Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #562: Vision, Set, Play Design Retrospective

Episode Date: August 10, 2018

It's been two years since Research and Development started the new Vision Design, Set Design, Play Design model. In this podcast, I take a look at it and judge how I think it's going.

I'm pulling up my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today is a retrospective day. So, a while back, we changed over the way we made magic. So, the old school was the design and development process. And we moved to a system of vision design, set design, play design. So, I'm going to walk through and explain real quickly what the difference is and then what I want to do is say, okay, I've now

had a chance to work with this for a couple years. You guys have actually only seen it. Dominaria is the first set that had vision design. But I have worked on not just Dominaria, but Spaghetti and Guilds of Ravnica and Ravnica Allegiance but I have worked on not just Dominaria, but Spaghetti and Meepo's, Guilds of Ravnica and Ravnica Alliance,

Allegiance, and Milk and Archery and Baseball and Cricket, and I'm currently working on diving and doing advanced stuff on both Equestrian, and I don't think F is a name you guys know yet, but anyway, so I've been living in this world for a while. So let me talk a little bit about what the old system was and then I'll talk about the new system. And then my plan for today

is to sort of evaluate and say, how do I feel about it? How do I feel the system is going? I will point out, by the way, that there's a little, I was trying to figure out whether or not I wanted to do this now where I've experienced it for a while or whether I want to do this now, where I've experienced it for a while, or whether I want to do it in two years, when you've experienced it for a little while. And I finally came to the conclusion that I could just do both. One of the things about doing a bi-weekly podcast, or is that right, bi-weekly? I always get confused whether that means every other week or twice a week.

Twice a week, but it means twice a week. I essentially have a lot of topics. Today's is the 560th something podcast. So I got a lot of topics to cover. So whenever the answer is more, I will choose that. So I'm going to talk about it now and if I remember a couple years from now,

I will evaluate it also from the end of when you can see the stuff. So today will be more me talking in general terms since there's not a lot that you can see yet. But anyway, okay, old system, the system we used for many, many years was the design development system. And the way that worked is design would work for five, for 12 months. Before design started, we usually would have exploratory design. Exploratory design was usually somewhere between, I think originally it was six months

long, and then became three months long. The current version is two months. But, so anyway, we would do exploratory design for some amount of time, and then we would do twelve months of design, and then we'd hand it off to development, and they would do I don't know, what, nine months of development?

And the idea was that it was kind of a long, continual process, and that design was sort of figuring out what we wanted things to be, cracking the vision. In fact, there were three different sections of design. And we would, it was, what was it? Um, and we would, uh, it was, what was it? It was, uh, Vision, uh, and then it was, um, I can't remember this. Vision, uh, I always forgot the middle one. Uh, something reminds me, I had to apply guess on this.

Um, Vision was broken down to three parts, sort of. I mean, it wasn't, it was all one team, so, uh, what version we did each thing was kind of up to us. But we would sort of figure out what the set was about, start populating it, and then make an honest first attempt at building the set. That's the old system. Okay, the new system is we have exploratory design for about two months. There's exploratory world building, which is the creative team sort of fleshing out the world. Then two months of exploratory design. Then there are four months of vision design.

And vision design, what I always explain, the metaphor I use is we're building a house. And vision design, like, exploratory design is about kind of scouting out locations and, you know, doing a lot of research work on the kind of houses that are and the different buildings, you know, just sort of doing some research before you start. Then vision design is kind of like building, is being the architect, is doing the blueprints. You're not building the house, but you're figuring out what the house is going to look like, what the house is going to be made out of, like the general sense of what the house is going to be.

what the house is going to be made out of, like the general sense of what the house is going to be. Then set design, which is nine months long, although there's a gap in the middle for three months where they don't do a lot of work. So it's like three months of work, three months off, although they're peaking in, and then three months. And then after set design is done, then there's some time in play design.

