Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #525: Rookie Mistakes

Episode Date: April 6, 2018

Having just read 94 design tests for the GDS3, I spend a podcast talking about many of the common mistakes novice designers make.

I'm pulling up my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so last we talked, we had given the contestants of the 3rd Grade Designer Search the design test, trial number 3. So, I, over the last two days, have been grading all the tests. grading all the tests. And so what I thought today would be interesting is I want to talk about some common mistakes beginners make when designing magic cards. And I will use some of the stuff I saw from the Great Designer Search as a means to sort of, as some examples. I do want to say, by the way, before I, there was a lot of really cool stuff done in the design test, a lot of really good work. So when I point out things that were not the best, I don't want to sort of somehow say that all the people who did stuff

didn't do great work. They did. There actually was a lot of really interesting things, as you guys will see or have seen, I guess, since it's the future. There's a lot of cool contestants we're going to have. But today is a little bit more focused on sort of rookie mistakes, beginner mistakes. So what is the number one mistake people made? And this is a mistake I actually saw on the Great Designer Search is too much text. People sometimes are like, I want to make a cool card and do cool things and tell a cool story. So I'm just going to keep piling things on it till I have lots of things on it. And that one of the things about magic design is the importance of elegance is that you want the card to do something. Do it well. You know, be the card that it is. And then that's it. You're done.

well, you know, be the card that it is. And then that's it. You're done. And a lot of the text, like, one of the things I noticed from judging the test was how many times somebody would give me text that literally would not fit on a magic card. And so this first mistake, it's not just that people put too much text

in the sense of it won't fit on the card. Sometimes people do that. But also just that sometimes, like a lot of times I'll look at, like I'll be reading the design test, and like somebody would make a really good card, and then they keep going. It's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, if you just stopped right here, you'd have a really cool card. whoa, whoa, if you just stopped right here, you'd have a really cool card. You adding more text on the card, instead of making it an even better card, start to lower the quality of the card. And so one of the things that when you're designing your magic cards, one of the things that is an important thing that we look for is you kind of want to,

it's kind of like a poem. Designing a magic card is kind of like a poem. And that the best poems get in, they do what they're going to say, and they get out. And that, I have a friend who's a poet, and they describe to me poetry as the art of saying what you need to say without any extra words. Now, in general, that's true for writing,

whether you're writing a short story or a novel or a screenplay, in general, in general, you don't want anything excess you don't need. But when you get down to poetry, poetry, because of the form it is, usually how most poems are not particularly long,

that you really get to fine-tune and get to the attention of, like, this exact word is one syllable too long. Magic cards have a lot of that quality, that you really, you want to get the essence of what the card is about. And so one thing I say to people when you're designing magic cards is, look at cards you've done and say to yourself, what would happen if I don't have all of that on the card?

What would happen if I took this line off? What would happen if I took this line off? What happened if I took that line off? Like, see how much you can, like, on some level, the cool part of a magic card is you're doing something interesting and you want that thing to shine through. This is actually sort of a meta note about games in general. I think people when making games in general put too many things in their games. If you saw my GDC talk, I have a thing about making peas, my little making peas metaphor, where the super quick version is

my wife usually cooks dinner because she's a far better cook than I am. And often when she makes dinner, I'll make the vegetables, which involves putting frozen vegetables into a boiling pot, very advanced. And whenever I make peas, there's this routine I go to where I always assume I don't have enough peas, and I keep putting more peas in, and then I always make too many peas.

And I think a lot of game designers have that similar problem of they have this concern they don't have enough game mechanics in their game, and they keep adding game mechanics. With a magic card, get in, get out. What is your card about? You know, whenever you add other stuff, you pull focus. That if you want people to notice your card and for your card to be the thing it is, figure out what's special about the card and then focus on that. And then don't distract it with other things.

It's very, very easy to do that. Okay, second problem, which is connected to the first problem, is people putting things on a card that don't create a cohesive whole. So one of the things that's important when you're designing a magic card is to remember that the card is a singular item. And that if you put more than one ability on the card, it should be because those abilities, when combined together, create something that is greater than the sum of its parts. That you're trying to make something, and these pieces all come together to make a larger picture.

