Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #717: Making Un- Cards

Episode Date: February 28, 2020

In this podcast, I talk about the challenges of making silver-bordered cards.

I'm pulling out of the parking lot. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work. And my son got an award at school today, so I had to go to the award ceremony. Anyway, today I have a fun topic. I'm going to talk about how all of you can design silver border cards. So I've spent a lot of time about talking, designing normal cards, but I spent very little time about, I mean, I've done some behind the scenes stuff about designing how I designed them, but I've never really talked about how for you to design them. So I'm going to walk through the common pitfalls today of silver boarder design. So let me start with the following.

I think silver boarder design is one of the hardest things to design in magic. I do know, for example, when I talk to experienced magic designers and I say to them, hey, would you like to be on a silver board or design team? Usually the response, some of them are very eager to do it, but a lot of them are like, no way. You know, they're very hard to do. So even people that design magic cards all the time recognize that it's a hard, it's a very disciplined skill. So let me walk you through what exactly, what makes a good silver-bordered card, you know, when you're trying to design them. So first off, let me walk through the major pitfalls,

and I'll go in depth on each of these pitfalls. So the number one pitfall, the number one mistake people make when they design uncards from the ones I've got to see. Now, given I see internal, the uncards I'm seeing are people who work for wizards who are designing cards for an unset that I get to see. So this is not based on the public. I don't get to see the public's cards. But anyway, based on that, the number one mistake I see is too often they design things that can just be done in black border. One of the truisms of silver border is that you are making something that you wouldn't make in black border. Now there's a couple different areas for that to be true. So let me walk through what exactly makes something silver border not black border? What makes it not black border?

something silver border, not black border? What makes it not black border? Okay, the biggest category of things that aren't black border are things we just can't do in black border. We're not allowed to do, and those fall into two major camps. Number one are what I will call rules issues. The black border rules, so the normal rules, can handle certain things and other things it can't handle. So I'll give a good example. I tried to make a card, which you guys all know is Stain Power. That wasn't its name in Black Border. But the card basically is an enchantment that says anything that would end at end of turn doesn't. It's permanent.

So the idea is it turns at end of turn until the end of the game. permanent. So the idea is it turns at end of turn until the end of the game. So the idea is if you do giant growth and your creature gets plus three plus three until end of turn, with staying power, it just is forever plus three plus three. I originally made that for a magic set. And, you know, we do permanent effects. We do text alteration. So you're like, okay, all the component pieces we do, right? So like, for example, I'm allowed to give a creature plus three plus three permanently. Now, normally we would do that as three plus one plus one counters, but the game can handle a permanency of a boost. And we do text splicing, right? We will change things.

So on first blush, this seems like, okay, what could be the problem? Why would this be problematic? The component pieces could be done. The problem is, while there are things we can do permanently, there are things that are temporary that the game, it's hard to make permanent.

And so the problem with staying power are temporary that the game it's hard to make permanent. And so the problem with staying power is it just says, well, I'm going to make anything that says until end of turn permanent. And there are reasons sometimes that we do things until end of turn. There are some effects and some things

that the game does not handle well if there's not a duration tied to them. And so the problem we ran into was some effects are fine. I mean, there are memory issues as well. The other thing with staying power is there's a lot of memory issues.

But that alone, I mean, that alone might dissuade us from Black Border. But the idea that I can just text splice anything of this kind, well, there are things we do durationally because we need them to be durational because they care about the duration. And so, it was one of those things

that, like, it's a technical thing. Like, a lot of the thing I find, like, there's cards I make all the time that are Silver Bordered. I act like I just do them all the time. There are many cards that I've made in silver border that I've gotten the response from the audience of, hey,

why, like Super Duper Death Ray, which is a direct damage spell with trample. It was in Unstable. And people are like, yeah, why can't the game do that? That seems like a normal card. And once again, that's the example there is,

it's something I had done. I originally did it on a card called Liquid Fire, I think, in Odyssey. And if you see Liquid Fire, we kind of wrote it out, but it's very awkward. If you say, you know, do three damage trample or do five damage trample, whatever, I think it might be four damage.

You kind of get the idea. One of the things that Silver Border does well is that the rules, a lot of times, get caught up on nuance. For example, in Future Sight, I think Mark Gottlieb suggested

Last Strike and Triple Strike. Or he might have... I forget whether he recommended both or recommended one of them. Once last strike got submitted, then we knew we could do... Like, if last strike exists, you could do triple strike.

Because triple strike is just last strike, normal strike, and double strike. Now, in a vacuum, that doesn't seem that complicated. Like, it's very obvious how a last strike would work, for example.

The problem from a game standpoint is the rules are written in such a way that that step doesn't exist. And in order to make a last strike work, you have to sort of define the rules to make it happen. Now, it is not that it couldn't be done. It is that it requires a lot of work and a lot of change. And sometimes when you change things, it requires rewording other things. And so one of the questions we always ask is, what's the benefit for making the change?

