Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #738: Donald Smith Jr.

Episode Date: May 8, 2020

Donald Smith Jr. is a member of the Play Design team, and I talk with him about what Play Design does.

I'm not pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It's my drive to work, coronavirus edition. So I've been asking different people that make magic or have made magic to come on my show. So today I have Donald Smith Jr. So welcome, Donald. Yeah, what's up? So why don't we start by telling people what you do? What is your job? So why don't we start by telling people what you do? What is your job? Yeah, so I'm on play design.

So we do the competitive balance for limited and standard. And yeah, I mean, that's really the gist of it. Okay, so let's start from the beginning. How did you get into Magic? All right, so I was in college. I actually started pretty late compared to most professional players and most Wizards employees. So I started in right when Theros, the original Theros came out. And I've always been like a competitive player at heart so i i got like super into the lgs tournament scene started going to grand prixs and just kind of worked my way up the the uh professional chain and then landed at wizards

okay so you what was your best performance at a pro tour yeah i got top four at pro tour aether revolt that was my best performance and then other that, I don't have any huge finishes, but I changed like a lot of like top 32s and whatnot. And I actually got a world's invite. So that's like, those two are my two best accomplishments. Okay. So one of the things that's very interesting about you is that you have not

been playing magic all that long comparative to a lot of R and D. Um, and so one of the things that's very interesting is, um, you, to a lot of R&D. And so one of the things that's very interesting is one of the things that I think got you hired is you pick up things very fast. You have the ability to sort of very on the fly understand what's working and what's not working. And when we make brand new stuff,

that's a really important skill because the brand new stuff, no one's played with that before. And it's kind of i mean when i think of sort of what you're known for is that you're able to take new things and understand them way way quicker than most people can yeah it's uh it's kind of a blessing and a curse but mostly a blessing of like yeah it's super valuable that I don't really get these like old references. Like the first cards I saw were from original Innistrad because my cousin gave me his collection that started there.

And, yeah, it's just super interesting in the meetings when people throw out these cards from like early 2000s and honestly even like 2008. It's just like a black hole for me. honestly even like 2008 is just like a black hole for me yeah one one of the things that's super entertaining uh you probably know this but it's super entertaining for a lot of us in r&d is we love watching you experience the card for the first time so when we mention some famous card you don't know like oh i gave you the one to show you this card you know um and i don't remember what the cards are but it's like we'll have it we have a conversation. We'll say something and you'll go, what? And I'll go,

Oh wait, you've never seen this card. We'll pull out whatever that that's always a lot of fun. Yeah. Some notable ones that come up is like, I think there's a dream halls where it's just like, you don't spend any money on your cards for the rest of the game. And,

uh, I, it also happens to a lot where like, I'll pitch a card design for like any set design or vision design meeting and people be like oh it's just like this card from odyssey or whatever i'm like okay well i didn't know that so it's original to me at least so here i'm gonna tell you a little story about dream halls because i made i made dream halls um that you might find entertaining um so I made it just

because, you know what the pitch cards are from Alliances? Force of Will? You know Force of Will. Yeah, yeah. I don't really know the others. Back in Alliances, we made a cycle of five cards. Force of Will is the famous one, but you could pitch another card to cast it.

So I was inspired by that to make an enchantment that just said, well, that's how all spells work. You can just pitch another card to cast it. And so I was inspired by that to make an enchantment that just said, well, that's how all spells work. You can just pitch another card to cast it. And when the, when, there used to be a magazine called, what was the magazine? It was, I'm blinking the name of the magazine.

It'll come to me in a second. But anyway, there was a magazine that used to grade the cards and give them, for every set, they'd pick the worst card of the set. And they picked Dream Halls as the worst card...

Oh, in Quest Magazine. They picked Dream Halls as the worst card from... I think it was in Stronghold. And I remember a time going, how do you... I thought, this card, I don't know whether it's completely broken,

but it might be. How do you pick this as the worst card in the set? And it later got banned, and I thought that this card, I don't know whether it's completely broken, but it might be. How did you pick this as the worst card in the set? And it later got banned, and I thought that was very funny. Yeah, when I first saw the card, I'm like, wait, why don't you just play a bunch of card draw spells with this and draw your deck? And people are like, yep, that's what happened back then. And I'm like, okay. Yeah, it took us some time in the early days. We made a lot of cards that overrode casting costs,

