Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #510: Great Designer Search 3

Episode Date: February 9, 2018

In this podcast, I talk about the lengthy journey to make the third Great Designer Search happen.

I'm pulling my driveway we all know what that means it's time for another drive to work okay so today I'm going to talk all about the great designer search 3 or better yet what I'm going to do is sort of give some background and explain sort of how it came to be and talk a little bit about it as of me recording this we have not quite announced it yet. We're going to announce it very soon. But I want you guys to hear this. My goal is I'm trying to aim in between people entering and the show starting. I might be a smidgen off, but that's my goal here.

So anyway, I want to sort of give some context to what's going on and give a little history. I've had podcasts on The Great Designer Search, so I'll spend a little bit of time doing back up, but I really want to spend more time sort of talking about how the third one came to be. But let me start by a little background, because I always assume that people haven't necessarily listened to my other podcasts. So let's talk about sort of where it came from and sort of the reason behind the Great Designer Search. So, it goes back to, I think it's 2006. So, what happened was,

my boss at the time was a man named Randy Bueller. You guys might know him as the, from the Hall of Fame, Magic Pro Tour Hall of Fame. He was a pretty famous pro player. He did commentary for a long, long time. Anyway, Randy was my boss at the time. And so one of the things that we often do on the development slash sort of set and play design end of things

is we often will go to the Pro Tour, find players that have the skills we need, and then we will give them a six-month, what's the technical term? I keep wanting to call it an internship, not an internship technically. A contract. A six-month contract gig. And the idea is, one of the things we're big in R&D is sort of trying people out before we hire them.

And that we give people, it's like, okay, let's try this out and see how it goes. So Randy comes to me and Randy says, okay, I would like to do a six-month contract position for someone for design. Because I was, you know, I was the head designer. It's like, you know, we always bring people someone for design. Because I was the head designer. He's like, you know, we always bring people in for development.

Since then, we've shifted over to vision, set, and play design. But you guys can listen to the podcast on that. But anyway, he's like, I want to bring in a designer. You know, I have the budget for six months. And if they work out, then, you know, we could hire this person. And he said to me, but like, you know, this is your area. Who do you want? And I said to him, I go, oh, well, here's the problem.

Here's the thing. Here's the concern I have is I know that on the developmental side, that the Pro Tour is a perfect sort of place to search for people. That the skills that you need to sort of place to search for people. That the skills that you need to sort of test the game and break the game and, you know, all the skills you need to sort of figure out whether or not something is working translate really well to being good at magic. That a lot of our top developers have come from the Pro Tour and have Pro Tour experience. from the Pro Tour and have Pro Tour experience.

The problem is being good at making the cards is a different animal than sort of field testing the cards. And that just being good at magic doesn't inherently make you necessarily good at coming up with what the cards do or the ideas. So I said to him, I don't know where to find this person. I don't know. I would like to do this. I definitely, we need to find more design talent. So he said, well, think about it. This is something that he was budgeting. So I thought about it. And that night, I believe, my wife and

I were watching TV. I don't remember. I'm going to say Project Runway. I think it was Project Runway, but it could have been one of multiple reality shows. So for those I don't remember. I'm going to say Project Runway. I think it was Project Runway, but it could have been one of multiple reality shows. So for those that don't know their reality shows, my wife and I watch a number of reality shows. There's a whole class

of reality shows in which it essentially is a job interview where you are trying to do something and it, you know, you know, Project Runway, you're designing clothes

and Top Model, you're a model and Top Chef, you're designing clothes, and Top Model, you're a model, and Top Chef, you're a cook, and Last Comic Standing, you're a comedian. There's been a lot of these kind of shows. So the idea is you're good at some skill, and then you're constantly tested on that skill, usually through challenges that are a little offbeat.

And then each week a panel of judges judges you, and somebody gets eliminated. And you whittle down until somebody wins. And I was watching this and I was like, oh, this is what I need. I go, my problem is I want to find designers

but the only way to do that is to sort of test people's design skill. How do we do that? And I said, oh, well, what if we had like a show, like a reality

show where people applied and then I'd give them design challenges, you know, and they could have to come up with weird design challenges. And then we have judges. And so I came back and said to Randy, okay, okay, this is not a little weird, but what do you think if we do like a reality show to find our designer? And Randy was like, if you want to do it, sure, find it with me. So we needed to come up with a name. I remember we went through a whole bunch of different names. And I don't even remember who came up with the great designer search. It wasn't me.

It was somebody else. And they said, what do you think of the great designer search? We had all sorts of names. I think we were riffing off existing things. And we were trying all sorts of, you know, so you want to be a designer, I don't know, different things like that. And somebody pitched the great designer search and I don't know, it just sort of hit us. Like, oh, that sounds pretty good. So GDS for short. So if I refer to it now, I might call it GDS means great designer search.

So anyway, I got the thumbs up from Randy and the real big question was, I knew if I went out there and I said, hey, who wants to be a designer? I get requests all the time from people who want to be an R&D. It is a really, really common thing that people like sort of ask me about is, I want to make magic cards. How do I make magic cards? And I know there's tons and tons of people that go make their own custom magic cards. I can't look at them, but I know they're there. I write a yearly column or an annual column called Nuts and Bolts, designed for people who want to make their own cards. I know there's a thriving group out there, and I just wanted to tap into that.

