Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #745: Matt Tabak

Episode Date: June 5, 2020

I talk with editor Matt Tabak.

I'm not pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another edition of Drive to Work Coronavirus Edition. So I've been using this to talk to people, people that make magic and are connected to magic. So today I have a special guest, Matt Tabak. So say hi. So Matt, say hi one more time. Hey Mark, how's it going? Sorry, I one more time. Hey, Mark. How's it going? Sorry, I talked over you.

Okay, so what I want to do today is I want to talk about sort of how you got into magic, how you came to Wizards, and what it is you do at Wizards. Because I want, I'm hoping all these interviews can help people see the breadth of all the people who make the game, because there's a lot that goes into it. Well, absolutely, Mark. First off, thank you for having me. Out of all the people who make magic game, because there's a lot that goes into it. Well, absolutely, Mark. First off, thank you for having me. Out of all the people who make Magic, I am certainly one of them. So I don't know if this is the bottom of the barrel for you. I don't know who haven't you interviewed yet, but you finally got to me, and I appreciate that.

Well, no one else returned my phone call, and so... Right. Okay, so let me start from the beginning. This is a question I've been asking everybody, which is, how did you get into magic? Okay, picture it. Sicily. 1994. Except for it's not Sicily. That's a Golden Girls joke, which no one listening to you will understand.

I actually got started, it was 1994. I was in college and instead of going to classes, I mostly went to an old laser tag place called UltraZone. Shout out to anyone who remembers UltraZone. One of the guys who works there was like, hey, there's this card game that's been out. You know, it's pretty fun.

But I'm getting out of it. Do you want to buy all my cards? It's 20 bucks. I was like, sure. So I bought his, like like shoebox of cards. And this was my first kind of foray into the game. And it blew my mind. Like this game was awesome.

It was unlike anything I'd seen before. Like I played D&D a little bit, played a lot of the old Marvel role playing game, you know, liked board games, that kind of thing. But man, Magic was sweet. So that was how we got started um guy at ultra zone kind of looped me into it started hanging out um at friends houses played a bunch uh finally found now it's like 95 found a store i lived in vegas at the time by the way uh found a local store that was playing and uh never looked back okay so i went to class every once in a while store that was playing and never looked back. Okay. So I went to class every once in a while after that.

Okay. So you played Matt, did you play continuously or did you take breaks? No, I took a break around Mercadian masks. Just sort of life got in the way as it does. I'm really thankful that I got a job after college with wizards where, I mean,

I'm skipping ahead a little bit, but I'm thankful that now life getting in the way is magic and that doesn't stop magic. But yeah, as I went through college, things got a little busy and I took breaks here and there. So how did you end up at Wizards? How did that happen? Oh, man, funny story, I hope. Otherwise, why am I here talking to you about it? So I was hired by a small independent game company who shall remain nameless to come up and work for them and basically kind of be their rules guy. I had been a reasonably high level magic judge for a while. Like I judge pro tours. I showed up at Grand Prix's tours i showed up at grand prixs i showed up

at nationals things like that so it was kind of like known who i was wasn't super high level but i was up there um and this kind of fledgling trading card game company needed someone to work on their rules and maybe like train judges and things like that so i was living in vegas at the time uh this was after i graduated, obviously. And so they hired me and got me to move up to Seattle. So I'm living in Seattle. And I've never, like I'd lived in Las Vegas since I was four years old. This is my first time I'd ever lived in a different city as what I will jokingly call an adult. Things are going great. We found a place to rent.

Traveling downtown every day, seeing cool new stuff, working on this game. Everything's awesome. Six months later, they go bankrupt. Oh, well, I just moved. My then girlfriend, now wife, same person, moved up and now I don't have a job.

