Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #710: Success Paralysis

Episode Date: January 31, 2020

In this podcast, I talk about a phenomenon known as success paralysis where being successful can discourage you from embracing change.

I'm pulling my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today I have an interesting topic. It is what is known as success paralysis. So I'm going to explain what it is and explain how it applies to magic and magic design. Okay, so to explain it, let me first talk about how it came up. Okay, to explain it, let me first talk about how it came up. So, as I'm recording this, I'm starting up after my holiday break. Over the holiday break, I ran a head-to-head that was about possible changes to Commander. And one of the feedbacks I got from a bunch of people was,

Commander is in such a good place. Why are we talking about changing it? Why are we even having conversations about, you know, it's not broke, don't fix it. You know, it's in a good place, so leave it alone. And what it made me realize is that I think it might be a falling victim to something known as success paralysis. So I wanted to talk about that and talk about how it's impacted magic and something that it is a concern that we've had been worried about in magic design. So let me explain what

success paralysis is. So the idea is you make something and it is successful. Okay. So what happens is if you've ever heard me, I always talk about how restrictions breed creativity, but I have another saying that I say a lot, which is success breeds repetition. And what I mean by that is, when you do something and it is successful,

there's a lot of encouragement to repeat those things. Because they were successful. And one of the biggest things that happens when you are successful for the first time is the pressure to do what you've done is very high. Because doing what you've done got you to where you are. But one of the dangers of that is if you look at the things that have truly been long-term successful, and magic in my mind is a good example, you know, one of the things that magic really had to worry about early on was this exact problem.

So part of what I wanted to do today is go back and look at early magic and talk a little bit about one of the things that is very important for us is so like, when you do something and you are successful you don't necessarily know what it is that caused your success. You don't, I mean, you might have some ideas and you might have some guesses. What you know is this thing as a whole was successful. And so you're hesitant to change anything. So my example here I want to start with.

I'm going to talk about a bunch of examples today, but my first example is a card from Alpha called Terror. So Terror, Richard Garfield obviously made the card, and Terror says, I think it's destroy target non-artifact, non-black creature, and it can't be regenerated. And the idea is that I was killing somebody with fright. You know, the flavor of the card is I'm scaring you to death. And the reason that the card said non-artifact is, well, like artifacts don't have emotions. How do you scare artifacts? And black creatures, ah, they're used to scary things. It's hard to scare a black creature to death. I'm not even sure

why he put the anti-regeneration clause on there. My guess is that there was some regeneration and he wanted to make sure there were answers for it. I'm not sure why terror was the place. I mean, from a flavor standpoint, I don't know why.

Maybe if you're so afraid that regeneration won't help you. I'm not sure. But anyway, Richard that was Terror. And Terror, when the game first came out, Terror was a popular card and it definitely was uber flavorful and stuff.

So for many years, for a while, we destroyed stuff. So for many years, for a while, we destroyed black cards couldn't destroy artifacts or black creatures. Because that's what terror did.

Alpha had come out, magic was very successful, this was the main black kill spell, and it didn't kill artifact creatures or black creatures. And we're like, well, okay, well, you know, I guess that's, that's what black kill spells do. And eventually, we got to the point of saying, oh, well, I think the reason it doesn't kill artifacts is more of a flavor thing, and I mean, I don't think black is supposed to, I mean, black wasn't,

black wasn't able to kill artifacts, but artifact creatures, black can kill things and things that are killable should be killable. And so eventually we took off, we took off the non-artifact part, but we kept making cards and cards, you know,

would kill non-black things and usually prevented regeneration. And then at some point we're like, why are we always hosing regeneration? We did it so much, we even at one point made a vocabulary word. So rather than say, destroy a creature that can't be regenerated, we had a term called bury. Like, we did it so often, we made up a vocabulary word to say, oh, well, this means you can't regenerate from it. And at some point, we had to ask ourselves, man, regeneration sucks. Why does regeneration suck? Because all our best kill spells just don't let you regenerate. And we're like, well, why is that? And we're like,

I don't know. I mean, that's what terror did and what disintegrate did. Like there were cars in alpha that did that and we just sort of repeated it. But it's like, well, why, why are we doing that? And we finally came to the conclusion of one of the ways to make regeneration matter is to not have every, like, the whole point of regeneration is if normally you would die, instead you won't die. So having every spell kind of hose regeneration really undermined regeneration. So at some point we're like, oh, okay, we can just kill things. We don't have to, you know, occasionally we could say they can't regenerate, but it doesn't have to be a normal thing.

