Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #492: Printing

Episode Date: December 1, 2017

I talk a lot about the process of creating what the cards do, but part of making Magic cards is also physically creating them. In this podcast, I talk about how we print Magic cards and what impact that has on designing them.

I'm pulling out of the parking lot. We all know what that means. It's time to drive to work. Okay, so today, so one of the challenges of, like, I'm almost to, like, 500 podcasts here. So one of the challenges is thinking of things to talk about that I've not yet talked about. So today I realized that I want to talk about printing. There's a big part of making magic cards is physically making magic cards. And that is, there's a whole department called CAPS. I know that stands for something. I'm not sure what it stands for.

But anyway, CAPS is the people who are in charge of, basically, you know, R&D comes up with what the cards are. Basically, R&D comes up with what the cards are. Design development figures out what they do, and the creative team figures out the art and the world and the flavor text and the names. But basically, and then it goes through editing. So once it comes out of R&D, we have all the components of it. We are able to, but then it has to get turned into an actual physical card. And that is the CAPS. That's what CAPS does. So there's a whole bunch of different parts of CAPS.

Part of it is just laying out the card, you know, figuring out what it looks like, getting it in frames, you know, and doing all, like, essentially what happens is R&D has information. Here's what the card is supposed to be. Here's all the component pieces. Then they have to put it together. Okay, but today's part is not... there's a lot that goes into graphic design stuff. Maybe one day I'll do that. But today I want to talk about the next step beyond that, which is, okay, so now we have ideas for cards.

We want to turn them into cards. So to go back a little bit, back to the very beginning. So when Peter first sort of proposed the game he could make to Richard, when Richard came to sort of, you know, Richard came to want to sell RoboRally, Peter was like, we can't make that, the cost of goods is too high. He goes, but Peter created a relationship with a printer called, in Belgium, I'm blanking on the name of the, okay, it'll come to me in a second. He had a relationship with a, Cartamundi. He had a relationship with a printer in Belgium named Cartamundi that he had been printing his books at because they were doing role-playing things. So they had a printer that they were dealing with.

And so he's like, oh, I have a printer and I know my printer does cards, so they can do cards. So let me first talk a little bit about how magic cards are made. I mean, physically made. So when you print, you print on a printing press that creates a sheet. Each card isn't individually printed, but rather they're printed together as a large... So right now, I think our sheets are... Well, for a long time, they were 11 by 11. I think the ones now might be 10 by 10. When Magic first started, I think they were 11 by 11 because if you go back to Alpha, there was 121 of, well, the sheets were 121.

There weren't 121 rares because there were some lands mixed in and stuff. But early Magic, I think the sheets were 121, so 11 by 11. I think now they might be, I think they're 11 by 10 now. So it's 110. Anyway, the idea is when we print cards, we are not printing, it is not like, the printer doesn't print on an individual card. It prints on a giant sheet. Sheets get printed at a time.

And then the idea is they chop them up to make cards. So let's say the sheet's 11 by 10. That means, you know, it's 10 wide, 11 long, I think. And then they chop it and it turns into 110 cards. And then the way it works is different rarities have different sheets. rarities have different sheets. Now, one of the things that gets confusing is sometimes we can recreate rarity through means other than a sheet. And so, for example, right now we print, there's four rarities that we indicate and then there's some other hidden rarities, like land technically is at a rarity different than common. So if you look at a normal booster, on average, a booster will have one land in it, which is on its own sheet.

The land sheet's its own sheet. It will have 10 commons. Commons are on their own sheet. It will have three uncommons. Uncommons are on their own sheet. It will have a rare seven out of eight times and a mythic rare one out of eight times. The rares and mythic rares are on the same sheet. The way that we're able to differentiate the rarity between them is the rares show up twice as often,

meaning on that sheet, every rare on the sheet shows up twice, every mythic rare shows up once. So rares show up twice as often, but be aware there's more rares than mythic rares. So actually getting a mythic rare is roughly one out of eight. And the idea is that we sometimes will mimic rarities for other means. Like, for example, let's say we're doing double-faced cards. Double-faced cards have to be printed on their own sheet because there's some technology that comes with printing on both sides. Oh, let me say that real quickly. So the way that magic gets made is they take these sheets

and they print the magic back on a whole bunch of sheets. And then, the magic back's there, then they send it through the printer and they print on the front side. Normally, the magic backs are done at a different time than the fronts, traditionally.

