Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #437: Great Designer Search 1, Part 2

Episode Date: May 19, 2017

This is part two of a two-part series where I examine the first Great Designer Search in detail. I walk through all the tests to get in and then all the challenges given to the contestants.

I'm pulling out of the parking lot. We all know what that means. It's time to drive to work. So today's podcast is in between me dropping off my son for spring break camp and me dropping off my daughter at school. So anyway, let's get started. So last we talked in the last podcast, we talked all about the Great Designer Search 1, the very first one. And last we had talked, we'd gotten through the second test. There were three tests you needed to get into the Great Designer Search. And I talked about the two tests last time. First was a 10-question essay test. Second was a 35-choice multiple-choice test.

So before I move on to the third test, a little bit about the second test. I did some sample questions last time. I just want to say that there was a lot of controversy around the multiple-choice test because it had definitive answers, and I needed to have definitive answers. I needed to get from thousands down to a hundred, and that requires some objectivity.

And so there definitely was some complaints that, you know, why is there a multiple choice test? And there was a lot of people who thought that they had an answer that was a legit answer. So I did post, if you go online, I posted all 35 questions and the answers to the 35 questions and then my explanation for the answers to the 35. I felt all the answers had legit answers to it. There were a couple of questions that, in retrospect,

I could have written better, were like... But because you were allowed to miss five questions, all you had to do is get a 30 out of the 35. So you could miss five questions and still advance. We decided... Well, A, I decided all 35 questions were legit questions. But even the ones that definitely... Even though if you count there were a few that were a little on the tricky side, you still could miss all of them and still advance.

In fact, you can miss all of them, miss a few more in advance. So, okay, so now we get to the third test. So I'd cut the second test so we had 100 people. And I think the way it works is I cut where whatever got a hundred people in and then everybody above that got in as well so I think like 128 my memory got into the final the final test so the final test was a design test so here's how it worked um what I wanted to do was I wanted to create a test to let you show off some car design so I wanted to test if you how you were a car design but I also wanted to make sure that you weren't showing me something you made

over the course of five years. I wanted to show that you could adapt some. So what I did is I wanted to make a test that had some parameters to it that allowed you to make one or two cards that maybe you made years ago that you loved, that you thought were awesome cards, but also forced you to sort of adapt and make some cards to constraints know, two constraints, because that's also important in the test. So here's how it worked. The test required you to design six cards.

And there were some parameters. The six cards between them had to cover all five colors. They had to cover all six card types at the time. So Planeswalker wasn't yet a card type. So you had to have an artifact, a creature, an enchantment, an instant, a land, and a sorcery, in alphabetic order. You also had to cover converted mana costs from 0 to 5. So between your six cards, you had to have a cost of 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. And you had to have two commons, two uncommons, and two rares. So at first blush, that doesn't sound like a lot of restrictions until you start to realize

a couple things. First off, you had the problem of we wanted all five colors, but we also were asking for like a land and an artifact, both of which are traditionally colorless. So if you made a land and you made an artifact, well, there's only four cards left. Assuming the artifact's not colored, you only have four cards left. So how do you do that? Now, you can make a colored artifact, you could make a multicolored card, there were a bunch of solutions to that problem. Also, there were six card types that we wanted, but you know,

it didn't give you a lot of flexibility. Now, one of the tricks that people could do is you could combine. You could make an artifact creature as one of your cards, and that freed up to allow you, for example, to make a second instant or something if you wanted to. Also, the converted mana cost, lands luckily have a converted mana cost of zero, so your land

could be your zero, but you had to sort of build the constraint in. And then, the other thing that proved to be a lot harder as people started actually designing cards, is designing to rarities is very difficult. And so, having to sort of legitimately make two comms, two uncommons, and two rares, and do that in a way

that is correct. Now, there's gray areas in the rarities and there's cards that well this card could be common or uncommon or this card could be uncommon or rare um but there are certain cards there's definitively certain rarities so um anyway um i gave everybody i forgot my day we gave a bunch of days to do the design test i don't remember exactly how many days, but it was a few days. Not a lot of time, if I remember correctly, because we wanted to give you enough time so you weren't super rushed, but not so much time that you could take forever.