and that burned us a lot. Not that it never burns us now, but it burns us a lot more in the past than it burns us now. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about what... I want to get... I know people... I mean, we've talked a lot. I've talked about sort of what you do,

but I want to get into what exactly it means to be doing the end part of design. So let's talk a little bit. Okay, so I work on vision design. So we come up with, we're going to do something. Okay, we'll take Ikoria since Ikoria's out. Okay, so I'm in vision design and I'm like, it's a monster set and there's monsters

and you build monsters with mutate and there's companion and cycling and ooh, there's giant monsters everywhere. Okay, so I, we come up with that. We hand it off to Dave and then Dave's the set designer. And so Dave is like, okay, well, Mark had

a lot of crazy ideas. How do we make those crazy ideas more, you know, how do we build a set and make use of that? And you know, he took Mutate and Massage Mutate and figured out how to make Companion work right, and you know, he took all the ideas that we had envisioned and then brought them to life and, like, figured out the

practicality of it, right? Okay, so when you guys get involved, what, what do you guys do when, when you're seeing Ikori for the first time? Yeah. So I always joke that like the, the most common thing we do at work is just to like add,

add or subtract toughness from creatures, which is, uh, kind of true, but yeah, so we, um, we, which is kind of true. But yeah, so we... It's hard because it's not like we're just playtesting all the time

and adding stats or whatnot. We do a lot of design work too. So I guess a good example of this would be Luminous Broodmoth. I actually wrote a pretty funny mFiles story about how that came to be, but that was actually kind of like a play design design. Not that play design made it, but it was a perfectly fine design, but because we're taking into account the whole format of Standard, the whole format of standard, whereas set design really only focus on their set. It ended up being too similar to a card in M20.

So that that's like something we had to do to redesign it. And we just make sure all these pieces, all these game pieces from all the sets and standard just interact with each other. And there's not too much overlap. There's cool synergies and it's a lot of designing around that. Sometimes it's just ability tweaking, but sometimes we do have to make our own new cards and do actual design work. Yeah, one of the, I think, the misconceptions a lot of people have about play design is that all you guys do is adjust power level.

And while that is something you do, a lot of making things work is, oh, this doesn't work. Let's make the thing that will do the thing we need to do. And that there's actually a lot of design done. I mean, that's why the word design is in play design. There's a lot of design that gets done then. So talk a little bit about,

I use anything from Ikoria but like give me an example where you go oh we need this a more concrete example of how you'll craft something yeah so this isn't Ikoria but this is from Theros this is what jumps out to me

so we there was like the Orzhov guild in Ravnica Allegiance and they had Afterlife, so a lot of kind of aristocratic gameplay, death triggers. And we didn't, it was a fun deck, but we didn't actually, like it just never worked. It never clicked. And just the nature of the sets you know

we have to move on to the next set and maybe there's not a specific card slot so when it came to eldraine and theros we we didn't think the sacrifice package like with all these death triggers was that strong so we added witch's oven and woe strider to like really tie that together and that's like an example of something that is fleshing out in the real world. Like, I don't want to say close. Like, we didn't have the exact deck or whatever, but, like, we planned that. We had some support with Midnight Reaper and Guilds of Ravnica and just a lot of Orzhov cards. Then we added Sacrifice Outlets.

And that's kind of us, like, going set the the set leads and saying like we need these specific elements to tie this package together and that's like that's us in a sense designing the format even though we're not like designing specific cards here and there although we do do that too yeah i mean one of the things that I think is, I mean, when a set designer is making their set, they're very, very focused on kind of what their set is doing. They do think about the sets around them, but their main job is bringing their set to life.

And a lot of what I know play design does is kind of bring in the perspective of, because like, when players open up a brand new set, they've been playing with it for quite a while, and a lot of the way they treat a new set is, how does this new set interact with all my old sets? Like, I have decks. I've made decks.