And she doesn't have a job. And we're in a city we haven't been in before. And this is not good. Like I said, having been a Magic judge for a while, I kind of went, well, let's see if Wizards is hiring. And I was really willing to take any position they had available. So they had a spot open in their game support department. And I knew some of the people at Wizards

just from judging Magic tournaments. I knew Scott Larrabee from the Pro Tour and a lot of people in what was then called Organized Play. So they helped me out. They hooked me up with the right people. I went through a job interview. My job interview with Wizards was kind of funny because when I walked into the interview panel,

there's like five people from that department waiting to interview me. And all due respect to those people, but I had been a pretty high level magic judge for a while. I knew way more about magic than any of the five interviewing me. And they're like, how would you explain what trample is to somebody? And I'm like, okay. And I explained what trample was and how would you explain how combat works and just really like kind of basic level questions uh so they hired me and i went to i went to work in the game support department where people would call up and ask me rules questions and i got to work on magic and dnd

which i knew very little about and other card games which i knew even less about uh and i kind of made my way through there and and eventually I fell, almost literally, through the floor into R&D. R&D isn't below them, it's above them in the floors, right? They're on the second floor, we're on the third floor. Well, they were fourth floor at the time. Oh, at the time, okay. So I fell downward.

Okay. The corporate ladder kind of goes down. It's my ultimate goal at Wizards, like I started on the fourth floor, now I work on the third floor in what used to be called R&D. Now it's Studio X. My ultimate goal is to work in the cafe on the first floor and get like free food. I'm slowly making my way there.

I don't know what anyone on the second floor does. I'm hoping I qualify for a job there somewhere. Okay, so you get an R&D. What was your first job in R&D? So I got into R&D almost entirely by accident. The rules manager at the time was Mark Gottlieb. And I'd been at Wizards for like a year or so. And I kind of just let him know,

hey, you know, I got all this judge experience. I've read like a million FAQs. It's my favorite thing in the world. If you ever need help with like I could, you know, proofread it for you or read it for you or something, like I can help out if you need me and wizards is awesome because you can work on things outside of your like core job responsibility a lot there's so many opportunities like i want to help out with magic you can help out with magic so this is a way i thought i could help out so i told gottlieb about this so somehow this became this this story got back to Globus, who I don't remember what he was doing specifically at the time, but he was in charge of everything. I still don't know who's in charge of everything.

I just know that there are people that are. Globus heard this and thought, oh, Matt has editing experience. Matt is a qualified, trained, professional editor. R&D needs a qualified, trained, professional editor. R&D needs a qualified, trained, professional editor. Let's get him in on a six-month kind of swap-portunity, and R&D can borrow him for six months, try him out, and see if he's good. Here's the thing.

I was not a qualified, trained, professional anything at that point. Definitely not an editor. I had no experience i had no like i'm i was a math major i had like words bad no uh but i did it and i came over for six months and they gave me jobs and i guess i did okay because they kept me and didn't let me go back to game support so okay so but you so you started as an editor, right? Yes. Okay, and then when did you become rules manager? Because I know that's a...

I became rules manager ahead of Innistrad, because the big... Rules manager is kind of a unique position that Wizards has. Not really unique, but it's uncommon. It's some parts, like, technical uncommon. It's some parts technical editing. It's some parts coding. It's some parts game theory. There's a lot that goes into it. So Mark Gottlieb was the rules manager, and he just wanted to do something else.

Rules manager is kind of a grueling position. No one does it for super long. Eventually, you want to move on to other opportunities. And Mark wanted to move more into the design side. So he was looking for a replacement. And given my experience and background, I was just sort of the natural choice of people in R&D at the time. So he handed off to me a head of Innistrad, because I remember double-faced cards were like the big thing that, like the big project I was worked on first so ever since uh I was rules manager for somewhere north of four years what was your last set as rules manager oh golly I wish I remembered this here's the problem with these coronavirus

inspired interviews Time no longer has meaning. I don't know what day it is. I don't know what month it is. I'm pretty sure it's still March. In fact, people are going to be listening to this in the future. And I don't know if there is a future. What was my last set? I don't know. It was a couple of years ago. like mark uh i was ready to move on from rules management unfortunately i didn't really move forward i moved kind of back to what i was doing back into the editing role um mostly because r&d just needed more editors um the number of sets we were working on had increased and there was just more work to do um this was like when arena was starting to become a reality and there was some work to be done done there so let's i want to talk about editing a