But I needed to do it in a way that I was allowed to do because I'm not allowed to look at unsolicited stuff. But if I did a contest where I solicited things, I could look at it. And so the big challenge was, how do we find our contestants? Because I couldn't look at endless contestants. And I knew thousands of people would apply, and they did. So how do I narrow that down? So the first idea is that I said,

okay, I want to make sure people are committed, that part of doing this job is having a real commitment to it. And I want to make sure that people have the right ideas. A lot of finding a good designer is not just the car design itself, but do they get the general sense of magic? Do they, you know, where's their mind at? And I also, communication is a really important part of being a designer. You have to communicate your ideas to other people, and you have to sell your ideas, and people have to understand what you mean.

So communication is important. So for the first trial, we decided to do an essay test. And the idea was that there would be 10 questions. Each question would require an answer of 250 to 350 words. So on average, 300 words. So that's about 3,000 words of writing. Now, it did a couple things for us. One, it showed you were serious.

You don't just write 3,000 words unless you mean it. Two, it allowed us to get a glimpse of what they thought about things, and we can ask questions and try to get a sense of their mindset. What do they think of design? How do they see it? And third, it allowed us to sort of get a sense of their communication. What do they think of design? How do they see it? And third, it allowed us to sort of get a sense of their communication skills. Can they convey what they mean? And the important thing about the essay question really was,

do they have thought out ideas? The goal of finding designers is not finding people that just mimic what we say. It's finding designers that have their own ideas. One of the great things about the Great Designer Search and the successes we've had, we'll get to that in a second, is we found people that really come and have their own stamp on on magic design. Take someone like Ken Nagel. Ken Nagel makes cards that nobody would Ken Nagel would make. And that's what we need.

We need somebody who's going to make something that's not going to repeat what we would have made, but make something we wouldn't have made. That's the most value. So anyway, we did the essay test, or sort of the trial. I'm calling them trials to separate them from the challenges. Okay, but still, a lot of people were willing to write in, and a lot of people had good ideas. So we needed a way to get from the large number of people to a smaller number of people. Because design tests are really, really hard to grade and you can't grade infinite number of them. So what we did is we came up with the idea of doing a multiple choice test. And that was very, that was very, of all the trials we have, we have three normally, that's the controversial one.

Because it's something in which we're taking something that's very subjective and making it very objective. Like, here's a test in which, hey, there's an answer, and one of them is the correct answer. And if you think, well, I know people think B, but I think A, well, you get it wrong. well, I know people think B, but I think A. Well, you get it wrong, you know, and that the essay test and design test give a lot more flexibility for sort of having your own take on things. But I need to get a lot of people down to not so many people, and we need to do it in a way that's easily, you know, gradable.

And so we need to do a multiple choice test. The first one we did was 35 questions. As you will see, we, over time, have added more questions. And then what we did is we looked at the amounts of people who got different questions right, and we had a general sense of about how many we could grade for the design test. We took that cutoff. So we never know what the cutoff is when people take the test. I will point out, by the way, in the two tests we've done so far,

the first one had 35 questions, the second one had 50 questions, one person, a guy named Max McCall, who actually worked for Wizards for a while, is the only perfect score in the history of the Great Designer Search. The tests are usually hard, because we're trying to, you know, check things.

The idea of the test was that there are a lot of objective things you need to know to be a designer. You need to understand the color pie and the color philosophies and sort of how things are made and what's what rarity we had to

there's just some things that look you need to understand these basic principles so a lot of that we put on the test and then the third trial was a design test. So for the first one, it was make a number of cards. And there were constraints. Make these cards under these constraints.

The idea of that test is I want to give enough flexibility that people can come up with some really cool ideas that they've had. But enough restriction that they're going to be forced to design some new cards off the spot. And the idea essentially is some cards will be completely what they made. Some cards will be adapted from things they've made. Some cards will be brand new made for the spot. And I want to test all three of those skills. Those are all actually really important design skills. And so I want to make a design test that sort of lets them show off all of that. And then what happens is once they turn the design tests in, we then go back and look

at everything again with a fine-tooth comb. So we look at the design tests, we look at the essays, we see how they did on the tasks and what questions they missed on the tasks. Not all questions are equal. I mean, they're equal for getting so many passes. But when we look back and see what you've missed, anyway, it's very illuminating to get a sense of the person. So anyway, we did the first grid-down search. We had our trials.

So the first one, we ended up picking 16 people to be in the challenge. One person dropped out right at the end, right before it was about to start. So we ended up doing 15. And then what we did is there was five weeks of challenges. So everybody did the first challenge. Then we eliminated three people, then three people, then three people, then two people,

then two people. That's right. No, it was three, three, two, two, two. So we ended up with three. At the end of the last challenge, there were three people remaining, who was Alexis Jansen, Ken Nagel, and Graham Hopkins. And then we flew the final three out to Wizards. We had a live challenge.

We were able to sit down and chat with them. And then we picked the winner there. So for those who don't know their history, Alexis Jansen won the first Grand Diamond Search. Ken Nagel came in second. Graham Hopkins came in third. We offered both Alexis and Ken six months in R&D and design. Graham ended up getting a contract position in digital. And two other people, Mark Lobis, who had tied for fourth, got a job just outright.

Actually, the funny story, I think I told the story. When we were going to fly them out, it was cheaper to buy tickets for the top five than it was to wait until we knew who the top three were. So we ended up having tickets for Ryan and Mark. And Ryan was in school, so it didn't make sense to fly him out. But, I mean, Ryan was willing to leave school to take the internship if he got it. But we didn't want to sort of take him away from school prematurely. But Mark, we flew out because he seemed like an interesting candidate.