Well, what am I going to add to my deck from this set, you know? And I think that perspective of what's going on is a very important part. i'm sort of curious um how do you guys handle that let's get some of the technical how do you make sure that each new set is going to play well with what comes before it yeah it's honestly just a lot of negotiation and it it really is is what most of our job is. Again, we're not only playtesting, we're crafting and designing an environment. I mean, there's so many situations that come up, whether it's like, oh, your card is... It goes both ways, like, oh, your card, so with like with luminous brumont this is too similar to

a card we already made so like we really think we should change it to just add more texture to the environment sometimes it's um oh maybe this is gonna be too similar to something in a future set and that future set is like it's a um like a really key part to the set so um kind of for example um theros doesn't have too many like like huge auras and there's no like a voltron style gameplay because that's kind of what mutate was going to do in the set after it so we didn't want to just like oh here stack up one creature with a bunch of auras and then then the next set, okay, mutate a bunch of creatures onto each other, because that's just, like, similar gameplay, so that's why the constellation rewards are more about, like, going wide, you know, drawing cards, making tokens, and, like, doing just more mid-range-y stuff. And, yeah, it's a little bit beyond me because it's like we have all this feedback and it's just so day-to-day to me that it's hard to go too technical about it, I guess. But I hope those examples at least are somewhat enlightening. So another thing that people might not be aware of is, while the majority of play design is done at the end of the design process,

you guys actually are involved much earlier. For example, whenever I run a vision design team, I normally have a play designer on it because I want to make sure that the things we're making can be made appropriately down the road. Talk a little bit about that. I know you've done some of that too. Yeah.

Yeah, so again, we're're play designers we're game designers so we are on different teams i'm i'm a vision team with you right now i was actually on the icoria set team also and yeah we just kind of we get rotated around but between different sets a different part in the process uh it's just uh i guess at least for me i get a lot of value because i like seeing like oh how did we get here and uh being in all parts of the process lets me realize that um well when when when you're in a vision design team when we're looking at raw mechanics meaning we haven't we're just coming up with them um what are the things that are important as a play designer? What are you looking out for in a new mechanic?

Yeah, so the big buzzword we use is knobs, right? So we want to make sure that we have opportunities to tweak numbers or just turn knobs. Well, explain what knobs are. Explain to them what is a knob? What does that mean? Yes. So a knob is just like something we could turn up or down basically um it's a the the most obvious knob is a number right so if uh like a power and toughness of a creature those are knobs we could

turn we could we could increase it decrease it depending on what we need um just like mana costs are huge not to uh it's and that's why like play designers love activated abilities is because oh we could like really fine-tune this card because now we have the mana cost the power toughness and this ability could also cost more cost less and then oh if you put a number on the ability like let's say it deals three damage oh now we could increase that up or down and then oh if you put a number on the ability like let's say it deals three damage oh now we could increase that up or down and then it's like a puzzle whereas it's a lot harder to um like some of the ultimatums like the uh the saltai ultimatum in ikoria is like that card doesn't have many knobs because you're searching for three monocolored cards and casting two of them.

Yeah, you could technically change the number three, but then the design kind of breaks. And also the ultimatums have a specific casting cost, so you can't change that either. And they're all sorcery, so some cards have a lot of knobs, some cards don't. We have to have both. As you pointed out, so numbers are knobs, but here's some other examples of kind of knobs. It's like whether it's an instant or a sorcery, for example.

Like you were saying you were locked into a sorcery, but one of the ways to make a card more powerful is to make it instant, or make it a little weaker is to make it a sorcery. We also have a lot of effects. Like, for example, let's say we're doing a bounce effect. Well, I could just bounce. What I can target is a knob, right?

If I just hit a creature versus hit a non-land permanent, for example. Also, how strong the effect is. Am I going to bounce the creature to your hand? Am I going to bounce it to the top of your library? Having knobs means that there's a lot of different ways to allow people down the road to adjust and change it. Um, okay. So we're making a mechanic. You want to look at knobs? What else are you looking for? I just, yeah, I want to make sure it's interactive. I don't like, I like to envision, okay, if, if you were to build a, whether it's competitive or casual, if you were to build a deck around this mechanic, like what would that deck play? Like, like, let's say you just had

as many cards with the mechanic as reasonable into this one deck is, is that deck going to be super slow? Is it going to like lock you out the game is it going to you know kill you on turn three or whatever um and i just uh kind of i just have to like conceptualize like what would a deck built around this be and it's you know that's just the game right so i'm just envisioning how the game plays out. So it gets kind of complicated and I just get into my own head and start daydreaming more or less. But at the end result, it's like, okay, is it fun?

You know, does it play well? Another thing that I know that goes on is one of the problems sometimes that the vision designers have is we play the mechanic as we want it to be played rather than necessarily what would optimize it. Oh yeah. Yeah. And so talk a little bit about optimization of mechanics.