How hard is the change? What is the benefit of making the change? Sometimes I make a brand new mechanic, like split cards or something, or double-faced cards. A double-faced card was made by the, originally it was made by the Duel Master team. Tom LePaley suggested moving it over.

I did make split cards, but I did not make double-faced cards. I fought for double-faced cards, but I did not. I was not the one that originated them. But anyway, each one of those, they brought with them rules baggage. The rules did not quite work with them only because they didn't exist yet and rules had to be made for them. But we look at something like hybrid mana or

split cards or double-faced cards. There's a lot of utility. Each of those things we've done many times and they've been something that's added value to magic and we said, okay, there's some how much do we have to add? Okay, it's manageable and there's a few corner cases to deal with, but they don't come up so much.

Okay, that is worth it. The problem we ran into with Last Strike and Triple Strike is how many cards are we making with Last Strike? For example, in Future Sight, we were planning to make one card with Last Strike and one card with Triple Strike. Well, is completely rewriting the combat rules worth two cards? And the answer was no. So we didn't.

And so the reason I stuck them in Silver Border was, hey, these are cool abilities. You generally understand the ability. You know what I'm saying? You generally get the essence of how they work. you know what I'm saying, you generally get the essence of how they work. And so, it, it's, the thing that Silver Border does well is taking rules and things that the reason they don't work is not, they're not grokkable, it's not that they're easy to understand. It's that there's some technicality.

Like, one of the things about Black Border is we have tournaments. We have high-level tournaments. We need rules that there's definitive answers. And a lot of the things that Uncards can do is play in space that is not definitive enough to work in tournament play, but it's good enough that people get it. And I'll come back to this a little bit later today. But anyway, so the first big category of things that we can't do is things that just do not work within the black border space. Meaning the rules cannot handle the thing we're asking. And once again, yes, rules can be changed, but it's not worth the change. Well, and once again, split hairs again,

there are some rule changes that we could do, but have a high cost to them. And there are some that we can't do in the sense that logistically, well, there's some that are logistically problematic and there's some that are contradictory. Like you can't do in the sense that logistically, well, there's some that are logistically problematic and there's some that are contradictory. Like, you can't really add the rule because it contradicts another rule and it causes paradoxical loops and things.

So there are some things that aren't worth changing and so we don't do. And there's some things that we can't change. Both of those, though, are fair ground for silver borders as long as they make sense the other thing that we can't do is on the creative side there are things that we've decided that we to make off limits and once again that's the creative team that makes that decision

for example squirrels beables there are certain things that we do in Silver Border that we just have been deemed off-border for, for Black Border. I will admit,

some of these I don't quite get. Squirrels, to me, should just be in Black Border as far as I'm concerned. Uh, even beevils. I think beevils have a place in Black Border.

Um, but it is not my call to make that decision. Um, so, anyway. Okay, so that is the first batch of things. Okay, now there are other things that we don't do in Black Border. Not because the rules can't handle them,

but just we've sort of deemed it off-limits from a overall, I don't know, feel of the game. So the classic example of this would be six-sided dice rolling. Six-sided dice, usually. And the answer there is we allow a little bit of coin flipping. Richard put some coin flipping early

in Magic, and we allow coin flipping every once in a while. Not very often, but infrequently. And we tend not to put it on anything that's remotely close to tournament viable. One of the things that is easy to comprehend, the rules can handle just fine, is rolling a six-sided die. There's, in fact, a lot of fun design space. Unglued is played in it.

Unstable is played in it. Unsanctioned plays a little bit in it. One of the things that is interesting about silver border, about six-sided dice rolling, is it's just what we call high variance, meaning, oh, well, I don't know what's going to happen. It's one out of six. We've made a conscious decision in Blackboard and Magic

to be careful about our variants and to be careful about things that are very high-profile, high variants. And so we have decided to make Silver Border... I'm not Silver Border. Sorry, I keep saying Silver Border when I mean Six-Sided Eye. We've decided to make dice rolling not a Black Border thing. Now, that's good for me,

the guy who makes Silver Border cards, mostly because there's a lot of fun space in dice. And that, like I said, one of the tricks of making Silver Border cards is not making something we do in Black Border. And so dice are nice. It's nice that dice exist. There's a lot of fun cards you can make with dice.

Okay, next. Another thing that separates Silver Border from Black Border is the humor. And sometimes we'll do other things. Like, for example, one of the things we did on Stable with some of the commons is we did art variants. And the cards we did were simple cards.

They were vanillas or French vanillas. Or in one case, it had a sac ability. But they were relatively simple cards. Those cards in a vacuum we could have done in a normal set but we no longer do extensive art variants. We did them back in like Fallen Empires.