So I think the test might have been 24 hours. It might have given you 24 hours to do this test. So my memory of it is that, well, actually, I think we gave the test for it to you and then you had to turn it in by midnight, I think, of, you know, you had to turn it in between,

you had a 24-hour time period to turn it in. That we gave you the test, I think you then had 48 hours to be used all the time because we gave you a full day and then you had to turn it in on a certain day between you know midnight uh and 11 59 at that night p.m that night um so the funny thing is i get in the next day and the idea is during this day people have to turn stuff in but i get in and there's one mail in the mailbox we have a special mailbox for people to turn this into uh and there was one one contest the mailbox. We had a special mailbox for people to turn this into. And there was one contestant

had turned in their design test exactly at midnight just to sort of say, hey, I'm so confident, I'm going to turn this in the second I'm allowed to turn it in. And that person was Ken Nagel. And I remember when I read it, I was like,

wow, that's a ballsy move. I'm going to turn it in I was like, wow, that's a ballsy move. I'm going to turn it in the second I can turn it. But I read his cards, and I liked them. And I'm like, well, okay, you know, it's a bold move, but if you make good cards, which he did, he advanced. Okay, so here's how it works. People designed the test. They made their six cards.

And then I went through, and I think I put them into different categories. Um, and I think what I did, so here's the way it usually would work is, um, I would go through and I put them into yes, no, and maybes. So if I put you into yes or to maybe, um, then I reread your essays. Um, if I put you into no, I don't know if I re-read your essays. I think if you weren't given by that test, then it wasn't reading, I didn't need to read again. But if you got yes or maybe, I read your essay again. And then with a much more fine-tuned sort of like looking a lot more critically. And then from that and then I think

I gave a full grade to the essays and I did yes maybe a no in the essays um for the first time too we were we were we were making sure you did things you were scanning quickly but we were that it was a quick scan I had to look at a lot of a lot of um essays so in the uh this one it was we read through them in depth we thought thought about them. But if you had not done well in the design test, I didn't read your essay again because I knew I wasn't going to pass you. And so when I read a design essay, I then got a yes, no, and maybe. So the no's came out and the no's from the essay got pulled out of the design test. So if you just utterly flunked the... So then what happened was I had a bunch of piles.

I had people, you fell into, uh, a couple of camps. Um, you could either be yes in both the, um, design test and the essay test, or you could be yes in one and maybe in the other, or you could be maybe in both. Uh, I think if you were maybe in both, uh, that was the problem. And I think you got, I think you you were maybe in both, that was the problem. And I think you got cut. And then I slowly narrowed down. I actually went through the design test and the essay test multiple times as I started narrowing people down. Because I started with 128, and then I narrowed down.

And eventually, my memory was, I got it down to 24, I think I got it down to. And the plan was I wanted to have 16 people in the final, 16 people. So I got it down to, I think, 24, maybe 32. I got it down, somewhere between 24 and 32. It was a long time ago, eight years ago. So I got it down, and then what I did is

I had other people look at the design and essay test of the people who were my contenders. And then with feedback from other people, I ended up getting 16 people. Okay, so let's talk about the 16 people. They were Conrad Corbett, Andrew Emmett,

Mark Globus, Graham Hopkins, Christopher Jablonski, Alexis Jansen, Greg Krojenta, I apologize if I mis- say Nate. I think it's a sound check. Krojenta. Chris Lurs, Ken Nagel,

Andrew Pacifico, Ryan Sutherland, Scott Van Essen, Noah Weil, Aaron Weiner, and Landon Winkler. Now, you'll notice that's only 15 names. The 16th person who made the cut, there was a whole bunch of things you had to fill out. There's forms you had to fill. There's a whole bunch of legal stuff. And somebody dropped out at the very last minute, and it really, we didn't have the time to replace them, because of all the paperwork and stuff we had to do, we needed to get started, so I actually went with 15. So there were 16 people

selected, one person in the last minute, I'm not sure whether they dropped out, or they weren't qualified, or some reason they couldn't do it. And because of the amount of energy it took, because this was an actual job interview, there were a lot of rules we had to follow. One of the rules we had to follow, by the way, was I wasn't allowed to use your picture. This has to do with rules. And so for each person, they could pick a magic card.

