Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #733: Ari Nieh

Episode Date: April 24, 2020

In another of my interview series, I interview Ari Nieh, winner of the Great Designer Search 3 and someone I work closely with on the Vision Design team. We talk about his early days of Magic, GDS3, and what it's like to work in R&D.

I'm not pulling out of the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another Drive to Work Coronavirus Edition. So as I've been doing, I've been interviewing people because in my car it's actually hard to do interviews if they're not sitting next to me. And I've had a few carpool guests. But anyway, today I've gotten Ari Nee. Nee, is that correct? So Ari, introduce yourself. Nee or Nia. What? Nee or Nia is fine. Ni or Nia, okay. So Ari, among other things, is the winner of the third great designer search, and is currently working every day with me.

So say hi, Ari. Hello. This is my first time on Drive to Work. I'm very excited to be here. Okay, so let's talk a little bit. Let's start from the beginning. So how'd you get into magic? What was your introduction to magic? I went back to America from Japan and I went to school and I saw people playing this game on tables like around – like between classes or in free periods. And I was like, whoa, that looks really interesting.

What is it? And I would like ask people what's going on and eventually I found someone to like sell me a deck and teach me what, what, how to play. Um, and, uh, yeah, so that was the beginning of that. Okay. Uh, so you played, did you play continually or do you take any breaks along the way? Uh, no, I, I definitely took breaks. Uh, I was out for all of Mercadian masks block. Um, and I played sort of off and on for for a long time but i didn't get like seriously into like drafting and like going to fnm every week until ravnica um but then i started then i started playing a lot around rav Spiral. So when did you start doing card design? Yeah, custom card design. So GDS1, I just sort of watched because I was still sort of on track to be an academic at the

time. I was like, oh, this looks fun, but I'm not going to try. I have other plans. And then GDS2 came around and I was like, this is really cool. I want to give it a try this time. And so I did the multiple choice test, and I was two questions short. So that was very, very sad, big tragedy. But for GDS2, there was this community component of the competition. As some of your viewers may remember, there was a wiki, and the top eight were actually soliciting designs from the community to use in their submissions they did not design all the cards themselves they were not allowed to they had to use community submissions so they had to like

sort of curate this giant slush pile of you know a bunch of wann wannabes who wanted to design cards for them. And so I just did a ton of that. I designed a lot of cards for Ethan Fleischer, for Scott Van Essen, for Sean Mayne, for, you know, Devin Rule, all those people, to try to help them get jobs at Wizards. And three of them did, of the ones you just named. Yeah. So, okay, so from there, so were you involved in the creation of goblin artisans yes i was one of the i was one of the core people in goblin artisans because like

you know after the end of gds2 like we'd sort of formed this big community around design right including the finalists but also the hangers-on of the finalists. I believe we called ourselves Tweet Force Alpha because we were using, you know, if like Ethan or someone wanted a card designed quickly, rather than post it on the wiki, it was faster to just tweet, hey, can somebody make this a card that, you know, a green common that uses this mechanic that's a creature, and then post it on the wiki. And that was the fastest way to alert us all, you know, a green common that uses this mechanic, uh, that's a creature and then posted on the wiki. And that was the fastest way to alert us all, you know? Um, anyway, so a bunch of us and the finalists who had not yet flown out to Renton, so they didn't know which of them was going to get hired. Um, so some of us and some of the finalists were like, we should start a blog

and write about magic design and like, you you know get really good at designing our own sets um and so we did okay so that was gds2 so yes okay gds3 what happened there right so gds3 was uh about seven years after gds2 roughly yeah yeah yeah so so in the intermediate time like you know i'd often on been active in goblin artisans like designing cards myself giving other people feedback on their designs um you know and how much time i spent on that sort of depended on how much free time i had uh then when gds3 was announced i hadn't actually i'd been really busy with other things so i hadn't actually even been playing magic recently like other things so i hadn't actually even been playing magic recently like the last time i played was kaladesh and both amonkhet and ixalan

had come out since then so the um so so like somebody sent it to like the goblin artisans authors list was like oh wow this is happening right because i wasn't on attached to any magic circles and then i clicked on it i was like oh my god it's back this is happening, right? Because I wasn't attached to any magic circles. And then I clicked on it, and I was like, oh, my God, it's back. This is finally my chance. Okay, so you entered. So it's funny, for the third one, we had way, way, way more people enter than we had the first two. I think the first GDS 1, we had 1,200 maybe apply.

