Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #439: Other Teams

Episode Date: May 26, 2017

I talk a lot about the design of Magic, but there are many other teams that design has to work with. This podcast talks about all these other teams. I talk through the lens of Amonkhet, so if you’re eager to hear a few Amonkhet stories, you might want to give this a listen.

I'm pulling out of the parking lot. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. And I dropped my son off for camp, for spring break camp. Okay, so today I'm going to approach things a little differently. One of the things that I talk often about is the cooperative nature of making magic. That making magic is not just a solitary endeavor. Like, I used to be a writer and I would sit down in front of my computer

all by myself and I'd write a story. And you know, making magic is not like that. Making magic is very interconnected. So I want to talk about today is while we're designing cards, how many different people we have to interact with and how many other people get affected by it. So I really want to sort of give you a breadth of there are a lot of different groups all working on magic,

all of which design has to care about. So we're going to walk through this and I decided since Amonkhet is out, I'm going to use Amonkhet as for most of my examples, not all of them because a few of these I couldn't get a good Amonkhet example. But where I can, I will use Amakit as my example. Okay, so the team that we most interact with would be development. The key is design is trying to get a vision. We're trying to get sort of an emotional feel. We're trying to come up with innovative things. But development wants to make sure that we can then execute it. You know, development wants to make sure that we can then execute it.

Development wants to make sure that we can make a cool environment. So a lot of the interaction we have with them is making sure, A, that things can be balanced, that we can build a competitive environment out of the elements that we're making.

So for example, excuse me, I'm going to take a sip of water. Give me one second here. Okay. So, the example I'll use from Amonkhet is the wither mechanic. The wither mechanic? What?

There's no wither mechanic. So, when we first started Amonkhet, we knew it was going to use minus one, minus one counters. And so, one of the earliest things we did is we decided to put Wither in the set and put Wither on zombies. That early on, before we understood there were black

and white zombies, before we knew all about the servant zombies, originally we were going to do more old school scary mummies. And we're like, okay, well, black mummies, mummies will be black because they're zombies. And we'll put Wither on them all because, oh, you have a zombie's curse and stuff. And so we put Wither in the set.

And then development came to us and said, you have a problem. You seem to have two different qualities in your set. One is you have Wither. I mean, you have means by which to put minus one minus one counters on the opponent's creatures. I mean, you have means by which to put minus one, minus one counters on the opponent's creatures. And because we were trying to get this bowl-less feel, we had a bunch of, like, reasons you'll put minus one, minus one counters on your own things. And once you do that, you start wanting to do some cards that, like,

use minus one, minus one counters as a positive thing. Well, once there are both cards that want minus one, minus one counters and cards that grant minus one, minus one counters, you create a very weird tension. And the idea is, let's say, for example, I have one of the cards that like, oh, I can remove a minus one, minus one counter to do something. Well, now if my opponent is Wither, wow, they really don't want to attack with their Wither creature, because their Wither creature only sort of fuels the ability that I'm rewarding with the minus one, minus one counters. And what they said is

we needed to kind of figure out where we wanted to push things. That we couldn't both push putting minus one, minus one counterers on and push using minus one, minus one counterers. And so we decided because we were getting the bullish feel of it kind of being harsh

and you taking advantage of your own things, harming your own things, that felt super bullish-y. We decided that we, that was the thing that was more unique about this environment. And so it turned out that we just couldn't do Wither at the level we needed to do to be able to push it and do the other things we wanted to do. And that came from working with development. Now in general, development, like one of the things that always happens with development

on anything is whenever we make a mechanic, usually what happens is, or in the early stages, like, let's see if it's fun before we worry about the development of it. But once we sort of go, okay, I think this is fun, okay, now let's kick the wheels developmentally, you know. Because one of the things I discovered is, design tends to play the mechanic the way the mechanic kind of wants to be played. And then when you get to development, they play the mechanic however will break the mechanic. The mindset of the developers is much more like, I'm going to win. What do I need to do to do that? And design has this habit of going, oh, well, this mechanic is for reason X. That's what we'll do.

We want to have fun doing that. But the problem is that people aren't always, I talked about this in my speech, about how you've got to put the fun where people will find it. And if people, if your mechanic says, hey, the best way to win is to use it this way, but that's not the fun way, they'll use it the way that lets them win.

They'll use it the way that people will optimize power, or gamers will optimize power. And so you have to be careful. So one of the things we also work with development is to make sure that the set is working the way we want.