So set design is building the house. Set design is figuring out, okay, you know, usually visions come up with mechanics and a general theme for the set, but then set design is about the actual execution of those themes and mechanics. For example, like

in vision design for Dominaria, I'll use that since you guys actually know this one, we came up with the idea for Saigas that they represented stories, that they had a different layout, that you processed stuff over time, and that they were enchantments. But most of the Saigas that were actually put into the product were made during set design. They figured out what stories they wanted to tell and mechanically how they wanted sagas to play.

So Vision came up with the concept of sagas, but set design sort of executed on sagas to make the actual sagas in the set. That's a good example of the difference between the two. And then play design is all about field testing, making sure that the sets are balanced and are ready for tournament play. It's all about just getting the reps in and making sure that we understand how things play. And play design overlaps a little bit with the end of set design, but I think it's like three months total.

But one month is an overlap and two months is unique just to play design, I think, if I remember correctly. But anyway, so it's a radically different system. A lot of the same things get done, but who does them and how it's done and just the way we think about it is different. So what I want to do today is look at the system and say, okay, we have about over two years actually, but over two years of rough with this. Because Dom and I was the first set,

and then we have the whole next year, and the whole year after that, and I'm working at the beginning of the year after that. So we have over two and a half years of, in fact, two and a half years approaching three years of working that we've done. Okay, so the question is,

what do I think of the, I mean, this was, by the way, I've worked in R&D for a long time. We've had a lot of changes over the years. This is probably the biggest change we've ever had in the way we make magic. I mean, there are things that definitely we've had adaptations, and you heard my talk on the stages of design.

I mean, we've definitely changed how we did things. But those were smaller incremental changes. This is a bit bigger. Okay, so what do I think of it? Well, the overview is I like it. I think it's a really good system, and as Dominaria demonstrates, I really think the finished product, I think, is improved. So let me walk through a little bit about what I like about the change.

In general, I'm super pumped on it. I think it's doing really good work. Okay, so first, let me talk a little bit about one of my favorite things, which is something that I get to do. So under the old system, oh, yeah, yeah. So that's before.

So it was vision, integration, and refinement were the three stages. So before, when I used to do a set, I would spend roughly a third of the time

doing vision, meaning I would figure out what the set was about. I would do the blueprinting, as you will. Then integration was sort of figuring out how to actually make cards on what we did. And refinement was us trying to clean it up. So one of the things that I like a lot is under the old system I used to make the large set in the fall and then the large set would kind of figure out what we thought the small sets were doing but the small sets really just kind of got whatever they like we we did block planning so

I would think ahead and sometimes we'd save mechanics it wasn't that we didn't think about the small sets um it's just that so much of our energy went toward the big set with the philosophy of, well, the little sets will gain from the knowledge that we get on the big set, which it did to a certain extent. But it meant that really the fall sets were getting the lion's share of our attention. Under the new system, every set gets the same amount of attention. Now, that's really important in a world in which we're not staying in the same place all the time. Like under the old system, you know, the old block system, we were on the same world for three sets. And up until Rise of the Eldrazi, usually if we

were on the same world, it was mechanically, there was a through line all three sets. What we started doing for a while is every other year, we'd do a third large set that was mechanically different. Rise of the Drazi and Avacyn Restored being good examples where it was just different than what the earlier, same world, but different mechanics. And then you'd start drafting over. In some ways, you can see this is a precursor of our 3-in-1 system

because at least for one of the sets, we'd make it large and draft by itself. Eventually, our current system sort of pushed toward all sets are that. All sets are drafted by themselves. All sets are large. And so, under that world, I really... There's no way that we would be able to go to all these different worlds if each world didn't have a time that we can map it out and plan it and figure out what it's doing. And so the new system, I mean, one of the things that we realized was that there comes

a cost when you're just trying to do more. Like, we used to do one world a year. One world. And then we said, okay, we're going to go to a place in which we do two worlds a year. And now we're in a place where we can have up to three worlds in a year. Well, that's a lot of worlds. That's a lot of different possibilities. And one of the things is, even when you're going back to an existing world, you still

have to understand what you want to do. You still have to map and plot it out. What aspects of the world are you picking up on? What are you repeating? What understand what you want to do. There's still, you still have to map and plot it out. You know, what aspects of the world are you picking up on? What are you repeating? What aren't you repeating? What are the new things you want? You know, like, even when we go back to a world, there's usually something that's new about that world.