We ended up hiring him. He got hired in digital originally, but now he works in R&D as a project architect. So what happened was, and then there's a guy named Noah Weil, who we ended up giving a contract development internship, or contract, I keep wanting to say internship, I wasn't talking about internship, contract position. Now Noah, I think, really had a, I mean, I think he was interested in seeing what R&D was like.

Noah really wanted to become a lawyer, by the way. He ended up going to law school and is now a lawyer and on to wonderful things. So I don't think Noah's long-term job was to really be at Wizards. I think he was more interested to get a sense of it. He had always played Magic and loved Magic. So he did not stay. But Alexis and Ken and Graham and Mark are still at Wizards.

All four of them are still at Wizards. Wizards. All four of them are still at Wizards. And like I said, Alexis led the design for Dragon's Maze. Mark Globus led the design for, I think, Magic 2014. Ken's led all bunch of designs.

He led Worldwake. He led New Phyrexia. He led Born of the Gods. He led Eldritch Moon. He and I co did Ixalan. I was co-did Ixal... I keep wanting to say Ixalan. I was going to say Ixadron.

That's the wrong... That's the guy who... That's the character from Onslaught. Anyway, and Graham has not actually led a design team, but he's very, very active in the digital side, and he has been on many design teams, and I love having Graham on design teams. Anyway, so that went well. We got a bunch of people, like I said, four of them,

you know, five came, four of them ended up long-term staying at Wizards and all was well. So flash forward four years, I believe, I think it was 2010. We decide, okay, we're looking for... At the time, we were looking for a slightly different skill set than we were for the first one, which was we were looking for what we call vision. The first one was a little bit more about raw card design. The second one was more about sort of vision, which is coming up with worlds,

coming up with sort of larger sense of what's going to happen. We needed more people of that scale. So we changed up how we did the second one. So the second great designer search was we had the audience, I'm not sorry, we had the contestants build a world. So we did the same thing. We had the trial of essays. We had the trial of multiple world. So we did the same thing. We had the trial of essays. We had the trial of multiple choice. We went up to 50 questions from 35.

And then we had the third trial was, involved you building a world and then making some cards that went within that world. So there still was a card design aspect to it. But we really made them build a world, which was a big part of it. And we had a wiki, and then people could submit cards. So it was a very different system.

We did something where we wanted other people to get involved. But really what we were trying to do is test sort of vision. And part of what we were testing was, can you take other people's ideas and use them? So not all the designs came from themselves. That they also got other people to work with that came up with good designs. And that test went similarly. So there's a bunch of differences between GDS1 and GDS2.

So GDS1, we had 15 contestants. We were knocking out multiple contestants a week. We had five challenges, but they would run week back to back to back, which is kind of crazy when I think about it now. It had five challenges, but they were run week back to back to back, which is kind of crazy when I think about it now. It was five consecutive weeks. So when we did the second great designer search, we're like, okay, okay, that was a little much. My running joke for each time I had done the great designer search is, I'll do the next one once I forget

how much work the last one was. So what happened was that we decided to not do 15. That was a lot of people. So we've cut down to eight. Top eight, big thing in magic. It felt like the right number. And we decided instead of making it every week, we'd make it every other week for two reasons. Sorry. One was that it was a lot to ask of the contestants, and we felt like we needed to give them some downtime, that making them work five consecutive weekends back to back to back to back was just grueling. So we thought, okay, okay, let's make it every other week to give them a week off. And we needed more time to put it together. So a little behind-the-scenes thought for you guys.

The way it works is we have a number of judges. And then for each test, the people turn it in. And then each judge, at the same time, because we're trying to go quickly, judges all the cards. So let's say, for example, we do a challenge where we make them design 10 cards. Let's say there's eight of them. So that means every judge has to grade 80 cards. Has to take each card from the 8 different people and then grade each card. And then what happens is each person writes their review and then they send it to me.

And then my job is to then mold them all together. And what I mean by that is I want it to read conversational. I want it to read as if the judges are talking to each other. So let's say, for example, one of the judges says something and then I say the same thing. I will change my answer to go, I agree with judge A. This is a problem. So I will say what I have to say, but I will put it in the context of me agreeing with what comes before me or me adding on to something someone else said so that it is, it gets the sense that there's more connection. One of the things that we're trying to do is,

the Great Designer Search has proven to be a really good tool to find designers, but it's also been a very educational experience. If you love magic, especially if you love magic design, you know, there's no greater way to really get into the nitty gritty of magic design than watching people actually design and watching real people judging them and giving them feedback.

Because that is actual magic design. You make cards, people give you feedback on them, and you adapt to the feedback. That is what we do. So, if you really are interested in how match design clicks and works. The other thing you'll find interesting is the judges don't always agree. Sometimes one judge likes something the other judge doesn't like. You know, it's not as if there's just universal appeal to everything. The other thing you'll find is there are a lot of rules that come out.

If people break the rules, we're like, oh, well, you did something we don't do. And then we'll explain why they, you know explain why they should or shouldn't do that. And the thing that's been really cool of watching both these previous GDSs for the audience is some of the ideas that have been made later went on to become things.

Prowess showed up in the second great designer search. There's a card the card Better Than One from Unstable. Alexis Jansen made it in the First Great Designer Search. I think we changed colors, but she designed the card.