We do a little bit of art variants in that we do showcase cards but the idea right now is when we make a set there's a default piece of art that players know what the art is and so we try to make sure that there's a default piece of art

so we try not to make a lot of art variants in normal Black Border sets in Silver Border we had some fun with it. I mean, obviously, we did some things to make sure they were recognizable. But that's an example of cards that... Just some aspect of it has to be something we won't do.

As long as there's... One of the tricks is there's a bunch of things that we don't do in Black Border that... For example, in the past, things we've done. We've done fractions. We do things like outside assistance where you ask somebody outside the game for something. We put other people's cards in your hand.

That's something we don't normally do. So there's a lot of little things where we... Anything that, as long as something on the card... Oh, another thing that we don't do in Black Border is we don't do physical things. Things that involve any kind of physicality. Obviously, once upon a time, there was Chaos Orb and Falling Star, which you had to throw.

We don't do those anymore. Throwing cards are all in Black Border. Things that have a verbal component where you have to talk, Black Border. Subgames are now in Black Border. Subgames like Scheherazade, where you stop the magic and go play another game of magic

and then come back. That's a little too logistically problematic for Black Border play, so we do those in Silver Border. So there's a bunch of things. Like, one of the things about making Silver Border is kind of knowing what is a Silver Border thing so that you have some flexibility when you're making things. The other thing we occasionally do in Silver Border,

and I try to avoid this, it's not ideal. We've done it a little bit on the holiday cards. It's something in which the flavor of the card... It's a top-down design and the overall top-down design is something we never do in Black Border.

Fruitcake Elemental is my example here where we do elementals made out of weird things, but Fruitcake is a little silly. We wouldnals made out of weird things, but fruitcake's a little silly. We wouldn't normally do a fruitcake. But it is something that is... I mean, it was from a holiday card, so it was kind of cute. It was meant to be funny.

The holiday cards are silver-bordered. But nothing about that card design couldn't be done in Black Border. But the idea behind it was the design only really worked. The reason that all the pieces of the design held together is because it was a fruitcake. And the joke of fruitcakes is people pass it back and forth. And so it kind of had a design that was top-down based on a silly thing.

And even though all the components could be done in Black Border, the combined combination of it is something we wouldn't do in Black Border. That's kind of subtle. We don't do that very often. But every once in a blue moon, if we really, really like the top-down silliness of something. Normally, though, normally even in those cases, one

of the tricks is if you add in some small element, if like 90% of the card is black border, but 10% is silver border, it's silver border. That any amount of silver border makes the card silver border. It's not like, well, most of this, most of this could be done in magic,

in black border magic. And so when making silver border cards, being well-versed... So let me run through the list one more time for you. Dice rolling is silver bordered. Caring about... Oh, caring about any quality of a card that could change between cards. What I mean by that is

a card that has the same English name is identical from a rule standpoint for normal Blackboard tournaments. So for example, think about anything that you could reprint a card and something could be different. Or it could be in another language and something could be different. So although the language is a little bit weird

because I guess you translate language cards to English. So think more about I'm reprinting a card in English. What are qualities of the card that could change? Number one, it could have different art. It could have different art or different artists. It could have a different it could have a different collector number. It could have a different copyright.

It could have a different number of lines of text. It could have a different copyright. It could have a different number of lines of text. It could have different flavor text. So all those things are fair game. So anything that looks at the quality of a card and asks for something that might be something that might vary between two cards that are the same but reprinted, that is off limits for Blackboard. Expansion symbol as well. So right, so if the art, caring about

art, caring about artist, caring about expansion symbol, caring about length of rule text, caring about collector number, caring about legal text, caring about flavor text, all that is fair game

the other thing that we don't do in Blackboarder is we don't care about names by the quality of the name we might say does it have this name, that we can do in Blackboarder like there could be a card that goes oh if this other card name is in play I get a bonus, we can do that

but what we can't do is look and say hey does this card have two words? Does this card have a certain letter? All that is fair game for Silver-Bordered. Okay, so Silver-Bordered also you can do physical things. You can do verbal

things. You can interact with other people. You can interact with other people. You can interact with other games. Although the rule when you interact with other games is you can only interact with other games in which you can see Silver Border cards being played in the other game. The idea is if you're playing Silver Border, then you can be involved in Silver Border shenanigans.

But if you're not, you can't. So you can't play a game next to a serious game and mess with the game with your Silver Border cards. You're not allowed to do that. What else? If you have a sub game, if you put cards that you don't own in your hand if cards are face up in your library

if you're using any rules that aren't supported in the normal Blackboard rules although that's a little fuzzy because sometimes you make a brand new thing that doesn't currently have rule support but Blackboard could make a rule support that's the trickiest ones where I've made Silver Border cards before and then somebody makes a card in a Black Border set that kind of does what I made and like, oh, I didn't think you could do this, but apparently you can. So, that is

one of the hardest things at home of making Silver Border cards is you don't have the rules manager, you know, several steps over that you can go, hey, Eli, can Black Border do this? And Eli will always say one of three things to me. He'll go, yes, Blackboarder can do that. He'll go, no, Blackboarder can't do that. Or he'll go, maybe. And then maybe is, you know, well, we could make it work, but, you know, here's how much energy it would take to do

it and sort of gauge whether it's worth it. You know, one of the tricky things in general about silver border cards is trying to figure out the value of what makes things work. Anyway, okay. So number one problem people have in making silver border cards is they make black border cards

that aren't silver bordered. So don't do that. Okay, number two. The number two mistake I see when people make silver-bordered cards is they make cards that are funny to read but not funny to play. What I mean by that is, sorry, one second, let me take a sip of water. Okay, so what I mean by that is you don't just... The point of a silver board or card, yes, people are going to see it for the first time.