And then whenever we talked about them, that illustration from the magic card was what we used to refer to them. And that was a job thing. One of the people I actually know a while was at the time a columnist and his picture appeared in his column. So on our website, if you saw Noah's column, you saw his face. But if we referred to him in the contest, we could not show you his face. Even though obviously, elsewhere in the thing, you could see it. Anyway, so we had 15 people, and it was time to start the main part of the show.

So there were five main design challenges, and then there was a sixth thing. Well, okay, two. Okay, design challenge number one. Give me five. So what I did is I made them each design three five- card cycles. One was a common cycle, one was an uncommon cycle, and one was a rare cycle. Remember, this is back in the day, there was no mythic rares. Each cycle was a different card type,

and they were assigned at random. So for example, one person might have been, you're making a common cycle of creatures, and an uncommon cycle of enchantments and a rare cycle of instants. Another person might be, you're making a common cycle of lands and an uncommon cycle of sorceries and a rare cycle of creatures. So it was randomly assigned and all the different card types got assigned to the different people. So you also had to make at least one loose cycle and one tight cycle. A loose cycle means that it can be a very loose connection, where a tight cycle, usually the mana cost and a good chunk of the rules are the same. I mean, the converted mana cost and the rules are the same. So,

like, oh, they're all 2M, 2-2 creatures with an attack trigger or whatever. So they had to make at least one loose cycle and one tight cycle. And any effects that appeared on one card could not appear on the other 14 cards. So, for example, if you decide to do direct damage on your red common creature, well, then your red uncommon instant and your red rare enchantment couldn't be a damage spell. So we made a mix-up.

So at the end of this, Conrad Corbett, Greg Krogenta, and Landon Winkler got cut we went from 15 down to 12 and making cycles by the way the reason we started with that is cycles are a pretty normal part of the process if you're going to be a magic designer you need to know how to make card cycles for magic so that was it was a good place to start. And it was, once again, we only gave them to do these tests. I think we gave them 48 hours. I think you would get it on Friday night and turn it in Sunday night. I think if I remember correctly. Um, but we did not give you a lot of

time. And not only were these tests hard, these are a lot harder, these are a lot harder than they sound when you actually do it. Um, but we did not give you much time. This was very amazing. This was a lot like, you know, watch Project Runway and like, you have eight hours to design clothing made out of vegetables, you know. These were really, really hard challenges on purpose. Design challenge number two, picture this. So we gave them 10 cards, each with a specific description.

A white uncommon, which had to be a subtle answer to token making. A white rare that was a weird Johnny enchantment. A blue common that was a sorcery that wasn't card filtering, drawing, or bounce. Returning a permanent back to its owner's hand. A blue rare that was a splashy Timmy creature. A black uncommon that was an ore to be put on your own creatures. A black rare that could be anything.

A red common that was an incident or sorcery, but no direct damage, artifact destruction, or land destruction, a red uncommon that was a creature used for a draft build around, a green common, which was a creature that cost four or more, and a green rare that was a non-creature spell, something splashy and innovative. So we gave them a bunch of parameters, not giving specifically what we needed, but a bunch of descriptions, and then we gave them 10 pieces of art from magic cards that had never, we had never used the art from our slush pile. And so the idea was they had to make 10 cards and each card had to be assigned to one of the pieces of art. So once again, this is a really, really hard challenge.

This is not far apart from make a dress out of, out of lettuce or something. This is really, This is not far apart from make a dress out of lettuce or something. This is really, really hard. And so for this test, we swapped in a judge. So Brady Dobermuth, who was the head of the creative team at the time, judged instead of Aaron. And he was the one who judged about how accurate, you know, did this art and these cards have anything to do with each other? Did they make sense together? Could you have this card mechanic go with this art? cards have anything to do with each other? Do they make sense together? Could you have this card mechanic go with this art? So in the end, Christopher Jablonski, Andrew Emmett,

and Andrew Provasco got cut. So we went from 12 down to 9. Design challenge number three, silver and gold. So this was, you had to design five gold un-cards. So they had to be multicolor cards. When I say gold, they were multicolor. And they had to be un-cards. And not only did you have to design them, but you had to lay the whole thing out. You had to describe the card. You had to write the name of the card. You had to write the flavor text.

