Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1292: Designing for a Format

Episode Date: November 7, 2025

This episode talks about why it's good for R&D to design around a format you play.

I'm pulling in my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay. So today, I'm going to address a common comment I get in social media on my blog. People who are like, stop designing for our format. Our format was better when you weren't designing for it. So I'm going to use Commander as my through line today.

Not that people never say this but other formats, but Commander is the one I hear it most about. that Commander was more fun when you weren't designing for our format. So I want to talk a little bit of why. Why do we design for formats? Why do we just make generic magic cards in a vacuum? Why do we do that? So first and foremost, we design magic for people to play magic. That, I mean, our goal, as simple as that is,

we're making something that has a use case that we want people to use. In order to do that, we have to figure out how people are using it. There's no such thing really is designing in a vacuum. Like you design, it's almost like I'm going to build a lamp

but I'm not going to build a lamp specifically for anybody. Like, well, what kind of lamp? Is it a desktop lamp? Is it a bedside lamp? What's the functionality of my lamp? For those that have not listened to this podcast for a long time,

LAMP is my go-to when I talk about designing things in general. Like, when we design something, you have to design for the use case of what you expect it to be used for. That is how you design things. And a big part of that is the iterative process is we make something, we play test with it, we get notes on it, and then we adapt it. Now, there are many different ways to play magic. And to be honest, we don't necessarily design for all of them, only because that's an endless. task. But we do design for the majority use cases. So the big things we design for, we design with limited in mine, especially draft. We design with standard in mine. And we design with commander

in mine. Something like modern we think about. Things that are, you know, next tiered on, we think about. And then there's lots of lots of formats, you know, Canadian Highland or whatever, things in which they exist and we make cards, but we don't specifically design for them just because there's not the volume, like we're trying to design for the largest use case. That is what we design. So obviously, magic changes over time. How we design magic today is different than how we designed 30 years ago, because the use case is different, how people are using it. So let me walk through a little bit of what are the advantages of us designing for your format. Why is that a good thing? And I also talk a little bit about, is there a downside? I'm not saying there's a little bit of

downside. I'll talk about that. But I think it's mostly upside. That is, that is my contention today that you, you want us designing for your format. So, okay, so let's first start from the very beginning of the process, from exploratory design, vision design. Why do you want it's designing for your format? And the answer is, you want your format to be relevant. So once again, Commander is my example today. Once upon the time, we did not have, like, we didn't even think about Commander in design, in early design.

And what happens is often we'll make things that aren't even viable, right? Like, it's very possible to make mechanics that don't work in Commander. And there's a couple different things. One is, so we have what we call parasitic mechanics. what a parasitic mechanic is is I make a mechanic that is only usable with things in the set that I'm making it in. And

there's a certain amount of parasitic mechanics that go on, but Commander has a huge problem with parasitic mechanics. And the answer there is a volume answer. So let's say I make a new set and I make a mechanic where really you need this to play with it. But even if we do a large, even

if we can make it a major, major theme of the set that we are in, You know, we're going to make 35 cards, 40 cards, maybe. Now, in 60 card where you have four of, that's fine, that's more than enough. You know, that, you know, and remember, mechanics that big are spread across color. So it's not even like any one color or color combination gets a lot of that. They get a fifth of it. And so, you know, we'll make something like energy.

Energy was like a major, major element of Caledus, the stuff that introduced it. But the idea was for a 100-car single-ton format, it's just not enough. One set, even one set that's blowing it out and doing a whole bunch with it, it's just not enough. And so if we just make too many of those, I mean, once again, it's not that every mechanic we make have to be for Commander, but we want to make sure when we make a set that some of the mechanics are for Commander, that some of the things are relevant, and that, you know, for example, the fact that Commander exists, now when we're looking at our suite of mechanics, We do, in fact, ask ourselves, do any of the mechanics, are they relevant in Commander?

Can you play them in Commander? You know, we have to be very conscious of thinking about what we're doing, what's the suite of the mechanics we're doing, what themes are we doing? And we now, in Exploratory Design and, especially in Vision Design, will have a casual play designer, somebody whose expertise is in Commander, so that we can get notes about whether things will or will not work in Commander. And early on, when we're doing early design, things are very flexible. The system is very flexible.