Some worlds are more structured than others. You know, Ravnica has more of a built-in identity that we know we're doing, where something like Zendikar, there's a little bit more flexibility, you know, how we want to focus on it. So like the, you know, the... So even returns need attention.

It's not like, oh, we're just going back to a world we know, so we don't need to worry about it. No. Every set, no matter what we're doing, needs attention. We need to understand what we're doing and how we're doing, needs attention. We need to understand what we're doing and how we're doing it and such. And so the thing I really appreciate, one of the things I appreciate about the new system is

that I get the opportunity to really give time and attention to every set. The thing that is nice under this new system is that instead of giving kind of 12 months attention to one set, I give four months attention to every set. Um, and as somebody who likes to sort of plot and plan and map it out, I think it just makes for more rich sets. It just makes for better sets. The more vision you do on a set, the more you think about it, the more holistically you plan it out. Um once again, we'll use the metaphor, like a house with blueprints, ah, it's just a better house. It's just, that means that you've thought out all of the things and that a lot of kind of, you know, to follow the metaphor, the small sets were kind of like,

well, look at the big house and kind of make a house like the big house and so there'll be a lot of copying what the big house would do but it it meant you missed a lot of nuance um i mean a lot if you go through the history of magic a lot of the issues i have would be we try to do something within the constraints of what we were doing and then realize wow we were smashing our head against the wall. Like, that was, like, a good example is Fifth Dawn. Like, we were doing Mirrodin, and we figure out Mirrodin has some problems.

Fifth Dawn has to sort of, you know, zig instead of zag so we can sort of, like, you know, there's a lot of broken things in the environment, and we knew we couldn't do those. So Fifth Dawn really had to try something new, but we hadn't planned for it. So we weren't really set up to enable you to do that. Or even likewise with eventide,

where we switched from ally to enemy, but it was the third set in the block, and this was back before we came up with the idea of having you draft the newest set first. Like, I was trying to have themes in which it was one pack of three packs at the end. Like, how loud do you have to be to even make those potentially viable at all? And so, a lot of the evolutions to me of R&D has been us figuring out better ways to do things. solutions to me of R&D has been us figuring out better ways to do things.

Now, the trade-off for me personally is I used to do not just vision, but integration and refinement. I'm passing that off now. So that's the other next big thing, which is one of the things we realized under the old system was that we would get the the developmental skills I mean everything's now designed I guess by name but the developmental skills what we used to call development there's a lot of reasons to bring that early during the process because you want to make sure

you're building your mechanics from the ground up in a way that allows them to be played maximally like one of the problems we tended to run into under the old system was, usually design teams were mostly designers, and we'd have a developer on them. And development teams were mostly developers, we'd have one designer on them. But the problem we'd run into in design was, the designers were really, really good at coming up with ideas. We were really good at coming up with new and different and being flavorful. But we

weren't as well versed. Like, we would play with a mechanic and it would be a lot of fun. And then we'd hand it over to the developers and they would go, okay, we're going to maximize this to win with it. And now the correct way to play didn't end up being the fun way. I've talked about this all the time. That you need whatever your set is encouraging your players to do, and I mean they're always going to try to win, you got to make sure that that path is fun. And a lot of times we were building our mechanics in such a way that, well, if played a certain way they were fun, but if optimized, if you were trying to win, they weren't always as fun as they could be. Or the other problem sometimes we run into is we make something

and that thing wouldn't be very easy to make constructed cards out of. And so one of the things in the new system is we, instead of breaking up the designers sort of by early to late, we break them up by their skills. And the idea is we make sure that every team has a certain level of skill set on it. And the other thing that we do right now, which is, well, sorry, I'm jumping around. So one of the big things we do