Another good example, this is not from Mom and Cat, but in Innistrad, I wanted the zombies to be aggressive, not the zombies, the vampires, the black and red vampires

to be aggressive. But the way I designed the file, they weren't as aggressive. They weren't really playing in that aggressive role. And so Eric Lauer, who's the head developer on that set, said, okay, I get what you want. You want aggressive vampires.

Here, let me tweak a few things to make them more aggressive. And more and more, we're trying to get that feedback, like, not wait for development, but get it in design so that we can sort of make changes and make choices that don't require, you know, tweaking so much later on.

But anyway, development, I talk about development all the time. But development, obviously, is a very important part of it, so much so that we have a representative from development on every design team. So clearly it's an important thing. And not only do we have a representative, but, you know, Eric Lauer, who's the head developer, he'll check in all the time. Whoever I'm handing off to, the lead developer, I'll check in with them.

So there's a lot of developers that are constantly sort of checking in, peeking in, and making sure that what we're making can be made, can be developed, if you will. Okay, the next team that we interact with is creative. But I will actually divide creative up. Creative has two parts. They have a story part and they have an art part. And both sections we have to interact with. So let's talk about that with Amaket.

Okay, so we'll start with the story. So one of the things that we were trying to do in design was we wanted to make some top-down cards. And it turns out that top-down Egypt, I mean, Egypt has a lot of themes that we can play with. Obviously, you know, mummies and deserts and curses. And there's a lot of themes that we can play around with, and we did. But we were actually trying to do individual top-down cards, and it was a little trickier.

What I learned was Innistrad was, bothistrad and Amiket are tropes, but one is what I call a genre trope, which is Innistrad, which is about a genre style that you see in pop culture. You know, that the way I know about vampires and zombies is seeing vampire movies and zombie TV shows and reading books or comics or whatever. I can experience it because I've seen it through pop culture. A cultural trope is more like I learned about it in school. Maybe, maybe I've seen, I mean, some of it seeps into pop culture. Obviously, Egyptian things, you know, there's Stargate and, you know, there's various things where there's an Egyptian flavor to it.

But what we found was when we were doing top-down cards, it was a lot harder than Innistrad. Innistrad was just like, you know, pouring out. And even Pharos was easier because Pharos, Greek mythology, at least with a Western, you know, a more Western audience, which is the majority of our audience, not all of our audience, obviously, Greek mythology is a little better known. I could do characters that you'll recognize. You know the story of Icarus or something. When we start getting into

Egyptian stuff, the average person we found doesn't necessarily know the Egyptian mythology. So they know iconography of Egypt, but they don't necessarily know the stories per se. So it's a lot harder. So one of the things we were doing, we were trying to do top down, was we were looking at what are Egyptian things people might know. Now we shied away from the sort of the tomb robbing end of Egypt. Egypt is a dead civilization, which people are coming and, you know, breaking in, finding things from it. We were doing sunny, live Egypt.

So one of the things we found was, one of the things people knew was the leaders of Egypt. And there were three leaders we thought were pretty well known. Cleopatra, King Tut, and Ramses. And so we sort of made cards based on all these characters. But the problem was that in the story, there are leaders to the city, you know, the gods and Bolas, and there's leaders to the city. So it's not like we can just say, hey, this is the pharaoh.

You know, Bolas is the god pharaoh, so, like, there's a pharaoh. So we worked with them. They ended up becoming viziers. And Cleopatra, they made her into sort of this, we made a sort of snake association. Cleopatra, once again, even though people know

who Cleopatra was, okay, well, what does a Cleopatra do? You know what I'm saying? She has a sort of look about her. We ended up playing around with her association with snakes, which I learned once the set came out was not as well known. She liked to study snakes.

She died, you know, she committed suicide by having a snake bite her. She had this fascination with snakes. Not everybody knows that, but we played into that. King Todd, we played sort of the boy king. And we had him kind of inside you could see the wall of hieroglyphics behind him

but Ramsey for example Ramsey plays into sort of the more of the task, you know, bald pharaoh taskmaster and that didn't quite fit there are some things that, you know, a lot of the, you know, the building of the monuments and stuff was done in our version by the mummies. The mummies were the laborers, not the people.