So I have three or four different ways to do a mechanic, and I have somebody who's sitting in the room saying, you know, it would work better in Commander if you did this. I can hear that. I can adapt things. And so just having the voice of thinking about what the format is means early on in the creation. This is before we get to single cards, just so the creation of themes of the format. mechanics of larger sets, we actually lean toward the things we need to do. Much like, for example, limited, there's a lot of things we need to do to make limited a good format. So we think about that

early on. If we didn't think about limited early in the process, when we got time to, you know, make limited, it wouldn't work. That there's a lot of structural things that have happened. So first and foremost, just thinking about the format means as you start to do the very basic building of a set that you're making, the idea that somebody in the room is saying, hey, here's a note about how you can make it better for this format, helps the format, you know, helps push things toward the format, helps make things more relevant to the format. And I can't stress enough that, like, we do a thing called Vision Summit that's at the end of Vision or, you know, three quarters into the way of Vision.

And one of the things at Vision Summit is I have people who are experts in a lot of different areas. You know, I have people who are competitive play designers who are thinking about things like standard to go, yeah, I think this mechanic will work well for standard if, or this mechanic won't work well because, and I'm getting a sense of, okay, do our mechanics work well for standard. You know, I'm getting that for a commander. Do our mechanics work well for a commander? You know, will they work well for a limited? Like all the different things are coming in so we can get a sense of are we building something that down the road is going to be good for what we need, you know, for all the different ways they'll get used. So that is very important. Just the idea that just the idea that you're keeping in mind that these things are relevant. And the other thing that I'll get into, but one of the advantages of playtesting something and iterating on something is you start to understand what the format really wants, what it needs.

one of the advantages of having a casual play design team for commander is I have people who are experts in commander who play commander all the time who designed for commander all the time who are constantly thinking about commander so when I present something to them they can say oh this is why this wheeler won't work and go in great detail of or what the other thing that's very very effective is this is close you know if you push in this direction it would make it much worked much better. And that's a lot of things you want to hear early on when, you know, early in design, things are very flexible.

Like, you know, and a lot of times when you're designing, you have choices of what you want to do, knowing that when you're trying to make those choices, what impact those choices will have on the ways people will play the, play magic down the road, very valuable. So another interesting thing is, so regular listeners of this podcast, cast or my columns or whatever. One of my big themes is the key to designing is what we call finding the fun. And what that means is you playtest your stuff, you figure out what about it is the most fun thing. What's the most fun thing to be doing?

And then you have to make sure that the cards encourage you to do the thing that is the fun thing. And I've talked about this many times. If you make players do something unfun to win, they'll do it because they're trying to win, but then they won't have a good time, and they will blame you the game designer because you made something that they sort of followed the rules of what to do and didn't have a good time. That is fun to you, the game designer. It is up to you to say, okay, what is the inherent fun there?

We spent a lot of time, especially in early design, when we're to start figuring out mechanics of where's the fun, where's the cool thing? Where am I doing something, you know, that I go, ooh, this is neat. I'm glad I'm caring about A, B, or C, you know. And that's a lot of it. Like, I tell the story about Zendikar when we tried, whatever, 46 land mechanics. And it wasn't until we got to the landfall. We're like, oh, there's something here.

Wow. Getting a reward for doing something you fundamentally want to do just felt good. And the idea that, you know, sometimes I would hold off on land because strategically makes more sense to play it later. Or late in the game, I dream of drawing a land. That's just something that never happened, you know, and that there was a lot of inherent fun there. And that's why we tried 46 mechanics. A lot of them weren't fun. In fact, the immediate predecessor to landfall, which was the exact opposite, the idea that you got rewarded for not playing land, made it super unfun.

People were constantly manis-growing themselves, and then, you know, not, I mean, R&D understood why it was happening. But I think a lot of players would have done it and kept losing games, but not even understand why they were losing the game. So we need to find the fun If you want to find the fun You got to understand where the fun is And that comes from play testing and iterating And figuring out Oh yeah this kind of thing

Playing magic this kind of way Is a lot of fun And that that is another thing That if we care about your you know If we think about the format We are thinking actively about where the fun in that format And how can we lean into that You know another thing

happens, you know, one of the ongoing themes today is that you want your format, you know, it's nice if your format could have playtesting. Not every format gets playtesting because we, you know, we sort of have to lean into where the majority people are playing just because there's infinite ways to play magic. But when you get playtesting, A, you just get people playing your card, you know, the cards in the way you play them. And those players, you know, those R&D folk, get a lot of reps in it. So they also sort of understand when something's working

or not working quickly. And so that all comes together. That they understand where the fun is. They can recognize more quickly when the fun is being reached. And they can sort of push and pull to get the mechanics going in the directions

that make it more fun. Okay, the other thing that we can do when it is a format that we think about is we can look at what is what is going on in the format and say to our oh, are there gaps? Are there problems? Is there something that we need to fix? The classic

example of this would be when Commander gets introduced. So real quickly, for those who don't know the other commander story, Sheldon Menary was in the Army, I believe, and he would move around a lot. He could station in different places, as the Army often would do. And so he got stationed in Alaska. And so he always would find his local game store and find a local game crowd, and they were playing this format that they had made up. And he really thought it had a potential. He tweaked it a bit, but it would be essentially what they originally called E.D.H. Elder Dragon Highlander, which we now know as commander.