In GDS 2, we had 1200 maybe apply and GDS two, we had like maybe 1800 apply. Uh, and then GDS three, it was over 5,000. It was, yeah, it just an avalanche of people. Um, which partly meant that you had to score really high on the test. So last time you missed the multiple choice test by two. So how'd you, how'd you handle this time? Uh, so I was not going to take any chances with the multiple choice test by two so how'd you how'd you handle this time uh so i was not going to take any chances with the multiple choice test this time because i was like

you know i bet if i get past the i felt like that was like the most likely point for me to get eliminated because that's when most people get eliminated and you know so i i i fortunately i had that day mostly off of work already so i just spent all day doing the exam i went through the whole exam and i i you know selected my answers i made a spreadsheet i selected my answers and i wrote like a short justification maybe just a few words or maybe a whole paragraph on why i thought my answer was correct and the other ones were wrong because like the act of writing something down helps you reevaluate whether or not it's true all right um how'd you end up sorry how'd you end up on your multiple choice i got 73 out of 75 which was the minimum possible passing grade.

That was the cutoff. And I missed two questions, both of which were on rarity. I thought the card which was a mythic was only a rare, and the card which was a rare was only an uncommon. So, I mean, that tells you a little something about me as a designer, I guess. Okay, so you then make it into the – so after the multiple choice was the car design part. Yes. And if I remember correctly, we – I had to go through. So I think 98 people made it past that section, 96 or 98.

There were 96. 96, 96. Oh, wait, sorry. Wait, no, there were 94. And here's how I know because after the top eight were, the the remaining people said that they had been 86. OK, OK. Very cute. Yes. So there are 94 people. I mean, it had to do with we had a break.

Like if you took 72 out of 75, we had too many people that I couldn't grade. We could take about 100. And so two wrong broke at 94. So I then blindly, I blindly, meaning I have no idea who the people were, I graded all 94 tests. And then I broke them into three categories. And there was no, maybe, yes. And then we evaluated all the yeses first. The idea being, if we could get our people from the yeses, we didn't need to look at the maybes. And you were in the yes pile.

And then even among the yes piles, all the judges sort of met. And then we, from the yes pile, we didn't end up needing the maybes. From the yes pile, we made a yes, no, and maybe from the yes pile. And you were in the yes pile.

You made yes. You were in the yes pile of the yes pile. And you were in the yes pile. You made yes. You were in the yes pile of the yeses. So you were like, there were a bunch of people that were fighting for the last few slots. You were in very early on. We didn't, you didn't actually have to fight for the last few slots.

Okay, so it starts. Tell us a little bit about the act of doing the Great Designer Search. Yeah, so this was super exciting. I remember when I got the email from you that i made top eight um i was in the kitchen cooking dinner for chinese new year with my partner like we had 10 people coming over later that night and i had like three pounds of pork belly on the stove um and then i got this email and i'm screaming, oh my God, I made it, I made the top eight. So then we got these challenges every two weeks where they assigned us a test of some sort

where we had to design a bunch of cards to some particular specification. And all of this is online, by the way. If you don't know what we're talking about, search for Great Designer Search 3. This is all online. Everything Ari's talking about, you can see all the stuff they made and the judges and everything. Yeah, it's all, in fact, it's stored on a convenient single webpage where if you just search for my name and Great Designer Search 3, you can click on each challenge and it'll pop up everything I made for that challenge. It's all there. challenge and it'll pop up everything i made for that challenge it's all there um yeah so so for each of these challenges came out on like uh late late in the day on thursday i think i think so yeah yeah and then it was due sunday night right yeah we had all day friday all day saturday all