One of the mistakes I find, and this happened a bit on the test, is people who would put together two abilities that it's not that either ability wasn't a good ability, but the two abilities of the card together don't really mesh. And there's two ways for abilities to mesh. Ideally, you want both, but there's two ways. One is you can mesh mechanically.

Oh, well, ability one and ability two mean something to each other, so there's some synergy in how it plays or they can mesh in flavor oh i see it's this thing and this thing would do a and b and a and b makes it feel more like that thing um so if you're going to add multiple things on a card it has to serve the larger card um and a lot of times people would like to just cram stuff on just because, I don't know, because they can? I'm not sure why.

But the thing is, if the component pieces don't make something greater than the sum of the parts, the audience expects it to. That is how we make magic cards. The cards are a cohesive whole. And when you make something that sort of, it doesn't make sense why something's there, it breaks the aesthetics

of the card. It makes people assume that things connect. So when they don't connect, it really it just is sort of unnerving. Because you're trying to figure out why they connect. And the human brain loves to connect things.

So just be conscious. If you're going to put more than one thing on a card, that the multiple things have to serve a purpose in relation to each other. There has to be some sort of, they need to come together to do something. And that can't just be, well, why wouldn't you, if you like A and you like B, my answer here is like imagine for example you're going to make a recipe you go oh people really like cream puffs

and people like you know boiled chicken I don't know if you want you know cream puff and boiled chicken or ice cream and ketchup or whatever. Just because people like two things in a vacuum doesn't mean combined that they're better together. That if I'm making a recipe, I want to get two tastes that will taste well together.

I now realize that putting chicken in a crust like a cream puff might be cool. So anyway, maybe my example was not the best of taste that don't taste that together. But the idea essentially is that you want the component things, just because people like them in isolation doesn't mean they get better together. And people have to be sort of aware of that

when you're making things. Another mistake. This one was not a mistake made too much on the great designer search mostly because we did a giant test before you got it turned in but color pie is another huge mistake when I've seen

you know I don't get to read I don't get to read people's designs all that often but we've done stuff like you make the card and there's been opportunities in the past where people can sort of turn stuff in um and another big one i notice is you really need to understand the color pie um also and this was on the design test you need

to understand card types you need to understand rarities um i i wrote an article about rarities. I wrote an article about rarities that should be up by the time you hear this. I've written lots of articles about color pie. I've done podcasts and stuff about card types. Like one of the things about magic is

we spend a lot of time and energy giving definition to things. And then when you make a card, understand the definitions. Another thing that people love to do which sort of offers you this is breaking rules to break them.

Like, magic's never done this does not inherently a good magic card make. Now, if you find out a good reason to do that like, I'm all for finding new and interesting design spaces to play around with there's not a lot that's taboo for me but when people sort of break rules just to break them, I think that is not good design that when you want to do something, for example

the first time we made a card with two faces on it, a double-faced card, it wasn't just, oh, way, we can make double-faced cards. It was like, oh, we were trying to serve the purpose of something, werewolves in this case. We got into the idea of dark transformation. The vampire becomes a bat, and the man becomes a werewolf, and the little girl becomes the demon.

There's these transitions that are part of horror. And so we think, oh, well, here's a way for us to show something that's a neat thing that magic doesn't currently show, you know, and we got to new technology to do that. But the inherent problem there is that if you're not serving something, if your idea is not serving your rule-breaking, then the rule-breaking sort of, like, rule-breaking for the sake of rule-breaking into itself is not particularly, like, it doesn't, you need to lead the audience to what you're doing.

You need to get the audience accepted to what you're doing. And here's the important thing. There are a lot of rules set in place on purpose. Rules serve an important function, which is we make a lot of magic cards. There's a lot of reasons why there is a color pie, why there is a mana system. There's a lot of things that it matters what things are.

