Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #644: Ajani's Pridemate

Episode Date: June 7, 2019

This podcast is all about us adding two words to the rules text of one card and all the hullabaloo that followed. I explain why we did it and walk through the timeline of what happened (it's a little convoluted).

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today, one of the things that I've started wanting to do more of on this podcast is take sort of issues of the day and walk through them. Now, obviously, the issues of the day are delayed a little bit because I record this ahead of time, but I'll talk about something that's been a topic of conversation on my blog, and that is the card, Ajani's Pride Mate. So real quickly, let me fill you in on what the card is. And then I'll get you up to what the controversy is.

Okay, so Ajani's Pride Mate was first made in Magic 2011, I believe. It's a white creature. One and a white. So two mana total. One of which is white. It's a 2-2 creature. It's a white creature, one and a white, so two mana total, one of which is white. It's a 2-2 creature, and it says, whenever you gain life, you may put a plus one, plus one counter on a card name, on Johnny's Prime Mate.

It designed, whenever we make the cards, we don't, because the title will change, we just put card name where the title will go, so we don't have to keep rewriting it as we change things. So sometimes when I say that, I'll say card name when it means the name of the card. Okay, so the issue at hand is a couple months ago, my time, a few more months than that, your time, a Johnny's Pride Mate changed in digital. That the May got dropped. That before it was, you know, whenever you gain life,

you may put a plus and plus counter on Johnny's Pride Mate. And the change was now it wasn't optional. Now you had to put the plus and plus counter on. And there was a big hubbaloo. Yes, I said hubbaloo. I'm from the 20s, apparently. There was a big controversy in the sense of why. Why do changes? Why is this card functionally being changed?

We do not functionally change cards very often. The story behind the scenes was War of the Spark. Let me talk a little bit about War of the Spark. War of the Spark has 36 Planeswalkers in the main set, plus the buy box is a Planeswalker. Every Planeswalker in the main set had what we called a signature spell. And what a signature spell was, a spell... Or, actually, I think Karn had a land.

But anyway, it's a card that that Planeswalker might play. Hold on a second. Let me, sorry, take a drink here. I'm coughing up a storm. Okay. So every planeswalker that had a card in the main set had at least one signature card representing the kind of spells they would cast. And the idea was that their name would be in the title.

So it would be blank something. And that they would most likely show up in the yard, and that it just helps communicate, hey, all these planeswalkers are here. Because one of the issues in general is we want to communicate the idea of a planeswalker war. Yes, we have planeswalkers, yes, they're pushed on in rarity, but there's nothing in common. And so the idea was the signature spells allowed us to just get more of those planeswalkers' names and pictures and just get them more in the set. And most of the signature spells are common or uncommon. Anyway, so one of the things that the set design team, because they're the one, I mean, we,

Vision created the idea of doing the signature spells, and we made some up, but I think this happened during set design, because when they were sort of figuring out what they actually wanted. And one of the things they did is they went to look at, okay, for all of the 36 planeswalkers that are in the set, how many have a card that's blank something that might be something we want? Like, how many have a reprint that could be a signature spell? Now, once again, it was very limited

because, A, it had to have the creature's name as a possessive, so it had to be Blink's something. It had to be something that would go, you know, that we would want to put in War of the Spark, and ideally it wanted to be something that had some synergy with the Planeswalker.

That wasn't a requirement, but it was nice if it had synergy with the Planeswalker. Okay, so one of the but it was nice if it had synergy with the Planeswalker. Okay, so one of the cards they found was Ajani's Pridemate. Well, Ajani, the card, Ajani's a rare green-white card, has some life gain.

It's one of his abilities is life gain. And like, oh, well, Ajani's Pridemate, like, it just synergizes with it. It already says Ajani's. Like, it was just the perfect card. So it seemed like a really good inclusion. One small problem. So let me talk a really good inclusion. One small problem. So let me talk a little bit about the history of May.