There's just a lot of cool things that get created, and some of it, like, Ethan made Evolve. That became a Simic mechanic in Gatecrash. Sean Main made Battalion. That ended up becoming a mechanic

also in Gatecrash. Gatecrash was right after GDS, so I was able to use it or something. So anyway, oh, let me talk a little bit about the judging. Um, so the way the judging works is we were modeling ourselves after the way they do them on the shows, which is we want to have judges give you feedback.

The first time we did it, um, I ended up getting three judges, three human judges, um, which was I got Aaron Forsyth and Devin Lowe they were I think Devin at the time was the head developer and Aaron was my protege at the time

working on design I knew both of them could write and then we had Gleemax which I think I've mentioned this before I wrote Gleemax

so I wrote myself as well the point of Gleemax was I was trying to get a Simon Cowell kind of like really cuts the point you know not sentimental sort of judge but I didn't want any human

to have to do that so I decided Gleamax is the alien brain that runs R&D we decided that we could use that as a means so Gleamax always gave really short really to the point bluntly to the point advice

and anyway oh the funny story is so the very first week we do judging and Devin is a Devin's a sweet guy so he was just being real supportive in his his comments and a lot of people

so at the time American Idol supportive in his comments. And a lot of people, so at the time, American Idol was a big thing. And the judges at the time, Simon Cowell was the harsh judge, and Randy Jackson was sort of, I don't know, he was the fun one. And then Paula, Paula

Abdul was known as the nice one. And so all these people made jokes about him after the first week that he was the Paula Abdul because he was so nice. And the next week he decided, oh, I'm not so nice. On week two, he just got really harsh in his criticism. Like somebody had made a mechanic called Fragile.

And the way Fragile worked is any damage you took would kill you. And so his response to that is, yeah, there's already a mechanic in the game. Fred's already a mechanic in the game. We call it one toughness. So I remember going to, I go, whoa, whoa, Devin, Devin,

you gotta, I like nice Devin. Can you please be nice, Devin? So he then got a little nicer. So, but anyway, so that was it. So the second, the second great designer search,

the judges were me and Ken Nagel. And then we brought in guest judges. The reason we did that was there's a lot of people I wanted to involve. And so the only way to do that was I just, everybody couldn't judge if I just had, you know, I couldn't have 20 judges. So what we did is we'd have me and Ken, and then we would have one to two guest judges that would come in. And it allowed us, for example, to bring back people who were in the first great designer search and stuff like that. I know Alexis and Ken.

Well, Ken was one of the regular judges, but Alexis and I think Graham and I think Globus, a bunch of the people from Genius One came and did stints as guest judges. I thought it was really cool. So anyway, oh, the other thing about the second Great Designer Search was there's this thing at Hasbro called the INI Awards, which stands for innovation, I believe, that just looks for innovative things, cool things that people do.

And so the Great Designer Search 2 won the Innovation Award, won the INI Award Award. Now we joked at the time that it's kind of funny that the second one won the Innovation Award. It's like we did it again and that's innovation. I think what happened though was, I don't think the INI Awards existed when we did the first Great Design and Search. So the first Great Design and Search that existed within the context of us there being Innovation Awards won. I still have that at my desk. There's a lot of traffic. How do we do on time? Let's see.

Oh, this might be a long podcast. I should pace myself. Okay, so those were the first two great designer searches. Oh, so the second great designer search, the top three were a guy named Ethan Fleischer, who came in first, Sean Main, who came in second, and Scott Van Essen, who came in third. So what happened was Ethan won it. He got a contract at six months in design.

Sean ended up getting a different contract gig in R&D, but not in design. track gig in R&D but not in design. And Scott, at the time, we passed, although Duel Masters would later come back and hire Scott. Scott now actually works in R&D. So all three of the top, all three of the first

three came to work in Magic. All three of the second three came to work at Wizards in Magic. I guess Alexis and Graham in the first one are in digital. Still magic, but... So anyway, also John Lauchs, who was

I think came in fifth in the second grade designer search. He also came and worked for R&D for a while. A few of the people I named, Sean and Noah and John, went on to do other things, aren't currently at Wizards. But of the nine people I named, six of them are still at Wizards.

So that's impressive. Ethan and Scott from the second one are still at Wizards. And Sean was here recently, Sean less recently. But anyway, very successful. So people might say, okay, so you did the last one, I think we did it in 2006? Is that right? 2006? No, no, sorry. The first one was 2006. The last one was 2010.

But still, there was a four-year gap between the first one and the second one. There's a seven-year gap. What happened? Or six-year gap. The 2010 is when we started, and 2011 is when it finished, and they got hired, I believe. Because it takes a while to run. For those who don't know,

the GDS, so on December 4th, we announced that we were doing the third-grade designer search. People could put their name in, and then on January 16th, anybody who had turned their name, oh, let me talk about this real quickly.

So one of the restrictions, if I could wave my, if I had a magic wand to wave, I would love to just hire the best magic designer in the world. The problem is because of sort of labor laws and things, I'm only able to hire somebody who can work in the building that I can hire them in,

meaning we need the person in Renton with us so we can see them to gauge. There's no value. Long distance doesn't work. We're too collaborative that you really need to be in the thick of things. And that means in order to try somebody out in a temporary capacity, we need them to be able to work in the U.S. It is basically impossible to get a visa for somebody for temporary work. It's just in order to prove you need a visa, you have to prove that they have a skill that you need, and there's a lot of things you need to do.