day sunday yeah so we had like three you know about pie days to take care of it um and and yeah so and those were and those were every two weeks and the thing was we we got those at the same time as we got the results of the previous one so there was sort of a lot there was a lot to process it was like all right here's what happened in the previous one you did amazing or you did really bad please do better next time and by the way here's your new challenge oh real quickly just for people that might not be familiar with the designer search the way it works is we had three regular judges which were me eric lauer and melissa detora and then we had a guest judge so there was always four judges but the fourth judge would rotate and so they would turn in cards and then for every card every judge judge would comment on it. So there was a decent amount of feedback. And the judges,

we wouldn't even always completely agree. We would generally agree, but we wouldn't, we would vary a little bit on certain things. And then you'd get all that feedback. And then in addition to the feedback you then get, and here's the next challenge. Yeah. Oh, and also we received everyone else's feedback, and we're told you should read everyone else's feedback too so you don't make their mistakes. But eventually I stopped doing that because I was like, my brain can only hold so much.

I got to focus on my cards I'm designing. Okay, so there were five different challenges. Yes. And so we started with eight people. Each challenge we'd knock out one person in true reality show style. And then in the end there'd be three people, and then those three people get flown out to Wizards. Yes.

So the final three people were you, Jeremy, is it Geist? Jeremy Geist. Jeremy Geist and Chris Mooney. Yeah. Okay, so what was it like flying out to wizards what was that like uh it was it was pretty exciting my my flight left at like very early in the morning on eastern times uh so so i was but you know it was it was still the the day before the interviews so i had time to like rest and walk around renton um

we had dinner with you and ben hayes and mark gottlieb i think i think that's right yeah um so i got you know i got to meet you i got to meet um chris mooney and jeremy geist who are just wonderful wonderful folks um and then and then it was like all right get a good night's sleep the next morning is going to be going to be a very busy day for you yeah so basically there were a couple things we did so first was the gauntlet which was you have three hour interviews with

three different groups and then you would the three of you would rotate between the three groups yes but it was three hours worth of interviews with most of the higher, you know, I'll call the muckety-mucks of R&D.

One of the groups was all the judges. One of the groups was the managers. And one of the groups was... The bosses. The bosses, right. Right.

Yeah. And how'd the interviews go? What do you think? I thought they went pretty well. Yeah, it was it was interesting. The I remember the judge questions. Eric Lauer asked me asked me a bunch of things about, OK, about actual card designs, which which the other the other groups didn't do so much. They were asking more about sort of employment stuff you know work work stuff yeah yeah um okay right so we did the interviews and then we did a live

challenge so well first we did magic for lunch oh we did magic for lunch right you guys had lunch uh we what did we play what uh yeah it was dominaria sealed and I had a green-white deck, and I was up against Paul Cheon, and he beat me. Actually, no. We didn't finish the game, but he was going to win. Well, Paul Cheon's very good. He's pretty good at magic. Okay, so we had lunch, you got to play some magic, and then we had a live challenge.

This was the final challenge. Yes. And the way the live challenge works is occasionally, this doesn't happen all that often, but occasionally we have to make changes very late in the process. And so the scenario is always, okay,

very late in the process, something has to happen. You have an hour. Here's these crazy restraints. And usually it's like, this card has to change, but it has to keep the art, and the name has to fit within these parameters, because that's where it's locked in collector number, and then it has to be this color.

So what card did I have you redesign? I forget what card it was. Seance. It was Seance. Oh, Seance. Okay. And then you guys had an hour, and then the second hour was you pitching your ideas to the other contestants and a bunch of the judges, basically. Yes.

And so how'd that go? That was very, very difficult for me. So, like, I had not slept very much the previous night because I had gotten up early for a flight. And then the night before, I was like, this is the biggest day of my life. I also cannot sleep. So I was kind of just running on empty by then. I had no brain left at all. And I had one hour to design the most important three cards of my life.

