Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #734: Chris Mooney

Episode Date: April 24, 2020

I also interview Chris who is another GDS3 alum and another person I work closely with on the Vision Design team. As with Ari, we talk about what it's like being a Magic player from the outside who became an insider.

I'm not pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It's another Drive to Work Coronavirus Edition. So what I've been doing is I've been interviewing people because it's actually hard to interview people not sitting next to me in my car and not everybody lives remotely near me. So today I have Chris Mooney. So say hi, Chris. Hi. So Chris works with me in R&D and on vision design. Also does some set design and a bunch of other things. We'll get to that. But I just, the last podcast I interviewed Ari.

So Chris and Ari have a similar introduction to Wizards. But before we get to that, I actually met you before you were even involved in the Great Designer Search. That's true. So you want to talk about the first time we met yes um so the first time we met and so don't i not remember the first time we met i maybe okay so uh i'll let i'll tell you right now the first time we met was actually at GDC. Okay. I was at – that's the Game Developers Conference for anyone who doesn't know. In San Francisco, yeah. Mark did a very popular talk about his 20 lessons from working on Magic over 20 years. I was there i met mark um and i actually uh

asked him you know uh for advice on how i could one day work at wizards um what did i say i mean um it was funny because so one of the things the piece of advice that i really knew from from always reading all of your stuff was sort of making sure that you were, you know, well-rounded, that you weren't so focused on one thing because, you know, it really helps in R&D to have multiple different areas of knowledge that you can pull from and multiple different, you know, things you can bring in. Um, and I remember at the time I was worried because I was, uh, I went to school for game design so i was sort of like do oh do i only have games is that my only sort of well of knowledge but um it worked out it all

worked out um but uh additionally which i think uh the second time we met yeah was um when mark mark was traveling the country to visit colleges with his eldest daughter, and I showed them around my college, which was USC. Yes. So, yeah, one of the things I found early on was when Rachel, not Rachel, my oldest, when we were doing college searching that I would just get on social media and say, anybody want to show me around? And it was very effective. I got a lot of great, great, great tours. So, yes, I met you there. OK, so. How did you get involved in the Great Design Research 3? How did that happen?

So I had just recently graduated from college and I was working at Disneyland at the time actually. Um, and I just, you know, I love magic. I am online all the time looking at all the stuff. So I saw the announcement. I was like,

you know, uh, yeah, it had been a long time since the second one. So, uh, I, you know, I hadn't really even been thinking about it as a thing that could happen.

But when I saw it, immediately I was like, oh, well, of course I have to try doing this. I love magic. It's what inspired me to go to school for game design. So I sent in my application, and then a long, long process followed with many many nights of working on magic cards um so before we get to the g just to fill in when did you start playing magic oh so i started playing magic um in middle school which for me i think is 2006 2007 what's that what was the first set um so i think at the first set i remember like going to um was rise of the old drossy um but i remember for sure that like i was playing with tons of older cards before then you know um i sort of got my i got started with like a ravnica intro deck and is it gizmometry uh pre-constructed deck which was sort of a you know started my lifelong love of is it um

and but yeah i played with sort of these the older cards at the time um to learn how to play with all of my friends. Especially one of my friends had tons of time spirals, specifically lots of Planar Chaos, which is sort of similarly where my lifelong annoyance with Planar Chaos began. I was like, these cards aren't right. They're not doing what they're supposed to do. Okay, so were you around for The Greatest Hand of Search 2? Were you playing Magic? I was not. So it was before your time? Yeah. Okay. So this

was the first Great Designer Search you got to experience directly? Yeah. I remember that when I first really started getting into Magic and learning about the design and stuff, I came across the Great Designer Search 1 and two online content

and sort of went through all of it to see like oh how do they you know how do these people do how do they make the cards um what were sort of the ideas that they had um so for me it had all sort of been like this relic from before i began actually interfacing with magic um so it was exciting that it was like oh this thing that I've seen online and read so much about is actually happening now and I get to be a part of it. Yeah, I'm not sure whether you or Corey is the first employee who is younger,

that I've been working at Wizards longer than they've been alive, so. Okay, so Greatest Ender Search is happening, so you sign up. As I explained when i did my podcast re that uh uh we had 5 000 plus people apply which was a crazy number a lot more than the previous ones ad uh how'd you do on the multiple choice test i missed uh whatever the max you can miss two i missed it i missed two so you got 73 out of 75? Yeah.