You had to do the art description. You had to make five cards and really explain what you're doing. Get the whole concept. Because the designing of an Uncard goes beyond just the mechanics. It's a whole package. So you had to make the whole package.

This is another really, really hard test. Uncards, as someone who's led, who did both unglued and unhinged, Uncards are really, really hard to make. Because one of the rules, for example, is you can't do anything in silver border that you can do in black border. So you have to, first of all, understand like what the parameters are and what makes sense. And then you have to be able to, you know, build cohesive whole cards. So anyway, it was a very difficult challenge, but they did a great job.

So Noah Weil and Aaron Weiner were eliminated. So went from nine down to seven okay next we have design challenge number four once more with feeling so for each of the remaining seven designers we took one of the people that had previously been kicked out and we took a card that they had made and had them redesign those cards in fact I think what we did is I think for each person that had been kicked out because there have been 15 so there have been eight people you had to redesign those cards. In fact, I think what we did is, I think for each person that had been kicked out, because there had been 15, so there had been eight people, you had to design eight cards, one for each person that had been knocked out.

And then there were parameters we gave you for each of those cards. We wanted you to make something inspired by them. And so we wanted to use that as inspiration to make new cards. I guess I don't need to keep saying this each time, but this was another pretty difficult one. We wanted to show that you could build on other people's work.

Each one of these was testing you, like, you know, the first one was, well, let me get through these. If I have time, I'll walk through what we were testing in a big picture. I'm not super far from Rachel's school, so I want to make sure I get through this. Okay, so Christopher Lurz and Scott Van Essen got eliminated. We went from seven down to five. So Scott Van Essen, by the way, for those that don't know, is one of the only person that was in the first grade designer search that was also in the second grade designer search.

He now actually works on dual masters and occasionally does magic work. So Scott did eventually make it to Wizards, took two grade designer searches, and even then, he didn't get hired right after the second grade designer search, but soon thereafter. Okay, design challenge number five, game, set set and match okay so we wanted you to come up with a set and you and we gave you a color and

then you had to design 11 commons assuming that what you're making was a small set you had to design all 11 commons and one splashy timmy rare to be your pre-release promo. So you had to have a cohesive idea for a set, a small set, and then you had to make the commons for us and the pre-release promo, which was at the time a splashy Timmy card. Once again, in a weekend, you had to basically come up with the idea for a small set. Now, you only had to make the commons and the one rare. But still, just coming up with the concept of hinting at what your set was about. And you probably needed a mechanic or two.

So this was really, really difficult. And in the end, Mark Globus and Ryan Sutherland would get eliminated. We went from five down to three. Mark Globus and Ryan Sutherland would get eliminated. We went from five down to three. So Mark Globus, the story here is we had to get the airplane ticket before we knew who the final three were. So it was actually cheaper for us to buy plane tickets for the final five, because at the time we knew who they were, than it was to wait till we knew who the final three were. So it turned out that Mark Globus had impressed a bunch of people and we had a free

ticket. So they ended up flying him out. One of the things they did with all the people who were in the GDS is looking for people that they were looking to hire some people, especially digital at the time. And so Mark Lobos, because he had a free plane ticket, he came out here and had an interview. He ended up getting a job. And that job started in digital digital but he would later transition over to Magic R&D and now he's a producer in Magic R&D, one of the big players in Magic R&D. So that's where we found Mark Lobos and he came in tied for fourth. Okay so the final thing is so Alexis Jansen and Ken Nagel and Graham Hopkins were the final three.

So we flew all four of them to Wizards. We gave them a tour. I gave them a personal tour. Then they had three rounds of interviews, what we called the gauntlet, which is three different groups of people. I think one was designers. I was in that one. One was developers and one was management.