And that if you just willy-nilly ignore things, you start to break down those things. And those things serve a purpose. They help the game. They make the game better. The structure of all the different components makes magic a good game. And there's a reason why you can't just put everything in your deck or just ignore the mana curve. That these things matter and they're elements of the game. So if you make things that ignore those things, you are sort of A, undercutting the game, and B, you are confusing the audience

because the audience has some expectation. Now, if you're going to break a rule and you do it for a reason that makes sense, the audience goes, okay, this is weird. Oh, but I get it. You know, yeah, I don't normally have a face on the back of my card, but oh, it's a werewolf and it's a human that turns into a were Oh, but I get it. You know, yeah, I don't normally have a face on the back of my card, but oh, it's a werewolf

and it's a human that turns into a werewolf and that's cool. You know, and they can see the total package and they can get the total package. But if you had just made a transform card

that transformed for no reason and had no logic to it, it's like, I'm a 2-2 and I transform into a 3-1. Okay, why are you a 2-2 I transform into a 3-1. Okay, why are you a 2-2 that turns into a 3-1? Is there a flavor reason?

Is there some reason you're doing that that you need to sort of have some definition of what you're doing? Because people really, really do embrace the rules and like the rules. And they get upset when you mess with the rules without some reason they understand why you're messing with them.

Doing it the right way, it's fun. Doing it the wrong way, it's just disconcerting and not fun. So, if you're going to, like, I made an article called Mechanical Color Pie, where I talk about all what mechanics go into what color. Between my podcast and my article, I've talked about rarity

and car type and color. Understand what those are. Understand what they're supposed to do. And really, when you're first starting to design, what I say to people is, and this is true of any art. This is true of me. I'll tell a story.

When I was in college, I took a creative writing class. And the very first class, the very first assignment I ever did. So back in the day, there was a thing called the Book of Lists. Maybe I'll be dating myself. So the Book of Lists was just a book, it was a trivia book of just weird lists. Here are 10 people who got an Oscar nomination without speaking. Here are 14 people who, you know, were over

eight feet tall. It was just lists of weird and quirky things. And really it was a trivia book, but the gimmick of the trivia book was it was put in lists. So anyway, I was taking a creative writing course in college. And so for my first story, I wrote the story of a date, basically, of a college kid going on a date. But I wrote it in the form of the Book of Lists. So, and there was a giant debate in my class about whether I'd even written a story. I believe I had. There was a beginning, a middle, and an end. There were characters, things happened.

But it was an untraditional format. And the next time, what else did I, I mean, I for a couple assignments, I really was messing with the form of writing. Like, telling things for the, and there's this ongoing, like, could someone tell

Mark to write stories, please? You know, I was writing things for, like, is this a story? So finally my teacher took me aside one day and she said, Mark, I appreciate the experimentation you're doing, but this is a beginning class. Could you just write some stories for me, please? Could you stop

messing with the form and write stories? Could you actually just write stories? Someday, once you understand the stories, you know, please explore the form. But when you're learning and you're

starting, and she said, look, if you were in an art class, you're not going to start with cubism. You're going to start with painting a bowl of fruit with a pretty realistic thing. Hey, can you paint a bowl of fruit? Now, at some point, you will learn other techniques and there's other things you can do and you can experiment with form

and all sorts of stuff. But when you're learning, you know, when you're starting off, start with the basics. And so, you know, I finally wrote a story with just characters in it and a beginning, a middle and an end. And it wasn't some weird format or, you format. And I understand there's an excitement. I see it within myself. There's an excitement when you are starting in a medium, whatever that medium is. Whether it's magic art design, painting, writing a story, a screenplay, dancing, whatever. Whatever it is you're making, whatever artistic expression you're doing. There's this great desire when you're first starting out to kind of buck the system, to go, ha ha, look, I can subvert

the form. And at some point, you do want to get there in your craft, but you don't want to do that when you start. And the thing about magic design is if you don't know the basics, then you don't know when you're subverting for the right reason. And so a lot of people I say as you're starting out, start out by making simple magic cards. You know, make magic cards that we would make. I mean, at some point you can make magic cards we would never make.