It's just... The other thing, by the way, is we budget for a certain time period, and that even if somehow we could get a visa, which is near impossible to do, the time frame it would take to get it, we wouldn't have the person in the period where we have the money to pay them. So it just doesn't work. So there are a bunch of rules to being

the great designer search. And like I said, they're rules out of necessity, not out of desire. So one rule is you have to be able to work in America, in the US, in Renton. Number two is you have to speak English fluently,

just because you have to communicate with all of us. It's a collaborative thing. Number three has got to be 18. You can't be a minor. And there's a bunch of other smaller rules. Those are the major rules. I mean, you have to be willing to relocate if you get the job and stuff.

So anyway, we did the first grade designer search, got, I don't remember, 1,600 applicants or something like that. We did the second grade designer search and it was like 1,800 or 1,900. I have no idea what's going to happen this time. You know, the fact that we've done it twice and it's been successful and people can literally see like, hey, Ethan Fleischer who just worked on the last that set he won the second great designer search and he's a major player you know that you can sort of see

and one of the cool things by the way about the great designer search one of the things that I really really liked that I didn't realize how much I would like but once it happened I was there's not a lot of opportunity where we kind of reach out to the public that one like I said the number one request I get is I want to work in R&D.

There's not often where I'm like, hey, you out there, there is a chance you could work in R&D. And that the Great Designer Search really has ended up being this sort of, even for people that don't participate in it, just to be able to watch and root for people. And you get to see someone who's just a fan, right? You know, when this whole process started, Alexis and Ken and Graham and Mark and Ethan and Scott

and Sean and John and Noah, they were fans. They were all fans. They weren't necessarily somebody, you know, I think Noah might have been on the pro tour, but with a few exceptions, they weren't names that we knew they were brand new faces that we hadn't seen before and that

these are people this is sort of a system by which we get people that are just I love getting new blood in I love getting people with fresh perspective it's a chance to get people

who know magic but we don't know them and that's a really cool thing and the public has really, really embraced the Great Designer Search. For example, back when we used to have threads,

articles used to have bulletin board threads on our site. We don't do that. We haven't done that in a while. The longest thread in the history of Magic's website was the bulletin board thread

to the first Great Designer Search. And, you know, one of the things is whenever we put up the Great Designer Search is a lot of people read them. They're very popular. And, you know, the whole audience gets really into it. And, in fact, you'll see articles of people talking about who they like and what person they're rooting for. And it really becomes this really Magic community thing, which I really, really enjoyed.

And the fact that it's something that everybody gets to participate in. It's very public. Most of our employment stuff is not very public. And this is super public. So I love the sort of the approach to it and the publicness of it. Okay, why did it take so long? Why did it take six to seven years before we did the second one or third one? Okay, well, a couple things. So I need to go behind the scenes a little bit for this one. So here's one of the biggest reasons, which is something that it's kind of the harsh reality of business, which is the prize for winning the Great Designer Search is you get a six-month contract opportunity.

But really, the point of that is that we want to try you out. And if you, if you work out, if you really are a great fit, we want to hire you. We want to convert you into full time. Like all these people I'm naming, we converted them into full time, you know? And so one of the things that's important is I don't want to do a great designer search if, in the end, the business realities keep me from having the potential to hire somebody. And so one of the issues has been, and I can't get into all the details of it, but suffice to say, I needed to wait for an opportunity where I could have the opportunity, I could, if the person works out in their six-month contract position, that we have the ability to hire them.

That's not always the case. There's many people who come in for contract work that there's no expectation or there's no even chance that maybe they'll convert. And this is something where, hey, look, we're bringing them in. I want the opportunity. And once again,

winning this doesn't mean that you necessarily get to convert. On some level, you know, we joke that you win one contest to start the next contest. You know, like, you have to prove yourself on a different level. You have to sort of prove yourself in the job as opposed to outside the job. And there's overlaps, but there's some differences there um but anyway the biggest reason that I took so long to run it was I needed to have the opportunity um from a business perspective that I could hire the person if they work out um the other thing is that one of the problems with success uh is that everybody gets really excited to sort of make it bigger and better. So we actually, we had tried to start the third grade designer search a couple years ago.

But part of what happened was, because we got a lot of people involved, and a lot of people were really excited, really, really excited. were really excited, really, really excited. This is something like a lot of the people I know who work on social media, for example, one of the things that they said they were really excited to do was they were excited to do a great designer search. That they had been on the outside and watched us do it. And it was such an exciting thing that they wanted to help be part of that on the inside. And so what happened was there were a lot of really grandiose, I mean wonderful, awesome ideas that would have added extra elements and extra layers and do extra cool things. But the problem is when you make something larger, when you do new

things to it, it just adds a lot more complications. And so the problem we ran into was this desire to do lots of cool new things sort of was slowing us down because, you know, new things require people and time and budget. They require technology sometimes. And something that seemed like, oh we just could do this thing, when you actually kind of got in down in the weeds of it, seem like oh we just could do this thing when you actually kind of got in down down in the in the weeds of it was hard to do and so um we ended up realizing that if we wanted to do this that we kind of had old school to a certain extent that um there's we're making a little bit use of new technology mostly on our end stuff that you you might not notice but um but we're not

quite being as flashy about it not being as showy about it because um it just was slowing us down and you know we really really could use some new designers it's been a while um i i like getting the fresh blood and i like having the new perspective and that magic could use that that's something that's really valuable and so finally i said okay look maybe the maybe we do the fourth grade design and search and are able to do grandiose things, but I just can't wait years and years and years.

Let's just, we'll just do it the way we've done it before. So the third grade design and search, like I said, we'll have a few, there'll be a few changes.