And, okay, so then we got into the car design part of it. What do you remember of all the tests? Which are, like, thinking back, what do you remember of all the early tests? Do you have any memories? Oh, man. Do you mean the challenges or sort of the... No, not the challenges yet. Just the car design tests, the multiple choice test the essays i i remember feeling pretty good about the essays and about the multiple choice test um the cards that i submitted um for sort of that 10 card challenge that was sort of

the last hurdle to pass before you made it in as a finalist. That one, I remember just being very sort of nervous about how much I was, I'm supposed to be sort of going outside of the box versus delivering on something that is, uh, you know, sort of closer to what had been printed at the time. Sure. You know, it's funny to think about the cards that I submitted then and about the different things that I sort of was hemming and hawing about. Like, ooh, like, you know, would they do a Planeswalker

with, like, a static effect or something? And then, you know, for just a couple of years later to be like, yeah, like, there's a whole set that has tons of them. you know, for just a couple of years later to be like, yeah, like, there's a whole set that has tons of them. Okay, so I'll give you a little behind the scenes. So the way it worked was 94 people did the test. I graded them blindly.

I literally didn't know who the people were. I just graded them blindly. I put them to three piles, which was yes, no, and maybe. And then of the yes pile, we ended up not using the no's or the maybes. I then showed all the yeses to the other judges. There were three judges that were on air, and there's one kind of behind-the-scenes judge.

And we then had a big meeting to pick the top eight. And we divided into three categories for that. There was for sure in, probably in, eh, they got to fight for the last lot. Which of the three were you in?

Um, I would like to hope that I was in the for sure in category. You were not? Ah, darn. You were in the second. You were in the probably in category. You were one of the ones, darn. You were in the second. You were in the probably in category.

You were one of the ones, like, we fought over the last two slots. You were in the top six. We didn't fight over the last two slots. But I think there were three people that, like, everybody, all the judges said, for sure, they're in, and we put them in. And then some of the judges, and I was one of them, liked you. And so enough of the judges liked you, we got you in. Definitely, it makes sense for me to be in that medium category, given the responses I got from judges for the rest of the process, which were always very divided. Yes.

So, okay. So, I think, and I already think we explained sort of every two weeks you would get a thing. I think we explained sort of every two weeks you would get a thing. So Thursday night you would get an email that had all the judging of all the previous candidates. Someone would get knocked out and then you would get the challenge for that turned in 72 hours later on Sunday. So what was your process? How did you how did you handle things? Yeah, so my process was I, you know,

on that Thursday, I think it's on Thursdays when we got them. So on Thursdays, I would be just obsessively checking my email to get the challenge as soon as possible. Um, and from that point forward, I mean, it was basically, I would, you know, come up with all sorts of different ideas and I would write them down in my notebook. While I was at work, I would be thinking of ideas and on my break, I would type them in on my phone so I could save them. Then I just tried to get together with my friends to playtest as fast and as often as possible over that time. You know, I really have to thank, you know, the friends that were a part of my process that were helping me playtest. They were, you know, and this is just true of all game design, right? But, like, playtesting is so important,

and they really, you know, as much as they could, as good as their schedules could get, they would come and help playtest with me. So I'm really, really grateful for them. I obviously could not have done it without them. So to answer your question, just so people might be, we let them have some playtesters.