The backs are done, I think, in a large batch. They basically take sheets and make lots of backs. And then, they print the batch. That they basically take sheets and make lots of backs. And then, then they print the fronts. Double-faced cards, they're like, with a normal magic card, since it's just the back, well, they're all the same. But with a double-faced card,

there's a lot more to it because this front has to have that back. So there's more things that go on that you need to do. And the idea is that if you're going to do the double-faced cards, the way we're able to mimic rarity there is because we tend to have one sheet

that does double-faced cards. We print things in different amounts that represent the rarity. So be aware, one of the things that happens is, okay, so we physically go and we print the cards on sheets, we cut them up. And then we'll have sort of a hopper of all the different cards. There's a hopper of land, there's a hopper of commons, there's a hopper of uncommons, there's a hopper of rares and mythic rares.

Also, every pack, I forgot one, has an add card, slash token. And that is printed on its own sheet as well. One of the things about that is because printing on both sides is a little trickier and because we're doing ads and tokens, the standards of the ads and tokens aren't quite as high as normal magic cards. You know, one of the things you'll realize is normal magic cards have a very high standard. Like, one of the things you'll realize is normal magic cards have a very high standard.

Like, one of the things that happened along the way is, you know, we've dealt with different printers in the past. And one of the things that's happened multiple times is a printer will try to print magic cards and they'll do a test run and we'll go, no, no, no, that's not up to our standards. This is what our standards are. And there's been a couple of places who, like, have printed cards and are like, no, no, this, that's not up to our standards. This is what our standards are. And there's been a couple places who have printed cards and are like, no, no, this is what we do. This is the top notch of, you know, we make cards all the time.

And this is what we do. And we're like, we have a higher standard than that, though. And so there's a lot of issues that go on. Like a lot of the things about printing that you don't think about, that we have to think about, is we have to do a lot of sheet math, is what I call it. Which is, we are going to print... Oh, so there actually often is more than one of certain sheets.

So common, for example, usually there's more than one common sheet. Why would that be? Why can't all the commons fit on one sheet? Usually they can. But, so let me talk. So one of the things I'll get into today is there's certain areas that we're not super public about. So I'm going to talk a little bit about collation, but I'm not going to go into great detail. I'm going to more talk about the concept of collation than the details of collation, because that is something

we don't want people knowing. So one of the things that goes on here when we print is, our goal is, in the end, to make a booster pack that appears to be random. But the reality is, we have to actually put things in. We don't have, you know, randomness is, we have sort of put things in. We don't have, you know, randomness is, we have sort of controlled randomness, but you actually have to print cards and they're in a sheet and they're in order.

So one of the things that happens is, collation is, we want to print cards in such a way that we can make the packs feel as random as possible. Because what we want is, we don't want you, so like one of the problems that happened in early Magic when we were still figuring this out is we'd have a lot of what we call print runs, which is on the sheet, cards are printed in a certain order.

That's just the order they're printed. And so without any outside interference, there's just an order of cards that would appear. So just imagine on the paper, there's slot one, slot 2, slot 3. Well, without any guidance, card 1 would come before card 2, which would come before card 3. But what we don't want happening is we don't want things, you know, we want variety in the pack. We don't want, I open the pack, I go, oh, it's 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12.

And so one of the ways that we do that is we create what we call collation which is a means by which we can make the cards random i'm not going to explain how we do it only because we're not interested in people figuring out how we do it because we we want the mystery in the packs we want you not to know what's in the packs um and as time has gone along sort of we've gotten more sophisticated you know and part of that has to do with sort of how we print and how we cut and what goes and where and it's complicated like I said I'm not going to explain how we do it but be aware that's something we have to worry about when we do it another big thing the coalition does for us is so one of the things that development does is they take every card and they evaluate it.