is we make sure that there's a more mix of people. So it is not, on a, for example, on a vision design team, I have people from set design and play design that are looking at things. Like I usually, for example, on a vision design team, I have people from set design and play design that are looking at things. Like, I usually, for example, have the lead set designer on the vision team. So that, as we're sort of mapping things out,

they're there to be a sanity check. If they have concerns, they can say, oh, okay, but I'm worried about this not working with that, or I'm worried about how this will play out. And we have a play designer, and the play designer is taking notes and talking with the play design team of making sure that we're making things

that they feel that they can push, that they can make fun play experiences out of. And so that's getting integrated way earlier. And the other thing is that we're sort of focusing, one of the things that R&D has always done well is the idea of play to strength, is figure out what you're good at and then let you do that thing, you know? Um, and so one of the things that I realized was, um, I have a lot of skills, but the skill with the greatest differential

is the vision part of the skill, is here's a blank page. It needs to be something. What is this thing? What are you trying to do? What's the essence of it? What are the mechanics? And that, you know,

I'm not bad at making cards, and I'm not bad of, you know, there's plenty of sort of set design work that I'm good at. But I am much better comparatively at sort of the large scale sort of holistic stuff. And this new system lets me kind of do that for every set rather than kind of do it. And then the other sets just go, well, follow what I did. You know, it's more like I get to just set up every set rather than kind of do it and then the other sets just go well follow what I did you know it's more like I get to just set up every set and when I say I mean my team I'm not leaving every single vision team I lead a lot of them but I don't need all of them and I want to make sure

that we are setting ourselves up so that the like one of the things that the way I like to think about how we do the job is each team is trying to make the best product for the team that comes after it. So exploratory design wants to set up vision design for success. Vision design wants to set up set design for success. Set design wants to set up play design for success. Each team wants to make sure that what they're doing allows the team after them to thrive. And so one of the interesting things for me is just in the mindset of how I'm doing things, I really think about my job is not, I'm not trying to build the house. I'm trying to understand what the house wants to be. And then I'm trying to to understand or I'm trying to make a tool set that will enable the set designer to make something awesome. So a lot of time when I'm

playing with a mechanic I'm trying to figure out what flexibility there is with a mechanic. I mean sagas is a good example. When we built sagas we figured out that like there were a bunch of different knobs that you could play around with. You could play around with how many different chapters there were. You could play around with whether or not you had the same effects or repeating effects. You could play around with whether or not, you know, how did the things advance? What kind of control did you have over the advancement? You know, what was it? How was it treated? You know treated was it its own card type, was it an enchantment

was it legendary, was it not we did a lot of things, we mapped that stuff out so that when it got to set design it was like, here's an idea, here's what it represents sagas are stories, it takes place over time we think it's an enchantment. You know, I think when we handed it off, we said, we think it's legendary,

but maybe it's not. So, you know, that's something you could toggle. And, like, what we did was we gave them all the component pieces to build sagas out of. And we did some, we designed a bunch of Saigas for a proof of concept. We sort of showed, here's the kind of things they are, here's the kind of things you can do with them. We showed them

how to do ones that were more top-down. We showed them ones that sort of had a mechanical identity, they needed to flavor the mechanical identity. We did a bunch of different things. Sorry, don't yawn in here. But then, and we demonstrated how to build it out of stories, but then they built their own. So we,

that I like to think that how vision is working is setting up all the tools for set design. And that's a big way I think now when we're in Vision is I always have the set designer with me now, the set lead, and I will say to them, you know, here, let me map out a bunch of things and like, I can't give details

of this, but I just hand it over Cricket to Dave Humphries as the set lead for Cricket. And one as the set lead for cricket. And one of the things, for example, is we took some of our themes, and I actually spent the last couple of weeks taking some of our themes and pushing them in different directions to demonstrate a couple of different ways sort of you could use it. And that Dave, you know, then took it and figured it out and then through some playtesting figured out

all the different choices we gave him, which ones actually made the most sense. And then, anyway, what I'm trying to say is this new system lets us set each other up in a little bit better way. Like one of the issues I think that was going on in design and development was there was a bunch of work done, especially during refinement,

where we would spend all this time fine-tuning things, saying, okay, this is what we've made. Let's clean it up. And then development would come in and like, oh, well, a bunch of stuff doesn't work. We got to rip it out. And then they would spend time sort of making new things, and then obviously they had to refine the things that they made.

