Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1336: The Importance of Goat Guy

Episode Date: May 1, 2026

Who is Goat Guy? Why is he important? There's only one way to find out.

I'm pulling away from the parking lot. We all know what that means, or maybe we don't. It's time to rather drive from work. So here's what going on. Yesterday, I recorded a podcast, and I'm like, you know what? I can do that better. So this morning, I recorded a second time, and I liked it, and it wasn't bad, but I said, you know what?

I think I can do it me better. But tomorrow, I leave on a plane from MagicCon, Las Vegas. And so this was my last chance to record it. So I'm doing it on my way home. So hopefully this is the one that I like. Anyway, I've dubbed this episode, this podcast, The Importance of Goat Guy. Who is Goat Guy?

I guess we'll start it there. Regular listeners don't remember Goat Guy. I've talked about Goat Guy before. So Goat Guy is a person who I don't remember their name. I just prefer them as Goat Guy. They write to me from time to time talking about how much they love goats in magic. and normally the letters sometimes are asking for more goats or sometimes when we make a goat they thank us

they thank me for us making goats but it is somebody who is very focused on the goats in magic I refer to them as goat guy so I want to talk a little bit of today but the importance of goat guy and when I say goat guy I mean all the goat people I don't just mean specifically a goat guy but I want to talk about there's an ask

of the game I want to talk about, and I think that Goat Guy does a good job of capturing that aspect. So let me set the scene. A lot of time I talk about how we do market research, and we gauge how popular mechanics are and settings. Like, we want to know what people like. Like, fundamentally, my job and the job of the other designers is to make something that is enjoyable for all of you.

We want to make something that you like playing. How do we do that? Well, one of the ways we can do that is by talking to you and figuring out what things you like and then doing more of those. So as a general rule, the more something is popular, the more that players like it, the more we are likely to do it. Because, oh, we know that players like it. I mean, on some level, when we make a set, I want to maximize how much that set will make the magic audience at large happy. And to do that, you know, like, for example, the way I like to think of it is imagine

I have a checklist of every magic player. And then every card we make checks off some people on that list. My goal is every set, I want at least one card in every set that you just love, that you're like, this is amazing. This is why I play magic. I love this card. And I'm not saying with every set we hit everybody. But that's the goal. The goal is we want to make everybody happy with the game. And so one of the ways to do that, one of the easier ways to do that, is figuring out what the majority like. We'll do market research and say, oh, well, when we ask people about creature types, the number one creature type is dragons. So you know what? Let's make sure most sets have a dragon.

Occasionally, let's do sets, builds around dragons. You know, there's a lot of sort of crafting what we do, taking the majority opinion in mind. only because it just, like, if I'm trying to make the most number of people happy, obviously leaning into things that I know more people like does that. But, and this is kind of the focus of today's podcast, that idea only goes so far. That there's only so much that I can just lean on sort of what we know more people like to be the defining trait of what we do. I'm not saying we don't.

Obviously, we spent a lot of time caring about what people think, and that shapes what we do. But let's talk about Goat Guy, because today is the importance of Go Guy. So Go Guy, so I believe that the first goat ever was in Ice Age. So there's a mechanic that we no longer use called Landwalk. It showed up in Alpha. And the way Landwalk works actually, there's five different types.

or there's actually more than five, but normally land references a land, usually a basic land type. In Alpha, there was forest walk, there was island walk, and there was swamp walk originally. We would later do mountain walk and plains walk. So the flavor of landwalk is that if you have forest walk, for example, you're so crafting the forest, you know the forest so well that your opponent couldn't catch you if they could sneak through the forest.

So if your opponent has a force in play and you have a creature with forest walk, they can't block your creature with forest walk. It's a shandon and dryad. It's a creature that knows the forest like the back of their hand and you can't catch them in the forest because they're experts in the forest. Likewise, underwater is a island walk

or in the swamp, a swamp walk. So anyway, we're in Ice Age. Ice Age was in the summer of 95. And it had a sort of a Scandinavian flavor, sort of a Nordic Scandinavian flavor. And so one of the things that they wanted to do was capture things that were flavorful there.