Yes, you're trying to make it humorous. Yes, you want to entertain them with what it does. You know? But you also want to make sure that what you're making is not just sort of entertaining in the sense that when you read it, you go, ooh you also want to make sure that what you're making is not just sort of entertaining in the sense that when you read it, you go, ooh, that sounds, but when you actually play the card, that's interesting. And a big mistake I see with silver border cards are people that make humorous things that are funny, that tell a joke, but that aren't playable or aren't particularly fun to play.

fun to play. I'll use a real life good example. A mistake that I made. I would argue that Gotcha, the mechanic from Unhinged, falls in this category after much soul searching. So what Gotcha was, is Gotcha said if a certain

action is taken while I'm in the graveyard, you can get me back from the graveyard. If your opponent does it and you say, gotcha, then you get it back. And a lot of the things, for example, were verbal things. If they say a certain word, some of them had to do, did they laugh? Did they touch their face? Did they touch the table? Did they flick their cards? And the idea of gotcha was that, you know, oh, I do something and you're aware it's in the graveyard

and now you have to try to work and not do that thing. But what we found out is the actual way to play it if you're trying to win, and people usually try to win, even in some board games people are still trying to win. The correct strategy is just to be quiet.

You know, or just not do anything. Oh, laughing might cause me problems in the game? Well, I guess I better not goof around, because then I might laugh. Oh, saying a certain word might cause problems? Well, I better stop talking, because if I talk, maybe I'll say the word. And what it ended up doing was,

it made people sort of not interact. It made people sort of not interact. It made people sort of clam up. The whole fun of a silver-bordered product is that you're laughing and talking. The social aspect is very important. We made something that made people

withdraw from the social part of it when that's a big part of what makes it fun was a good example of a mistake. I think when you read Gacha for the first time they read fun when that's a big part of what makes it fun, was a good example of a mistake. You know? And I think when you read Gacha for the first time, they read fun. You know what I'm saying?

Like, oh, what's going on? But when you actually played them, they didn't play out fun. And that was a big mistake. So real quickly, behind the scenes. So how did Gacha get made? The problem we had with Gcha was that the team that was playtesting it we were trying

to have fun meaning that we were we weren't really playing with a spike effort as much as we were trying to have fun and so when we get a gotcha card the person who you know the opponent

wouldn't stop talking they They would just try really hard not to say it, meaning they would lean into the mechanic. And when you did that, it was a fun mechanic. Like, when everyone sort of said, okay, you know, if you say certain words, it's a problem, so what I'm going to do is talk carefully, there was some fun there. You know, trying to have a normal game and enjoy yourself, but not say the word. You know, there was something fun to that. But what we missed was we just didn't have any sort of spike players playing, going, oh, I want to win at all costs.

What do I do? Oh, talking is bad. I'll just not talk anymore. And I think we had one play test where one person did that and my mistake was rather than recognize, oh my gosh, oh my gosh, that is a real strategy. We should think about that.

I just said, oh, he's not in the spirit of it and I made a crucial mistake. One of my big lessons in designing Silver Border is you want to have people play who are trying to win and watch what they do. Because one of my, like, if you ever listen to my 20 lessons from GDC, one of them talks about how

you have to make the fun, you can't force them to hunt for the fun. You have to put the fun where they'll find it. You have to make the fun something where they naturally do what they want to do in the game that they get to the fun part. It can't be like you make them hunt and find the fun.

Because sometimes they're not going to find it and then the game won't be fun. And I think gotcha is a classic example where I made people have to hunt for the fun. It's interesting. Another life lesson of mine real quick. I have a bunch of traffic, so I can add a few stories in.

When I was in college, I had a play group. I might have told the story before, but it's an important story for this point. I had a play group that played games. And so oftentimes on Saturday night, we'd get together, and we'd often go to the store,

and we'd go to the game store together, and we'd buy a game, and we'd play it. And we had so much fun. All the games were so much fun. And then when we left college, we divvied up the games. And one of the games was a game, I don't know if I can name it, but basically you look at, um, at like inkblots

and it's a game kind of like, um, Balderdash. It's a bluffing game where you say what you see in the, in the inkblot. And then, um, you're trying to guess. One person is the, not the judge, but one person is the person who writes, they write what they think and then everybody else writes something trying to make you think

the person who is doing it, it's them. So you're trying to mimic what they're saying. And we used to have a blast with the game. It was so much fun. And then I took the game because that was one of the games I got, and I played it with other people. And it was miserable.