So in early Magic, if you looked at early Magic, we tended to just make things happen. They weren't optional. They just happened. So if something was going to happen, okay, that happens. And then around, I don't know, 10, 10 years ago, 10, 15 years ago, or actually maybe a little more than that, the pro tour started and the judging community sort of got built up. And we got some notes from the judges saying in tournaments, in tabletop

tournaments, it's kind of nice if it could be optional because when they have to make a ruling, if somebody forgot something and it was mandatory, they're forced to go back to figure out how it works. But if it's optional, then you could just say they missed it. Oh, well, you forgot to do it? Well, then you opted not to do it. It was a way to help adjudicate things. But since that time, digital has become a much bigger force in magic. Magic online, obviously. We used to have duels with planeswalkers. Now we have magic at the Gathering Arena. And as digital became more something

that we had to concern ourselves with, one of the things that happens is we want to be careful how many clicks you have, how many decisions you have to make when casting a card. Now, decisions that are interesting, decisions that, ooh, there really is a choice there, we want to keep those, no doubt. But decisions in which, look, 99% of the time you're just going to do the same thing.

That like, it's really a stretch when you're going to have to do something different, you know. We want to look at those and say, okay, well how often do we want to make you click for something in which it's just going to be the same thing every time? And so we've sort of shifted our thoughts on basically positive abilities. Or actually, positive to yourself or negative to the opponent. Things that like, you know what, barring some weird quirk, you're going to want to do this. And we've stopped taking, we've taken the may out of most of those effects.

So in digital, it just happens. I do it, it just happens. And this is the important thing, sort of one of my big points of today is magic is many games to many, you know, it's many different games. I say this time and time again. It's not one game. It's a whole bunch of different games with a shared rule system. Okay, so our job when making magic cards is to try to maximize the overall magic experience

for all the people playing magic. And what that means is if we have some wording that might help multiplayer play and have minimal impact on two-player play, we're going to do that. You know, if we have the opportunity to make something in which for one part of the audience, it really would enhance what they're doing and help them, and it has minimal effect on the other part of the audience, we make those decisions all the time.

We do that. If something will help multiplayer play and not affect, you know, two-player all that much, we will make that change. If something might help commander in a certain way and not impact too much, we'll make that change. Digital is no different. A lot of people play digital.

It is a way that a lot of people play magic. And so the idea of here is a rule of which, you know, you almost are never going to experience this in tabletop, very infrequently in tabletop. But every single time you play the card, you experience it. That's something that we're going to do. We're going to say, okay, we're going to make this decision so that this one experience is better, and the other experience, we're minimally changing

it, but it's not something that happens very often. Now, there's a reverse that happens, too, as well. There are times, for example, where we think something's better in tabletop, and digital has to suck it up. And digital has to go, okay, we have to figure out how to program that or do whatever, but we're like, you know what? This is something really valuable for tabletop. And we do that.

In fact, one of the issues at hand, I think, by the way, the underlying issue that's going on is, well, there's two issues. One is players, most players prefer more functionality to less functionality, meaning the more options you give them, the better. That's one issue. And the second has to do with digital versus tabletop. So I'll get to digital versus tabletop in a second. So the first issue is having the option to do more things. And this is kind of, I mean, it is true that if you give players the opportunity to decide whether they want more options or less options. They will choose more options. That doesn't necessarily make it better gameplay.

And I've talked about it. I did a whole article on choices versus options. Talking about that what you want to do is give players opportunities to make interesting, impactful decisions. But making people make decisions for the act of making decisions, when that decision almost always is the same decision, is actually less interesting. It's less good gameplay.

For example, we used to have a rule called damage on the stack, which meant that when 6th edition came out, this went away in Magic 2010, you would put damage, much like you would put a spell on the stack, you would put damage on the stack, and then people could respond to damage being on the stack. One of the things that damage on the stack meant is, whenever I had a sacrifice effect,

what I wanted to do was attack, get in combat, put damage on the stack, and then sacrifice my creature. Especially if my creature was going to die. There was no choice there. Let's say you attack with a 2-2 and I have a 2-2, and my creature has a sac ability. I want to block your 2-2, and then, of course, use the sac ability. My creature's going to die. There's no reason not to use it. And so what we found was when that went away,

now you have a much more interesting decision. They're attacking with a 2-2. I have a 2-2. I can do one of two things. I can block, not sacrifice it, and kill my opponent's creature, or I can block, use the activated ability, not kill their creature, but block it for a turn.