Yeah. So yeah, it's interesting that you bring that up. Cause like, that's just second nature to me. Cause I started magic at like three months after playing magic casually. I was like, okay, I want to play tournaments. tournaments so yeah it's just like when i'm imagining these decks it's yeah i have no concept of like oh it would be cool if it did this i'm like no

this is the mechanic in front of me i will build the most savage cutthroat competitive deck i can you know the cards aren't fleshed out yet but like you you still get a sense of like if someone was trying to win a tournament with this mechanic what would that look like and sometimes that's fun and sometimes that's not yeah one of the things i talk a lot about is how you have to put the fun where the strategy is meaning that the correct way to play the card has to be the fun way, that if there's a fun way and a powerful but not fun way, people will play the powerful version even if it's less fun. Yeah, for sure.

That is like, we have so many conversations on a card-by-card basis with that. Like, we know some cards are stronger than others, but at the end of the day, we ask, is this the fun place to put strength in is this the fun is this a fun card that we know people will play um so yeah that's that's like a really fundamental play design question right like one of the things so here's an interesting concept the idea that a set only gets so much power in it that you know that everything can't be the best that it can be that you have to pick and choose where to put it so expand on that a little bit like how do you decide what gets to be the best cards in the set yeah so we we have this

process um where we kind of like assign uh like a loose loose probability of how likely we think it's going to show up in standard. The probability part is really important because we don't have perfect information and like the probability is like a very big range. Like we will think a card is between 33 and 66 percent to show up, is like within that range it could be oh i think it's less than half of a chance to show up or over 50 to show up um and and that's like one rating we could give a card and then we have a rating for less than that and a rating for like uh 66 plus percent um and there's just some each set has like a certain amount of points allocated to it basically. And, and we just kind of divvy that up, but you know, we expect we're not going to get

it a hundred percent right. And it's really just a rough tool to make sure, uh, not one set is like eclipsing another basically. So let's, I'll talk a little bit about tools um one of my quotes i made a long time ago about magic design is it it starts in art and it ends a science um one of the things i know the play design does a lot is there are a lot of tools i you don't need to get into the nitty-gritty of the tool but talk a little bit about the kind of tools you guys use yeah so uh see we so we have uh what i just described with the probability of it showing up in standard that's called top 40

um then we have a quick pointing and limited which is uh we basically have like different letter grades and like for example a is uh equivalent to windrake which is two two flyer for three um and even though just to clarify just that it's an a but that doesn't mean it's like a really good card it just it's just the way the quick pointing is works which is kind of beyond me but whatever uh so yeah we uh that's like a way to color balance like roughly color balance the set so um oh each color could get so many a's a pluses b's and c's at common and uh you just kind of map that up for each rarity and uh for each color so that's like a rough way to balance the set just to get it play test ready then we have a more in-depth version of that called bucket

pointing which is like pretty similar to what uh pro tour testing teams do or players uh just pro teams really um where you you just lay out the whole set you print the whole set out and you just kind of stack rank the cards and you end up with like 20 buckets of just like categories that what cards you think are the strongest um so that's limited that's constructed i've been doing like format analysis stuff which is like i map out all the removal spells in a given standard environment and like see oh how much exiles what toughness break points or can we easily hit uh how much planeswalker removal do we have um i'm sure there's more tools honestly but those are like the the big ones the the limited the top 40 and the quick pointing are like that's like second nature to us and the removal thing is more of a

like tool that i use and that i've developed myself okay so here's one of my favorite things as far as i'm concerned this is my favorite part of your job is i'll make a card and then i'll come over to you and i go okay donald cost this card for me yeah that's uh i remember that was kind of a infamous question on the uh great designer search test where yeah you just you just ask play design how much it costs and we'll give you an answer and you know we might not be right but it'll be good enough at least yeah well so how do you approach that because a lot of times when i'm coming to you i'm coming to you with weird stuff because if it's not weird i probably could figure it out so if i'm coming to you, I'm coming to you with weird stuff because if it's not weird, I probably could figure it out. So if I'm coming to you, it's like, here's something we've never