That was part of the process. We let them have playtesters. So we knew that they needed to playtest. So we worked into the rules that they get a playtester. So people wondering like, what's going on? Yeah, the rules were sort of like, they couldn't really submit cards to you or submit their own

ideas but they were there to play test and help give feedback and really that that's the most important part to like try out an idea and see how they respond and if they work or don't work and then go back to the drawing board um that was my general plan but obviously for each uh challenge things were so different, right? Some of them were really focused on individual cards and trying to make each one as good as possible, and other challenges were about trying to, you know, the mechanic one, for instance, try to make a mechanic and explore everything you could over the ones. I think the main thing that I spent a lot of time thinking about was uh when i

submitted cards for the challenge making sure that i was trying to hit all sorts of different angles right so it's like some of them being very simple some of them being splashy exciting rares some of them going into new space some of them exploring familiar space just trying to sort of hit the hit as many different notes as possible in so few cards. So, one of the things that went on during the judging was, so there were, every set had, we had three judges,

and like I said, there was a behind-the-scenes fourth judge that was also judging, although not on screen, and then we had a guest judge for everyone. And so what we would do is we would grade you for the challenge, and then we would grade you overall, because we would always kick up the lowest overall. So you, I don't know how much behind the scenes stuff, I don't know if you know this, you were very polarizing. I could definitely tell that from the comments that I received on my part. For example,

going into the final challenge, it was like, for sure, barring Armageddon, we're inviting Ari and Jeremy. We knew that. And like, who's the third person? We're not sure. That was kind of the third challenge. And you definitely snuck into the third slot to get

in. But yeah, the thing that I remember about you, one of the things that was interesting that I liked was you were very bold in your choices and your challenges. A lot of other people would be a little more conservative, and you just never did that. You're like,

I'm going to do whatever. I remember when you picked Haunt as your mechanic, and I was like wow that is because for those that don't know i i i'm not a big fan of haunt and i know chris knows i'm not a big fan of haunt so it was a very a very bold choice i definitely thought a lot about it because i was like you know do i really want to uh i was very much afraid of just sort of like it being seen as like a taunt. Like I was just sort of like, I'm going to choose the thing that you really don't like. Um, but you know, I thought that I, I had a good idea for what to do.

Yeah, no, you did. You did well. So, okay. So you, you get to wizards, so you make top three. So what was it like walking to wizards for the first time? What was that like? So what was it like walking to Wizards for the first time? What was that like? It was pretty awesome. I remember that I got on site. So there's a – we were in a hotel that was right next to Wizards of the Coast. It was a hotel right next to the building.

So we were in that hotel, and I remember getting there a little bit early. I had maybe an hour or something before wherever I had to be. We had dinner that first night. And just getting and just walking like around the building that I had seen in pictures and stuff and being like, wow, there it is. It's really there. And being inside, I mean, it's difficult to think of now that i've been inside so often um but being in there and getting to see sort of the walls with the concept art and all of the sort of uh different things that were going on was really exciting um it definitely felt like you know i i think this is a metaphor that a lot of people, you know, would use. But it's totally a Willy Wonka in the chocolate factory thing of like there's this cool place where they make awesome stuff that you have heard about and you can't really go in.

And getting to finally go in and just see all of it going on was really awesome. OK, so once again, we explained this in Ari's thing, uh you did a three-hour interview where you did three one-hour interviews either we then had lunch then we did a live challenge which I think took two hours and then we announced the winner so how what how do you feel how do you feel about the both the interview and the live challenge so um i you know eric flower has called me out on this front but i played this sort of great designer search game very tactically in that i was really aiming to get uh into the top three and and sort of get the visit and hedged a lot of bets along the way. And I did that because I, you know, felt confident. I was like, if I can get there, if I can interview, I think that I have