And I have an interesting decision of, oh, what do I prioritize? Do I want to kill their creature? Do I want to get the effect? What do I want to do? Before, with damage on the stack, you always did the same thing. It was always, I mean, even though ironically you had more choices and more options, well, you had more options available to you, you really didn't have more choices because the optimal play was always to block do damage and then sacrifice the creature so this idea that doing more makes better gameplay is simply not the case and so I know that but whenever we sort of change

functionality people felt like they lose some functionality there's always like what are you doing I can come up in my mind with a situation where maybe I would have done something different. But if that thing makes you monitor all the time, and that thing isn't going to matter most of the time, like that's another big thing you'll see a big shift that we're doing in R&D over the last couple years is we don't want you to have to pay attention to something that won't matter 99% of the time. Because it can matter, you feel obligated to pay attention to it. So, you know, the better players pay attention to it, but it just soaks up mental energy and most of the time it just doesn't matter.

And then if you have enough of that in your game, if there's all these things that you have to pay attention to because, you know, under 1% of the time they could matter, but they can, and you don't want the game to hinge on the one time you didn't pay attention, you just have a lot of mental strain for little payoff in gameplay. And that's not valuable. That's not good game design. So one of the things we've been trying to do is minimize how often you have to track things. Anyway, a little off the topic.

So the first argument I know is people get mad of like you're taking functionality away. I believe there's times and places where functionality makes sense. And I know people always want to look at the game from their viewpoint. This is how I play the game. So you made a decision that somehow minimizes the way I play, but it might really help with the way other people play. And that one of the things is, as Magic players,

like, we need to think of the community as a whole. That maybe you won't play a certain format, but a lot of other people might play it. And that, you know, you making a small sacrifice so they have a big, you know, something that helps them in a bigger way. Look, that's just good community building in some level. That's like, you know, okay, I'm willing to, in the corner case, if this ever happens, not have this, you know, slight

out that I might have so that other people who are playing are just having an overall better experience. Okay, next, the tabletop versus digital. So the other thing that comes up sometimes is, I think some of the reason people get mad is because somehow when digital makes a change, they get really like, tabletop was here first. How dare digital change tabletop? And the answer is,

look, magic has constantly evolved. Every time we do something, every time we advance how we do it. For example, we started doing we do it. For example, we started doing Planeswalker decks, and before that they were Intro decks, and before that they were just PCDs and stuff. When we do Intro decks or Planeswalker decks

or things that are tied to a set, that will also impact the set. We will have to make decisions to make sure we have products for that. Making the core set work, making deck builders toolkit. Like, the idea that we don't constantly make decisions for other things is just not the case.

We are often making decisions to maximize other aspects of the game. And that is just something that we have to do and we do all the time. The idea that we're making decisions for digital versus for a planeswalker deck or whatever reason we're making. Like, a lot of people play Magic on digital. A lot.

A lot. I mean, tabletop's still a huge part of our audience, but the idea of tabletop matters more than digital. No, it all matters. Like, we're trying to make the best overall Magic experience for everybody. And digital is not a second-class citizen. I everybody. And digital is not a second-class citizen. I mean, tabletop's not a second-class citizen. But, I mean, everybody who plays magic gets our attention, and we are trying to maximize. Now, one of the things you'll see is we've been treating digital, especially Magic the Gathering Arena, as its own thing.