And one of them, one of the designers, came to the realization that if they wanted to make a mountain walk creature, we could do that, but you needed a creature that is skillful in crossing the mountains. And obviously they must have read about, there are goats that live in the mountains, mountain goats, and they walk along the cracks of the mountain in ways that most people could not function,

but the mountain goats can. And so the idea of a mountain goat makes a lot of sense for a mountain walk creature. That is my guess how they got to mountain walk. I mean, I just thought how they got to mountain goat is they wanted to make a mountain walk creature they were doing a Nordic-Skinadian set, and the best answer for that was a mountain goat.

Now, I'm sure when they made that card, they were not thinking about one day there will be a person who loves goats. And here we are starting that great journey. I don't think they thought that. I just think they thought, oh, well, okay, here's a cool thing. And that one of the things in magic that we want to do is we just want to make cool things. So a lot of times we're thinking about what people do or don't like. But sometimes we just want to make more cool things. And that in my GDC speech, back in 2016, I did a speech at the game developers conference,

where I talked about my 20 lessons, all of which, by the way, did a podcast all my life. One of the lessons was this idea that the details matter. And the premise behind it was that your audience is going to fall in love with something in your game. But you don't know what it is. And so what you want to do is sweat to the details because the details are the thing that are what people are going to fall in love with. So my example here that I used in my talk is Fibble Fem. So Fibble Fib is a little homunculei from Ravnika.

And so we were making a card, I think in Return to Ravnika, where we wanted to show the card was a bounce spell. We're either put a creature, I think, on top of the library. maybe top of bottom, but exactly. But anyway, we needed a flavor for this bounce spell. And so somebody, and I'm sure who, somebody in the creative team, said, well, what if we call it totally lost?

And the flavor is there's this little creature that is completely lost. And I don't know who decided to make it a homunculus. I don't know if that was in the card concept. I don't know if the artist just thought it's cool. I don't know where exactly the idea came from. But somebody somewhere said, There's a little creature, maybe it's a monculus, and he lost.

And so the artist drew that, and it was adorable. So much so that fibble-thips started becoming sort of a meme. That people put them, I remember there's a, where's Waldo they put them in? And there's just with little, like, tiny memes online. It's just, there's some, every once in a while we make something, and it grabs people. And fibble-fibble-fibs exactly that. We made little stuffed fibble-thips, and we made fibble-fip phone cases, and we've done a lot with Fibbleth.

In fact, we eventually gave Fibbizp his own card. And next time we were wrapping it, we started hiding Fibbensip in the background of pictures. Like, this Sibbleth became a thing, a magic thing. And the reality is, it's not when we made

totally lost. We knew aha, we were making the next big thing for magic. We just made something fun and cool, and people glummed on to that. And, so let's go back to Gope Guy. I think the reason that goat guy likes goats, I mean, A, they probably like goats, but B, that one of the things that is very important, and I did a whole podcast recently on identity, is that one of the things about the activities is you want to sort of express yourself through the things you love. And that most games, when you buy the game, everybody gets the same pieces, but still, there's different things to do.

that, you know, if you play chess or Scrabble or Monopoly, there's different strategies. There's different aspects of the game you can lean into. And that, you know, you can sort of explore the space that you want to explore. And that part of any game is sort of figuring out what is your aspect of the game. For example, one of the things I noticed in R&D is that different people have different sort of draft, I'm sure the right word here, draft like a... favorites. For example, like Aaron Forsyce, he likes to wrap as many colors as he can. If he can play four color, five color, he will. I'm the exact opposite. If I can get away with monol color,

I will draft monol color day and day night. I love drafting one color. And it's just a different strategies, just different inclinations. But there's something about how you play the game, sort of says something about who you are in a fun way. And so what happens is people on any game want to sort of personify and like sort of claim their corner of the game. But magic goes one step further. Magic is you, the player, has so much ability to shape what it is you play with. Because there's lots of pieces. Right now there's over 30,000 pieces.