And then at some point we asked ourselves and said, well, why non-black? Like, why can't black kill black things? You know, like, okay, we get in terror. If I'm going to scare you to death, maybe it's hard to scare a black thing to death. But if I'm just going to, you know, I'm going to harm you to death, But if I'm just going to you know do, I'm going to harm you to death, why wouldn't black black has no qualms killing other black creatures. In fact it was kind of antithetical

like there are colors that might go out of, like white might go out of its way to not harm white. But black doesn't, like black will do whatever it wants to do to get the job done. Black doesn't have any qualms. So it was kind of weird. So we liked the idea that there were,

that black kill spells had some restrictions, but they didn't kill anything. But we finally came to the conclusion that it didn't always have to be black. It didn't have to be, like, for a while, black kill spell wasn't that good because it just never killed black things, and that was an actual problem.

That black was splashing other colors to kill things because the black hill spills weren't efficient enough. And one of the major reasons was because it had this gaping hole of black things. Okay, the reason I use terror as my example here is when Richard made Alpha, it was amazing. Magic was amazing. Obviously, magic hit the ground running, and it's obviously been going for, we're on to, what is that, 2020? It's 27 years.

But, I think early on, we had a little bit of the success paralysis problem, where we, Richard would make decisions that were made for individual reasons on individual cards. Like, the reason I use terror as an example is Richard made choices and did things because in the moment it served what he needed. Like, he was trying to make a cool spell in terror. It wasn't necessarily his intention to say, this is how all things should be for all times. It was, this makes sense here in this way. And that one of the things that is very hard is because you don't necessarily know why something is successful, there is a lot of pressure to go, well, everything

is successful. Well, it's a success because of everything. It's everything we've done. And the reality is, when you actually sit back and look at something, I mean, Alpha was amazing. I talk all the time about the Golden Trifecta. It invented the trading card game. It had the mana system.

It had the color pie. Each of those things were really amazing things. But even those things, you know, there was room for improvement. It's not that they weren't amazing things. They were amazing things. But we learned things about them. For example,

early on, you know, we did not maximize sort of how trading card games could work. You know what I'm saying? It was other trading card games, for example, that had more than three rarities. Like, when we find a mythic rare, it wasn't because we decided to

do it first. Other people have been doing it and we realize, hey, it's kind of exciting to have something that doesn't show up every booster pack. Or, you know, stuff like Booster Fun, which we've done last year, which is adding in some extra value of, here are cards that exist

in the set, but in extra special versions, and those extra special versions show up at a lower frequency, which has been very popular. There's a lot of things that we've been able to do with the trading card game to improve upon it as a trading card game. That's not to take away from Alpha, not to take away from what Richard did, and we never

would have gotten to any of these improvements on the system without the original system. But the trading card game of it can be improved. And it's not just that. The idea of doing premium versions, the idea of having collector numbers, you know, there's a lot of, the idea of having, you know, there's a lot of, the idea of having, you know, there's a lot of things that original magic didn't do that we have since done that just makes it a more tradable, collectible thing.

Likewise with the mana system, you know. Yes, the core mana system is really cool, but there are a lot of incremental changes we've made to help it. You know, there are a lot of things we've done through mulligans, through different choices in how we make mana that has allowed us to help adjust with the mana system in a way that makes the mana system play better.

We learned a lot of things about what a set wants to have depending on its theme so that you can play the theme. And the color pie. You know, as somebody who's a big proponent of the color pie, look, the basic essence was there in Alpha. But there was a lot of fine-tuning that we've done. There's a lot of, you know, there were choices Richard made. Like, for example, one of the things that's very true

about Alpha early on was Richard wasn't trying to make he was trying to do a proof of concept of his original game and so a lot of what he did is he just made cool cards yes there was a color pie but it wasn't quite as he was a little looser with the color pie because look, he was just trying to make a handful of cards, you know, and that if one blue card did damage, or two of them did damage, well, it was flavorful. But as you start sort of carving out space, and you're like, well, I get how Prodigal Sorcerer is flavorful in a vacuum. I can see why there's a card where you did damage

psychic, what is it called? There's a blue card that does damage, but it harms you. The idea is a psionic blast. The idea is it harms you, but it allows you to do damage. But eventually we're like, oh, well, these are cool, flavorful cards, but we could capture that flavor.

Oh, if we want a sorcerer that's able to sort of do small type direct damage effects, well, red can do that. That's, you know, like, one of the things we realize is that one of the things of trying to make a game long term

is being a little crisper and clear in the color pie. Of saying that when you just do a lot of one-ofs, that it's very hard to say this doesn't do that when there's a card that does that. And so one of the things over time is we understand the delineation and how to, you know, a lot of early magic was made on a card-by-card decision. A lot of early magic was made on a card-by-card decision.