I'll talk about that in a second. But mostly it's going to be as you know it if you watch the previous ones. Now, one of the big things is we did some different stuff for two,

like this is going to be a hybrid of one and two. So let me explain how three is going to function. Number one, we are a little bit more interested in the skill that we were looking at for the first grade designer search than the skill we were looking at for the second grade designer search. So the difference between the two is the first grade designer search was five completely unrelated challenges. And the second grade designer search was five completely unrelated challenges. And the second grade of designer search were five very much connected related challenges. We're going back to the earlier one. Our five challenges will be disconnected challenges.

They will not overlap. They could overlap, but they're not inherently going to overlap. There are going to be five distinct challenges. And the skill that we are testing is more what I call blue sky design, which is just make, I mean, we'll give them constraints and things, because obviously part of designing magic is designing to constraints. But a lot of it is like, make cool cards. I'm going to give you opportunities to make cool cards.

And while I'm here with sort of your card designing skill and your mechanic designing skill, and I want you to sort of show what you can do. The second, like I said, the second one was more about cultivating and more about building something that you keep working on. That was cool, and that's something we do at Wizards,

but we're going to shy away from that. We are, though, going to adopt the time frame of the second one. There's going to be eight people in the finals, and there's going to be five challenges each two weeks apart. The first great design search was just a little too crazy for everybody. So this is going to be like the first grade designer search

in kind of the skill set we're looking for and the type of challenges we're doing, but be like the second grade designer search in more the time frame and how we work it out. That it'll be eight people, five challenges, one person knocked out each time, down to three people that we fly out to Wizards. Now, let me talk about some of the differences.

The trials are basically the same, and I think by the time you listen to this, most of the trials will be over, if not all the trials will be over. Once again, we're doing an essay trial, we're be over. Once again, we're doing an essay trial. We're doing a multiple choice trial. We're doing a design trial. The essay test,

it's new. They're new questions although the first question is the same. I always ask the same first question, which is like an introduce yourself sort of question. The first one is the same. Other than that, nine new questions. Multiple choice, we went up. I don't want to commit it to a number because we're still stress testing it as we speak.

But more. And at least from this point in time, significantly more. We decided, so one of the things we did with the multiple choice test was we decided we wanted to ask more questions to do two things.

One is it allows people to miss more questions if we ask more. So it allowed us to sort of get a wider breadth of what the people could do. And the first Great Designer Search, Devin and I did all the questions. The second one, I mostly did it by myself with a little bit of help from other people. The third one, we asked for a lot of help. A lot of different R&D people turned in questions. We got a lot more variety of the kinds of things we asked. It's a little more, this one has a little more breadth of questions.

I mean, it leans toward the design side. I wrote the majority of the questions, but it has a lot of elements brought in from other sections. So this is the one design test that, I mean, I think I did take most of the questions. The problem is I saw them before I took the test. So I think I would do pretty well, but I might not get 100% because some of these questions ask areas that are not my expertise, although having done this for a long time, I probably should do again. So anyway, we have a longer multiple choice test, and then the design test

is more akin to the first design test rather than the second design test, GDIS-1 design. As far as the judges, we've decided to sort of meld things together. Like the first great designer search, we're going to fundamentally have four judges. But, but the, we'll have four judges and they're going to be—hold on one second. We're going to have four judges, and they're going to be—the first one, one of them was Gleamex. So this time, it's going to be three locked-in judges and then one rotating guest judge. So I'm going to be there sort of overseeing vision design.

Eric Lauer, who oversees set design, will be a judge. And Melissa Totora, who is one of the playtest designers. So vision design, set design, and play design will all be covered. And then we're going to rotate again like we did on the second one. I really like having a guest judge

so that we can let different people sort of be there. Sometimes when we do things in which there are different skills we're playing up. When I say one judge, by the way, I reserve the right that it might be two guest judges, depending on what the thing is. I might bring specialists in if we're doing a particular thing. Okay. The other big difference will be...

Well, I guess I don't want to ruin all the surprise. We are trying to hand in a few new things as sort of a presentation. I mean, a lot, if you like the previous Great Designer searches, these are going to be modeled after them. The way it will work is, and I don't know whether it's going to come up on a Thursday or Friday, but at the end of the week, every other week, we'll have an article. The article will show,

and it might be broken into two parts. We're still working this out. But first you will see the previous challenge. You will see all the stuff they did. You'll see the judging from it. And the judges will go over everything they did and give comments and then gets overall comments. Um, and then, um, we will eliminate somebody, uh, and, and then we will, we will give the next test. So the way the design tips are going to work or the challenges are going to work is I think we give them, um,

to work or the challenges are going to work is I think we give them 72 hours to do their work. What will happen by the way for this behind the scenes is I will be talking with all the contestants behind the scenes. I will let them know when they get let go, what the next test is. They will know stuff before you guys all see it. They'll know ahead of time. They're not going to find out they get kicked off the show because they read it online. We accidentally did that once in the first grade on search. I sent everybody an email, but it bounced or something. Anyway, I don't want that to happen again.

But we will make sure that people know. And the cool thing is that, you know, like I said, the reason I wanted to film this when I did is I want you guys to watch the show. I want you guys to see the Great Designer Search. It is a really cool experience. It is something that is, like I'm saying, well, two parts. If you enjoy making Magic cards, there is no single thing we do with more content, more educational content to designing cards. These are actual working

R&D folks giving real tactical advice. And this year, because we have all three sections represented, you're going to get advice on, you know, I will give comments on the vision end of things. Is this a strong idea?