And you, the player, get to pick 60 or 100 or 40, depends on your format. You get to pick some number to play the way you want to play. And so the idea there is that, there is something very core to finding something. I mean, it depends a lot on the players. Some players might like something. It doesn't matter than a lot of other players. Maybe they enjoy that they enjoy some of the other people do enjoy.

But there's some players that are like, you know what, I want to find my own corner. I want to find my own, I want to do something that I put my steak in the ground. There are a lot of players that love murph folk or elves or goblins. But I, I am goblin guy. I'm not gobbling guy. I'm goat guy. I'm goat guy. I love goats.

One of the fun things for me is that I sort of carved out of space that, I mean, with as many magic players as there probably is other goat people. But as far as goat guy knows, as far goat guy experiences, he sees nobody playing goats. That goats are his thing.

Okay, so the reason I bring this up is our job is to make people fall in love with the game. Some amount of it is this playing sort of the majority numbers. We make things, what do people? Like, some of our job is just, I make things, I get feedback, and then I do the things that are successful.

I often talk about success. Success breeds repetition, right? If I do something to people love it, I'm probably going to do that again. If we go to a plane and people love it, probably should do that plane again. If we go somewhere and make a new mechanic, if people love it, probably should do that mechanic again.

That there's a lot of impetus to sort of take the things that are successful and do them. But that is not the only recipe for success. And the reason is, a la goki, we need to create the opportunity for people to sort of find their own space in the game, find their corner of the game. And that doesn't come from just doing the most popular things. Because the person who wants to find their own space is not going to do the things that everybody else wants by definition. Now, given, there are people that subdivide, like, I love elves, but I will find my take on elves. I'm the elf druid guy.

I'm the smiling elf guy. Whatever it is, like, you can subdivide within existing things. So when I said someone finds their own space, it's not that popular things someone can't find their own space within that. They can. They do. But one of the things that's really important for us is we really have to create this moments of organicness, where we do something that's cool.

just because it's cool in a vacuum. Like totally lost. It's a good example where I don't think Fibbleth was fitting some larger agenda. I mean, there's homunculus, I guess, in, like, we had to answer with things that were in Raphneka. So Fibblethift, I don't think,

is the first homunculine in Ravica. But we really wanted to do something where we leaned into that. And when I look back, a lot of sort of this moments where we do something that Kibble something, it's because we just did something organic. We just did something

that it tickled our funny bones. One of the interesting things is when I first got to Wizard so Richard Garfield in Alpha made a card called Berserk. So Berserk cost one green mana and target creature, I think it's just a target creature, maybe it's a target of you control.

It gets its power doubles for the turn. But then, an end of turn, I think, the creature goes away and gets sacrificed and dies. So the idea is, oh, I can make this creature really powerful, but it comes at a cost. So there's a period in time where nobody was playing creatures because of

the chant world, like abyss and things. And in Netherboid. Nobody was playing creatures. It really was like, and I decided, like, I was, I was the Johnny that was, you know, Iowa, don't tell me I can't play creatures. So I made a little weenie deck out of, it's green blue, had script sprites and flying and then I just had giant growth and unstable mutations

and I just would make them big. And one of the things that was great, I could only have one Berserk because it was restricted at the time, but I would have Berserk. A lot of time, you know, I would kill people in turn... I could kill one turn one, but normally turn two or three I would kill them.

It was a pretty fast deck. And one of the things that was really valuable was Berserk. But anyway, I just... From Berserk, I grew a love of doubling. I thought it was really... cool. So early magic, I just made a lot of doubling cards because it

entertained me and I liked it. And I guess in my heart of heart, I wanted to believe that I liked it, other people would like it. What's not to like about numbers getting bigger, right? But R&D at the time, this was an R&D was pretty small. I used to make, every time they make a doubling card, they would just make fun to me, they go, another doubling card? No, they put it in the sack.