And so it didn't, the trope we were trying to play around with didn't quite play out. And so we worked with them because we were like, well, we can make this one work, and we can make this one work. We don't think we can make that one work, and so we didn't do it. And so one of the things that, you know, is interesting is trying to, you know, the reason we work closely with the story people is we want our mechanics to reinforce what the story is. And a lot of times we have to work with them to figure out, okay, well, does this do the right thing? Does this have the, you know, when we were making the gods, for example,

we wanted the gods to have the right feel. And we spent a lot of time sort of walking with them and figuring out what were the monuments, what were the trials, what were the cartouches. And there's a lot of give and take to try to get the proper feel to match the tone of the world. Another thing we did that we worked with the story team was the idea of creating dissonance with the names,

that the art and the names would, the mechanics would feel rougher and meaner, but the names would be happy, so that you got to disconnect. Like, it's saying it's happy, but it doesn't feel very happy. And we worked with that, actually, with both story and art. My art story for this is, when we did the embalmed tokens, one of the things that Ethan, who was, Ethan and I co-led, this was the second half,

so Ethan was the lead at the time. Ethan went to them because he liked the idea of embalm, but embalm required tokens. And the only way that Ethan thought it would really work is if we had tokens for each embalm creature. But that obviously meant extra art assets.

It meant, you know, so what the art team ended up doing was they said, okay, yeah, we think we can do this. And everybody who had an embalmed creature also got the art for the embalmed mummy. So the token of the creature was drawn by the same artist. And they were drawn in such a way that the artist understood the shtick. So they picked silhouettes that they can make fun zombie silhouettes with. You know, mummy silhouettes.

But in general, one of the things we always have to work with is, you know, we work very closely with the art director of the set. And each set has a different person who's overseeing it, who's getting a sense of the vision. And we're working very closely with them to sort of make sure that the things we're capturing

are reflecting what the world wants to be. And so there's a lot of give and take there. Next, editing. So, for example, like we wanted to do in Balm, and there's a lot of questions about what qualities does the token copy keep and how do we, you know, like we really wanted them, when they came back, to be white and be zombies because that fit the flavor of the story. And we were trying to reinforce the flavor. But it's like, okay, but do the tokens have to say these things or can we

find wording to allow ourselves to sort of say what we're doing? You know, the reason we wanted to get involved with editing early is sometimes there are things you either can't do the way you want to do. Let's Suspend, for example, ended up being a lot more words than we thought. When we were playing with it, like, it was a very short thing. It's like, oh, just wait so many turns. But when you actually get to editing, they're like, well, no, we actually have to tell you what to do. We actually have to walk you through all the steps.

And that ended up being, you know, four lines of text. to text. So, and sometimes, by the way, we talk to them and they'll explain, like, why it causes problems or why we can't template it the way we think we can. Also tied into that, we talk to the rules manager because we have to make sure the rules work. Like, for example, when we were doing Aftermath, we had to make sure that, you know, okay, can we do that? You know, can we, like, these are kind of like split cards, but aren't split cards. And what does it mean? You know, obviously there's some rulings that came out because we are trying to consolidate how dual card cards work. We have double-faced cards, we have split cards, we have aftermath cards. And so there's a lot of cleanup that had to happen. And that when we create something, you know, I will go to Eli, who's the rules manager now,

and I'll say I want to do something and he'll talk through with me. He'll give me potential ways. Maybe we can template it. And then he'll ask me questions and he'll say, okay, well, if this happens, what do you think happens? If this happens, what do you think happens? And my team and I will discuss and try to get a sense of what we think the essence of what's going on so that we can properly capture that. Okay, digital.

You know, any cards we make here are going to go on Magic Online. Some of them might go on Duels of the Planeswalkers. Like, there's going to be digital versions of cards that we make. And so one of the things we have to do is make sure that what we're doing, A, that digital is in the loop, that they understand, and sort of understand if we cause problems. Like Exert, for example, one of the areas that we've learned over time is decisions made during combat, you can sometimes get into areas with digital.

Now, it turned out that Exert worked okay. okay, but for example paying costs during combat is tricky. I think that's why none of Xert pay costs. But what we always have to do is sort of early in design, if I give a head up to people, if I think we might be doing something, I give a heads up so that person understands what we're doing and so that they can sort of, you know, like we want to make sure that down the road that we can program whatever we do. It's not often that I change my card for programming. Well, it's not often I kill something for programming.