They rate it. How good is this in limited? Because one of the other things we want is, we want to make sure that when we have limited experiences we don't want the packs to have too much variance in their power because that could just make for really, really swingy limited experiences. So what we try to do is we figure out what we think the good cards are for limited, and then we want to space them out. So we don't want you getting all the best cards all in one pack, because it can unbalance things.

So another part of what we do with collation is we try to sort of figure out what we think are the best cards, and then we space them out so that packs have a rough sort of power weight to them. Now, there's variance. Not every pack is equal. And we don't correlate between different sheets. We can affect how sheets work. But a lot of the work we're doing is on the sheet,

is placement on the sheet. So when I talk about us printing cards and, you know, there's a whole bunch of, it's not just like we have all the cards and just they go on whatever order. It really matters what order they go on. And it matters both for, it matters both for sort of the power balancing and it matters for the printing. Um, so there's a lot of details that go into sort of making a card sheet. Um, there's a lot of things that matter. So we have to care about that. Um, we also, a lot of different, um, sets have different requirements. Um, for example, I use double-faced cards before. Double-faced cards have to be on their own sheet. So when we make a, I used double-faced cards before. Double-faced cards have to be on their own sheet. So when we make a set that is double-faced cards,

we have to figure out how and when are those going to come in. So for example, in Innistrad, they were one per pack. That meant we sort of slide, like, the way to think of it is when we make a booster, there are hoppers. And the idea is you chop up a sheet, you put it in a hopper, there are hoppers. And the idea is you chop up a sheet, you put it in a hopper, and then you can have some number of hoppers. So the idea is, let's say I'm making a normal booster pack. Traditionally what would happen is I would have a hopper for land, I'd have a hopper for commons, I'd have a hopper for uncommons, I'd have a hopper for rare and mythic rares, and I have a hopper for the add cards. And then the idea is it spits out the number

it's supposed to spit out out of its hopper and then it gets into the booster wrap. And that's how we make a pack. Now, one of the things that's happened over time is that the technology of printing has changed immensely.

Like early on, for example, we used to send films. We'd literally sort of mock up what we wanted. We'd make the sheets look as we wanted them to. And then we'd take a picture of it, essentially. And we'd send a very elaborate, very detailed, large but a picture, essentially. A chemical film. And then we would have to ship the films to our printer. Also, I should note that in the early days, we had one printer.

Imagine it's gotten so big and we make so much product and print so much, one printer can't print everything we make anymore. And also, another big factor, not really today's topic, but logistics, which is once things are printed, they need to get around the world. So one of the things we've learned is if you print around the world, it makes it easier to get cars somewhere. You know, if we have to get cars to Japan, maybe some of the cars should be printed in Japan. And then we don't have to, you know, pay to ship them because they're there. Or they're easier to get there because they're in the country.

So there's a lot of coordination that goes on of, you know, different products have different requirements. And when we make a product, we have to figure out, like, one of the things R&D has to do is figure out, okay, well, how are things going to work? What are you going to get? So, for example, I think when I'm recording this, it's not out yet, so I'll be vague. But Unstable, for example, had a whole bunch of really different requirements for how, you know, it had more pieces to it than a lot of sets have. You know, like I said with Innistrad. Oh, so I was getting on Innistrad. So Innistrad had double-faced cards.

Innistrad was, there's one double-faced card per pack. Okay, that's pretty easy. That's pretty straightforward. And the way we do that is, okay, there's a hopper, and okay, well, one slot in this booster is that hopper. Okay, but you get something like Ixalan or Magic Origins, where you have double-faced cards, but they're not at a high enough rarity that every pack would have one. You know, they were mythic rare in Magic Origins, they were rare in Ixalan

how do we do that? well what we also do and this is more advanced is we can say some portion of the time drop from Hopper A and some portion of the time drop from Hopper B so you can get more complicated and that one of the things we have to work with

is we have to make sure that when we're making the product, we understand what we want. And then part of making the rarities sort of, we want the rarities to stay at a similar, like we want common to roughly mean the same thing from booster pack to booster pack, from set to set. So part of what that means is that we have to, when figuring out how big the set is,

we have to do sheet math, meaning we have to figure out how many commons, uncommons, rares, and mythic rares there are so that we can drop them accordingly and get what we need. And that, one of the things that happens very early on is we have defaults. So we're just going to do the defaults. We're just making a normal set. You know, a normal magic set has, right now, has 101 commons, has 80 uncommons, has 53 rares, and has 15 mythic rares. That is a normal, and then it has 20 basic lands. That is a normal-sized set.