It is drifting in its own direction and its own way to play. And, you know, for example, a lot of the best of one stuff is just making different decks good on Magic Arena that might be in your FNM or something. You know what I'm saying? That it is becoming its own sort of format and having its own elements to it. There's overlap and stuff, obviously. But one of

the things that we are trying to do is we are always thinking about Magic in its entirety. And that is important. And I know there's some people that really sort of feel like because tabletop was first, like it's supposed to always get priority. And the answer is not necessarily. In this particular case,

we're talking about a niche corner case in tabletop and literally every time the card is played in digital. You know, that is not a fair trade-off. I mean, it is not fair to say digital. Well, guess what? You have to put up with this because, You know, that is not a fair trade-off. I mean, it is not fair to say digital. Well, guess what? You have to put up with this because, you know, tabletop, like it might possibly, you know, once in a blue moon happen, maybe, you know. Okay. The other issue at hand, and this is another thing that I think was some of what caused people to be upset was we changed in digital before people were even aware

that we'd made a card change in, oh, let me finish this story. So, okay, so we wanted Johnny's Pride Mate in War of the Spark. But we didn't want the May because that's just not the way we template it anymore. And normally when we print a new card we will follow the current templating and not the old templating.

And so the question to us was, we had two choices. We did not want to print the May version, so we either could print a Johnny's Pride Mate and change it, taking off the May, update the template, or we could make a brand new card. The problem there is, if we're going to make a brand new card, well, it has to have a Johnny's in it because the whole point of this is we wanted to make a signature card.

And a Johnny was going to probably be in it, or at least his, at least, you know, the lean-in would be in it. So if we called it a Johnny's Blah, and it basically is exactly a Johnny's Pride Mate, you know, it's almost the same name, almost the same creative, and just a tiny difference that wouldn't matter the vast, vast majority of games. Then we're just making a brand new card for people that play formats like Standard and say, oh, well, I know you own four copies of this, but okay, now you've got to get four copies of this. Like, we try to avoid doing that.

I mean, now, sometimes we go to a new world, and the new world has a different creative, and the old creative doesn't make sense, and we have to avoid doing that that give me now sometimes we go to a new world and the new world has a different creative and the old creative doesn't make sense and we have to reskin it but when it's like look it'd be almost identical creative um that's just making people buy a card that they already own and we try to avoid that where we can now like i said sometimes we have to reskin things um and when we reskin things, it's easier, obviously, to do template fixes and stuff. But it came down to basically, what do we want to do? Do we want to make a brand new version

of this card that is almost exactly the old card, or just do the old card, update the template? We chose the latter. We decided that was the least disruptive. But what that meant was the card was going to change.

It was a functional change to the card. A minor change, especially in Tabletop, but a change. Now, the next problem was we were making, what are they called? We were making the decks, the standard decks that we make. Blinking on the name of them. But one of those decks, I think, had in it an Ajani's Pride Mate. And since Ajani's Pride Mate was coming on War of the Spark in a month, we decided to do the War of the Spark in a month, we decided to do

the War of the Spark version of it. Since we knew it was getting changed. Because that deck had that card in it, it changed the timing of when Magic Online needed to make a change. Normally this change

would have been made when the cards got added for War of the Spark. That's traditionally when the change would have been made. the cards got added for War of the Spark. That's traditionally when the change would have been made. But, because the card was in a deck that was going to come out ahead of time that I believe was going to be on,

at least Magic Online, I'm not sure about Magic the Other Arena. Anyway, it required them to make the change earlier. And so we got in this weird space, and this can happen from time to time, where in order to sort of, like, one of the things behind the scenes that is hard sometimes is there's a lot of moving pieces.

There's a lot of decisions that have to get made. And I know on the outside, when you're focused on one issue, it's very easy to go, why didn't you just do that? And it's like, well, there's a lot of moving pieces going on. And for example, this cart needed to get an update. It needed to get an update in time for this deck. Okay, well, what was the latest time that an update could happen where it could make it happen for the deck? And what happened was, it happened at a time prior to not War of the Spark being out, but to the deck being out.

So, the change got made, and there was no reason why the change got made. Now, maybe in retrospect, we should have just said, hey guys, it's in War of the Spark, it's functionally changing, there will be a printed version without the May coming soon, that is why the change happened. Looking back, probably if anything that I would do differently, maybe just own up that that's in War of the Spark.