That is fine. And that's a neat part of the experience. But when I say to beginning designers, you want to start by sort of seeing if you can do what we do. You want to start by sort of seeing if you can do what we do. And one of the reasons we did the test the way we did is we were testing the boundaries of, do people understand the colors? Do they understand the car types?

Do they understand the rarities? You know, there's a lot of things we did to see if people sort of understood that and can build within the restrictions. Okay, another really common mistake that I see beginners make is that they don't know, they want to have too heavy a hand in what the card does. So remember, the cards serve the game.

And what that means is the reason people will like your game is not that any one card necessarily is the most amazing thing in the world. It's that the game as a whole is a really fun game. And that one of the things that happens early on is what I call grandstanding, which is people want every card they make

to be something people go, oh my goodness. And you get some of that. Part of making rares and mythic rares is making a little bit of splash and stuff. But the goal, if you're trying to make a magic set, is not that every card makes someone go, oh my goodness.

In fact, if I made a set in which every card would just made you look at it twice, that would not be a fun set. Even if each individual card was an amazing card, that would not be a fun set. And what I mean by that is, I use my cake metaphor. That my, I love cake.

I like vanilla cake. My wife and I throw parties all the time. And we love having cake. And we have a cake decorator. We have a cake decorator. They do cool stuff with the cake. And we just, we have fun cakes. And I love cake.

I'm a big fan of cake. And my favorite part of cake is probably the icing. I love icing. Icing is really good. But would I want to have a cake of nothing but icing? No. In fact, I want more cake than icing. Icing is my favorite part of the cake. I still want more cake than icing. What makes cake, what makes icing awesome is that there's cake for it. And that when you're making your magic set, you don't want a set full of icing. You want a cake with some icing on it. And the icing can be fun and fanciful and colorful and tasty and sweet. But the reason the icing is the icing, the reason that it stands out,

and yes, the icing is the splashy part of the cake. You know, the decoration is the splashy part of the cake. But what makes the cake taste good is the cake. And you need enough cake. And so be careful not to grandstand too much. And I think you can make a few exciting cards. But part of being good at magic design is not making cards to make people go, what? It's making people go, oh, okay, that's a cool card.

And it's a nice, simple, it does the thing it does. You know, not that I can't believe it, but more like, oh, that's a cool card. And it's a nice, simple, it does the thing it does. Not that I can't believe it, but more like, oh, that's a cool card. It's a nice designed card. And that a lot of people, because they're starting off and they're trying to get attention for what they're doing, so I'll use another analogy. One of the things when you do stand-up comedy is that there are some things that will get you attention.

Swearing is a really good example. Swearing tends to get immediate reaction out of the audience. But unless you are swearing for a purpose within your act, unless it's serving something, it is not long-term helping you.

Doing short-term things that sort of generate, like there's things you can do where the audience has to sort of pay attention just because in the way life works, you know, there's certain words and certain things that just make them go, what did that person just say? And there is some sort of, what do you call it, shock talk, that there

is some things you can do that makes the audience go, I can't believe they're saying that. But if you don't have something to back that up, if you're, I mean, it's not that I have any problem with people in comedy saying shocking things or using, you know, swear words or anything. It just needs to be for a purpose. It needs to be because it's serving some larger purpose. And that, when I did stand-up, I did a lot of open mic nights because I was a beginner. And there's a lot of people who have sort of learned how to get the audience to look at them,

but they do it in a way they don't understand why. And so when they go up and they do the routine, it's not that they're not getting people to look at them, but it's not serving what they're doing. And so in the end, it doesn't make for a good routine. And the same is true for magic cards, which is if your magic cards are spending too much energy saying, look at me, and not enough energy

making them play well. So that leads into the next big mistake, which is people making cards that read well or read interestingly, but don't play well. So one of the things I always say when you're designing magic cards is you need to playtest. Now, obviously, the farther along you are, the more playtesting you need,

and the farther along you are, the more outside playtesting you need, so you can get people that aren't part of what they're doing to get feedback um but another big mistake i see is i will see cards that like okay that's an interesting line of text you're doing something magic hasn't done or you're combining things we haven't combined before but then the second question is do okay we haven't done it Is there a reason we haven't done it? Like, sometimes, for example, you're mixing things. Like, here's a really good example, is trample and death touch. If you'll notice, we don't tend to put trample and death touch together.