So I didn't feel like I did that great, to be honest. It was a challenge. You actually did decently well. My memory of it is, in the interview, we thought Chris had done best in the interview, but you had done it is in the interview, we thought Chris had done best in the interview, but you had done second best in the interview. And in the individual design challenge, I think you and...

It was the reverse. Yeah, it was the reverse. Well, I think you and Jeremy were very close. Okay. And I think Chris was third in that. But you had come in kind of in first place. We had ranked you based... But what the judges did every week was

we would figure out how you did on that challenge and they would stack rank you up to then how you were doing. So we both had a ranking for the challenge and an overall ranking on how you were doing. Because we cut the worst person,

not the worst person at the challenge right um meaning we were trying to hire somebody so if a really good person had a bad week they wouldn't necessarily get cut if the conglomerate all their work had been good um right and so because i think i was last place on the circus challenge maybe you might have been yes i was last or second to last on um so anyway we would stack rank you so coming into this it was you then jeremy and chris i think was the stack ranking coming into the final day um okay so tell about the how did you find out that you'd won um so after right so after the after the challenge where we'd you know fixed that fixed the the seance into an entirely new card in one

hour you know under and you know extreme duress then uh then we we got a moment to like chill a bit while the judges conferred um and then they they brought us they brought all three of us into a room and um and said everyone did a really great job we were impressed with all of you but we have to pick a winner and that winner is ari and that was um that was sort of a a shocking moment to me not that i didn't think i could win but it was just sort of you know i'd spent i'd spent like months working really, really hard on this competition, pouring a ton of energy into it. And I'd also spent sort of the previous seven years with Goblin Artisans training for it. So it was a, it was a culmination of a lot for me.

It was a very emotional moment. Okay. So then you won. So the way it works is the prize for winning is you get a six-month internship. But the idea with the internship is kind of a tryout. There is, at the end of it, we never do the internship without the ability to transfer it into a full-time job. But there is, so you win the contest and then kind of you get six months to further sort of show what you're capable of. Although it's a paid internship. And, you know, I mean, it's OK. So you win. Yes.

When did when did you when did the GDS end in April, May, May? No, it was June. It was in June. Yeah. Right. Right. Early June. And then you started in September, right? Yeah. So I had some projects to finish up in Boston. And so I asked for a start date in early September, which Wizards gave me.

And so then I moved out to Renton. And I, yeah, I believe September 4th was my first day at work. Okay. So what was it like, your first day at work? What was that like? Um, I'm trying to remember, I'm trying to remember what happened on, on my first day. Um, like a lot,

some of it was like really sort of basic little hoops to jump through. Like, Oh, I need to to i need to like get my computer set up and have a login i have to go through this orientation i have to read somehow i already have 50 emails even though i've been here an hour um but then like i think i think the first day i also like at like i wasn't on any teams yet like my assignment was just like follow Rosewater around he'll tell you some stuff to do um and so I think we went into a a vision design meeting that Eastman Fleischer was leading that day okay and talked talked about some mechanics and like actually designed like a new mechanic for a set that he was working on together. And just give people some scope. So this was, it'll be two years this September,

right? Yes. And the set you're talking about is not out yet. Yes. The set I'm talking about is not, is still a ways away. Right. So,

so I just for people understand like that, like one of the things that I brought Ari on to talk, like we can't even talk that much about things he's done because he hasn't been here long enough that all of it, that there's much about things he's done, because he hasn't been here long enough that there's a few things he's done that you guys have seen, but very little, that most of the stuff he's done are just... And he's done a lot of work, just stuff you haven't seen yet.

So, I mean, two things. One is, I want to talk a little bit about stuff they have seen, but the second thing is, before I get to that, is you weren't outside, right? You were somebody who just played Magic. I mean, you weren't a Pro Tour player. You were just somebody who played Magic.