He liked the format, and he would play it with his friends, and then he introduced it to some of the judges at the pro tour. And after judging the end of the day, they would play it at the pro tour. And then other people sort of heard about it, they started building decks, and it slowly built a small sort of fan base. eventually it got big enough that R&D said, you know, this seems like a cool thing. We should make a product, so we made a product for it.

Product goes like gang buffers, and so we start making more products for it, and then starts the snowball, the snowballing. Essentially, like I said, I think Commander inherently is a very fun format, but it was important to expose it to more people. And, you know, like Sheldon did really good of getting the initial grassroots out,

and then I think Wizards picking it up, did a lot to just expose it to a lot, lot more people. So, one of the things about the format, though, is it made a few fundamental shifts from how normal magic is designed. Probably the biggest is you don't have one opponent, you have three opponents, and they're not at 20 life, they're at 40 life. So certain things, certain colors really leaned into that.

Blue is all about card drawing, greens about ramping. Those are both great in Commander. but red and white leaned into more direct fast strategies. Red's whole thing was, I'm going to beat you, you know, before you have a chance to stop me. Well, I now have, instead of trying to do 20 damage, I now have to do 120 damage. Okay, that was a big problem for red, you know.

And that early on, both the red and white were played way, way less than the other colors. You know, that the red and white were showing up at a much smaller percentage. So one of the things we had to do, because we cared about the format, because we were thinking about the format, is the council of color spent some time and energy saying, okay, what do red and white need to do in Commander? And is it a way we can do that in a way that feels red and white?

For example, one of the big examples was card advantage was really important. When you're playing a game that goes longer, if you run out of steam and don't have the ability to get more cards, it's less fun. So we came up with impulsive draw for red. The idea that red can have extra cards, but it's got to use them right away. It felt very red. With White, the idea of, we're going to make hoops that white is to jump through. You can only get one card a turn.

White's drawing long, not short, meaning it gets a lot of cards over time, but not all at once. Allowed White to have more of a long game. We started giving White more cantip-trip creatures, meaning you draw a card when you play the creature. So we started doing things that gave White a play pattern and red a play pattern. And it wasn't just those things, but the point is the Council of Cowers, we thought about what was needed and we could start adjusting things and pushing things and finding new space. So the reality is if your format is something we can think about, we can address problems in the format. We can address inequities in the format, balances in the format. And because it's

something that we are playtesting, because it's something we have experience of seeing, we can get a lot of notes of where the problems are. And that comes from paying attention. That comes from understanding. And, you know, and it's not just, I mean, Color Pie is my example here, but there are a lot of different things as they would play that they realize that certain colors, and sometimes it was

more colors can use this thing like card drawing. Sometimes it was more of, like, what are things the colors already do that work best? What are the commander-friendly things of each color? We could push on those a little more. But the idea that because we think about the

format, we can sort of fill in the gaps that are needed is very important. And a side connection to that is when we work on a format, we interact with the public. I enter public every day. And players often say, hey, I would really like this thing. And I keep track of all the requests from the players. But the more popular of the format, the more requests I get, and the more often the more common requests I get. Like a really common thing that I'll get is Here's a theme that I really want to make a deck out of for commander, but the commander doesn't exist. Could you please make a, you know, with these three colors, with this theme.

The cards exist to make it. I don't have the commander. And so we keep all those notes. And from time to time, we see the opportunity to do that. Oh, a lot of times in, you know, we're making commander decks. I know Gavin and I, because we have the most interaction with the public, We'll say, oh, you have to make this thing. This is the thing that they've been asking for for a long time.