There is times where I figure out a way that we can do something that's really similar that's slightly easier to program. That also happens a lot in development, is we want to work with digital to figure out, hey, is something that for us is easy, like, let's say there's version A and version B, and yeah, they're roughly the same for us, but

version A is way harder to code than version B. Well, the digital people say, you know, could we do version B? That would be a lot easier. The only time I've ever killed something was in Future Sight, I made a cycle based off of the double cards from Unglued, which did an effect now and the beginning

of the next game with the same player. In the Unglued version, it didn't care next time you played them, whenever you played them in a Civil Border game. But in this version, it was going to be the next game in the same match. So if game one or game two, and you go to game three,

it would carry over. Now, to be fair, development wasn't very happy with this mechanic anyway, so it might have been killed for other reasons. But Digital talked to me and said, here's our problem. Our games don't talk to each other. It literally, without monumental changes to the system,

that just is, we can't code it. And so I changed it. I took it out. That doesn't happen often. I don't often remove things, but I very often will change things. And even if we're not changing stuff, just interacting with them early

so they understand what we're doing. Organized play. Whenever we do new things, like in Amakit, for example, we had the Aftermath cards, which look a little bit different, and like how you use them. Like one of the things with organized play is

whenever we introduce new elements that might be used differently, like Double-Faced Cards was a giant one where, okay, we have these things that don't have backs, and you do drafting, and so when you pick a card and draft it with a double face card, can you see the card and what does that mean? And, you know, is it public information?

And so we have to work with organized play to make sure that whatever we're doing, they understand the essence of that, you know, because the things we do are going to go outside of just casual play and into tournament play. And so whenever we do something, whenever we think we have an issue that's going to go outside of just casual play and into tournament play. And so whenever we do something, whenever we think we have an issue that's going to affect any kind of organized play, not just at the highest level, even just F&Ms and stuff, we want to work out and want to get them into the loop early so that we can understand what ramifications are of the things we're doing. So also early design, graphic design.

So for example, Aftermath's the perfect thing here. We were doing this card, and it was kind of like a split card, but not a split card. And we couldn't make it look like a split card, because then people believe the functionality would match a split card, which it doesn't. You know, and was it supposed to be a normal looking card, but with some sort of rider that wanted a special frame? Um, you know, more and more we've been turning to graphic design to help use that as a component of

game design. Of saying, okay, I'm doing something different. I want you to pay attention. For example, in Kaladesh, we had vehicles and we really wanted you to understand that this vehicle doesn't always have power and toughness. Well, how do we communicate that? How do we say this is kind of like a creature

but not exactly a creature? Or we had energy. We want to communicate energy. And so, you know, sometimes with energy, we had to make token and make an icon. So we have to work with graphic design early on to figure out what is going on. Are there needs we have in the set that have to look a little bit different? How do we do that? And there's a lot of give and take with a graphic designer to figure those kind of things out. Also related to that is caps, the people that do the printing. My best example of this would be double-faced cards. Amiket really didn't have a major caps issue.

Every once in a while, I will come up with something that goes beyond just the rules of the game. And double-faced cards are a great example where there's printing involved. That the back of a magic card is not printed at the same standard as the front of a magic card. So that meant that printing a double-faced card, and then also ad cards aren't printed to the same quality either, that it required just doing things differently. It required thinking about things differently. And so we had to go and make sure that we could actually do it. You know, if I want to do something,

and it requires us doing something outside the norm, requires technology that we don't traditionally do, I've got to go to CAPS and figure out, can we print it? Sometimes we'll do a printing test. And CAPS, once again, CAPS is always eager to try to bring our vision to life, but sometimes if I ask for something that can't be done, and there's two things.

When I say can't be done, either sometimes it's technologically can't be done, or more realistically, it's cost prohibitive to actually do it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it could cost five times as much and we can make it, but, well, you know, we can't just quintuple our prices of making something. From a business, we just can't do that. So, you know, one of the things we always have to deal with is looking with caps and figuring out sort of like, are we doing something that's sort of pushing different boundaries?

Also, sometimes we have to talk to brand. We don't talk to brand all that often. But if we're doing something where we think we're pushing to some area that could have marketing ramifications, it could have PR ramifications. Like I want the two examples. The first is we had a meeting with them when we were talking about marketing Oath of the Gatewatch. It was like a super, super early meeting. And they're the ones that brought back and said, you know what? This set also has the birth of the Gatewatch. We think that's really important could you bring that up a little bit you know it seems like you're more focused on the

Odrazi but really the thing we kind of want to focus on is we have this new team and this is the birth of the team and you know we really would like to find a way to play that up and so we went back and we ended up making the oaths and we ended up adding some elements to play up more of a team feel because it was about the formation of a team. The second thing is, for example, for like Unglued and Unhinged, when I was kind of playing in a little more dangerous space from a PR standpoint, and so I showed cards to them.