And to be fair, I mean, this is not, I'm not really trying to knock Richard. What I'm trying to say is that when Richard made magic, he had no idea what magic would become. For example, he didn't know how many cards people would buy. You know, limited wasn't really a thing. So he wasn't really designing many cards people would buy. Limited wasn't really a thing, so he wasn't really designing with limited in mind. There were formats that were yet to be discovered. There's a lot of what magic has become that magic wasn't. And Richard did an amazing job

of sort of bringing to life a thing. But in doing so, because he, I mean, it's not like he should have known where the game was going. Or, you know what I'm saying? He was just making something cool unto itself. And because of that, because of the nature of what he was making, Richard prioritized optimizing the flavor on a card-by-card basis. He didn't optimize the... Like, because Magic was small

and it was the first time we'd ever done it, he was just trying to capture people's imaginations. And the other thing is, I'm not saying Alpha should have been any different. If I was a time traveler,

I don't know if I would change Alpha. You change Alpha, maybe the game doesn't become the hit and then it just dies and it doesn't have the time to evolve into what it becomes. But my point here is that when Richard made alpha, he made decisions based on what he needed to do at the time he was making alpha. And it's interesting, as someone who's designed magic for 25 years this year,

someone who's designed magic for 25 years this year, I can look back, and in a lot of ways, I like to think of Alfa as kind of like being like the Model T, right? That if you look at modern cars, well, the Model T seems this very quaint old thing, but it's like, it was the first car. There's a lot of leaps that it made, and a lot of things that it did that were, for day amazing because no one had done that before um and that one of the things that i'm trying to say and this is one of

the things about success paralysis is that anything you make can be improved not because you're not you didn't do a good job not because it's not an amazing thing. Magic is an amazing thing. It's an amazing game. But the, and this is sort of my lesson of the day here. The true thing is that things will evolve and that you have to let things evolve. That you have to say, okay, this thing is good, but how can I make it better? And that one of magic successes, I truly believe, is while we were trying to honor what came before, and very much that's been important to us, we didn't want to be afraid to do something bold and make it better. And one of the interesting things is,

when I look back at a lot of the things I did that at the time were very, you know, carving out new space, one of the resistance I would get was that's not what magic is. For example, I remember when I first made the split cards, that magic had a frame and a magic frame looked a certain way. And when I said, well, how about this card that just does something a little different? There's not one card, but two cards. There are people like, but that's not what magic is. That's not how magic looks. Or when I was doing Innistrad, and we were trying to do the double-faced cards.

We're like, no, no, no. Magic cards have a back. That's a defining quality of magic cards. You are changing something fundamental that shouldn't be changed. Likewise, I know, for example, when we were doing pitch cards in original alliances, like Force of Will,

you know, the customer service wrote a letter to the president and one of the things they really disliked was the pitch cards because before the pitch cards, if you were tapped out,

if your opponent was tapped out, you knew they couldn't do anything. And there was this moment in gameplay where like, oh, they're tapped out. Okay, I know they can't do anything. Let me do something. And all of a sudden, we were introducing this idea that,

well, even though they're tapped out, something still can be done. And it's like, no, no, no, that's the essence of magic is that you know when your opponent is tapped out that they can't do anything. And that is something that is very interesting to me of, they're really, and this is why success paralysis is so important to understand. When you are successful, there is this inherent fear that changing something about what you've done, like you'll undo the thing that made it successful. You know, that everything is going great. I don't want to mess with anything.

I mean, and a lot of like superstitions, for example, like I know in sports, the idea that, you know, a player does something and then has great luck and like, oh, I got to keep doing that thing. Oh, I got to wear these socks or I have to, you know, that there's something that it is in human nature to be superstitious and to sort of lock on

to what has been done but one of the things that I'm trying to stress today and this really applies to more than just game design but I talk about game design which is you gotta love your darlings

but you have to be willing to push beyond what you've done. You have to be willing to say, yes, I did this. And yes, this was successful. But, you know, one of the things that I really think has been a big part of Magic's long term success is we didn't just sit on alpha and say, this is amazing, we will change nothing. What we said is, this is amazing, how can we make

it more amazing? That one of the things that I think that R&D has been very good about is never assuming that because we've done something a certain way that that's necessarily the best way we've done it. One of the things that comes up all the time is there are a lot of decisions that we've made that we kind of made and then that's what we did. So an example, something that, I mean, I'm just giving you some examples from work so one of the things that they like to do at work is take a known thing and say why do we do it that way and I'll give a couple examples so Eric Lauer shortly after he started this is back when we were doing blocks so we would do a block we would have a large set then a small set then a small set sometimes a large set and the way we drafted was you would let, let's say the third set's come out,