And all of a sudden, I mean, you put a lot of work in. It's not like you didn't earn it. But all of a sudden, you're now working in R&D. Like, what is that like? It was a big adjustment because I think the way sort of, like, amateur for fun Magic designers think about design is like super different from how we think about it in r&d well you get some sense of how how is it different uh so so i i was thinking about this because i anticipated you would ask me this and there's

sort of two main things one is like broad appeal right, right? Like if you're making if I'm at Goblin Artisans posting on my own blog, here's a cool card I made. I can post whatever I want and no one has to like it but me. Right. about this i don't have to worry about like is this the kind of mechanic that is going to like carry a set on its shoulders is this going to be like a key selling point that will make people you know people very excited customers excited to buy lots of packs of this like that's not something you worry about if you're an amateur designer you're just designing kind of for yourself and for your close peers so that's one thing the other big thing i think is that um we don't think in like in sort of in the amateur design community we don't really think very much about the pipeline about the people further downstream of us um and here's what i mean by that in in magic r&d we're working up in vision design you know

occasionally i'm on a set design team but like i'm you know about two years from release date whereas much closer to release date are people like late set design and play design who are working on tuning these cards very carefully for competitive play for constructed and also competitive limited play so these people need to be able to make subtle adjustments to the strength of a card to get its power level exactly in the right place which is one of the reasons that like you'll see cards that are um you know in in sets that have a lot of text on them sometimes you need all that text to make sure that the card is doing exactly what it needs to do to make for the optimal standard environment. Whereas if you're designing for a blog or a subreddit or whatever, you can just write whatever elegant text you want

on a card, cost it something, and it never has to change. Here's an example of why that can be problematic in practice. Suppose I want to make the most elegant murder I can, right? Well, that's the card murder, right? 1BB, destroy target creature. Well, that's not really good enough to be a top-tier standard constructed card as it is. But we can't make it two mana, right? It has no knobs. There's nothing to adjust as long as it just says destroy target creature

and that's why you'll see cards like hero's downfall or um like murderous rider that have you know more going on that there are little things that play design can adjust to make sure it's exactly in the right spot we don't have to worry about that when we're just designing we're being poets whereas inside the, you have to be more legislators, but you want your work to look like poetry. And you were mentioning, so you talked about set design and play design, but that's just the beginning. You know, we have editors, we have rules, we have organized play, we have digital, we have, there's endless, like, vision's the very, very beginning of it,

right? Like, one of the things that's funny is, vision at some level doesn't have to interact with a lot of people while we're making it

because we're before everybody, but every other person's going to have to deal with it. So, like, it is our job to talk to all these different people

to make sure that we're making a set that can be edited, making a set that the rules can work, making a set that digital can use, making a set that organized play can use, making a set that can be balanced, making, set that the rules can work, making a set that digital can use, making a set that organized play can use,

making a set that can be balanced, making, you know, like, there's all these things you have to think about, and you're correct. I think when you're outside the building, you can care about none of that. It's like, I'm just making cool sets, and... Right.

All you see is the finished product, and, you know, I'm not going to worry about art or editing for my thing. Like, I'm just going to make up some words, put them on a card. I don't care about the tournament environment and how it impacts it. What tournament environment, right? Yeah.

Really a different set of priorities and way more things to worry about once you're inside the building. Okay, so here's another question. Obviously, how we function is a little different, but from an outsider perspective, what was the most different coming into R&D

that you didn't expect? You're like, I just didn't, now having lived this life for a while, like, what was the most, from an outsider perspective, like, I didn't expect this at all, but this is the way it is. That's hard to say.