And a common thing I'll see when people are designing is they'll go, oh, I've never seen Death Touch with Trample. Let's do it. And then you've got to step back and go, okay, why don't we put Death Touch with Trample? I mean, you can, obviously, in the game, gain Death Touch and gain Trample. There's ways to do that. But we don't tend to put them on the same card.

Why? And the answer is that it is not how it plays is complex and that when we put abilities together we we if you know that we play together and you know they cause a problem you're sort of signing yourself up for issues for example with trample and death touch is death touch only needs to do one damage to something to kill it so as far far as trample is concerned, it just needs lethal damage. And lethal damage for Death Touch is a single thing. So if you have three creatures and I have a three-power Death Touch creature, I can kill all your creatures.

Is that obvious? Is it obvious that I get to trample over you even though you have a toughness of three? If you really understand the rules, I though you have a toughness of three. If you really understand the rules, I'm not saying a lot of people can't get that, but it is complex and something that a lot of people would get wrong. So we tend to avoid putting it. So there are things that we know we can do

that we avoid. Another common example is there are ways to take two abilities that exist on cards, exist in a color, and combine them to make something that really doesn't exist in the color. The perfect example is I could have a green card that says make a death touch 1-1, then have it fight a creature. Really what I'm making there is a kill spell because I don't mean, Yes, I'm technically killing you with a creature, but the point is I'm producing the creature

that's going to kill you, and as a 1-1 creature, it's going to die anyway. So for all intents and purposes, it's a spell that requires me having no creatures and kills your creature. Well, that's not what green does. So even though it's using components that green does, that just because the components are of a color doesn't mean the combination

is necessarily of the color. Anyway, so when designing, you sort of have to make sure it plays well and that it's not sort of violating the essence of what the colors and stuff are supposed to be doing. And I cannot stress enough how important playtesting your cards is when you're first starting to make cards.

Because there's so, so much you can't understand until you play. Because one of the interesting things about playing is you'll play and then all of a sudden something will come up. You're like, oh, oh yeah, that would happen. And then you have to answer the question, well, what happens? You know, and it forces you to either rewrite the card or think about the interactions or whatever. It forces you to go, oh, this is something that will happen. And I have to understand that. So I have to sort of accommodate, especially things if it happens with a common card where, oh, this will probably happen a lot in my set. Well, I better make sure that the cards can handle that thing.

another mistake this is something I saw in the GDS some is people who are who want to undo things that magic has done this is a common thing I see where magic has chosen to do something

and the people go well I don't like that decision, so I'm going to make a card that undoes that decision. Now, if you're making your own set to play by yourself, I'm not saying you can't make cards like that, but there's a little bit of a disrespect, especially if you're trying out for R&D. There's a little bit of a disrespect to... One of the things that I would recommend is if

you are trying to make cards that are, I mean, you are free to make whatever cards you want. And if you want to make vintage cards, I mean, more power to you. I'm not going to stop you. That is, you're free, you are free to make whatever you like. But if your goal is to make standard legal cards, if your goal is to kind of design the cards the way we design the cards, you have to be conscious of the things we're doing and what is allowed and what is not allowed. Like you need to sort of pay attention to what abilities do we do and how often and how cheap and, you know, you need to kind of watch what we're doing to get a sense of what's going on. Now, you can listen to my podcast, read my columns.

I mean, I spend a lot of energy sort of explaining where we go and where we are and where we're at. But if you are trying to make a set like a normal set, a standard legal set, that's the other big thing. For example, the people who were turning in cards for GDS, one of the things we said to them is, assume you're designing for an unspecified standard legal set. So when they're making cards that sort of really aren't standard, that aren't what Magic is now, that is something that sort of draws attention to itself. One of the things about designing Magic cards is there are a lot of restrictions.