But they would just tease me that I kept making doubling cards. And eventually it sort of culminated in, in Ravnica I needed to make a mono green card that crossed over between Golgari and Celestnia. And I realized that Golgari really cared about counters and Celestna really cared about tokens.

Well, what if the common mind was doubling them? And so I made doubling season. And I don't know, like I swear when I made it, I just thought it'd be a cool card to make. But people responded to it. And it turns out that all my doubling cards were popular because people like doubling. And what happened was, you know, as people discovered it and we learned to be people, like it, we started making more doubling cards. Now we do doubling cards all the time. So, like, part of our exploration, part of trying new things is some of the time we will find

things that while we're not doing a lot, we could be doing a lot because people really like it. So there's something to be gained of exploration because maybe we do find new pockets of things. And that is important. And exploration is always important. But it's getting back to goat guy. there is something really important that we do where we kind of carve space. We want to make cards. There's a concept, so I took an aesthetics class. I took an aesthetic class when I was in college.

So I went to communication school, and one of the classes they make you take is a class called aesthetics, which is basically the study of beauty. And the idea is that you want to think of beauty as being very subjective, but on some level it's not. There are certain qualities that humans, as a species, are attracted to.

Symmetry, balance. There's a quality that we're attracted to, and that if you ask people, if you take two pictures and say which person is more beautiful to you and you ask a whole bunch of people, usually it will not be 50-50. Usually, the majority of people will find one of the two faces more attractive than the other face. Why is that? And the idea is it has a lot to do with aesthetics. Now, aesthetics doesn't mean, like, some, well, most people will pick something.

Other people pick that the thing. Aesthetics is sort of saying, well, we're kind of guided by certain principles. Where was I going with this? Oh, so there's a concept of an aesthetic called ugly beauty. And the idea is that there are certain things that are sort of people like not because it fits the aesthetic, but because it breaks the aesthetic. The idea is sometimes you do something

that the non-traditionalness of it itself makes it attractive. And I bring that up because in making magic cards, like our goal is never, very rarely, I mean, every once in a while we make one with nothing, where when Brian Tisbid and we make one with nothing,

he was trying to make a card but make people go, why would you make this card? Like, Brian was doing that in perfect. We don't do that a lot. back in the day we had some one called discriminator cards but nowadays we want everybody to love the car I mean sorry we want everybody to love something

every card should be loved by someone doesn't have to be loved by everyone but should be loved by someone and so one of the things that we try to do is we want to make cards like we want to make a lot of cards that fall into patterns that we understand but we also want to make quirky cards

we want to make cards that like oh like one of my favorite things to do And there's different kinds of working cards. I love, for example, making what I call Johnny Jenny Challenge cards. And the idea is, it's a card that does something weird. And the answer is, what do you do with that? Like, there's a card we made, the design team made it in Estrade. We did it in our meeting one day.

We were doing top-down design. We made a card called Seance. And what Seance did is it brought a creature back from the graveyard, but it couldn't attack or block. And the idea is, okay, well, Why, well, what do you, why, if you couldn't get a creature back, I can't talk about what are you doing with it? And the answer was, there's things you can do with it. And hey, magic players, what would you do with this card? And that's fun to make cards where like, I, I mean, maybe we have some idea what you can do with it,

but we want to sort of challenge people and say, okay, here's a card that does a weird thing. What do you do with this card? And those quirky little things will be endearing to people. that one of the things that's really important is that we want it we want to make cards that are endearing and like I said some of that is sort of hitting upon the things we know people like obviously we do that but another thing is just sort of trying to go out the beaten track of just doing things that in a vacuum kind of tickle our funny boat to entertain us that we're like oh there's something about this I like and that not everyone will hit and not everyone will hit with every player um you know