quite done before. How do you, you know, how do you balance stuff that you've never approached before? How do you do that? Yeah. So I have kind of two processes. I, I try to liken it to a card that we have printed before. That's actually very hard for me because I just don't know that much about the history of magic. Uh, I'm learning a lot about the history of magic but i just don't know this like obscure uncommon from mirrodin or whatever that's just i just have no insight into that uh the other thing is i just like imagine this is especially useful for like cards lower on the curve like around three to four mana it's like okay what happens if i'm on the play and i play this on curve like on turn three like and then i try to think like okay if i'm playing against that like am i like sighing am

am i like punching the table am i happy is it are we gonna like now have an interesting combat phase or you know just kind of the the like grown meter i guess you could call it just like how fun is this car gonna be if played on curve um and then and then i just like again visualize this game state uh and you know oh oh, is it just a full mana off? Does it just have to come one turn later? Maybe it does, like, a little too much damage and kills too many creatures. And, you know, just turn the knobs from there. Okay, so I'm going to ask you a serious question here.

So you see me walking up to you, so you know I'm coming to ask you something. Are you kind of excited because I'm coming to ask you something. Are you kind of excited? Cause I'm going to ask you something weird or you're kind of a little, a little intimidated. Like, Oh no, what is he going to ask now? Normally I'm excited because it's actually for me a pretty like fun break from my desk basically. Cause I mean, usually you come to me when I'm at my desk doing something and I personally like having like short, short little five-minute breaks from my work, from, like, typing away in Excel. I also, like, look at your facial expression, too, to be like,

okay, how weird is the car going to be? Because, like, if you're – when you come to me and you're just, like, kind of nonchalant and I can't really read you, I know it's just going to be like oh here's like a limited card to like tie these things together but like sometimes you're really exciting i'm like okay this is going to be a spicy rare okay so um here's a question that gets asked a lot how much of your job is playtesting what percentage of your job do you think playtesting what percentage of your job you think playtesting is uh it's so hard because for me to answer that because it varies week by week um so i don't know i'd say

i'd say roughly half um so like every uh for each set we do like a like kind of a mox tournament just to like this is a way we wrap up a set and you know we really just like hammered out a few last things before we introduce a new set into the ffl and that that is like actual play testing for like 90 90 of that week um 90 of that week um sometimes it's uh it's a lot less so and the tricky thing too is like it's hard for me to disentangle play testing and deck building so when uh when a new set comes into ffl so like following a tournament i actually don't play that many games but i'll be building way more decks just because we have so many new tools um so that yeah that's a it depends if you count deck building as play testing because if you do it's actually like probably like 70 to 75 on average how many teams are you on at a time usually um see

um see uh my manager usually tries to keep play designers on like one set team and um and then basically yeah play design and then i might have like floating projects here and there but uh like as far as my calendar is i have one set team and then outside of that it's just working on ffl whether it's thinking about the format play testing deck building and and then a lot of that is also wrapped up into like drafting sets too because we do do a lot of drafts i talk mostly about constructed but like we we will draft this set uh 10 20 times right yeah you mentioned ffl real quickly for those that don't know what that is uh it stands for future future league which is the league that about a year ahead i guess right roughly yeah roughly a year um and uh people always ask this question so i'll explain real quickly the reason is the future do you know

why it's the future future league? Do you know Donald? I heard there's like some story about it used to be the future league but it was like you couldn't change the cards or something. Yeah so we made the future league and it was six months ahead of time and it proved to be a horrible spot because we could identify problems but not

fix them and so then they moved it six months further and so it wasn't the Future League anymore. It was the Future Future League and that's where it came from and the FFL. I mean,

no one actually calls it the Future Future League. It's just the FFL but the FFL name stuck. So anyway, we're almost, I'm almost to work. Any final thing?

Last chance, something, a story or something you you wanted to share um no i wish i would have prepared a story but uh i guess go check out the m files for my luminous broodmoth story it's pretty humorous i had a lot of fun with it uh it's just like that was a card that Play Design, again, redesigned. But Dave was the set lead of Ikoria, and he's, it's very hard to convince Dave, like, which is a good and bad thing. It's hard to convince him, but you know when you do have him redesign a card that you really have something special, and Luminous Broodmoth was one of those moments.

Okay, that's cool. Well, anyway, I want to thank you for being here and representing Play Design. But it appears I'm approaching my den, so it seems like this is the, as we all know, the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic with Donald, it's time

for me to be making magic. So I want to thank you for joining me, Donald, and thank you all for tuning in. So bye-bye. Thanks.