So, like, there's this period of time where we were making things and cleaning them up and making them sort of the best version of them that they could be, but they weren't serving the needs of the set, and so they were just getting pulled. And that was kind of a waste of effort. Like, one of the things about the new system that I like a lot is I think we're more time efficient. I think that we are not kind of repeating things anymore. That there was a period of time where we have some sort of parallel where two different teams were kind of doing the same thing. So the

second team is kind of redoing some of the work with the first team. And under our new system, it's a lot more crisp of sort of where the delineations are so that we're not repeating work. The other big, I mean, there's a couple big, one of the other big changes has to do with the relationship

to how the whole design process matches up to the creative process. The new system allows the exploratory world building so that early, early on, when we're mapping out what the world can be, they're mapping out, I mean, we're mapping out mechanically, they're mapping it out creatively.

And there's a lot of interesting things that go on during exploratory where, like, one of the things that's interesting, when you're mapping out where you could go, the world, like, there's lots of different possibilities. And we talk with the creative team, they start to figure out sort of what they want, and you go back and forth

because you start figuring out some interesting mechanical identity, and they figure out interesting creative identity, and you're kind of going back and forth to figure out how each one of you can keep the part that's the best part that you're finding. And then you get inspired. Oh, well, this is a neat idea creatively. Is there a mechanical way to copy this?

Or this is a cool mechanical element. Can we reinforce that in the creative so that's a larger part of the creative? Like a good example of that, this is not under the current process, the old process. like a good example of that this is not under the current process the old process but the idea that we liked the idea of energy

in Kaladesh and then once we had the idea of energy mattered and the energy was this mechanic the creative team really went really into the idea that this world is shaped by the fact that it has a unique

energy source you know what I'm saying that the ether was a really that this world is shaped by the fact that it has a unique energy source. The ether was a really defining quality of Kaladesh. And that came about because we had made something that made sense. Like mechanically we were doing something and they really wanted to pay that off in a way that was organic to the world and really

made an interesting world. I think the idea of the government controlling this material that was required for the people to make the stuff they made it made for an interesting world. I think the idea of the government controlling this material that was required for the people to make the stuff they made it made for an interesting whole dynamic and the cosmology it was very interesting. And that came out of creative trying to match

to what mechanics wanted to do. The other big thing about the correlation between them is because of the shift there's a lot more time building the set before art gets gets commissioned one of the problems the development always had is there is such a tight window between development taking over the file and art having to be assigned and one of the problems is

once you once you come up with art, then that's your art. I mean, there's sketch comes in. There's a little bit of tweaking. And even once you have art, there's a little bit of wiggle room you have, but not nearly as much. That once I have a picture of a flying creature,

or maybe flying is a little unfair because flying creatures fly, but once I have a picture of a creature, it's hard for that spell not to be a creature. The picture is a little unfair because flying creatures fly, but once I have a picture of a creature, it's hard for that spell not to be a creature. The picture's a creature. And even then, and now it's just a creature, but it's a creature that's doing something, and so if you want to change it, you have to sort of reflect what it's doing, what its size

or sometimes in the card concept thing, they'll build in functionality to match the card, and then it's like, oh, well this creature is shooting, you know, laser creature is shooting, you know, laser beams or whatever, you know, lightning bolts or something. Well, like, okay, is that drug damage? It starts saying that it starts to mean something.