Now, sometimes we'll deviate. For example, in Ixalan, there were 10 double-faced cards. Those aren't on any normal sheet. Those are additive, so there's an extra 10 cards that show up. And one of the things that you always sort of have to be conscious of is when things show up, how often they show up, and then we talk about as-fan all the time, stands for as-fan, which means when I open up a booster pack, what portion of my cards are the thing

in question? And that one of the things about making environments, especially limited environments, is you want to make sure certain things show up at a high enough amount that they can matter, that they can be something that, you know, you can care about. So one of the things that happens when we're making the set is we have to sort of think about, okay, I want this thing. How high can it appear? Where does it need to appear? And then we can figure out the as-fans. So a lot of that is figuring out where things need to go. And then, like I said, now when we do, as we're starting to do more things like double-faced cards, where we're starting to do things that have printing requirements,

we then need to figure that stuff out ahead of time so we can incorporate it into the design. One of the things that happens, like for example, when I wanted to do double-faced cards, that wasn't just me talking to R&D. Once I was sure I wanted to do them and I got buy-off from everybody in R&D, we then had to go to CAPS to figure out, okay, how do we do that? So for example, I'll tell a different story. So we wanted to do borderless basic lands in Unstable. Now, at the time we did this, we had never done that before. It turns out because Unstable got delayed,

the technology we figured out for the basic lands got actually applied and used for the invocations from Amonkhet, the Masterpiece stuff from Amonkhet. So that got revealed to the public first, but it actually, we figured out how to do it based on how we'd figured it out. So one of the things that happens is, you know, when we print, it's not just a matter of printing. There's always issues of, are there printer-related issues?

So for example, the basic lands in Unstable. Okay, how do you print up to the edge? Like, one of the reasons there's a little black border on cards, or silver border, depending on what card set you have, is it has a little room for give that, imagine, okay, imagine your sheet of cards, imagine your sheet of, you know, 11 by 11, 11 by 10 cards, and then you've got to cut them.

Well, if you are off just a little tiny bit, you could tell if the cards are butt up against each other. So the solution to that problem, the reason borders exist, is it gives a little bit of give that if we're off by a millimeter, the width of the black border, if it's just off a smidgen, it's hard for the eye to tell. And so that gives us a little bit of give. But if we, let's say we butted up the frames and on the left side is red and the right side is green, you're going to tell a little bit of green on your red card if we cut it

off by a little bit. So the reason the border is there from a printing standpoint is to give us a little give in general. So when we're going to print something where there is no give, we have to figure out how to print that. Now, I don't 100% know. I think what they did is what's called a gutter cut. And the way a gutter cut works is you don't print.

Normally on a sheet, you fill it up so everything on the sheet is a card. There's no dead space. And every single thing is on that. And so when you cut it, nothing gets thrown away. That's how we prefer to do it. It's more cost effective. It requires less waste. But what gutter cutting is, is you print slightly less cards on a sheet,

and then you leave a little bit of a gutter cutting is, is you print slightly less cards on a sheet and then you leave a little bit of a gutter between the cards so that when you cut, you actually leave a little bit of room that you can cut between them. And then I think in gutter cutting, I think there's a little bit of waste because the gutter part, like instead of being butting against each other, there's a little section in between. And the printers have the ability to cut to a gutter cut. So the other thing that comes up is that there's what we call premium, most of you guys call

foil, is we also have the shiny cards. And that is a whole different avenue. And I'll point out that in different products sometimes we will print on different premium versions. The foiling for Magic is how we do Magic. But even then, sometimes when we do from the vault or we'll do specialty things in which one of the card has a special treatment, there are different treatments we can do. There are different ways that we can do that. So another big printing issue is, so when you do the shiny, the shiny, the foil cards, first off, they have what's called an underprinting, which is, if you'll notice,

not every part of a foil card is foil. To make the cards look cool, what we do is somebody goes in and figures out what components of the art we want to be shiny. Usually the border is shiny. I'm sorry, the frame. Normally the frame. So on a card, actually I didn't define this. So if you look at a magic card, there's the art box. That's where the art is. There is the text box.

