one of the things, for example, that I'm very big on when I lead,

teams is I like to make bite-sized things. I like to go, okay, what are the, what are the core tenets of what we're doing? What's the emotional center of what we're doing? What is the mechanical heart of what we're doing? That a lot of what I need to do is I want to consolidate things down to bite-sizable things because that's easier to convey. So, for example, when I was working on pharos um i realized that that the three things that i wanted um that the three most core essences of greek mythology were gods heroes and monsters and i think i think i was in a library and i saw a book named that i'm like that is exactly that is exactly like i need by three pillars those out of the three pillars and then i'm like okay what's my emotional center okay i think

that Greek mythology was very much about adventure, it's about a journey, that you go on a journey and discover who you are, or, you know, the gods gain in power, or the monsters get more powerful, the idea that there's some, there's this journey you go on, just about who you are. And so the idea was, okay, the emotional center is the sense of journey of, of an adventure, of exploration, of becoming something, and then my three pillars are gods, heroes, and monsters okay now once we know that how do gods what's the journey of a god what's the journey of a of a hero what's the journey of a monster um and then our core mechanics came from that devotion came from the journey of a god um heroic came from the journey of a hero monstrosity came from the

journey of a monster and that once you understand the core things a it helps you do the design but also from a team design standpoint it communicates to your fellow team what you're trying to do. And that is really, really key in group design because people don't know what you're thinking. You know, solo design, you know, one of the things that I do a lot when I do solo design is I do a lot of instinctual things,

meaning I don't even know why I want to do it, but it feels right, so I do it. And I'm a very instinctual designer. So one of my challenges has been when you're doing solo design and you have a gut feeling that I should do this my gut says yeah then you do it in a team design that's tricky right

because you want to explain to your team what is going on and so one of the skills that you have to get better at for team design is you have to get better in understanding why you want to do things and for me it was a big job

I'm a really instinctual designer I do things because they feel right and when you're working by yourself Hey, feels right. You've convinced everybody working on the project that is good. But when it's a whole team and you've got to communicate what you're doing, that's a lot harder. And one of my big challenges in, like, you know, as a magic designer has been, getting better to understanding why something's important to me, why something matters, and that a lot of

my growth as a designer has been the ability in just learning how to get better at looking within and going okay i know i want to do thing x why why do i want to do thing x and so um that is definitely a skill that that's like some of the stuff i'm talking about are team skills like another big thing is managing team members it's a real skill um and it comes from a lot of the points i've already made is you want people to understand their expectation you want to make sure you're giving people um roles and ownership in their roles and that oh another thing that's really important is trust that not only do you have to have people have their roles and give them responsibilities but you need to trust them in their role if someone's job it is to do

something you can't then come back and go ah I don't think so that if someone if my play designer is making costs I don't go I want to second get your cost you're my play designer you're doing cost if you think that's the right cost I will trust you and even if someone makes a decision that I'm not sure about I don't overrule them on that decision for that is decision to make but i will um and one thing that's valuable on teams is one-on-ones and the reason one-on-ones are important is there's a different dynamic to a group talking than there is to two individuals talking and the and the and the point of that is there's a lot of emotion and ego and there's a lot going on in that how you look to other people matters to people you know and so let's say

for example i have some criticism that i want i want to get let's say i'm working with my strong second And there's something my strong second does that I'm not happy with. I do not want to do that criticism in the group meeting. Why? Because it is, you know, it makes my strong second look bad. It, you know, it can do a lot of things that could hurt their feelings. And that if we can get on a one-on-one, and I can say, okay, just us. I'm just, you know, I'm here.

The reason you're my strong second is we're trying to help you and try to learn. And I think you've made a mistake. So let me walk through why I think you've made a mistake. Here's why I think it's a mistake. Here's what I want that this isn't. You know, I can walk through with them if I think they did something that's not quite who I want

and I can use that as a learning opportunity where we can discuss and we can have a back and forth and that we can use that time. And I'm doing it out. There's no other people involved. There's no other, you know, there's no ego or anything in the sense that they're just learning

but it's not about looking bad in front of other people, you know what I'm saying? And that that dynamic is really important. And so understanding what you want to do in the group And some things you want to do in a group. Some things are better in a group. For example, if you want to convince people of things, it's nice to do it in a group

because once one person sort of gets swayed, they join and start, you know what I'm saying? Like, the key is you want the whole group aboard. And so trying to convince individual people one at a time is a lot more work. Now, there's time places you do that, I guess. But most of the time, if I'm really trying to get the team on board, I want them all together at the same time

so that there's back and forth. And once again, maybe if I'm wrong, if what I believe to be right is not true, having the whole team there will bounce and get ideas. And that, oh, that's another important thing of having a team, is you definitely want to allocate time for discussions among the team. Team talking time is what I like to call it. That you want to have some amount of time where you can sort of bring things up and people can work through stuff and issues and sort of have the whole team there.

The other reason that's really important is sometimes someone has a concern that other people don't know they have or haven't got in their mind, but they hear somebody else say it. They go, oh, yeah. And then if you can answer that as the lead, you're answering not just that one person, you're answering all the people.

And that is really effective in sort of getting the team. A lot of communication is explaining rationale. And sometimes, like I said, you do your best you can to explain the rationale, but sometimes people have questions that really do a good job of digging into things. Sometimes people ask me questions

that make me go, okay, let me figure out why, something that I haven't quite figured out, but the questions prompt me, which is really good. I'm a big advocate of questions. In general, my rule is questions are great in the team, but if you're wanting to do sort of pointed feedback, that is better on one-on-one. Anyway, what else?

Almost I'm not working here. Any final thoughts? I think my final thing is just to reinforce that I think that team design has the potential to be super strong. You're using the advantage of all these different people. One of the reasons that magic is, I think, as great as it is, is so many people at the top of the game that really are great at what they do, are coming together with other people that are really strong in what they do

and working together. And that is so fun to see the finished product, which in some levels is better than any one person could have done. You know, it's so neat to come up with an idea. and then inspires the creative team to do something or inspires rules or editing. It's fun to see everybody using their strengths and having it all come together.

And that is something truly amazing. But the other part of the team, which is from having done solo design, is you have to appreciate the groupness of it. One of the fun things about doing something by yourself is I did that, me. Me and only me, you know, I did that. But when you have a group, you did that.

We did that. And it's important to understand. One of the things I try so hard in my articles and stuff is I want to acknowledge as many people as I can. I always introduce my design teams because I want people to see all the people that were making this thing. That, you know, I want everybody to get their credit. I want everybody, you know, that a team is not an individual. And so that is very key. So anyway, guys, I hope this gave you a good insight.

into team design. But I'm at work, so we don't know what that means. It means to the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you guys next time. Bye-bye.