And so the change of the new system allows us to be committing to art much later in the process of how the cards are made. I mean, it's not, it's more that we're making things earlier than the art, I guess, is later. But from a practical standpoint, from the people making the cards, they have a lot more time to sort of play before they have to sort of, they have to, you know, the, once, the way I talk about it, we're building a house is at some point you've got to pour some cement. And once you pour the cement, cement's going to dry and the cement's going to be there. And now your house has to deal with the fact that that's where the cement is. We got to pour the cement's going to be there. And now your house has to deal with the fact that that's where the cement is. We've got to pour the cement a little later. And that gives us a little more flow of figuring out how we want the cement

to be or where we want it to be or what shape we want it in. It gives us a little more say. The other big thing that I appreciate about the new system is and I touched on this briefly so I'll go sort of the new system is, and I just touched on this briefly, so I'll go into a little more detail, is the way we kind of approach it and the way we approach the people is a little bit different. Like I said, it used to be in the process that, you know, there were designers and developers and designers did more design and developers did more development. And now it's much more like

there's card design people and balance people and, you know, there's different sort of skills and those skills get spread out throughout the whole process. That I want people in the early part of the process who are really good at knowing

whether something is going to be balanced and late in the process, we want people that on early part of the process who are really good at knowing whether something is going to be balanced. And late in the process, we want people that on the drop of a hat can really craft and make new things that are flavorful. You know, that we want those skillsets spread throughout the whole process. And that's made for a much more organic system.

So I'll actually go with Dominar a little bit. It's the only one you guys have seen so far that the interesting thing for Vision for example was so like one of the big challenges

let me walk through Dominaria and talk about how each part works with Dominaria Dominaria started with the following challenge we're going back

to this world okay Exploratory team what does that mean we're going back to this world. Okay, Exploratory team, what does that mean? We're going back to Dominaria. That's where we start. And Exploratory was like, well, our first problem is what does it mean to be Dominaria?

You know, and Exploratory design said, okay, well, our first problem is Dominaria is so many different things. Like, what exactly is Return of Dominaria supposed to be? And, you know, one of the challenges was we would like to bring Dominaria into the sort of modern world,

like how modern worlds work in Magic. We want it to be, you know, a plane we get to visit and to have an identity. And the problem is because, you know, there have been so many worlds, so many different sets on it that it really had a very mixed identity, not a singular identity. So exploratory design spent a lot of time and energy talking about what is Dominaria and what it represents and what could we do and what are mechanics we can reprint and what are themes we can look into. And then

vision design had to say, okay, taking all the stuff we've learned from what exploratory design has done, okay, we need an identity. What is this world? And vision was the one that really sort of came up with the idea of history world, that this is a world where the present is shaped by its past and that it's very obsessed. It's a world where lots has happened.

present is shaped by its past. And that it's very obsessed. It's a world where losses happen. And the idea of this world of rebirth, of, yeah, it's a place where bad things seem to always happen, but they always come through. And that there's a real optimistic feel to the world in that, look, if these eight crazy things didn't stop us, what's going to stop us? We can deal with anything. And that rather than make a world that was kind of depressed

because things go bad all the time, it became a world that was like, look, we can live through anything. We're resilient. And it really, so vision was sort of trying to figure out that flavor and that feel, the idea that stories were important, the idea that history was important, the idea that history was

important, the idea that we wanted to bring back things. So during Vision, we came up with sagas and historic and bring the kicker back. And we did a lot of stuff, you know, the idea of the legendary matters component of just having more legends. I mean, all part of our larger history theme. But we had all these things that we wanted to do and we sort of brought in. And then set design had to take all these ideas we had

and just kind of practically build them into a real set. Yeah, cybers are cool. Yeah, historic's cool. Yeah, kicker's a cool mechanic. Okay, but how exactly do we make this? Okay, you want more legendaries, but how do we do that? And, you know, they're the ones that came up with sort of the idea of a legend in every pack. The new legendary frame.