little bit because i think one of my goals like i said is to get people more in tune with all the people that work on a set so okay thank goodness if you ask me more like when did this happen questions i'm just gonna look so okay so let's explain what does editing do let's let's give the audience sort of a a brief overview of what the editors do for in magic shoot man not much don't tell anybody we mostly just sit over there and hope nobody notices um editing is responsible for a lot of things so we're basically responsible for as far as cards go everything you see printed on the card right we're um from a technical standpoint we edit rules tax like designers design cards we make sure that not only do they work within the framework of the game and like they don't break

any rules their templates like the words we pick to go on cards are compliant with our rule system and consistent with other cards so they're understandable we're like responsible for making everything as approachable as it can be uh magic is a game with like something like 19 000 pieces i don't know how many there are now i think we're over 20 000 are we over 20 000 okay i lose track of like what's been released and everything uh when they hear this you think it's still march so it's well and we're coming up to 2017 and i think we think 2017 is gonna be a big year for us so uh so we're responsible for kind of looking at the cards that designers have designed and making sure that the words on them make sense

that they're clear, that if they do something the same as another card that they read the same, and these are rules with a million exceptions I don't know if someone's going to read that and be like, hey there's eight ways to say this, and there are one second water so we're responsible for uh as far as rules text creative text we also edit the names and flavor text on the cards so we get those from our uh creative teams that they oversee and work with uh external contracted writers and they provide all of the flavor text and names. This is where more traditional editing happens. There's copy editing, but there's also a lot of magic-specific things like making sure that, from the simplest case, the names we put on cards we haven't used before.

That would be bad if there was a new counterspell called Counterspell, but it did something different. Making sure that all the flavor text makes sense within the world, and if it's a world that we've been to before, make sure we're not contradicting things that we've said years ago. If it's a new world, make sure that we're setting it up the way that creative intends, If it's a new world, make sure that we're setting it up the way that creative intends. So when we go back to it, we have, you know, a fruitful world from which to draw text.

So we're just kind of responsible for all of that. That's just cards. Turns out Wizards makes a lot more stuff. We put those cards in packaging. That packaging needs to be designed and edited and editing is making sure that all of the text that is on the packaging is correct and clear and meets legal requirements and visual appeal is not really our bailiwick we have designers for that but we just make sure everything like looks good and we see all that in some of those packages with cards, there are also inserts. Putting together all that text on the inserts, making sure everything is copy edited and make sure that it makes sense to readers.

Thinking about who's going to be reading these inserts. Who are they for? Are they for new players? Are they for established players? But maybe they're new to Commander. What do they need to know? So there's a lot that goes into that, too. Packaging, inserts, cards. What else do we do? Basically,

if we print it, editing looks at it, approves it, works on it. That kind of thing. So, for example, what is the last that you edited that is out? I was the lead editor for Ikoria. Okay, so let's talk Ikoria a little bit. Let's talk Ikoria. Okay, so I do the vision design. I hand it off to Dave Humphries, who does the set design. Where do you get involved? I start looking at the set as the set kind of enters, probably a couple weeks into set design. Once that there are card records

that we have enough confidence in that these are going to be real cards, let's start shaping them. Especially as we start looking at keyword mechanics. So we get involved with keywords real early because they're important. I mean, every card's important, but keywords are really important.

Especially in a set like a chorea that had some major swings right like mutate that's that needs a lot of work not only with editing and design but also like frame design what are these cards going to look like the art director so we get involved pretty early okay so you get involved. At some point, the file gets handed over to you. So your job before that is advising. What do you do before the set gets actually handed over

to you? Advising is a big thing. I talk with Dave or whoever the lead designer is throughout the process. They're going to ask me about certain designs. Does a card fit? Does this card work?

Does this card look like what are the words? This is the effect we want. What are the words to achieve that? Sometimes those words are great. Sometimes they're not great. And design goes and thinks about that. Basically, as a set moves through set design design i'm in constant communication with the lead um working on just a variety of topics the cards that come up okay and okay at some point the set designer says okay we we have we meet a deadline

uh then play play at some point play does play design happen before you start working on editing or is it it's a concurrent so i get involved in the set actually before play design does the set is a good way through its life cycle before play design gets involved but once they do there are a bunch of changes so at some point like it goes through play design focus and they hammer on those cards and things get changed and everything happens like that at some point editing takes ownership of the file dave's like okay i'm done for now he's not really done that's a lie don't buy it and editing takes the set okay it's now my set what that means basically it doesn't mean anyone stops working and it