But, traditionally, when we have an upcoming card and it's that you don't know about, we don't tend to tell you. At the time, you guys didn't know about the 36 Planeswalkers, I don't believe, and obviously didn't know about the Signature Spells. It was just giving away a little bit of information that we didn't want

to give away. And that is why the information got done early. Because of the nature of how we do things. Another problem that we run into is a lot of times we'll make a decision based on the future that we know is coming. Like a real common thing is we do something in the set and we make certain decisions on

a card or cycle card or something in the set because of what's coming up later in the next year. And in a vacuum you're like, hey, why didn't you just do thing X? You know, and the answer is, oh, well, for a reason we can't yet tell you. And that happens a lot where we have an explanation, but the explanation has hidden information built into it, so we can't tell you yet.

Now, normally when we get there, a good example being, when we got to a Johnny's Pride Mate in War of the Spark, I've been telling the story. I've been explaining what's going on. But there was two months where you guys didn't know that story and I know the change in a vacuum with not the information just seemed very capricious. Like, why? They just changed it to change it? Why did they change it? And the answer was it wasn't a willy-nilly change.

It was a, we were trying to make a decision for a set. We made what we thought was the right decision. Digital, you know, followed along because of decisions we had made. And I get that, you know, it's a good example of how information is revealed, has a lot to do with things. The lack of context can cause problems. And like I'm saying, it's an ongoing problem I face with as someone who communicates to the public on a lot of times the reasons we do things I can't tell you.

And so, you know, oftentimes I will give answers to something that are not, I mean, I'm not giving false answers, but I'm giving incomplete answers because, you know, I'll explain the things. Like, for example, when we made this change, I can't explain why digital prefers the new version. I can't explain that it's in War of the Spark. So I think another problem happened was the thing we could talk about was why it was changed for digital and there was no other information there. So in a vacuum, it felt like just a random change

for digital for no reason. But like I said, the point of today's podcast is to say that we don't make decisions, like it is not as if we snap make decisions. We actually spend, like, one of the things I find when we get new people into R&D is I say to them, what most surprised you? And a common answer I get is the amount of time we spend on minutiae. The amount of time that we argue about things that the majority of the audience won't even notice. And, you know, there's a lot of time

and attention paid to things. This is a good example where we made a decision, a lot of thought went into the decision. I'm not saying when you guys learned the one aspect of it, you understood all that. You know what I'm saying? That's one of the problems, I think, is, okay, a change got made. There's very little we can tell you about the change. That change in a vacuum didn't seem to make sense.

And so, and it plays into some of the larger things. I know there's some, why are you taking functionality away from me? Why digital over over tabletop? The arguments I was talking about earlier. I know some of those go right to the core of emotional issues. And something we're sensitive of, you know what I'm saying, part of the reason I'm doing the podcast today is to explain of saying,

look, I get that people, I don't do a whole podcast because people were happy about a choice we made, or seldom do. Normally, when I do podcasts like this, it's like, okay, people were upset. Let me walk through what happened. Because what happened was not a willy-nilly snap decision. It was not something not done with a lot of thought and care. It was something saying, okay, we have a lot of magic players to make happy. How do we maximize making our magic players happy?

And I, looking back on this, like I said, whenever there's an issue that gets created and the audience gets, you know, riled up about something, one of the things I ask myself is, okay, you know, if we had to do this again, how would we handle this? Now, sometimes I go, oh, well, that decision in the first place was a faulty decision. This isn't that case. I believe we made the right decision.