a good shot just from, you know, being in college and doing lots of interviews there and getting sort of a good, a lot of good interview experience and good feedback on my interviewing skills so uh i wasn't nervous at all going into the interviews i mean there's always some nerves but i wasn't i wasn't any more nervous than normal i was like i think i got this you know all of my schooling has sort of prepared me for for this step of the process so i really uh i felt good going into that um the the live challenge was the part that I was a lot more nervous about because I am not that good under extreme time pressure. I, for anyone who, you know, I talk about this a lot, but for me it's, I have ADHD. So having sort of a specific time to work on things can really sort of freak me out sometimes um and i think i did okay in that challenge um not as good as i would have liked to do uh but that was certainly far more nerve-wracking and you know anxiety inducing uh of the parts of

that day yeah so what happened well i just real quickly uh so we ranked you for both of those like we all these judge you got ranked. So you ranked first in the interview and you ranked third in the live challenge. Not that you did bad in the live challenge, but Ari and Jeremy just did a little better than you did. But so anyway, but you did very,

very well in the interview. I think that's what probably got you the, the, the internship down the road. So, okay, so. My master plan. It worked. It worked?

Hey. Okay, so. Now, the one thing that's different between you and Ari is Ari won. So, Ari's job was actually, like, Ari reported, I don't know if he reported to me, but for all intents and purposes, he was just working with me most of the time. You got another job in R&D. It wasn't, can we, I guess what we can say, it's public. That game is, you know, it's in sort of early soft launch right now, but it is announced it is uh spell slingers which is a mobile card battler um that you know i was when i first came to wizards that was the game i was primarily working on um with the other sort of uh spell slingers designer design team uh within you know wizards r&d yeah so the way it worked real quickly is

we had one slot for the winner we had that slot um and i i liked chris so we were trying to find a slot for chris and um the slot we had with this slot working on on spell slingers so um right and it made a lot of sense given my you given my education formally is in digital games. So I was able to sort of bring some of my knowledge of digital games and the things that they require and the different types of designs to help work on that team. Right, and so what happened was most of your time was on Spellflingers, and then I negotiated some portion of your time to work on stuff.

And just like Ari, you started as an internship, and the internship was six months, I think? We were contractors. Yeah, contractors. The initial contract was six months, and then I was extended for the full year. Okay. And then after that, I was converted to full-time. Yes. So, and that all behind the scenes was,

because at the time, there just wasn't a slot. And so I fought this very uphill battle to try to make a slot where there wasn't a slot. But luckily, Magic did well. So you can thank all the audience for buying Magic. That helped get you your job. Thanks, everyone. luckily magic did well so you can thank all the audience for buying magic that that helped you your job everyone and thanks just also for that that awesome year of magic tons of like war of the spark and yeah modern horizons and and eldraine just everything did so well that year um

and magic is a hungry monster that is really more and more people join the team, it seems, every couple months. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about things you've done that the audience has seen. So first of all, we'll talk about Unsanctioned. Yeah, Unsanctioned.

I had a huge hand in Unsanctioned. So you were both on you worked with Max, right, on the deck building. Like, we hired an outside person named Gabby who did the initial work on it, and then you and Max did the, I don't know, developmental, whatever we want

to call it, work. Yeah, Max had some sort of loose initial lists, but when I stepped in to help in, I basically did a lot of research trying to figure out, you know, what are the most popular uncards? What are the most fun ones? We basically rebuilt the entire decklist.

And basically, after that first initial rebuild, not too much changed. It was pretty much we rebuilt the decks from scratch. And from there, it went forward to what you see in the final product. Right, and the second thing was, so I was in charge of the new cards. There were originally 15, ended up being 16 new cards. And so you, me, and Ari did the vast majority of the design of the new cards. Yeah, it was largely a people who sit next to Mark Rosewater design team contribution

to that one well I mean one of the things that's interesting is uh unicards are actually very hard to design um I mean I've done it for a long time so I'm more used to it but uh whenever I get new people to do them it's tricky it is hard because it's a very like you have to understand magic well enough

to know what black border is and what's not black border and anyway it's very tricky but uh so you did a bunch of the cards so let's see if i uh see if i can remember your card so you did i know for sure you did um alexander clamilton that was yours uh i think you did the the flavor judge at least the mechanic of it the version we did you did Boomstacker was yours yes Boomstacker that was probably one of the most fun days that I've had

was the day that I came up with Boomstacker and then I got three or four other designers to waste like 20 minutes trying to see how many dice they could stack on it. But that was a fun playtest. You did Spirit of the Season, right? Yep.