And it was just, I mean, back to back to back, three one-hour interviews. And just asking a lot of hard questions, just like we would with any interview, of just really sort of putting them through their paces. We then had lunch and we invited, oh no, we just had lunch. We had lunch. I'm thinking of Genius too. And then we had a final challenge. The final challenge was a two-hour challenge, a live two-hour challenge. So what we did was we took the card Opposition from Earth's Destiny

and we wanted to recreate a real kind of experience. So I said, okay, here's what's going on. At the last minute, testing showed this card was broken. We can't use it. So here's what we need to do. We need to make a new card and we have to do it right now because the file ships today. So here's the card. Here's the art. It's the art for opposition. It was because we can't change card codes because it's so late, the name has to be somewhere between Meta Thran Elite and Private Research.

It can't be too powerful because we have no time to play test it. And we were looking at something that was interesting and novel. So we gave them one hour each to make three cards. And then we all came together for the second hour to walk through and decide what card to make. So the first hour was all about sort of, okay, you've made your parameters here. You have to make a rare blue card that has an interesting effect but it's not too powerful, that matches this art and come up with a name for it that can make sense that fits in that parameter. So we had a lot of very tight design work we had to do. And then it's about, okay, can we find the

best idea? The key to the second hour wasn't necessarily about your idea winning. It was showing that you were finding the best idea. So it turned out all three of them did very well. All three of them both turned in interesting cards and worked really well together to find the best. I don't actually remember what we ended up with. If you go online, though, it's there. And in the end, so what had happened, by the way, was

we got down to the final three. Bran had had some money for something that they didn't end up using and it was going to go away if it didn't get used by the end of the year and so it ended up going into a party we had a giant party for gds1 it was at a nightclub and there was dancing and i think we had like some some uh improv some magic improv. And we had a guest DJ, a celebrity DJ, the guy who plays, he's in Napoleon Dynamite, Pedro from Napoleon Dynamite. Anyway, it was a very esoteric night.

And there we announced, so I told ahead of time. So what happened was Alexis Jansen was the winner. Ken Nago came in second. Graham Hopkins came in third. So what happened was we gave Alexis, well, Alexis earned the design, Alexis earned the design internship. That was the prize. So she got a magic design internship. We ended up giving Ken Nagel an R&D design internship, although both of them ended up reporting to me. And then Graham Hopkins was an intern in Magic

Digital. Anyway, in the end, Ken Nagle would end up becoming a full-time designer on Magic R&D, and both Alexis Jansen and Graham Hopkins would end up going over to the digital team, not the R&D magic digital team, but the digital team. And both actually do a lot of work on digital magic. Actually, they're both really high up now. So all three people, all three of the finalists ended up getting a job at Wizards, all started with an internship, all three turned their internship into a full-time job, all three still work at Wizards. In fact, all three have done a lot of magic design. Both Alexis and Ken have led magic sets. Also, Mark Globus, who is another person here

who ended up getting a full-time job, also has led a magic set, led a core set. Graham has been on numerous, numerous magic teams. He's never led the design of one, but he's been on numerous teams. Alexis led Dragon's Maze, and Mark led one of the core sets, and then Ken's led a whole bunch.

Worldwake, he did New Phyrexia, he did Fate Reforged, he co-designed the full set this year, Ham with me. So anyway, it was a wild success. Also, by the way, for those that pay attention, one of the mechanics that Ken made was called Dispersion, ended up becoming a mechanic in Return of Ravnica, which is that the Ken also led, became Overload for the Izzet. So yeah, this was a really, the Great Designer Search 1 was very successful.

Let me, since I have a little smidgen, I'm almost at the school, but I have a smidgen of time. Let me talk about the design challenges real quick, about what we were looking for each challenge. So Design Challenge 1, give me five, was all about cycles. Cycles are like one of the basic building blocks of magic design. And so we started by, hey, can you do the basics? And by giving them commons, uncommons, and rare, it's really, we were doing basic design work. Like cycles are about the most, every set of cycles. So it was pretty nuts and bolts work. We wanted to sort of test you out.