And here's the perfect opportunity to make it. We need to do that. And it's something that, you know, I know the CSP has a long list of things they know people have asked for and people have wanted. And so filling in the gap flush answering requests is another part of caring about the format, meaning if we know what is either missing or what people are saying they want, we have the opportunity to do. that. Because we are thinking about the format, it allows us easier to give things that people need for the format. And responding to concerns is pretty big. So, sorry, that's more answering requests. Responding to concerns is, I guess, a corollary of a last thing. Just like people say, hey, I'm missing something and I want it. Also, when people don't like something, when

something is unfun or something ends up working not the way we think, people will complain about that, right? I don't like thing X. Stop doing thing X. And we can do that. So I want to use this as a segue into, are there problems designing for your format? And I definitely want to stress that I think overall designing for formats is very valuable and it's net gain. I do think that us designed for Commander has made Commander a lot more fun, but people do complain about things. I don't want to address that. I don't want to say

that. I think the two biggest problems that design for Form, and this is where people get complaints, one is, there is a certain learning curve that comes from doing something. When we make stuff for the first time,

sometimes we lean into what we consider the low-hanging fruit. But that's not always the right answer. So my example here is, I think when we first started designing for commander, we leaned into some wrong assumptions. One is we started making commanders that were sort of universally good, meaning, oh, here's just a strong commander. So one of the truisms of design is good design expands choices, bad design restricts choices.

We are a trading card game. We want to have a lot of options available for you. So if we make something that instead of going, ooh, what do I do? Of course I do that. That's not good, right? So when we make sort of universally good commanders that are just super powerful, well, people stop playing all the other interesting commanders and just start playing this one powerful commander.

Oh, well, it does what I need to do, you know, it does what these other 10 commanders do, but better. And early magic, as we were sort of learning what we were doing, we definitely fell into that trap. That was part of the learning curve. and we definitely early on made a few too many commanders that were a little more universally good than we should. Nowadays, our philosophy on commanders

is that we want commanders to be more niche, right? I want the commander to do something, ideally, that something else wasn't always doing. Or if someone else was doing, let's do in colors we didn't do it before. Let's find ways to introduce things that every commander we want you to build a deck you've never built before. We don't want you to just take a deck you already have and replace your commander with this commander.

That is not our goal. But the mere act of, I mean, one of the challenges of internal formats is cards don't go away. So if we are sort of cutting our teeth, learning things and figuring things out, we will make some mistakes. And it's not that we never make mistakes later in the process.

We do. Hopefully we'll make new mistakes. But part of the process of trying to do something is sometimes we're overly efficient. or we make mistakes that we learn with time but because internal formats they don't go away standard as we learn our lessons eventually they go out of standard limited as we learn our lessons

well new limited formats don't have that internal formats are kind of unique and that cards don't barring banning cards don't really go away so when we sort of make a mistake and sort of learning about things that sticks around and we understand that the second thing is and a correlation of this is sometimes in trying to make something

we figure out in need, but then we fill it too efficiently. And the classic example there is there are cards for a commander that if you're trying to optimize, not everyone needs to optimize, Commander's the casual format, but if you're trying to optimize, you kind of got to play this card in this color.

This card is so good in this color that it is you know, and once again, it shrinks things. Like if every red deck is supposed to play this card, that's not ideal. What we want to do is make our strong cards

strong in certain ways if you're doing certain things but not universally strong. And so if we make universally strong cards, that also can sort of reduce things rather than expand. And so it is true that when designed for your format,

especially early in the process, sometimes we can make things that collapse rather than expand the format. And that's a mistake and we shouldn't do that. But, I mean, my larger argument today is while we will make some errors, we will do a lot more good than bad. Like, for example, I've talked some people, there's a format called pre-DH, where it is

commander, but you play with cards that only exist from before Wizards started making commander products. And the idea is, there's a lot of nostalgia to that. And one of the things that people say, when they go back, like, oh, there's a lot of things you take for granted that, you know, once it's gone, once you realize all the stuff that Wizards, in fact, did do. For example, we did a lot to make manna work. That if you go back to the old system and you don't have access to like dual, actual old dual lands, it's hard to make manor work. We've done a lot of things to help you with mana. We also, like, you go back and you

realize the red-white problem exists again. Like, there's a lot of things that we fix. There's a lot of tools that we've made that when you go back and you sort of play before we've added those tools, you start to recognize, oh, well, those tools were kind of nice. And so there's a lot added there. The one other thing that I need to talk about a little bit is to use my metaphor, to use a metaphor. I like metaphors. Let's say you're into music and you find this band, that's this alternate band that nobody knows about.

You buy the t-shirt and wear it around and nobody even knows the t-shirt. Like, you're cool, you're the only one you see wearing the t-shirt. And when they come to town and they're at the local, you know, club, the tiny club, and it's easy to get tickets because no one's heard of them. And you're in on the cutting ground floor. You are, you know, this is a band you connect to. And then that band starts becoming popular. And all of a sudden, it's not so easy to get tickets to the band.