And I'm like, what the... This was such a fun game. What happened? And what I later came to realize was... The thing I had in college was this golden group of gamers that just really knew kind of how to make a game fun. Like, we were really good at just taking any game and making it fun. And what I found was when I took this game and I pulled it out of this group

to a group that had less experience doing that, the game itself wasn't inherently fun. Like, we had made it fun. We'd imbued fun in it. And that's something to be very careful with silver border cards. And this is true with playtesting. It's so easy when you're playtesting your own silver border cards that you sort of know what you want the fun to be, so you make the fun happen.

This is why, and this is true not just for silver border, but why getting playtests of people that aren't familiar with you is important. You want to see what people do when they don't know any better. What do you think they do? And, you know, I think that's a valid... It's a valid thing to keep in mind.

Okay. Next. Oh, okay. I'm sorry. I was talking about the second problem is that people make cards that are fun to look at and not fun to play. There's an easy solution to this,

and the easy solution is play the cards. Play the cards. If the cards are funny, funny, funny, and you play them and they're not fun to play, sorry, no go. Now, normally, one of the things I will say is normally there's something funny about the card, and you playtest it,

you can kind of tweak it to keep it funny but make it play better. That's something you can do. And, like I just said, make sure you're playtesting with people that don't already know the joke, that don't already know what the point of the card is. Like I like to say, you want to have playtesters that aren't emotionally

invested in you. Meaning, people that don't care, that are willing to hurt your feelings because they'll be brutally honest. You need the honesty. And especially with silver border cards, you want people to play your cards so you see what they do with them. And by the way, there's two completely different reasons

why it's valuable. One is you want to see are they doing things you don't think because maybe they're playing in a way that aren't fun. The second thing is sometimes they're doing things you never would think of it and it inspires you to think about other things you might want to put in the set. You think of synergies you might not normally have thought of. Okay, the third thing that people do when they make silver border cards

that causes problems is they make cards that don't make sense. And what I mean by that is, your cards have to be playable by humans. What that means is, just because Black Border rules can't handle it, and sometimes even if they can handle it, it's a matter of, can humans handle it? The rule for Silver Border for me is not, can the rules handle it. It's a matter of can humans handle it? The rule for Silver Border

for me is not can the rules handle it, because I don't particularly care in this case. It's can the humans playing the game handle it? And what I mean by that is something like Last Strike or First Strike, look, you're going to most likely, you know, if you understand that Last Strike

is opposite First Strike, you're most likely going to play that correct, especially if you give you a little tiny bit of instruction. But sometimes people make cards that don't have any internal consistency to them. It's like, I'm doing a weird thing to do a weird thing. And like, okay, how does that work? And then sometimes you read a card that's kind of weird for the sake of weird,

and it just, the reason it's not a good un-card is you don't know what it does, you don't understand it. And so one of the card that's kind of weird for the sake of weird, and it just, the reason it's not a good uncard is you don't know what it does, you don't understand it. And so one of the things that's important when you're making uncards is that you, and this is why playtesting, again, is important, that you want to understand what's going to happen. As a rule of thumb, I'm not worried about corner cases I'm not worried about I do something weird

and then okay what if this weird thing and that weird thing come together the weird corner case is mostly going to be figured out what I care more about is when I have a card and you do a normal thing it's not a corner case it's something you would see in any magic set

and you're like I don't know what happens okay that's where you start getting in trouble when you're just playing with basic effects and you don't know the response to them. Now, one of two things can happen. A, you can just scrap it, or B, you can spend more time and energy understanding what it is you want and what the intuitive things are so that you can start crafting it to be more leaning in that direction so that people are playing it correct. But, it is, like I said, I get a surprising number of cards that I'm

like, you know, someone's... Well, okay, and the next one's tangential. It's where someone's messing with something to mess with it because it's never been messed with before but not in a way that sort of feels organic. So one of the things about designing Uncards

is the idea, what I call organic. What I mean is that it is all the component pieces have to work together in a way that we don't do all that often. I mean, sometimes in Blackboarder, but not nearly as much. Like my example here is Shoe Tree. So Shoe Tree was a card in unhinged it was a tree folk that had shoes hanging on it and that when it entered the battlefield

you got to put some counters on it and those counters had to be your shoes there were plus one plus two counters but only if represented by shoes. And so the idea was, it was a card that uses counters, but use counters in an odd way. Because it, like, one of the things about shoe counters is you have to have a shoe. Okay, well, two shoes most likely you have. But the third shoe starts to become problematic. And the answer is, did you bring extra shoes? Do you borrow shoes from other players? You know, it makes you have to start doing things. And that's a good example, by the way.