The second task was the one where you're tying things into, you're meeting parameters and then tying things to art. That's something we do all the time. You know, designing to parameters is a big part of doing design and so we wanted to have a test that really sort of walked you through the paces and made sure that you could do that. So first, challenge one, nuts and bolts. Challenge two, working with constraints. Challenge three, silver and gold. Really what I was testing there was I wanted to get a sense of overall card concepting. Unsets are really really good for because you have to design that

card as a whole altogether. It was a really good chance to sort of get a sense of can they do sort of the whole essence. A lot of cards with top-down it's not that you're actually naming it but you're figuring out the concept and figuring out where you're coming from and trying to get the whole cohesive package. Also, we really were pushing their design, pushing them to the limits to see what they're capable of designing of. And Unsets, because they really push in unfound territory, is a really interesting space to test designers in. If you can do anything, what would you do? Don't let the rules of magic limit you.

And how do you end up doing that? Challenge four was all about redesigning. That often in magic design, you have to take other people's work and you have to improve upon it. So that test was all about, you know, taking another skill that we really needed to test you on of could you take what somebody else did and work on it, expand upon it, make new cards based upon it.

And so that was testing that skill. The fifth challenge, game, set, and match, you were just making commons. You were actually filling out a set. I mean, we didn't have time for you to make an entire small set because it was not that much time, but we were trying to do some basic beginning work of doing that. If you're doing a small set, you'd have to have your themes, you'd have to have your mechanics. And so essentially what we were trying to do

is make you do the beginning work of doing your own small set and just show enough of the work so we can see the beginning of it. If we had had more time, I would have been excited to have them turn in a small set. Which once again, even just turning in 11 commons was

these are really crazy. The final challenge was we were, I mean, obviously we wanted to interview you because it's like a job and there's the normal sort of getting a sense of who you are and what you believe in things. And then the live challenge was really trying to test you with real world things. But the first part of the test was testing, you know, can you work in type parameters? But we had tested that a little bit earlier also. The second hour, which was actually the more important hour, was how did you work in a group? Were you trying to get the best idea or were you trying to get your idea?

And really what that test was about was trying to make sure that people, what we wanted is people that worked well together and that were not trying to advance their own agenda. Because it was a test, you know, it's very easy to go, oh, maybe I need for my thing to win. But the real test was, are you helping find the best answer? And all three people actually did that. They all did that with flying colors. But anyway, so the first grade designer search, like I said, when I started,

there's a lot of like, you know, random like, okay, do whatever you want to do. But a lot of people are like, wow, that is,

really? You know, okay, let's see how this works. But it ended up being a giant success. Like I said, not only did we hire four people, full-time employees,

or they all started with internships, but led to full-time employees that are also at the company. We also had an intern known for a while as a development intern. He didn't end up staying. He's now like a lawyer, a successful lawyer. But anyway, and Scott Van Nessen, obviously, who was in it, would later get a job. But I more chalked it up to GDS2, I guess, than GDS1, although being in both didn't hurt him. And it was a big hit with the audience.

Lots and lots of people read it. In fact, it's still online if you want to go back and see it. It's a lot to read. One of these days I'll do a podcast on GDS 2 and we learned a lot from that. But when I get to my GDS 2 podcast, I'll do the same thing as GDS 2. I'll go in depth. I'll talk about exactly what we did. I'll talk

about all the details. I'm not going to do that right away, but at some point I will do GDS2. I'll go in depth. I'll talk about exactly what we did. I'll talk about all the details. I'm not going to do that right away, but at some point I will do GDS2. Anyway, if you want to go see this, it's all there. You can see all the contestants and all the stuff they turned in and all the judge comments and everything. It really is.

If you're interested in magic design, there is nothing I could actually recommend you, other than looking in the Two Great Designer searches, as just really clean information to learn about how to design and just feedback and stuff. But anyway, I started by dropping off my first child and now I'm dropping off my second. It's a two child drop off day. Anyway, but as we're here at Rachel's school, we all know what that 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. Okay, guys, I'll see you next time. Bye-bye.