They came up with legendary sorceries. You know, they did a lot of reinforcements of some themes. And they figured out how to execute sagas. And they sort of refined them and took them from four to three chapters and sort of changed... We had originally pitched maybe a different kind of layout, and they figured out how to get the layout to work and how to make it be this unique thing that had a visual sort of that grabbed you, but didn't feel too different from normal magic. And then play design, which, to be honest, for Dominaria, was just starting to form. So like, Dominaria is the first set that play design did any say on. But it definitely was sort of the earliest version of play design.

But they definitely got to come in and sort of look at themes and look at sort of figure out where can we play up different themes so people would have fun playing those different themes. And the thing I look back on Dominaria is one of the things that people have asked, so Dominaria, huge hit. So one of the things internally we've asked ourselves is why? What made Dominaria

so successful? And it's not one reason, there's a lot of reasons. I think doing this nostalgic thing on our 25th anniversary was pretty cool. I think just you know, doing this nostalgic thing, our 25th anniversary was pretty cool. I think just the, the way we approached it, um, there's a lot of factors that went into why it was successful. But one of the big factors that when we were going through, like we had a big meeting,

we were talking about like, what did we do right? Um, we, we, we do what's called a postmortem in our products, which, uh, which a lot of companies do, which is after you're done, after the audience has seen it, after you've seen the feedback from your audience, it's like, okay, now that we have, you know, 2020 hindsight, what did we learn from this? What was done correctly? What was done incorrectly? And so one of the things we were doing on Dominaria is we said to ourselves, look, this is really successful. Okay, what is there to learn from this? Did we do anything different from how we'd done before?

Are there things that we've done all along that we need to continue doing? Are there things that even though the set was well received, maybe this was a mistake and we shouldn't do that again? But one of the big conversations was being able to success is what did we do right, especially what did we do right different from other times? And one of the things that came up very early was the process had changed. That the way

we handle things, the way we do things made for a cleaner system. And that there was less work didn't get redone, that handoffs were done in a way that was a little bit cleaner. Oh, there's a lot more integration too, that the current system, like, I love the fact that there's input during vision from play design and set design, and there's feedback during set design from vision and play design and set design. And there's feedback during set design

from vision and play design. And then during play design, there's some feedback from vision and from set design. Vision, by the way, real quickly, what I mean by that is one of the things that I have to do from time to time is peek my head back in and just do a sanity check

that the overall holistic feel hasn't changed. Like Dominaria, for example, with Dominaria, there was definitely work, Historic took a little time to sort of, the way we'd handed it off, like the theme was good, and

the interconnectivity was kind of cool, but it wasn't quite executed the way it needed to be. And so I spent extra time during set design sort of creating batching. The idea of taking multiple things and using a term to connect them. I kind of came up with new technology to capture the thing of what I was trying to capture. And also one of the things that I do, I mean, usually the set designer comes to me,

or comes to the lead, whoever the vision lead was, so not always me, but when it comes to the lead, and when they want to make changes, they want to sanity check the changes. So, you know, if Eric's going to change something, I'm going to go down to Eric or Dave,

because Eric did it for two months, handed it off to Dave. As we were changing over the system, Eric was leading the beginning of all the set designs to get all the set leads up to snuff just because it was a new process. Early on, I was just doing all the vision designs. I wasn't handing it off.

I started handing them off, but because of the way it works, vision design is four months long, and there's three of them, so I can lead. I'm capable of leading all of them if need be. But Eric, because it's nine months long, and they overlap each other,

Eric couldn't lead all the set designs. So for a while, he was just sort of setting up the set designs, making sure that things were working well, and then handing them off. And that was the necessity of sort of how long set design goes versus how long vision goes.

But anyway, one of the big things we were doing the, you know, evaluating what Dominaria did is realizing, looking how the systems had changed. And I mean, the thing that I'm excited by, the reason I want to talk about this today is

there are changes we make that are kind of very public-facing. Like, we've added an evergreen keyword. Well, it's really obvious we added it, or we took away an evergreen keyword, or we re-templated something, or we changed the rules. That's really forward-facing. Of course you're going to see that. It's literally written on the cards.