doesn't mean anyone can't change cards it just means from that point forward all changes go through me um and we can work out deals like i tell dave i've worked with dave on enough sets that like hey if you want to change power toughness if you want to change your mana cost just do it i don't need to know about it whatever if you're changing words and you want my help let me know know. But if you feel comfortable, go on, do your own thing. So there'll be a period where basically the editors are focused on game text. We're just looking at rules text. That's our

focus. And then at some point, creative text drops from the sky. And that happens later. Just so people know, you guys first get the rules text and later get the creative text. Because the creative team wants to lock down the rules so they can finalize

and figure out the flavor. Yeah, and it's sort of a chicken and egg problem. Sometimes the creative treatment of a card will inform the rules text. This happens a lot with legendary creatures and planeswalkers. Like, if we're making a planeswalker, this planeswalker has a creative bent like we know what kind of planeswalker chandra is

uh the rules text goes around that or if there's a new legendary character you know creative is like okay we're making the leader of the humans and he's old and angry. Okay, well, design will make a card that fits an old, angry human. You know, like us. Okay, so you get the rules text, you make sure the rules text is correct, you get the creative text, make sure the creative text is correct. What's the next step after that?

Once the file is correct, like I'm happy with all the text, this is it, the file gets sent to a typesetter. Now, parallel to this, happening kind of at the same time but not really underneath my watch, there's frame design. Especially if there's a set with new frames. Like Mutate had new frames. We did a cool thing. We put Mutate in the kind of elongated art box that kind of dips into the text box.

So frame design is doing their thing. And eventually they're going to get all the frames designed and all the art comes in. And they're going to put all the art in the frames into something that we call, wait for it, art in frames, AIFs. Those AIFs go over to the typesetter. At some point, I send all the text to the typesetter. The typesetter, who's really a technical artist, puts that all together and then makes what I see as a PDF of complete magic cards. Ah, great.

All the names, all the text, everything's where it should be. There are no mistakes whatsoever, and there's no review necessary. No, wait, it's the other thing. Typesetting does their deal, gives me a set. I look at that set. I have many comments. Everything from the shape of the rules text. Maybe I

will ask them to make it bigger or smaller. Maybe the line breaks aren't flowing the way I want them to. Sometimes crazy things happen and like mana symbols show up or it's the wrong mana symbol or something isn't where it's supposed to be. Expansion

symbols go crazy. Any number of things can go wrong. But remarkably, the typesetting team we have are fantastic, and they handle dozens and dozens of weird things each set flawlessly. But like all things, there's going to be some human adjustments that the script cannot do automatically. I just want to explain that there is some automation that happens so that they don't manually do each one. Yes. The technical artist will do a lot of scripting beforehand, so it

automatically places text where it's supposed to go. It makes a very good guess as to how big it should be to fit within the constraints that it's set up. And at the end of that, you'll get magic cards. Hooray! So editing will get what we call V1, the first version of these completed magic cards. And I'll go through them completely,

a painstaking process looking at every detail of every card. And I'll make a bunch of notes things i'd like to see questions i have you name it throughout this process playtesting continues and there may even though we tell them pencils down some of them don't know what a pencil is uh they'll still request changes very late into the process this is fine it produces a small amount of work for other departments but we're happy to do this work if it saves you know a card from going out not the way they want to time out water uh speaking of these other departments oh mark a question i meant to ask you at the beginning

of this interview and now that we're going to be talking about other departments it's probably a good time to ask um in this podcast how much profanity am i allowed you are allowed no profanity okay so this is not a pg-13 okay because i'm going to be talking about other departments it's a g podcast baby g podcast okay often when i talking about other departments. It's a G podcast, baby. G podcast. Okay. Often when I talk about other departments, there's profanity. And I just want to be clear. Our other departments are all awesome.

We're not going to do that this time. That's what I say. That the profanity is emphatically hilarious. You did a bleeping good job that that's the kind of profanity you. Yeah, yeah. No, that's exactly what I meant. That's what I was asking about. I don't know what other conclusion one could come to. Okay, so you get a step back.