I guess, I guess. I guess things were things are generally maybe a lot more like there's a lot more communication going on all the time where like people are people are sort of moving up and down the pipeline and talking to external partners, but also just consulting each other just like randomly like hey i have an idea who's within shouting distance who can tell me if this is a good idea right um and like the extent to which it's it's like super useful to know who's good at what right it's like oh i need to i need to know is this any good commander i need to talk to someone who's more of a commander specialist because i only kind of know commander right or i need to know like is this whole mechanic not

going to be something we can translate into other languages like let me let me go talk to the editing team well like we just do that all the time there's just all this collaboration going on which you know it's not that i thought it wouldn't exist but I sort of didn't understand how just how much how constant it is yeah another thing that I hear a lot from new people is the number of things going on consecutively like all at the same time that the audience

when you hear about something we're just talking about one thing so it's like oh well here's how we made this set and we're giving the story of just this set in a vacuum because that's what we're talking about but one of the things that i know when i talk to new new people who come in r&d is there's 40 things going on at once like not that you're doing all of them but the idea that you're trying to at least be somewhat aware like my job i have to be more aware than most um but like just the idea of you're jumping into this thing and there's so

much is going on at once and so many different projects are going on at once what is that like yeah it's i mean it's it's challenging because you don't have the luxury of focusing on a single set you're always going to be on a bunch of teams at once and you want to make all of those sort of as awesome as they can be and understand their each of those sets place in the ecosystem of like where they come out and like how they affect the things before and after them and you want to like put you know try to eat like you're coming up with ideas for mechanics ideas for cards like okay well where does this fit if i have a really cool idea for a mechanic but it actually doesn't make sense in this set should i like sit on this and pitch it for the next set or is it actually not that good an idea or like what you

know there's there's just a lot of things and you're switching gears all the time going going into different teams and and also uh all the people leading these sets have somewhat different styles you know you like when i'm on a vision team, you lead a set one way and Ethan Fleischer will lead a set a different way. And Mark Gottlieb will lead a set a different way. And so it's it's fascinating to see, OK, what are what are these differences in the methodology and how does that come out in the results? You know, how does that reflect their personality? How does that reflect their tastes as a game designer? OK, so off to this, I'm sure the audience is curious. How what am I like as a vision lead?

What's unique to me as a vision lead versus other people? I would say more so than the other people, you are very instinctive, right? That you rely very heavily on your experience to give you an incredibly reliable gut feeling of whether or not something's going to work and so um so it's it's not sort of like directive in that like okay we need to go through these things one at a time and test all of them and i mean we do test a lot of things but it's more like we'll play test and then you'll just see what happens in play test and be like yeah this thing just isn't quite doing the thing all right that's where we're gonna work on next it's you know so it's more it's more spur of the

moment okay um so uh one of the things that we're almost out of time i'm almost to work but uh one of the things that we're almost out of time I'm almost to work but so what is what hold on one second sorry sorry Ed you can tell this is live I'm getting your call sorry

okay one last thing before we wrap up here one thing I'm excited for is for the audience to get a chance to see all the stuff you've done, because so much of what you've done isn't out yet. So in the next year,

we're only using code names, what is the thing that you worked on in the next year that you're most excited to see come out? In the next year? you're most excited to see come out in the next year yeah um let's see i think i would say in equestrian so equestrian was one of the first vision design teams i was on and i just did a lot of card designs for that one, and I think a lot of them are still in there. Okay, so a question.

So a question comes out, I think it's the first set of 2021? Yes, that sounds right. Yeah, I think it's the first set of 2021. So diving is this fall, and question is the next standard legal set after diving.

Yes. Oh, wait. Actually, there's – but M21 is this summer, right? M21 is this summer, yeah. As is Jumpstart. As is Jumpstart, yeah. Actually, yeah. I take it back.

There's a lot of my work in there too. Yeah, you worked a lot on Jumpstart, I know. Yeah, I did quite a lot of work on Jumpstart. And I fought passionately for some of the themes and tried to tune some of the decks. I'm very interested to see how that comes out. Okay, well, anyway, I want to thank you, Ari. This has been a fascinating drive to work.

Thank you so much, Mark. So thank you for joining me. I'm sure maybe I'll have you on again. I feel like we just barely we just barely touched the, like by the end of this, we like, you just started working at wizard. So yes,

I'll have to bring you on for some more, but anyway, thanks for joining us, but I'm at my den. So we all know that means this is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic with Ari, it's time for me to be making magic. So I'll see you guys all next time.

Bye. Bye.