Well, I'll get to other people in a second. But, shoe tree was the kind of thing where, in order for it to work, it had to be called shoe tree, because that name is what ties it all together. It had to be a tree folk, because it had to be shoe tree, it had to be a tree. It had

to use counters that were shoe counter, you know what I'm saying? And all these component pieces that, if you said to me, well, it can't be a tree folk, well, then I'm like, well, then I can't call it shoe tree, Then it stops holding together. And there's a holistic quality that also is important in making a

mortar card. You want to feel like all those pieces come together to make something which is, you know, the whole is larger than some of its parts. That's even more so in un-cards, where you're really trying to make something that is something. And a lot of, like, I'll use a more recent example,

which is circadian night owl. We started with a night owl, right? We knew we wanted a night owl. And that meant two things. One is, it meant that he was literally going to be an owl that was a night, because we're playing into the pun. And it also meant I wanted to care about

things in a way that felt owl-ish. Well, one of the things about owls, they're nocturnal. So clearly this is desirable. What if I care about whether it's day or night? Which plays nicely into owls. And then,

once I realized I wanted to'm naming, and then, once I realized I wanted to care about day and night, I knew I needed an activation in black because of the nature of, these were enemy legendaries

we were doing, so I needed a black activation. I love the idea that a black activation is at night. And then that, there's a, how to parallel if we can.

Like, oh, then you've got a white activation, that's during the day. Okay, you get one of two abilities. One if it's night, one if it's day. Figuring out what that is. We made it flying because it's nocturnal. And then vigilance for day.

Anyway, and we put all that all together. And then, obviously, we needed to name him because he needed a proper name. And then we served something because it's night. It's Arcadian because it's night day. But all those pieces have to come together and a lot of what makes a card sing is that it has a cohesive whole. Okay, so now we're getting away from problems and into things that you want to do. So number one of things you want to do is you want to be cohesive in your design. The name, the flavor text, the art card concept,

all of it has to hang together. It has to be something that is a cohesive piece. Now, I will say, sometimes, like very often sometimes, I'll design something that's in, that just mechanically makes sense and then later figure out in the flavor of how it needs to function. But you always,

as you build along and evolve your designs, the perfect state of an un-card is it does something cool but all the pieces tie together in a way that feels thematic. That is very important. Another aspect, since there's a lot of humor in it, is not only

do you want to bring up the different aspects, but have something humorous about it. Like Circadian is an example, a night owl is some comedy there. An owl is not normally a knight. And so you get to play around some fun space. Okay, so you want it to be a whole. The other thing you want to do is, I think silver border cards shine

when they meet the following criteria. They make you tell stories about playing them. What that means is, I have enough experience in the act of playing them that I want to share that experience with other people. That is what prompting a story means. It's something that I go, oh!

It made something happen on such a level that I'm encouraged to talk about it. We try hard with Uncards for Civil War cards to really have an agenda and push something that they can make stories happen. The classic example of that is I think it was called Tick 5. There's a card in Unstable

where you have 30 seconds to high five as many people as possible. And then you gain life for every high-five, and anybody who's high-fived gains a life, if they're playing in a Civil War game. And the whole point of that card was... Sorry. The whole point of that card was,

I wanted there to be moments, especially in game stores, where someone goes, Okay, I'm playing this card. And then people would line up and you'd have giant hand-pumping high-fives all around the room. And then I knew that it would make an experience, it would make a moment. And one of the things that silver board cards really shine is you want to make things

that capture, you know what I'm saying, that there's something about them that really captures. Okay, so that ties into the third thing, which is understanding the value of humor and understanding the value of sort of what I'll call charm, which is we try to make unccards, for the most part,

charming in the way that they're goofy and silly and fun, but in a very charming way, that it just makes you entertained by the idea. And that's an important quality. One of the things that when you're making your names and you're doing all that the humor isn't like for example, interestingly today, to gauge a little bit

I did a poll today about would you prefer Silver Border cards that just didn't have the humor you know, if we made a set that was a Silver Border set that did exactly what Silver Border does but just stripped the humor out of it would you like it more or less and a giant percentage, like last I saw, close to like four-fifths said they'd like it less.

So the other thing when you're making your cards is you want to really think through how you can play up the humor, how you can make something that, like I said, you want it to tell stories, but you also want it to speak to people,, and you wanted to sort of play with their heartstrings in some ways. You know, maybe it's a weird thing, it's a cute thing, it's a thing that messes in a space that was a meme, or I don't know, be careful on memes, memes are timely. You know, when you're making your silver border, you want to make sure that you're making something that...