so you would have large, small, small. We would open up a large set and draft it, the first set, then open up the second set and draft it, then open up the third set and draft it. And one of the problems we were having was, oh man, it was really hard to put themes in the third set that would matter in limited, that we had to make them so loud so that you would go, oh, I know I'm going to open the third pack and man, it delivers this theme. Well, maybe I should think about it so that if I get there, I'm prepared for it. And shortly after Eric started, Eric said, hey, I'm curious, why do we draft in the order

that the boosters came out? And we said, what do you mean? He goes, well, we always do large, small, small when there's three sets out. Why don't we do small, small, large? Why don't we go backwards? Why don't we open up the newest set first? And what we said is, oh, it's not that we did large, small, small because we hadn't thought about it. It's just, it's sort of like, it was the way that seemed, I don't know, it's just no one thought about it.

And so we just opened, like, I open up a large set, then comes a small set. Okay, I'll open the two large first, then open the small. Like, it wasn't something we thought about. And once Eric proposed it and said, look, if we open up the last set first, we don't have to make the theme so loud that if it's the first thing you open up, oh, now you have, you know, you can change the dynamic of it. And so we said, oh, that's an interesting idea. And so we went back and we tried drafting that way. And it was better, you know, and it really changed what we needed to do to make the third set,

and to some extent, the second set work better, make the themes work better. And it really was an improvement. And it just came from us saying, because sometimes you make decisions. It just came from us saying, because sometimes you make decisions. Like one of the things, this is a writing thing that I sense all the time, which is sometimes when you get stuck in writing and you don't know where to go, you have to take your premises and question, does this have to be? And when you ask yourself, why am I doing something? One of the things you'll often find is you're doing it for a larger reason, but that larger reason could be addressed making different smaller choices.

Like, oh, well, the reason I needed this character in the story was I needed someone who was a nurse. And so maybe the lowest hanging fruit was you meet the character at the hospital. But if the hospital doesn't work in your script, well, maybe you meet someone who's a nurse, but they're not in a hospital. They're not, when you first meet them, they're not in the situation, you know, like, obviously, if they're a nurse, the most likely place you'd find a nurse is in a hospital. But what if you meet the nurse at the drive-in movie?

You know? What if you meet the nurse at the hardware store? Like, there's other places the nurse could be. And so one of the things about writing is the idea of like, why did I go to the hospital? I needed a nurse. Oh, well, I I go to the hospital? I needed a nurse.

Oh, I didn't need the hospital. I needed the nurse. And design is similar in that sometimes you have to go back and say, why did we do that? Now, the interesting thing is sometimes... So here's a question that we get asked. And I don't even know the answer. This is something we've been discussing.

Which is, why 15 cards in a pack? When Magic started, it was 15 cards. And we spent some time going back and looking at it and trying to understand the nature of why. I mean, we talked to Richard, and like why we think 15 cards. The funny thing is,

I think the number one reason to why cards came in packs of 15 is that the printer who made other trading card games, other, or not trading card games, sorry, other trading cards, I think 15 was the default for our printer of just, when they made trading cards, this is what they put in the pack, I think. And one of the things we definitely asked is, now, one of the interesting things about decisions you make is you make decisions and then those decisions are what is and you build around

them. So another reason for success paralysis can also be, okay, well, choices were made. I accept those choices were made. I build around those choices. choices were made, I accept those choices were made, I build around those choices, then now those choices become very ingrained because we built around those choices. And the 15-card pack is a good example where, while there are a lot of reasons why we might have started at 15, because we were at 15, a lot of our technology of how to do things has evolved along with being 15. Like one of the

interesting thing is whenever we change something, you start to learn about how previous things, like for example, we used to do design and development. Now we do vision design, set design, play design. Now there's a lot of overlap. It's not as if the previous system didn't do a lot of the things done in the current system. But by the nature of what it is, whenever you change over your systems, it requires you to sort of question how and why you're doing things, because sometimes you were doing things to meet the old system, not necessarily because it was the best thing, but that it matched the system that you were working with. And so one of the things that I think is very important

when you are working on your systems and stuff is being willing to look and ask why is something the way it is. And like I said, it is not, you are not dismissing what came before because you are trying to find ways to make it better. Us improving upon Alpha is not us saying Alpha was bad, alpha was amazing.

But it's also us saying, okay, well can we take something that is truly amazing and make it better? And that, like I said, that is one of the things that I think, one of the causes of success paralysis is, on some level, you don't always know what causes success. Like, magic is a very complex game. There are a lot of moving pieces. And one of the things, so I'm going to use my metaphor here, of Jenga. So Jenga, for those that don't know, is the game where you

have thin pieces of wood and they go three by three, but they alternate the direction they go in and you build a tower. And the idea is you pull out a piece of wood and then stack it on top. And the idea is you keep going until someone knocks over the tower. So the reason I'm using Jenga here is my thing is I think when you make something, it is like a Jenga tower. And what that means is what is supporting the tower? What is holding it up? The answer is it's not every piece of wood. There are things in the Jenga tower that there's no weight being put upon them. There are things in the Jenga tower that there's no weight being put upon them.