That's where the rules are. There's a header for the name. There's a header for the card type. And there is a power toughness box. And then around all that is what we call the frame. That tells you what color the card is. And then around the frame is the border. That's the edge of the card.

Normally on magic cards, there's a black border. On cards, they have a silver border. Long ago, we used to have a white border on corsets. So, usually when we do foils, the frame is foilediled and then some portions of the art are foiled but to make it extra cool we do what's called an under I think it's a white under printing so we sort of highlight which parts are supposed to be in foil so that when they come in foil you get that neat thing where certain pieces are foiled so it sort of pops so and that's another big thing is you you know, when we make a set,

every time we make a set, not only are we making the normal cards that we make, but we're also making the foil cards. And those have other treatments to it. And the part I'm not even getting into, because I don't know the technical aspect of this, but there's a lot to composing and making all the card. You know, we want, like, one of the things we pride ourselves on is our art is top notch. So we want to make sure that the quality of the art that comes with the card is top notch. There's a whole bunch of stuff that goes on, color balancing and all sorts of things.

You know, another big thing that goes on that you guys are behind the scenes is cropping. That normally artists send us art, but we have a certain dimension, and sometimes the dimension of the art isn't 100% with where the card is. So sometimes there's some cropping that goes on. Usually the art director is involved in the cropping, and if it's significant enough, they'll sometimes talk to the artist. Sometimes we have to crop to highlight something, and they'll talk to the artist, make sure the artist understands how we're cropping it.

But anyway, there's a lot that goes into sort of piecing the things together. Then another big thing is we print a lot of different products. Now, some products are just their own sheet. Like, for example, if we're going to make dual decks, usually the dual decks is, I'm not sure whether it's one or two sheets, but I think a dual deck is usually one sheet. I've got to think about this. Sheets can hold up to, yeah, maybe it's two sheets.

Well, anyway, it is some number of sheets. So whenever we print things, it's always printed on sheets, no matter what the product is. And, by the way, not only are the cards printed, but remember, the packaging is printed, the boxes are printed, that everything we do, we have to sort of, that has to get printed as well. And so, I mean, there's, I haven't gotten into sort of the act of boosters

and how we shoot booster images and how we make the boxes. Another thing you'll notice is that we tend to standardize what we do so that the normal sets have, because every time we change something, we have to change the box size, for example. So if we make a box, like right now, we make booster packs that have 16 cards in them, 15 magic cards plus the add card and token card. And there's 36 boosters in a box. So the box we make perfectly fits boosters of that size in that number.

And that if we change anything about it, if we want to add one more card to a booster or have less boosters or more boosters or do anything, we're making a new box. And all that, you know, all that has to be done as well. So printing isn't, you know, that has to be done as well so printing isn't you know literally when you go buy a magic product everything in the box you buy from the box to the flow wrap you'll notice for example we have special flow wrap that's wizards of the coast flow

wrap because we don't want people opening up boxes we want people aware to we want people to understand if someone's opened it before they opened it. So we have special flow wrap. You know, we print not just the boxes, but inside the boxes. There's often a promo electric heart sometimes we do in there. There's often information in sheets that explain how, you know, sometimes how to run drafts and things.

You know, there is, part of printing is all that. Another thing that goes on is some of our products, like a lot of our products is, okay, I need to make a dual deck or something. And one or two sheets are made to make the dual deck out of. But here's the tricky thing. Some of the things we need to make, for example, promo cards or F&M cards or different things that we are making that aren't part of a natural set have to go somewhere.