And they're not playing at the club anymore. They're playing at a stadium. But even then, it's hard to get tickets. And when you walk around, everybody's wearing a t-shirt with a band on it. And when you wear it, people are like, oh, yeah, you like that band. You're like, there's something very special about be in early. And, I mean, Commander has had a lot of that, that it went from being this kind of rag-tag format that was sort of fun that you were experimenting with the dregs that no one will touch into sort of the powerhouse.

I mean, it's the number one played tabletop format, right? It is the 800-pound gorilla in tabletop right now. And there is a lot of things that change, you know, the dynamics are different. So, for example, one of the side effects of being a pie, when you are playing a format in which you are the only one playing, or you and maybe a few friends, but, like, it's not a well-played format. When you are figuring what to play, you got no help that you are figuring out all in your own. And while there's downside of that, the upside is, it's, you know, it's fresh, fresh-fallen snow.

The design space is open for you and that you can really explore everything and everything's possible. And you just, there is a world of discovery to be had because there's nobody to tell you what to do or not to do. But as it becomes popular, as more people start playing it, all of a sudden you get resources like EDH rec, you know, a place that lists decks that people are playing. you get to see other people playing the format and even if you're not constantly thinking about it you're starting to get informed on it oh you're playing white well here's all the good white cards oh you're playing blue here's all the good blue cards

and all of a sudden what once was a wide open thing starts feeling a bit smaller and like I said if you were optimizing for the format you know there are more cards made thinking about the format And so my big point here is as you sort of evolve, the format changes in feel. And I think a lot of people talking about stop designing for my format really want to like recapture some early feeling of the format.

But the format becoming popular, the format sort of increasing and making more people aware of it and creating more awareness of it changes the essence of what the format is. and I think a lot of Stop Designed for Commander is this idea that it was R&D designing for it that made it change and I'm not

obviously we've made cars that probably if you're trying to optimize the format we have made some cards that you know help you play a little more efficiently but the reality is I know Aaron Forsyth told me the story of when he first got introduced to Commander back in the day

and he made really really powerful Commander deck and then had to be told, well, you don't do that. It's not as if you couldn't make efficient decks back in the day. Even in pre-EH, you can make really efficient decks that are super unfun. Like, Magic had broken things. And that's the other thing I guess that I should stress here is when we make a stuff for a format and we playtest the format, we not only figure out what is working for the format,

meaning we're not making cards that go nowhere. We're making more cards point toward you. But we're also making sure that when things are broken that we address them. Like, R&D just didn't care. Let's say we just didn't care about Commander. A couple of things would happen. A lot of those cards would be relevant for Commander.

A lot more sets wouldn't speak to Commander. A lot of things, we wouldn't be filling in the gaps. We wouldn't be giving cards people want. But we'd also be making things that were broken for that format. Because when we're not focused on the format, it's very easy to make things that cause problems in the format and that one of the nice things about that is

we have an entire team the casual play design team that play tests I'll say most of the cards making sure that those cards aren't causing problems now they're also making sure the cards be as fun as they can be we're tweaking things and improving cards

but the other thing that's important is there is a safety valve to make sure that the broken unfund stuff doesn't get made that gets changed and that's the big The idea that an R&D just wasn't designed for the format, what would happen is wayless cards would be relevant and

wayless cards would cause problems. And in the end, it would make the format less fun. You know, that I know there's this idea that, you know, somehow there's this purity of it and that when R&D gets involved, somehow it's like, it's tainting it.

But the reality is it just means that we're spending time and attention on it, that we are spending care on it, that we are playtesting with it, that we are looking at it, that we are thinking about it. And I, my point of today is things are better when we actually think about it, when we're playing with it, when we're iterating on it, when we are, it's in our mindset as we make magic. Us not thinking about it and things randomly happening, that is just chaos. That is not making it better. And I get, there's this time back in the day where we didn't care about it,

where there's this discovery of trying to find these things, but that is, that's the day of the, the band's in the club that isn't true anymore you know the bro if the amount of people playing commander now that number of people

were playing back in the day you would feel the same way about back in the day the same systems would happen there are better cards people would find those better cards that would be broken stuff in fact I think it would be even worse than now

because at least now we're actively thinking about it and there's less things that are problematic so anyway guys that is my podcast guessing why designing for your format is in fact actually good for your format. Okay, guys, well, I'm now at work, so we all know what it means? It means it's the end of my drive to work.

So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you guys next time. Bye-bye.