That if I take that piece of wood out, the integrity of the tower will not be harmed. But there's pieces that when I take it out, oh my goodness, there's a lot leaning on that piece. And that piece could be what tumbles the tower. So part of what working with something that is successful is kind of like dealing with a Jenga tower. And what I mean by that is you have to figure out what are the pieces that are holding it up and what pieces aren't. Because if you... A lot of what magic had been,

if you go back and look at the history of magic, is us saying, what are the pieces holding magic up? What are the things that are crucial and important? And some things, like, for example, I mean, one thing that's very interesting, if you look at early magic, I did a whole article about this,

which is there are a lot of things that people take as essential, crucial parts of Magic that simply were not there when the game began. That were something that got added along the way.

A good example might be formats. When Magic first came out, you just, I mean, for example, when Magic first came out, there was no card restrictions. You could play as many cards as you wanted.

The deck restrictions was 40 cards, not 60 cards. And you just played whatever cards you owned. There was no structure saying, well, the idea of formats didn't exist yet. The idea of limited didn't, I mean, the play testers in Alpha did goof around a little bit with doing some limited stuff. They didn't really build it in. Alpha wasn't designed for limited. That was really something that came later. And there are a lot of just

even basic rule concepts. The idea of last and first out or the stack. Magic didn't start with the stack. It didn't start with last in, first out. You know, there are a lot of things that you might think of as being integral to what the game is that didn't start there. Likewise, there were things that were part of the game. there. Likewise, there were things that were part of the game. For example,

when Magic first began, ante was not just an optional part of the game. I mean, it was basically a mandatory thing that, I don't know if the rulebook said, well, you can opt out of this if you

want to. Although, Richard was very big from early, early on, on house rules. I think the idea was the game, you were supposed to play the game for ante, but you know, people could use house rules and not play for ante. But ante was a big part of the game when the game started. Now, once again,

I've explained this before, but real quickly, the reason Richard built ante into the game had a lot to do with what he expected of the game. One of his big concerns was he did not expect people to spend lots of money on the game. He thought people would spend as much money as they spend on a board game, and then that's what they'd own. And the problem is, if you only spent $20, $30 on Magic,

and then that's all you ever owned, well, at some point it would start getting stale because you'd be playing the same things. And one of the things that was cool about the game was that it could ebb and flow. So the reason that he put in Ante was when he was a kid, he used to play marbles, and he really liked the idea that you could lose your pieces,

that you could trade your pieces, just kept the game being dynamic. And so Richard put Ante originally as a means to, well, if people are not going to spend a lot of money, this is something built into the system. They'll make sure that there's a variety of change. The decks will change by nature, not because I'm buying new cards, but because I'm playing with my friends and we're trading cards amongst ourselves.

Also, in Richard's first imagination of what Magic was, because it was a smaller game, it was something you played with your friends. Like, another thing that I added to Magic that wasn't there originally is the idea of tournaments. The idea that I'm going to go to a store and play with people I don't know, or maybe I do know, but not necessarily my friends,

the people I know from the store, that I can go play with people I don't know. And in that sense, do know, but not necessarily my friends, but people I know from the store, that I can go play with people I don't know. And in that sense, you know, playing ante with my friends, where these are the people I play all the time, well, hey, my cards are in the system. If I lose it to my friend Bobby or Sue, well, maybe next time I win it back from them.

But if I lose it to a stranger, that's the only time I'm ever going to see them, then it's gone forever. It's out of my system. So a lot of Ante assumed things based upon where Richard could imagine magic being. Because on some level, what magic became happening is such a crazy out there possibility that it just didn't make sense to plan for it. possibility, that it just didn't make sense to plan for it. And one of the things Richard said was he understood, for example, that there were broken cards at higher rarities, but because people wouldn't have that many, it's like, well, you're just not going to have that many broken

cards. It's not a problem. And he said, well, it will be a problem if it's a runaway hidden. People have lots of cards, but okay, we'll solve that problem when we get there. And that problem, you know, ended up banned in restrictions lists and formats. And, you know, there are a lot of things that came along later that addressed some of the inequality of power. But for early magic, when I'm like, hey, look, people are only going to have so many cards. I want exciting things to happen. You know, in that system, it was okay to have some more powerful stuff because any one person wouldn't have that much power was the idea. But anyway, back