The goal of Silver Border is... The number one goal is not to make the most competitive games. In fact, we do allow high variance. I'll get to that in a second. But the most important thing is we want people to have fun. We want people to interact and have socialness. And so another thing to constantly think about your cards is not only a matter of

how much stories they tell, but how much is it prompting interaction? And the interactions are good. One of the reasons I was really happy with outside assistance in Unstable was it just made you go interact with other people. And it was fun to bring other people

into your game. And they get to make a decision that means something. And so, you know, that dynamic I thought was really enjoyable. Okay. Another thing that you want to do in making a silver border card is make it as simple as it can be to do the thing you're doing. Another common mistake I see,

I forgot to mention in my common mistakes, is people really tend to make un-cards super wordy. They're like, oh, I have a weird thing and I got to explain it all and I got to put as much on it that also ties into it. The best un-cards,

and I would argue in some ways the best blackboard cards too, are ones that have a clarity of purpose, that know who they are, know what they do, it's simple, but it just is asking you to do something that is offbeat. That a lot, to me, of really fun Uncards are ones that just ask you, the player,

to care about something you don't normally care about, but in a way where there's some entertainment value to caring about it. You know, that is a big part of what will really make an Uncard sing, is that it speaks to you, right? That there's something darling about the card. And part of that, like I said, one of the reasons that Uncard design is so hard is

there's a lot of nuance. I mean, all magic design has nuance, but there are nuances upon nuances. Like, one of the things I find funny is how often I explain a joke in a previous unset, and people who have played the unset go, yep, never caught that, never saw that. And this is on cards where people are looking for the jokes and one of the things that I enjoy about unsets and that I recommend for you if you're making them cards

is I love seeing where I can push boundaries and where I can just cram jokes in I mean I like to cram so many jokes into an uncard as many as I can and it's not just my jokes. The artist has jokes, and the templators have jokes, and, you know, there's all sorts of things. There's all sorts of ways to make it funny.

And, like, one thing that's interesting is, like, you know, one of the things that I appreciate about Unsets is that everybody who works on it, you know, like, I'll use Unstable as my example, is, okay, obviously my design team was really into trying to make it an unset, but the creative team really had fun with it. The artists really had fun with it. The editors really had fun with it.

They, you know, they, for example, if you look at the reminder text, one thing that's a lot of fun is the editing team has a lot of fun with reminder text, which is just we're going to remind you, but can remind you in a way that's entertaining. Can we make the reminder text funny? The packaging people had a lot of fun trying to add extra value in. The marketing people, everybody at every level is like, this is the essence of what it is. How do we add to that? And that was really fun.

And part of the neat thing about making silver border cards is trying to make things that, like if you are not making them by yourself, but you're making with other people, really let your partners have a chance to shine too. And a lot of times by doing back and forth and playing on different kinds of humor. Oh, that's another big one I would recommend as well.

Diversify your humor. It's okay to have some cards that are subtle and dry, some cards that are blunt and in your face. You want to have a smattering of different kinds of humor just because your audience is going to be different people and they have different kinds of humor. And if you do exactly just what is your style of humor, fine, people who enjoy

your style of humor will like it. But then a lot of people might not like the overall product because, oh, the kind of humor employed is not their kind of humor. So we like to mix up the humor and make sure that we're doing

a bunch of different kinds of things in doing the humor. Other things when doing, like I said keep it on make sure the story is to tell make sure it doesn't work at Black Border make sure there's humor added in it make sure it's holistic and the pieces all come together

and like I said, try to keep it as short as possible if you have one really cool idea that fits and is on, it can often stand by itself. It doesn't need to be mixed with lots of other things. Okay, so now I've given you a lot of basics on making the individual cards. So let me talk a little bit about making a set of cards or a mechanic and stuff.

One of the things that's important when making a mechanic for an unset is... Well, let me talk about variants, I guess, as we get into mechanics. So one of the things we try very hard in Black Border is we try to limit the variance so much. We want skill to matter. In a Black Border game,

we would like the skilled player, meaning the player that's the better skilled player, to win the majority of the time. Not all the time. We want the lesser player to win some of the time. But because of tournaments and all the stuff we do that's very serious with it, we want skill to be an important factor. And so the idea of variance in Blackboarder is

that skill is supposed to reign supreme. That if we're going to make a design that's going to cause the better player to lose the majority of the time rather than win the majority of the time, that's problematic. In Silver Border, the idea is it's less about competition and it's more about the social, emotional aspect of playing. It's about having fun and enjoying time with your friends. And so what we found there is variance makes games fun and dramatic. And if your attitude isn't, I gotta win, I gotta win, I gotta win,

and more like, I'm gonna do what the set's telling me to do and have fun, the high variance is something that we really lean into to make just to add some... I mean, it makes the games play differently.