The Fibble Fib is a good example where a lot of players like Fibble Fips. Sometimes there are the Fibble Fips of the world out there that, you know, certain people like and others don't care. You know, maybe we make a card where other people don't like the card, but there's something with a card that certain people really dig. Like last time we were in Strixhaven, we did, we did the, what's it called? The Archive. and there was one card there's a red card it had a very quirky artwork

and what we found was some people didn't like it at all but other people one is it's you know sort of that ugly beauty like there's something about it that was so different

from everything around it that it sort of it had this beauty because it wasn't like everything else and was it a faithless looting it was a red card

but anyway it was interesting watching sort of the reaction to that that some people really disliked it. Some people thought it was unattractive to them. But other people, wow, it just, it drew them in. And that we really want to be making cards like that. And that, like, knowing that goat guy is out there,

knowing that there are, and when I say goat guy, like the goat people, and I just mean people that like goats. I mean, everybody, there's something that each magic player appreciates that is something that they appreciate, that the majority does not appreciate. It's something that it speaks to them. And that part of making magic magic is we need to speak to the individual people.

That we need to make cards that make people go, oh, there's something about this that makes me, that, you know, we want people being drawn to cards in different ways. And that means that just as much as we need to make things that are kind of tried and true, we also need to make things that are untested, that are unknown.

and that a lot of, like sometimes you do something, and there's something about it that says, I have to make this card. I remember there's a card in infinity. There's an alien. He's ambassador, Blopri Blurpoop. And I remember when I came up with his name, and I don't know what, something about it tickled me into no end.

Blurpery Blurpoop just, it was very funny to me. And I said to Ari, because Ari, Ari's oral language was in charge of the name, they go, we have to call this. I go, I don't, I don't know what is it about this name, but there's something about the name that just speaks to me that, I didn't even know what it was. And that's kind of the things that I love is when the card speaks to you, the designer, in a way that you don't even understand. Like, that name is funny to me, but why is it funny?

I don't know. It's funny sounding, I guess. I don't really know why it tickles me so much. And that's, that's one of the things that we do. tried to do really hard that all of us working on are just trying to find moments and trying to find things like every single card needs to find a home and a lot of the cards are kind of like when we make a set when we make a set skeleton there's a lot of things in a set skeleton that are like look there's going to be a giant growth variant there's going to be a naturalized variant there's going to be

uh counter stuff like there's just things we put in our design skeleton they're like that's just what's going to be like a lot of magic is repetition. A lot of magic is, look, this is what makes magic fun. When we make a set, we're going to do a lot of those things. Not everything. We're going to do tweaks. We're going to have new elements that weave in in different ways. But you know what? Every set's probably going to have a giant growth or some variant of giant growth. Maybe it'll be a sorcery. Maybe it'll grant other abilities. Maybe it has the keyword of the set stapled on. Like, how exactly the giant growth is going to vary from time to time. But we're going to have a giant growth. And so,

So a lot of the way we make magic, there's a lot of structure to it. There's a lot of repetition. There's a lot of, well, this is just what magic is. And that doesn't mean we can't tweak things, but there's a certain amount of this is the system. This is what we make. We have a design skeleton. That skeleton is the same skeleton. It's a skeleton.

It's the bones of what we are doing. And we want to make sure that that exists because we need to make a magic set that feels like a magic set. And we, you, like, it is possible for us to make a magic set. where we do everything that magic can do. We're not breaking any rules of magic, but it will not feel like a magic set. If we start breaking enough sort of internal rules and not doing things,

it's just going to drift away and not feel right. And that's an important part that when we make it sad, we need to do that. So there's a lot of things, like there's a lot of continuity. There's a lot of things that are the comfort of the thing. but just as much as we need the comfort, we need the surprise, right?