What am I forgetting? Am I forgetting anything? Oh, and then you tweaked the turkey. What's it called? Strutting turkey? Strutting turkey? So one of the things that happened on the turkey, here's a good example of, I think I had figured out that I wanted to regrow small creatures

because White hadn't done that yet and we were looking for abilities. But it was tricky because we wanted it to use, we wanted to get Augment. But you're the one that figured out how to make that happen. So that's an interesting example where some of Chris's stuff on this was it wasn't that he came up with the idea, but he figured

out how to execute on it. Yeah, Greg and I... Greg's the editor. Yeah, Greg the editor and I, we sort of had to... we figured out a couple of the tricky wordings on some of these, yeah. Did I forget anything of the cards? Um... i don't think yeah i don't think so just look looking through the list right here um yep basically building the deck list and making

those cards um also i guess helped out with like underdome yes yes that's true yeah yeah underdome was sort of a came out of us playing with the product and being like, you know, oh, we really would love to have just a little bit more ability to activate sort of the off-color activations. And we wanted to do a sort of goofy silver-bordered card that doesn't technically work within the Black Border rules, but, you know, you get what it does. Okay, so interestingly, Unsanctioned was not the first silver-bordered product that you had come out it was not so what was the other silver-bordered product you worked on i also worked on the extra life my little pony promo cards um and yeah it was pretty funny that between that and uh unsanctioned i did so much silver-bordered design when I started. I really didn't expect to do that many silver-bordered cards right off the bat. So what was it like doing My Little Pony?

Yeah, that was a lot of fun. I worked with Ken Nagel, who was sort of the head designer in charge of that. And the two of us came up with the cards that you saw get printed. of that um and the two of us came up with you know the cards that you saw got printed um really it was just sort of a a stroke of chance really that i i helped out with that because i was just um you know looking through our sort of internal database and i was like twilight sparkle what's going on um and i found those cards i sort of asked about it and i i love the idea of it i think that they're super fun and uh you know cute uh i was a big fan of the show a long time ago um so i was like really happy to to help bring these characters uh into magic um and also help

with you know the charity that they were eventually for yeah okay so here's a question i asked ari i'll ask you the same question um so you essentially were an outsider you're someone who played magic but all of a sudden you're working at wizards you know all of a sudden you're in r&d what what is that like like what what what is it like to sort of go from outsider to insider yeah so uh the going from being on the outside to being on the inside, the initial coming in has this huge learning curve where you've got to sort of catch up on, you know, R&D is working, you know, one to two years ahead, depending on what part of the process they're in. one to two years ahead depending on what part of the process they're in um and so basically learning all of that stuff to catch up to where they are is it's this huge undertaking i remember yeah in my first week i was reading through like a great example is the tuesday of the week that i started was the day that uh the whole you know the whole studio got a look at the final version of War of the Spark.