It makes it a little bit more excitement. You know? And it allows for wild... Like, wild swings can be very fun. It's frustrating when you... Like, when I'm playing

a match in which, oh my god, the outcome, it really matters whether I win or not. Having random factors determine things is very frustrating. But in a game where I match in which, oh my god, the outcome, it really matters whether I win or not. Having random factors determine things is very frustrating. But in a game

where I walk in knowing, look, I'm going to have fun. Win or lose, I'm going to have fun. And then crazy things happen, I can enjoy and get in on the crazy. I can be part of the crazy

rather than sort of rail against the crazy. You know what I'm saying? Like, if you're at a, you know, the world championship and, you know, it all comes down to, you know, can I do three-card Monty with my opponent or whatever,

pick a wacky un-thing. Can I toss a card from three feet? You know, it comes down to that's not what Magic, you know, is at its core about. That would really be unfulfilling. But if you're playing a game, like one of my favorite Magic games is I was on Game Nights,

and we were playing with Unstable, and I was playing Josh, and Josh got out slaying Mantis, and I was like, okay, I've got to throw this. And I'm like, oh, goodness. I could be in real trouble if he hits my, especially if he hits multiple of my creatures. And so there's this wonderful moment

where I'm kind of sweating, and I'm like, oh no. And Josh lays up and there's all this lead up to it and he throws it and it misses the table. And we laughed so hard and it just was a great fun moment, you know what I'm saying? It's something that I always remember that it's one of the hardest I've ever laughed in a magic game. And like that is an awesome thing. You know what I'm saying? And I ended up winning that game.

Josh didn't win. But Josh was like, oh, that was an awesome game. Because it was really fun. Because look, we're playing Silver Border. The experience of playing is more important than the winning. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you want to win. I'm not saying you don't try to win. But when you lose, it's not as sort of heart-wrenching.

You know what I'm saying? If you're in the World Championship, and if you win, you're the World Champion, and you lose, it's not as sort of heart-wrenching. You know what I'm saying? If you're in the world championship and if you win, you're the world champion and you lose, it is devastating. I've talked to many people in that situation. You know, it's being so close to something that really, really matters to you and missing, you know, it can tear at you. You know what I'm saying?

But playing a fun game where goofy things happen and you understand there's variance. So when you're making your own card, do not be afraid of variance. I mean, obviously you can use die rolling, but variance just means that if the same thing happens over many games, that many outcomes will happen.

That's what variance is. For example, in something where there's not a lot of variance, if you play 100 games and this comes up, oh, well, 90 times the same thing will happen. And if you say high variance, like, oh, well, it's all over the board. You know, usually in high variance A, there can be more options

so there doesn't have to be more options. And whether something will happen or not is more up to unknown. It's more coin flippy, for example, than determined by skill. Although I will say that variance can, often depends on randomness, but doesn't have to depend on randomness.

There's other ways to have high variance. And part of that is just, if you give somebody conscious choice, even if they have conscious choice, and you make those choices something where, you know, more all over the board, like you can make something

where more different things can happen. Another good example might be host and augment. There's no randomness, I mean, other than I guess the card drawing, but you choose where to put things, and so opportunity costs will make you mix and match things differently. So even though I might have the same

host and augment cards in my deck, from game to game, they're just going to be combined differently and so the cards are going to play, there's variance there. So that's an example of variance without randomness. So be aware of variance. Be aware of synergies. One of the things, I mean, this is true

in any design, but especially in silver board design, you want to think about when I'm doing things, because you're caring about things you don't normally care about, be conscious of thinking about those things on other cards. Meaning if one card cares about, I don't know, whatever, you know, when one card cares about some weird thing, you do want to think about oh, well, do I have weird things that it can care about? Like, if you have a card that cares about something that no Magic card's ever cared about, well, make sure

other cards in your set have that thing. You know what I'm saying? What you don't want to do is I care about this weird thing and then nothing in the set is even that thing. It does not lead to great experiences. But if I care about a thing and the set you're playing with has that thing, then it can be relevant. I also like

to think how Silver Border plays with Black Border. Not everybody will do that. Some will only play Limited, which is stuck to Silver Border. But I also like to think of synergies in Black Border. I prioritize synergies within the set over outside the set, because a lot of Limited will be played, but I do look at both.

The other thing that's fun sometimes for Silver Border design is taking a card that you'd like to make, that something about it doesn't quite work in Black Border, but because Silver Border's a little bit looser, you can make it work. There's definitely cards I've done that way as well, where I'm like, oh,

I just can't quite make the card I want to make in Black Border, but with the extra tools available to me, I can make in Silver Border, and sometimes I will do that as well. So anyway, there was some rain today, so you guys got some extra content. So I hope you guys enjoyed it. Like I said, Silver Border

design is very hard. It is very hard. Do not get discouraged. It is very difficult. You know, we've had a lot of hole fillings for Silver Border where we get back stuff and none of it's usable. That is how tricky Silver Border is. So I hope today

walked through a lot of the issues of things to look out for and things you're trying to do and maybe tools you can help. So anyway, I hope for those that are enjoying it or even those that are never going to make a Civil Border card, maybe make you appreciate a little more how hard it is for us to make the Civil Border card. So either way,

anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed today. I hope the extra content was good, because traffic means more content for you. But I'm now at work, so we all know what this 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.

Bye-bye.