Like, for example, there was a card in Unglued, which I later put it on Unhinged as a joke, but called Disrobing Scepter, where your opponent had a choice between discarding a card or moving a piece of clothing. And, you know, Brand's like, yeah, that's not really our brand. You know, let's not do that. So I took the card out. Like I said, we don't get involved with Brand too much

from a card selection standpoint. But every once in a while, if we push certain areas, we'll talk to them. Likewise, legal. You know, like Unhinged had a card where I made you hold your breath. It was a breath-holding contest. And I'm like, I actually have to double-check and go, okay, hey, is it okay if we tell people to have a breath-holding contest? So, like, it's not that legal necessarily looks at everything we do. And most of the stuff doesn't matter. But every once in a while, you know, so like, it's not that legal necessarily looks at everything we do, and most of the stuff doesn't matter. But every once in a while, you know, we can fall in territories where we're like,

okay, we've got to interact, and, you know, legal's the kind of thing I can't talk a lot about, so there's not a lot of stories there. But it is a group that every once in a while I do have to talk to. Game support, what used to be called customer service. Sometimes, for example, if we're doing something that we think is complex, we will go down and they are the experts on complexity. They're the ones that interact with the public. They get all the questions.

They get a, they have a really good sense of what, what confuses people. So a lot of times we'll talk with game support to understand if we're pushing in an area that we think will be a problem. Um, sometimes I'll go talk to sales because we have sales because we have something we think might be a strong, what we call a KSP, a key selling point. And sometimes I'll talk to sales to go, I think this will be exciting, you know, but as someone who sells a product on the front lines

that has a real good sense of what excites the people that sell the cards, I say, is this kind of thing going to excite people? And I'll talk with them. Sometimes, for example, I have to talk to our marketing people or to our, the online people, people who do our social media and stuff. Usually, well, I always talk with them when it's time to market the product, but sometimes I'll actually talk to them during design because I'm like, I want to make sure the area I'm pushing is something that we can market or something that you know we might be able to do something with social media that I actually will think ahead and sometimes

tailor what I'm doing to make it a little friendlier for marketing to make it a little friendlier for online media and part of doing that is definitely sort of interacting with them and you know and and trying to sort of think ahead like talk to the experts in the field and then think if I can tweak to help them do their job. That a lot of the cooperative part of this is making sure that other people who are experts can help you and that you can make subtle changes that can often make their job a lot easier.

The last group I've written down is every once in a while we have to go outside the building best example of this is the commander committee we did not create commander, we did not run commander, we do make commander products though, and so one of the things we need to do is, part of making commander products is we make new designs, we push into new design space, so we always

we talk with the commander committee we want to make sure, like, okay, we have an idea to make planeswalkers that can be commanders. Okay, that's a little bit different. Let's talk to you. Are we doing anything? Are we causing problems? And whenever we do new commander things, we talk with them to make sure that they're experts in commander.

They're experts in the rules for commander. Are we doing something that's going to cause a problem? Or are we just doing something that's going to require some work? And we want to make sure that they're aware of what work we're asking of them and get signed off to make sure that we're not doing something they don't want us to do? And so one of the reoccurring themes you'll see today is, as I sort of started with this, it's collaborative.

That what I want to do is make an awesome magic set. But there's so many things that make magic awesome that magic is not just about the words on the cards. It's about the flavor and the pictures and the gameplay and the tournaments and the social media and the marketing and all these different facets have to come together, all these different things. And so one of the things I've learned more and more as I've been doing the job is in design, in the very beginning of the process, the more I go and talk to other people. Now, development creative, we literally have representatives on the team. But now as a normal part of design, I go to the rules manager.

I go to editing. I'll talk to digital. I'll talk to organized play if I need to. I don't normally talk to brand legal, but every once in a blue moon I do. Clearly I talk to Graphic Design and Caps if I have issues that I think are going to be a thing. I talk to Game Support if there's complexity issues. Occasionally sales, marketing online.

All that stuff I talk to because if I get them involved early, it just means I have a much better chance of solving the problems I need to solve. But anyway, I've just pulled up to Rachel's school, so 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. Thanks for joining me, guys.