So it's my second day on the job, and I'm getting a first look at this set that has, you know, 30-some-odd planeswalkers and, you know, all these proliferate cards and these, like, god eternals. And it was an insane experience. So reading through sets like that and reading through modern horizons there's a lot of stuff to catch up on um and then after that i think it's sort of the big change is going from you know i used to be one of the people who would be super engaged online

that i would just constantly be checking um twitter and reddit and anywhere i could get information about magic and going from being the person who was looking for that to being the person who had that information, huge shift. And really all it has done is I now obsessively look for information inside. I'm like, instead of like, ooh, when are they going to announce something? I'm like, ooh, what's the creative team working on? Ooh, what has play design changed this week? I love just sort of seeing what all different parts of the company are working on

and how we're all pushing forward for the next awesome things that are going to be revealed. So from what you expected R&D to be, from what it is, what was the biggest thing you didn't expect? I think the biggest surprise to me was probably um how uh the structures of the teams so to give some context so i went to college for game design and in my game design program right it works like a normal college you've got

different classes that are scheduled at different times of the day and then in between those classes you're going to do homework you have projects that stretch out for a long amount of time and so on and so forth um and i wasn't really prepared for how similar that was going to be to the way that wizards works which is that know, at any given time, as someone working in, you know, R&D, you've got multiple teams that you're a part of. Each of those teams has a schedule. They meet at certain times in the week, and they have projects that go, and you have homework that you do in between each one. So it was really almost identically structured to college, which is not something that I expected. I think that a lot of the times, to college, which is not something that I expected.

I think that a lot of the times when you're on the outside, the way that you receive sets is so structured where it's like, you know, okay, Eldraine is coming out. So we're really focused on Eldraine. And then now Theros is coming out. So we're really focused on Theros. And I think that's a big difference from the way that it works internally when you're always on multiple teams so you're always thinking about multiple sets that are at different times of the process and how they

all interact with one another and what sets have which needs um that is a big sort of surprise to me because i think i was thinking that like oh a team that's working on a set would be focused on that set really hard for a long period of time. When really it's more that everybody has a smaller amount of focus on many different sets, which is great because it means that you get all those different perspectives on each one

as it goes through the process. So what, so I mean, I'm almost to work. So we'll wrap up here. So what is, I mean,'re I'm almost to work um so here um so what is I mean you now been there but year and a half right we two years yes an August okay the more to an hour a year and a half um what as somebody from the inside talking to a whole bunch of people now on the outside um what is the thing that is most interesting to you about the insider view that is, I don't know, most interesting to you about the insider view that maybe the outsiders don't know that it's just something that's, you'd like to share with people about what it's like in life on the inside? I think that the one thing that I wish people knew sort of now that I've been on the inside is that

you know Wizards tries many people at Wizards put in the effort to sort of interact with the community you as a big example of someone who does a lot of you know interaction with people and responding to their questions and really engaging with them. But tons of other people at Wizards who maybe don't have the time or the experience to do that are still always online, always sort of reading the feedback, getting a sense for what people are saying, and really trying to listen to that feedback. So I guess for the people on the outside, you know, sometimes you might sort of feel like, oh, I give feedback online, but I don't feel like anyone's really listening. Trust me, people inside are definitely listening. They might not always respond. They

might not always have the answers or might not always have the time to, but they really do constantly check to see what people are thinking. So your voice is definitely being heard, even if not everyone is like Mark and they can't always respond to you right away. Yeah, it's funny that if you write something somewhere on the internet, I'm like, yeah, 30 R&D people might've read that. I mean, people don't realize

how much R&D really is actively seeking out. We want feedback. And like I said, yeah, sometimes it's a little more public about it, but there's nobody I know that works in R&D really is actively seeking out, we want feedback. And like I said, yeah, some of us are a little more public about it, but there's nobody I know that works in R&D that doesn't. Like part of their day isn't, let's go see what the audience is saying and read about stuff. And we share things all the time.

We're like, if we see a certain post, we'll share the post internally so people can see stuff. Yep. Okay, well, I've made it to my den. So I need to wrap up. Any final thoughts before I make it to work? Thanks for having me. You know, given that we don't live anywhere near one another,

I kind of figured, like, oh, I'll probably never be on Mark's show. So it was great to be a guest. Yeah, you finally made it. So anyway, guys, I made it to my den. So we all know what that means. It means this is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic with Chris, it's time for me to be making magic. So I'll see you guys next time.

Bye-bye.