to my Jenga. Part of working with something is figuring out where do the important things lie. And a lot of magic, looking back on magic, is we recognize, for example, we recognize the golden trifecta. We recognize that, you know, the color pie and the mana system and just the nature of a trading card game are all doing very important things. Now, even those, there was room to improve upon them. But we didn't, from very early on, if anything, like at some level, we tightened things up. We said, okay, like what,

and okay, let me talk about the rules. That's another thing that changed. When Richard first made the game, the assumption was, I'm playing with my friends. This is something that, you know, like any normal game, the assumption was, I'm playing with my friends. This is something that, you know, like any normal game, I'm going to sit down with my friends and play. And Richard said, you know what? The nature of a trading card game means new combination of things are going to happen. And remember, this is really early. When Magic first came out, like I said, the

internet as we know it wasn't really there. I mean, the Usenet was there, but it wasn't the, like the World Wide Web hadn't existed yet. So the idea of having information at your fingertips, the idea that I have a question and there's a place to go to answer it, especially about very narrow, niche-y things like this game,

wasn't something that existed yet, right? So when Richard first made it, he's like, okay, what's going to happen is weird interactions are going to happen and then the group can decide what they think is going to happen. And so Richard really embraced the idea that one of the features of the game was, because of the so many combinations of interactions, is, you know what, people will figure it out. You know, one of the fun parts of playing and interactions is, you know what? People will figure it out. You know, one of the fun parts about playing the game is,

ooh, weird things will happen and you and your group have to figure out what goes on. But that assumes the game is small and, you know, kitchen table-y, that you're just playing with your friends. As soon as it starts becoming a larger game where there's tournaments

and you're playing against people you don't know, that's not a good system, you know. And once again, it was a fine system for what he, the most likely scenario of what the game would have been. But because that didn't end up being, you know, the rules were designed early on to be, to make sense on a card-by-card basis and to maximize the flavor on a card-by-card basis and to maximize the flavor on a card-by-card basis. Once Magic started getting big, one of the things we realized was we needed a more concrete rule system. So 6th edition rules were, I mean, we have had small rule changes, but the 6th edition rule change was a pretty large rule change. Where the stack comes from. It really said

we have to, because there was an early issue of the Duelist where Tom Wiley, who was the rule manager at the time, made a chart to explain how all the rules worked. And it was literally done as a rat maze.

Because we were kind of making fun of the fact of how complicated and ornate the rules were at the time. And the point of 6th edition rules were to say, in order for the game to be what the game wants to be, we need to have a universal system of rules so that you don't have to learn on a card-by-card basis how things worked. A lot of early Magic was like, well, this card does that, but this other card, which is similar,

doesn't do that. That's not a good thing for what Magic became, that we needed a way for someone to learn the rules and then be able to apply it and figure out most of what's going on and what's happening. And that required us, instead of building the rules card by card, instead of band-aiding things, we needed to build the rules from a structural standpoint and then make the cards match the structure. The same is true for the color pie where early on where, you know, there was just a small subset of cards, you could bleed things a little more. There are even some breaks. But once we're like, look, we're going to make 600 plus cards a year, actually more

than that now, and we need to maintain, like we need to have design space and we need to, you know, even though there might be thousands and thousands of cards, we want colors to feel consistent. And in order to do that, it required us sort of tightening the color pie and once again, making some structural changes and then having card design match the larger structural changes.

That's one of the big things. One of the pieces of the Jenga puzzle that we, or multiple pieces, that we slid out early on is saying that we have to move away from a system where every decision is made to maximize making the card better to something that's maximized making the game better because if you make too many decisions on a card by card basis and you make enough cards it gets too complicated and too hard to remember and follow

and so once we had a larger thing, we then had to sort of figure out how to make those systems work to allow it. The other thing that is important when discussing success paralysis is question whenever you say to yourself, but that's the way we do it. Now, that's not to say that there aren't things

that can't stay the same. You know, when I say question why you do something, I'm not saying everything should be open to change. There are rules and magic that we have not broken. But, and magic's an interesting case here, magic's a game that breaks its own rules, right? That is kind of the nature of it, that Richard said, okay, well, I have rules, and then individual cards might break those rules.