I'm hearkening way back. I did a podcast in very early days about the lessons I learned from, from communications. And both comfort and surprise are a big part of that. And predictability is that they're running. So the idea is that part of what we want to do is we want to do things that you know and understand,

but we also want to do things you don't. We want to do things. that just, it tickles you because you've never seen that before. Or maybe you've seen it, but not quite in the way we do it. Or maybe there's some aspect that we push in a slightly different way. And that those things, those things become really important. That as much as I talk about design skeleton, as much as I talk about market research, like there's a lot of things we do to make sure that what we're doing is big picture what people want.

But another really important part of what we do, is trying to find those small moments, those individual cards, those things that aren't part of a larger system, they're just unique core individual things that can speak to the players. And not everyone will speak to every player. Some of them might speak to very few players.

But, you know, when they made Mountain Goat, it's not so much that they're saying, oh, goat guy exists. It was more like, hey, here's a fun, I captured something in a bottle. I want to make a mountain walker. We're in Scandinavia. Here's this cool matching of something.

One of the things I love when I make a magic set is, I love making cards that would go in no other set than the set I'm making. Now, first and foremost, that saves a little bit of design resources. That's good. But more so than that, I just like making things that are unique in their moment. And that is a really important part of what we do,

that we need to make things that aren't necessarily big picture large connective things they're small, intimate, private, quirky things and that those are really important. And it's hard. It is not like when I want to talk about how we do a certain thing.

I can, here's the rules for making lands or here's how we divide the color pie. This is something really weird. It is not something that I can just explain here's how you do it. Because there's no one. way to do it. In fact, if there was one way to do it, it would violate the essence of what I'm talking about, right? I want to make things, and I and all the other designers, want to make

things that speak to people on multiple levels, but this, this ugly beauty, this sort of hitting things that are just a little bit off from what you expect, doing things that you had not seen before. That also is a very, very important part of making magic. And there's not something, like I said, it's hard for me to talk about because there's not some internal rules. They're not some, it's not as if I can just say, here's what we do. It is not that simple. In some ways, there's art and there's science. And it's a lot easier for me to talk science, right?

Here's the process. Here's what we do. But there also is art. And sometimes it's just you make a card and you're like, this card has to go on the set. You know, and maybe emotionally I understand why I like it, but maybe intellectually I don't understand why I like it. There's some cards I've made it.

like, I don't know. Ambassador Plurpey Blore Boo is going to set. And I can't intellectually tell you why. But emotionally, I'm like, oh, yeah, that's got to be there. And there's a lot of stuff like that. And so my point of today is we want to make, we want everybody to be a goat guy in their own way. We want you to find the thing that just speaks to you

and maybe doesn't speak to other people or maybe not a lot of other people, but it speaks to you. And part of doing that is spending time and energy not on the big picture things, not on the skeleton, not on the market research, but on the quirky feel things that just feels right. And that is really important. So that was my whole podcast today was talking about how we want to make lifelong magic players.

We want people to sort of find their stamp on the game, their corner of magic. And to do that, part of doing that is us being willing to push in boundaries and try things and listen to the inner voices that don't necessarily understand why it's there. And that's an important part of making magic. Just as much as all the structural stuff I talk about all the time. It's just something that's harder to talk about. So that's why I talk about it less.

But luckily, guys, goat guys out there writing me letters and making me realize the importance of having the occasional goat. And that is symbolic of exactly the kind of thing I wanted to talk about today. So thank you. Hats off to goat guy. Thank you so much for helping me Talk about something I've been meaning to talk about, but I didn't know how to talk about. So anyway, guys, I'm now at home, because I drove home.

And so it is time for me. It is the end of my day, the end of my drive from work. So thank you guys for joining me today. I hope this was a fun topic. It was quirky. I like doing quirky things. It was a quirky topic, much like the thing I talked about today. But anyway, guys, I am home.

And so we all know what that means, it means instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making dinner. So anyway, guys, I'll see you next time. Bye-bye. Thank you.