Does it support itself? Can you build around it? What kind of design weight does it carry with it? Individual cards can dictate what happens in the rest of the design, and I'm going to talk about that. Eric's going to be talking a lot about sort of, look, we have to make cards, and they have to sort of make sense sense and they have to fit in the larger thing. And there has to be a balance, not just within that set

but within the larger ecosystem. And Melissa's going to talk about, okay, we want to make sure things don't break. We want to make sure things are fun and playable and you've made choices maybe that don't allow us to make the funnest card, that don't let us push it in a way we can. You've maybe

not, you've taken away knobs or you've built things in such a way that maybe it's hard for them to do what they need to do. Or maybe you did something right and she says, oh, this thing is excellent. The fact you've done this makes it an easier card for us to be able to push and construct it. We will have feedback from all the judges to get a real good sense of that. And like I said, I will rotate and guess judges. So so you also get some more tactical feedback depending on what the challenges are. I'm trying to think

any other... How are we doing on time here? Wow. A lot of traffic today. This is one of those ones where like really I meant to talk for half an hour and I'm going to talk for an hour so I'll see if I can fill in the time

I'm still probably 15 minutes from Wizard so let me talk a little bit I'm going to shift gears a little bit and talk about some of the qualities I'm going to talk about past people and sort of how my relationship to the people who have become staples on Magic and how I first got to know them.

So let's go back to GDS1. So Alexis and Jansen and Graham and Mark are the four that still work in Wizards so Graham and Alexis work on the digital side Mark and Ken work in R&D so the interesting story about this is I'll start with Ken so Ken

I gave them the design test, and I told them, I think I gave them a day to turn it in. And Ken turned his design test in the first minute it could be turned in. It was like 24 hours to turn it in, and he turned it in at like 12.01 or something. Like, you can turn it in at midnight, and he turned it in at midnight. But they had 24 hours to turn it in.

So Ken was like, I want to show you that I can do this. And he made this bold sort of grandstanding move. And I remember when I came into work that day, I came in that morning and looked at my email to see what had been turned in. Or it wasn't my email, but the email. We had set up an email for this. And he was the only person,

he was the only design in. And I don't know, there were, I don't remember the exact number, hundreds of people that were taking the design test. And I was like, wow, that is ballsy.

Like he turned it in when he was allowed to turn it in. Not a minute later. The earliest possible moment. And I said, either this guy is good or he's, you know, he's just. And I remember, like, looking at his designs and going, oh, he's good. Like, you know. And I was impressed. And he took a big risk. Ken is a big I was impressed. And he took a big risk.

Ken is a big risk taker and that was a big risk because that could have flopped and that could have flown in his face. I could have said, you know, hey, here's someone who doesn't care to spend the time

to get it right or something. I liked what he did. I sort of liked, I liked his bold move. And one of the things that Ken did the whole time that I really appreciated was it was clear that Ken had an opinion

that was not my opinion that was Ken's opinion and he would make bold statements even in his essay he made bold statements now he backed them up, he defended them he had thoughtful ideas to say but they were bold, brash statements Alexis really impressed me because it was clear that Alexis was a student of writing, of magic design,

that she really understands the nuance of it. And the reason that she won, I think, is she, her, the nuance of her designs were so strong. You know, like, the fact that she made a card that I'm making the third unset, like, in, in, it was just a perfect card. You know, it was well designed. Like I said, I think I changed the colors. But other than that, um, and me changing colors was more about the needs I had of the set I was making, not that the color she gave me couldn't have worked.

Um, like, I think she made it red-green and I made it green-white. But anyway. But Alexis really, the thing that I, really grabbed me right away was that there was so much attention to detail

and so much that, I often talk about how magic is a craft. And Alexis was, was like a student of the craft and clearly spent time and energy understanding it and working on it and that really impressed me Graham

Graham the thing that I loved about Graham was his designs had sort of a lyrical quality to it that he really cared about the aesthetics and that he did like Ken, he really made cards that weren't the cards I would make

like Alexis was the person who was the most similar to the way I designed and not that she didn't make stuff that was uniquely her own but it was stuff that I could see elements of how I would design it in it both Ken and Graham were doing their own thing. And Graham really had this appreciation of aesthetics that I loved

and just sort of made cards that felt right. They're the kind of cards sometimes that seem like by the numbers they shouldn't work. There's this thing, I don't even know if this is really true, but there's this thing they talk about how, you know, they tried to figure out how bumblebees fly, and the Aeronautics people couldn't figure it out. I'm sure they could. But he had a little of that, what I call, bumblebee quality,

where you can't quite, it works, but you can't quite understand why it works. And I, like I said, Graham is always fun to work with. He always sort of pushes you in fun and interesting directions. And then Globus. Globus was somebody who really, he was somebody, he obviously came from a very technical background and he really had this this technical sort of way he observed things and broke things down. I mean it's no surprise that he became our project

architect. Like he sort of took the skill that I always admired and sort of built an entire job around that skill of sort of understanding how things click together and how they work. And he was always super, super technical in his design. You know, he was super Melvin in what he did. You know, he didn't necessarily, Ken and Graham were a little more Vorthosian in their designs. But I really appreciated that Mark was just super technical and really had appreciation for

the element of the design itself. And like I said, I think he was the Melvin-iest of our of the four that still work at Wizards, of GDS1. Let's talk to GDS2. So the two still work at Wizards are Ethan and

Scott. So the two still work at Wizard are Ethan and Scott. So Ethan was hired for his vision skills. That was the skill we tested. And he has them in spades. Ethan really, he is really good at sort of looking and seeing things and coming up with really grandiose ideas. One of the things that is fun working with Ethan is he really can see beyond. One of the big skills you need in design is you can't see where things are. You need to see where things will be.