For example, if you never came to our website or listened to my podcast or never sort of connected with us, never connected with the behind-the-scenes information, you would know there's a new evergreen keyword because literally on your card there's a new keyword. And maybe you don't know it's evergreen until you see it for the second or third time, but you'd pick up eventually it's evergreen. If we change a template, you'll see the new keyword. And maybe you don't know it's evergreen until you see it for the second or third time, but you'd pick up eventually it's evergreen. If we change a template, you'll see the new template. Now, a new rule change, some of those aren't written on the cards,

so maybe that's a little trickier to tell. But this kind of stuff, look, if you're not listening behind the scenes, you have no idea. Like, the fact is, the fact that Dominaria was made completely differently than, you know, Our Devastation, or not Our Devastation, I guess Amiket, was the same set a year earlier.

A year earlier, it was just made completely differently. I don't think you would necessarily know that. Maybe, I mean, what we're hoping is that the quality and then the process sort of seeps through to making a better product, but it's not something that you're going to, you're not going to look at cards and see that. And so one of the things I like to do in my articles and in my podcast and stuff on my blog is I like sort of sharing with you what we're doing behind the scenes because I'm a big believer that, you know, I really think to appreciate something, the more you understand it, the more

you can appreciate it. That's kind of my general belief. So I like explaining our processes. I like explaining how we do things. I like explaining our philosophies. I think that's a cool thing. So anyway, today was me sort of talking about how I'm very happy. I think we did a really good thing. I think the change is making for better sets.

for better sets. Now, the interesting thing for me is it has radically changed my job in that I used to do a broader area of things and now I'm doing a much narrower area. But the cool thing is, and part of this also

is going to the 3-in-1 system, is I like the Blink page. I like figuring out what's going on. I like making mechanics. I like the early part of the process just because there's something very neat of making something out of nothing. I know it's intimidating to a lot of people

but it's very exhilarating for me. Not that it's easy. It's hard. But I think anything that really is rewarding has to be somewhat hard because part of what makes things rewarding is that you accomplish them and so it's like pick up that brick okay, picked it up, not that rewarding you know, I'm not sure why it's a brick, but anyway

probably because I'm thinking of physics anyway anyway, so my takeaway for today for you guys is this new system is a really good system behind the scenes. It's doing a lot of good stuff. It is allowing us to make a richer, more nuanced set. It's allowing us to sort of spend more time and energy making sure that when you're playing with it,

that the fun isn't how you're playing with it, that the fun isn't how you're supposed to play it. It's going to lead to, I think, richer environments and play environments. So, I mean, I'm really happy with where we're at. And so kind of me looking back is saying, you know, okay, did this work out like we hoped it would work out? And the answer really is a resounding yes. At some level more so. I'll admit when we first talked about changing, I mean I was up to it because I

like iteration and I like trying new things. And I also knew if we try and it really isn't working, we always could fall back on the way we used to do things because that did work. But having not been through the process and watching this change and really lived in this world for two and a half plus years, this is a better system. It really is. I think the good news for all of you is you're going to see it in the product you get.

I think it just leads to better sets. So if you like Dominaria, that's good. We have other cool sets coming. I can't wait for you to see Guilds of Ravnica, to see Ravnica Legions, to see Milk, to see Archery, to see Baseball, to see Cricket, to see Diving.

There's all sorts of cool stuff coming. None of which I'm allowed to tell you about. That's my burden to bear. But there's a lot of neat things coming, and this process has allowed us to build them and craft them in a way that gives each set specialized attention, and each set gets to be crafted and shaped to be the way that gives each set specialized attention and each set gets to be crafted and shaped to be the best that it can be.

And so I'm really excited. Like I said, two years from now or two and a half years from now, I'm going to be doing the, okay, now that you've seen the first two years, and I'll talk about this process again with a lot more concrete examples. This was more of the high end. Next time I do this in two years, I get to do the crunchy version where I can talk about this change and this change and this change and that change. And then you guys can compare the two and see which one you like better. But anyway, I'm now parked, so we all know what that means. I mean, 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.