Now, A, there are, one of the things you have to figure out is how, using my Jenga analogy again, which of the rules are pieces that really things rely on, and which are ones that you can pull out. And the thing that is interesting is there are a lot of things. So let's say you do something for some amount of time. Like, for example, when Innistrad came out,

Magic was, I don't know, 20. I wouldn't have come out. Magic was over 15 years, between 15 and 20 years old. And the point is, at that time, every magic card had a back. So it's very easy to say, oh, well, I mean, that has to be important. For 15 years, we've never not had a back. So clearly that must be an important part of the game. But one of the things we found when we started investigating is,

first off, we looked into how many people play with sleeves. Sleeves were not a thing that, you know, in the first beginning of Magic, sleeves weren't a thing. I mean, real quickly, just for people who care, sleeves existed prior to Magic because trading cards existed, and there were protective sleeves for things like baseball cards. But the protective sleeves prior to Magic weren't made to be played. They were made to be displayed, right? That if I have a baseball card that I'm very proud of and I want to protect it, it's not as if I need to protect it while I'm using it. I just want to protect it, I'm not, it's not as if I need to protect it while I'm using it.

I just want to protect it. So a lot of the tools and things to protect your baseball card wasn't really practical. And so what happened was as magic started, you know, sort of blossoming and you saw a need,

there were companies that started saying, oh, we can fill that need. And the idea of the modern sleeve, like for example, the sleeves that existed prior to Magic, I think were clear and thin. What Magic did is said we need thicker sleeves because we need to put up to the wear and tear of play and we need backs on them because even when we just had Magic backs, there was wear and tear on the Magic backs and that if you could, and not only printing

was the exact same darkness, there were issues with seeing the back of your card. So eventually they said, okay, well, let's make opaque sleeve cards where you can see out of one side, you can't see out of the other side. And sleeves eventually sort of evolved. And I mean, it wasn't just magic. The other thing that went on is

because magic was so successful, it prodded other trading card games. So not only did sleeves evolve because Magic existed, but other... Like, Magic created other... Magic's existence propagated other trading card games. And so not only did Magic sort of build a need for itself, but it built a larger need for the whole swath of trading card games. And what we found was

that sleeves were very popular. So much so that the vast majority of people who play, especially in Constructed, were using sleeves. Like, sleeves were... I forget what it was, but at the time of Innistrad, when we did the research, and this is of Innistrad, so this is years ago, it was over 90%.

Over 90% of players when playing Constructed used Sleaze. And what we said is, okay, well we're at a point now where the back not being the same, that's another thing to remember is your game evolves. And so things that might not be true at one point aren't always necessarily not true. It is possible that early magic, that the backs were one of those jenga pieces that things were relying on.

But as time went on and other factors about it changed, that was not the case. So one of the reasons you want to ask things, and you want to keep asking. So the point of this story is, it's not just enough that you ask. Because things can change, you want to be re-asking. Like, one of the things we do all the time is, we'll constantly say, this element of magic.

Like, one of the things that's very interesting when you ask yourself, why are these the rarities? Why are there so many boosters in a pack? Why do we draft in this way? When you start getting the nitty gritty, you start opening up some very interesting questions. Now, sometimes there are pieces of the Jenga puzzle that you don't want to pull out.

There are things that the game does rely on. So it is not... As a good example, one of the things that I get asked all the time is yeah, yeah, yeah, the color pie exists, but would it be so bad if you just let red destroy an enchantment or, you know,

it would be so bad if just, hey, could we just make one card, you know, if red normally doesn't do it, but one card does it, how bad is that? And the answer is, especially in a game that has, you know, legacy formats, has games where you can play any card you want. Look, Commander is very popular, and Commander lets you play whatever card you want, or mostly. Or mostly. And like one of, from a game design standpoint as a designer,

one of my biggest problems with Commander is there's mistakes that we made, cards that I wish we'd never printed, that are just part of the game and warp things and, you know, definitely cause problems. And the idea that, well, can't we just make one card? Can't you just make one break? No, that really does cause problems. And that you have to be careful.

You know, there are things, there are rules that you should and can break. But there are also rules that you've got to be careful with. And so, when I'm saying, when I'm talking about success paralysis and saying don't be paralyzed, I also

want to be careful of, I'm not saying that nothing is the cause of your success. I'm not saying that everything should change. I am saying that you need to be aware why and how your game is functioning. And you need to constantly be asking yourself about it. That if you are too worried, like my job, essentially, as head designer, is magic is an ever-evolving game. Yes, we're going to repeat things we've done, but we also have to go into brave new territory.

So, for example, let me talk a little bit about the unsets, because the unsets are an interesting tool here. One of the things that I really appreciate about silver-borderedets is it lets me experiment in a place that's a little safer to experiment. I'll take Unstable as my example. I don't know whether Black Border wants for example to do another deck. But in order for me to really understand the dynamics of it, hey, I want to build something with another deck.

I mean, the reason I made Contraption, A, I want to build something with another deck. I mean, the reason I made contraptions, A, I wanted to make contraptions, but I was really interested in how does it feel? What is it like? What is that kind of design space? And it is very hard to... There are things that maybe we should or shouldn't do, and it is nice to have the space where I can sort of play and push boundaries a little bit with less consequences for the pushing of boundaries.