And that's something that I like watching with Ethan. It's a skill that I'm pretty good at, but it's something who we were testing and Ethan is good at that. He can sort of see where things are supposed to be, even if they're not there yet, even if you haven't done them yet. And that's an important skill to have from a design sense. And Ethan is always fun. Ethan loves doing research. Whatever you're doing, Ethan will go read books about it.

He will try to get in the mindset of whatever the thing we're trying to do. If we're doing Greek mythology, he's reading all about Greek mythology. If we're doing Greek mythology, he's reading all about Greek mythology. If we're doing cosmic horror, he's reading novels that are cosmic horror novels. Whatever we're doing, whatever kind of thing we're doing. When he was on Dominaria with me, he went and read all the books on Dominaria.

He became an expert on Dominaria. It's how he functions, that he does the research and becomes an expert in the field that he needs to understand. It's a real commitment to the craft that I really appreciate. So Scott Van Essen was in both the first grade designer search

and the second one. A little trivia there. He did better, obviously, in the second one, making the final three and would eventually lead to getting a job. The thing that I always appreciate about Scott is Scott is very adventuresome in his designs.

That he does not worry about constraints and that he will really push boundaries and try new things. And his hit rate, I mean, Scott's hit rate is lower than some, but that's because he pushes farther than most. And that one of the things that I really, really appreciate with Scott is Scott will just try things that nobody else would try. And that, yeah, sometimes they fail miserably, but sometimes they succeed beyond your dreams. And that he really is a designer

that pushes and stretches. Interestingly, I've actually had a chance to work with Scott on not just magic design, and I really love watching the way his brain ticks. He's a really neat designer. His background was he was an engineer and so you can kind of see in the way he approaches game design he's very system-oriented and that's very neat to see. It's a very cool sort of approach to design

and I really like it. Real quickly, the three that aren't still wizards. Sean, I love Sean's ability to, Sean Main, to, he was a great problem solver. That if you said to him, if you sort of gave him the target to aim for,

he would find answers that you would never think to find and that the skill set that he was so good at was he was really good like the world he built the reason he went so far in the greatest honor search too was he built a world that i didn't think was sustainable like he built a world that i don't know if we could actually build it had a lot of inherent flaws in it but he kept finding such interesting ways to do it like you know i still when the dust settles i don't know if we could actually build. It had a lot of inherent flaws in it. But he kept finding such interesting ways to do it. Like, you know, I still, when the dust settles, I don't think we could make his world. But I believe that he was so bold and so innovative

in how he sort of built in his world that I'm like, wow, I can't wait to put him in a world that isn't fundamentally flawed. He's going to shine. And he did. Sean was excellent. Sean led a whole bunch of sets. He led Magic Origins. He led

both Conspiracies. He and I co-led Kaladesh together. Really super inventive. Then we have John Lauchs. So John and Noah are the two that I worked the least with. John did Digital and Noah was doing Development where I worked the least with. John did digital and Noah was doing development where I was not very involved with it. Both of them, John Lauchs had a very imaginative mind and was very creative. And he really was someone who committed to trying to find, to making the best vision of something come to be the reality. And Noah was, I mean, maybe you get the sense of why he went into law,

but he really sort of examined systems in a really interesting way, and loved how he approached things, and he really sort of tried to figure out why things didn't, did not work, and how they could work. Like I said, neither John nor Noah did I work particularly close with, just in the nature of what they had. But both of them were also super, super... Like, all nine of the people that we got out of the Great Designer Search

were really talented people. In fact, one of the cool things about everybody in the Great... Like, it's a hard system to get through, but there's so many talented people. And there were talented people that we didn't end up even hiring that I know went on to have careers in the game industry elsewhere that have shined. So, one of the neatest things about the Great Designer Search

is it's been this awesome tool to find people out there in the world that show signs of doing game design and bringing them in. So, I am excited for the Third Great Designer Search. Like I said, I'm not 100% sure where we are right now in the process. I think we're in between people entering and us starting it i think it's where we

are um we might have might have already started but we haven't finished yet because i know it takes a long time to do it um so i am excited if you haven't watched the great designer search 3 if it hasn't started yet watch when it starts if it has started yet hey go watch it go read it um it really is informative and be a lot of fun And I'm excited to see who we get. Who are the new people? Who do we find? Who's the winner of The Great Designer Search 3? I'm really, really looking forward to

this. And I'm recording this at a time where I know nothing. We haven't even announced it exists yet. So clearly I don't know who the possible people are. At the time you're hearing this, we probably have our finalists if the show hasn't already started. So there's some cool people. I know there will be cool people.

Every time we've done this, there's been cool people. And I don't even know how many people are going to try out this time. Like I said, each time we've broken the record for the most people to apply to something within Hasbro.

So we'll see how we do this time. But anyway, I'm excited. I hope you guys are excited. Please pay attention and watch it. I know we're going to spend a lot of time and energy on it. We're going to have some really good insight and give a lot of judging. And you'll get a chance to sort of see Magic's reality show. That's one of the cool things about this. Not often what you love gets to be a reality show, and we get to do that here. So anyway, I had extra traffic today, so you guys got an extra long podcast, but I hope it was fun and enjoyable. But anyway, I'm now finally at work. So we all 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.