I believe we're doing what's right. And now, what I would change looking back is I think the way we can convey the information, like looking back now with 2020 in hindsight, knowing that Ajani's pride mate's in War of the Spark, while it gives away a little bit

of information, it's vague and it's not the kind of thing you necessarily think, yeah, yeah, Ajani was pride mate's in War of the Spark, while it gives away a little bit of information, it's vague, and it's not the kind of thing you necessarily... Yeah, yeah, Ajani was going to be in the story. He's in the Gatewatch. That's not a giant surprise. And so, I mean, looking back, that's my take on it is I think we should have been a little more upfront about hidden information. Like, one of the things we have to be careful of is

when does giving hidden information... Like, when does it matter that we're about hidden information. Like, one of the things we have to be careful of is when does giving hidden information, like, when does it matter that we're giving hidden information? Like, I don't want to give away the theme of an upcoming set, but I do think there's times and places where even, I mean, in this particular one, I had to tell you a particular card was in the set, but I think one of the things that I'm sort of coming to grips with is trying to understand when it's important to give away a little bit of hidden information because it can just

head off a lot of sort of, you know, stern and drain is the drama term. But in this game, people sort of riled up. And, you know, that is my takeaway

from this whole thing is, okay, we probably should have done a little better job explaining it up front. We really sort of, like, I think some of our naivete was it was a small change. We're like, you know, maybe people, maybe it's not, you know, it's a small change. Maybe no one will care.

You know, it's not a major change. It will be, the people who will notice it will be mostly people on Magic Online. They should be happy about it. It makes their life easier. And in tabletop, we're like, oh, you know, it doesn't affect things all that much, so maybe people won't care. But, like I said,

I think there's a bunch of larger issues that it ties into. What I found online is as I describe what's going on and explain this, I think people are slowly coming around. The other thing, by the way, that I learned, this is a communication thing, is if something happens and you go, I don't understand why it's happening,

and we explain it, then you never get to the point where you're upset about it. But if we don't do a good job explaining it, and then you start getting upset about it, and then, you know, a month, two months, three months later, you finally hear the answer. But you've had time to be upset about it. Now there's a lot of emotion tied into it. You know what I'm saying? The answer, if I gave you early, that would have calmed you down, given to you months later, means that not only does the answer not calm you down as quickly,

you've built up a lot more, you know, like, there's a lot of people who are like, have to work this out of their system because they've been really upset about it and that maybe they'll slowly work through the answer I'm giving them, but it's not as easy as if I gave it up front. So that's the other big takeaway is one of the reasons to give information sooner is,

you know, if you give people time to get upset, then they, you know, the later you give an answer, the more energy it takes to sort of get them to the same place because they've then they, you know, the later you give an answer, the more energy it takes to sort of get them to the same place because they've built up, you know, they've got riled up. And, you know, for example, when you get upset about something, it can take a while to calm down. And so what I'm finding now is as I'm explaining things, people are slowly accepting it, but

I'm still getting people that are like, but, but, but, because it's just, they've been upset about this for a while. And so it just, it takes more work. And so as somebody whose job it is to communicate with you guys, the more I can explain things earlier, I think the easier the job becomes. And so I will work on that. Anyway, my final thought before I'm almost at work is, just a thought on, I'm experimenting.

I mean, one of the things is I'm you know 600 plus podcasts in so all the low-hanging fruit topics are no longer there so I am looking for more things to do podcasts on and

I like the idea of taking things that are sort of that upset people that have become an issue that I'm arguing about you'll notice

I'm doing a little bit more of that like I said I did another one the other day about you know that have become an issue that I'm arguing about. You'll notice I'm doing a little bit more of that. Like I said, I did another one the other day about making changes and when we break our rules and stuff. So anyway, if you guys, I'm sort of curious what you thought on these kind of podcasts, on podcasts that are more about

sort of delving into a topic that seems to be upsetting people or is this getting a lot of talk in the community? I'm hoping you guys enjoy that. This is me trying out something. I mean, not completely new, but I think I'm doing them a little more often than I used to. Maybe I need a name for the subcategory.

I'm not sure. But anyway, I am now at work. I hope you guys enjoyed today's podcast. And I hope I explained a little bit, talked about some of the reasons why we do things and why we made the change, why it came out ahead of time. I'm not saying everything we did was perfect.

I'm explaining why we did what we did. And like I said, I'm owning up to the fact that there's a few things probably we could have done differently. But anyway, I do stand behind the decision. I do believe it was the right thing to make the change on the card but I believe the things we could have done better

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 I'll see you guys next time