Like, one of the reasons, for example, that we have to be careful about where we push magic is because of a larger structure. We support tournaments. We support competitive play. You know, I have to be careful of the kind of things I do. So the fact that I have a resource like Silver Border, which is never being played in competitive play, there is no fear that some world championships are going to hinge upon a Silver Border card. Which means I can take some risks and try things with the Silver Border cards that I couldn't

normally do. And because of that, it lets me test some things out. Host Augment's another good example where I was doing something a little bit out there with Host Augment. But I will say, having done it and having seen how it played, I believe that us doing it in Unstable has taken that and at least shifted it closer

to maybe one day being something that Blackboard Border could do. Now, there are decisions made in Host Augment that I'm not sure Black Border would make. Like, one of the things I did, because it was a Silver Border set, is I really played up the goofiness of the premise. It's going to be half squirrel, half ninja. From a non-silly space that is you know, one of the things we would have to

figure out if we, I mean, once again, me saying this doesn't mean necessarily that tomorrow Host Augment is going to be in Black Border, but it is saying that having done it in Unstable, seeing the player reaction, understanding it says, oh, there's elements of that that maybe we could get there, but there's other elements

kind of like the silliness, that I'm not sure the creative necessarily wants to be. While it is definitely silly to have, you know, a half squirrel, half ninja, whatever, that brings with it a lot of other baggage, so you've got to be careful. But the takeaway, I mean, sort of... Funny.

I attracted it because it was raining. This has gone a little longer than I anticipated, as the case. Really, the thing that I'm trying to hammer home today is that one of the things that makes magic what it is is... There's a saying, some of my favorite books, The Whack on the Side of the Head,

a book about creative thinking by Dr. Roger Van Eck. And in it is a quote, which is, sacred cows make great steaks. And what it means is you tend, there's a lot of equity that gets built up

in doing something a certain way. One of the things that made the double-faced cards exciting was it was very transgressive. We had never printed on the back of a magic card. So all of a sudden to do that is, I understand it's disorienting for some people, and some people are like, oh, don't do that. But other people are like, oh, you can do that? Like, one of the challenges of my job is I want to surprise the players. I want to do things that make them go, I didn't know the game could do that.

Well, in order for me to have the ability to do that, I need to play in spaces, like I need to do things we've never done before. And so by the very nature, I mean, on some level, a trading card game itself is, has to fight this idea of success paralysis. We have to. My very job is saying, hey, we can keep reinventing what we do. We can keep finding finding new ways to break our rules. And, you know, the, I don't think I have, I mean, I don't think any game or anything really has the luxury of success paralysis. I mean, I guess there are games that you make the game and you're done and you never touch it again.

But any kind of game that has evolution or has, you know, additional pieces or extra add-ons, you don't really have the luxury of just never changing anything. And the key to it is really digging down deep and understanding what is doing the work that it needs to be done. And a lot of great sort of shrives in Magic have come from someone like Eric Lauer going, well, we did this, but why did we do that? And have us look and go, oh, well, here's why we did it, but we don't have to do that.

And that is something I'm always striving to is I like to question why things are and why we do things to understand what is going on. That isn't to mean that necessarily everything I question I should be breaking. Some things when I study and understand them, I'm like, oh, this is doing something important.

There's a reason this is the way it is. This is a Jenga piece that's holding up the Jenga tower. This is a bearing wall that's holding up the house. This is an important thing. Okay, I've got to be careful not to mess with this. Or I at least have to understand if I mess with it, what element of it I can't mess with. But anyway, the real point of today is

just an understanding of success is good, but success brings with it its own share of problems. And one of those problems is a fear that if you change something, right, the whole Jenga tower is going to be tumbling down. But what I'm saying is, if you want to be successful in the long run, not just in the short run, but if you want to be successful in the long run, not just in the

short run, but if you want to be something that is going to go on for years and years and years, you have to be willing to question the premises of what you're doing and continually because things can change. And you have to be saying, I want to make the best thing I'm going to make. And part of doing that is questioning what has come before. And if you just use magic as a perfect example, I don't think magic in its 27th year would be as good as it is

if we weren't willing to question things and say, hey, yes, this is amazing. Magic is a wonderful, terrific game. But can we make it better? Okay, guys, I'm now at work. So you got an extra long recording today thanks to traffic and rain. But anyway, I'm now at work. So you got an extra long recording day thanks to traffic and rain.

But anyway, I'm now here. So you know what that means? This is the end of my drive to work. Instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you guys next time. Bye-bye.