There are a lot of restrictions um there are a lot of restrictions that are built into the system because it makes for a better game um some of that is power level some of that is color pie choices some of that is just how we choose to do some interactions um what effects we do is sorceries versus instant you know what things we're willing to do as enter the battlefield and what rarities and all that different stuff. You need to study that because the goal, if you're trying to make

a standard legal set, when I say standard legal, if you're trying to make cards like we make cards, you need to sort of understand what we're doing and what restrictions we're putting on ourselves.

There's a lot of interesting cases in the GDS design test where, like, one of the interesting things about the design test for me is trying to get a sense of who understands magic. And one of the interesting things about the design test for me is trying to get a sense of who understands magic. And one of the big red flags, if you will, is when they do something

they're like, oh, we wouldn't do that. So you don't understand some element of how we do things because you thought we would do that. Or you thought that that was acceptable for a standard legal set. I got a bit of that. Or you thought that that was acceptable for a standard legal set. I got a bit of that. The other thing to be careful of is

people sometimes get really enamored either with corner case stuff or with weird combinations. Like I said with the Death Touch and Trample, be careful. Remember that you're making magic. One of the things I always talk about is

I could make a set where I use the mechanics of magic and make a game that looks nothing like magic. The game is flexible enough that I could do that. The real question, though, is, is that what the audience wants? Does the audience want to go, okay, time to play magic, and go, oh, this isn't magic.

No, no. And so one of the things that's also important to remember is you need to make sure that you're doing enough of what magic normally does that your set, when you're done, will feel like magic. That's another big mistake I make is people sort of stretch boundaries so much that they make something that isn't essentially a magic card. I mean, technically it's a magic card in that it could be a magic card.

But it isn't a magic card in the sense that it doesn't get the nuance of what magic is or how it works or doesn't play in a way that feels like it's part of the game. And you've got to be careful of that because you're making a magic set. Your magic cards need to feel like a magic card. Ideally, what you want to do is make cards so realistic that people who assume that they're playing with real magic cards. I mean, often you have to, when you play TAS, you have to sort of mock them up. So you kind of give away you're making up cards. But really, really good designs. Like some of

the best designs I have are ones in which we make the design and I'm like, didn't we make this? Have we not made this? Isn't this something we've made? And you look it up like, oh, we've never made this. Like, oh, okay. Well, that's a sign of a pretty good card if, like, it feels like we've made it, yet have never made it. That is a really sweet spot for designs. It means that you're capturing the essence of the game,

but you're also figuring out where there's areas to fill in gaps. There's a lot of gaps in Magic. It is shocking to me, 25 years in, how I'm always finding cards that go, we haven't done this yet? Which is a sign there's a lot of gaps in Magic. It is shocking to me, 25 years in, how I'm always finding cards that go, we haven't done this yet? Which is a sign there's a lot of design space in the game, but it's also a sign that you're going down

the right path when you sort of make something that, like, okay, I've got to double-check to make sure we haven't actually done this. Anyway, I'm now pulling up to the office. Part of today is sort of to say to you, designing Magic cards is hard. It's fun. So like, part of today is sort of to say to you, designing magic cards is hard.

It's fun. It is a lot of fun. I mean, I know there are lots of people that for fun do it and there's lots, I mean, I can't read them,

but I know there's websites and there's all sorts of stuff to do that. And if anything I'm saying today makes you excited, makes you want to make magic cards, there are a lot of places where you can get feedback.

Not from me, obviously, but there's a lot of places you can get feedback and because i've spent a lot of time and energy sort of helping lay down the rules for everybody there are resources where people go oh no no no you can't do this mark said this in this article whatever um and at least makes you understand that are you breaking a rule because you mean to break a rule or are you breaking a rule because you didn't understand it was a rule. And those are very distinctly different things.

But anyway, so now I have to, I'm now going to park. I have to go read some essays now. The GBS is lots of work for me, but good work. And I find good people. But anyway,

I hope today was illuminating and I hope today was illuminating. And I hope you guys... I hope for people who are making their own cars, which is a fun thing to do, that this was insightful and gave you some thoughts. Anyway, I'm now 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.