So how do you do that? How do you print just one card? Remember, the sheets are these giant sheets. So the way we do that is not every product uses up all its sheets. Usually the main sets do, but for example, dual decks might require seven eighths of a sheet or something, or, you know, or might require one and a half sheets. So there are leftover spots. And what we want to do is, because we don't want to waste that, what we do is we print things in those spots

that need to go elsewhere. So let's say, for example, we need some promo cards done. We'll go, oh, well, we're making a product that has six slots left over. Well, maybe we can make six promo cards. And so the key is that part of doing printing is you have to think about how to print not just any one set, but all the sets combined. And so a lot of times we have to work ahead to say, okay, well, this product we're making has

some extra slots. Okay, guys, give me the stuff we need so we can start filling slots. And so a lot of times, for example, like the holiday card is something we make that we give away to the partners we work with. And it's a special kind of our version of, you know, of instead of sending an actual holiday card, we send a magic holiday card. And you know, we normally have to do that way ahead of time because we're at the mercy of figuring out where we can fit it in. So we tend to work way ahead with that. In fact, promos in general, we work way ahead with because we don't know

when there's slots. We need to work ahead so we can find slots. That's why, for example, if you ever talk about promos, we have to pick promos way ahead of time. That's why with new sets we have to make a lot of guesses sometimes because we don't have the knowledge yet of what's being played. And that's why sometimes we'll take guesses and then the card we guess

we think maybe will be good for different factors by the time it comes isn't as strong a card as we thought when we were making the prediction many many you know sometimes you know a year or so earlier um but anyway um so like i said one of my hopes of today is um i talk a lot about magic design and there's all sorts of nuance of magic design but like there are people who work in wizards who their day job is some completely other thing that they have to work just as hard as I do, and they have just enough knowledge of what they do, you know,

and, you know, one of the CAPS people, if they did a drive to work, could probably talk for 400, 500 podcasts about all, today we're going to talk about underprinting, and today we're going to talk, you know, I was just trying to hit on all the different aspects of things, and all the different kinds of things we have to think about, and that are

people who deal with printing, you know, and once again, there's all sorts of factors I didn't get into. There's buying the right paper, there is, you know, figuring out printing processes, because we do different things. Another big thing that's happened is you'll notice ever since we redid the frame

at the bottom now, there's information in the bottom of the frame where it's black and there's white words. That is collation information because technology of the printers has gotten so good that now they can use that to help us with how we collate things and how they print things. And so the technology of printing is forever changing.

And another thing, by the way, I'll end with sort of peeking toward the future. One of the things that I'm starting to do is understand what the technology of printing will allow us so I can see if there's new things that we can do. For example, unstable early on try to do something that we couldn't do. And then there's a set that you guys, I don't think you know about its existence yet, but there's a set that we've made that we finally figured out that we had the technology in printing to do something we've never been able to do before. And that product incorporated that mechanically into the set.

It said, oh, we can do this thing. Well, we're going to take advantage of that thing and do something in the set that takes advantage of that. So one of the new things about printing is, even though you might think that printing has nothing to do with my job, in fact, as printing gets better, as printing allows more things, it now means that I, as the guy who designs the set or oversees the design, that I now have more options of maybe what I can do. That maybe there'll be things that I can now do, new designs I can make because of printing technology that exists and that is quite exciting um in fact I will tell you this I we didn't explore early unstable we were looking at uh

advanced printing technology and we came up some really really cool things we could do that technology doesn't quite let us do yet, but one day it will, and there is a whole like, we spent we spent a lot of time on this in Early Unstable sort of talking about what could we do, we did a lot of experimentation, and I'll have you say there's a world of cool

things that are not quite there but are at our fingertips, that are, I would predict within five years might be something we can do and there is the future of magic design goes in many directions, but one of them is going to be printing. One of them is going to be the technology of printing. So anyway,

let me lead you off a little teaser of how printing might soon affect the packs you get. But anyway, next time you open your pack and you see your cards and you appreciate the cards, be aware there's somebody that has to turn our ideas into actual cards and then print them and then wrap them in booster pack and put them in a booster box and make all that happen. All that, everything you're buying, everything you're purchasing, all the physical tangible things you have, somebody's making that. It's

somebody's job to do it. In fact, it's the whole department's job to do it. They do it really well. And so that was today. So you'll be aware that there's other things to think about when making magic. Okay. Well, I'm now at work, so we know what that means. This is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. See you guys next time.