You look at it. They are. Meanwhile... There's a series of back and forth between editing and the technical artists. We make some changes. We request some changes. They'll make some changes. We'll look at it. Maybe there'll

be some fine tuning. Oh, wait, we came up with a different ability for this card. Can you change this text to this? This process goes. About sometimes a week, a week if we're lucky, into this process, we will have what is known as the slideshow. The slideshow is, I take the kind of current state of where we are. Here's the set as it exists right now. And we show it in a presentation, a big meeting with everyone in the studio, and some select people from outside the studio that are like involved and want to see the cards and it's a big like celebration check out these cards and one at a time we'll show the card and people will ask questions the creative lead for the set will

talk a little bit about here's the world here's the story here's what's going on the design lead will introduce each of the new mechanics and talk about like how this world how this set is playing what are the draft archetypes things like that so it's a big thing at the slideshow everyone has notes and suggestions and questions so for the next n days where where N is like three, everyone emails the editor or it's either the design lead, the editor, the art lead with just a million comments, questions, and suggestions. And this sparks a lot of rapid conversation. Like this card was confusing. Can we change the template? I had no idea what this does. This art doesn't really fit. Art takes so much time that art comments at the slideshow rarely cause action, but every once in a while.

So the slideshow and the week after is just furious activity. Things are changing rapidly. We're going back and forth between the designer and me and the typesetter and play design and you name it. A million changes happened at the slideshow. Most of them are not super impactful on play. Like, there's a lot of flavor text changes during this time. Maybe things will change power toughness. There's not a huge, like, amount of redesigning redesigning but it happens every once in a while

something like the thing is there's so many magic sets in progress at any one time the slideshow is really an opportunity for everyone to sit down and focus on that set which isn't something we all have time to do like i'm working on six sets today i don don't have a lot of time to focus on any one thing. And for some people, like the people outside of the studio, this is the first time they've seen the cards. So we're getting their raw reactions to it, which is really valuable because that's what the players are going to see in a few months or whatever. There's a lot of people inside the studio that haven't seen the cards.

Like one of the things is different people work on different teams. So there's certain blind spots a lot of people have where oh, I was never associated with this, and yeah, maybe you played it during a game day, or maybe you were pulled into a playtest, but there's a lot of stuff the average person might not have seen. I love the slideshows

just because it's, and it's the final version of the cards, that even if I have done and played with it to see everything come together is really cool yeah it's really the first opportunity for a lot of us to see the cards looking like magic cards as opposed to play test cards uh for most of us it's the first time we're going to see the art um this actually happened to me with theros beyond death because i was the throne of eldraine lead editor and i was also the akoria lead editor so i was like those, even though they're not consecutive

from the player's point of view, that's back-to-back. It is unusual for one person to be a lead of two sets in that close proximity. Don't ask why it happened, it's a weird question. But I did both those sets. So Theros, who Greg Lubin was the lead editor for, I didn't see any of that set hardly before the slideshow. So you mentioned Greg real quick. So how many magic editors are there? Too many, if you ask me.

You got me. I really don't know what else. You want to do all the sets? There are five full-time editors. The principal editor, kind of like the leader of our group, is Del Logle. She's amazing. She's worked at Wizards longer than I have. I think 19 years, I believe.

Yeah. 19 or 20. She's fantastic. Then me. I've been at Wizards since 2007, which, if my math is correct was 16 years ago someone could listen to this in 2023

don't look at me like that then Greg Lubin who worked for Hasbro proper before moving he lived in Rhode Island I believe he worked for Hasbro proper before moving. He lived in Rhode Island, I believe. He worked for Hasbro as an editor

and then took a job with us and moved across the country. Relatively recent hire, although, wow, he's been here between one and two years, I'm pretty sure. I think? I don't even know. Hans? Yeah, but you're two years, I think.

Yeah, he's relatively new. Also a very good letter. He is in charge of a set I cannot talk about right now. Yeah. He was the lead editor for Equestrian. Do they know what Equestrian is? No, no, they do not. They know the code name, but they don't know what it is. Okay.

Yeah, they know code names up until... What's the last code name they know? I'll let you say it. I think they know Kayaking. Well, if they don't, they do now. They do now, okay. Kayaking is currently in Exploratory Design, so normally I tell people once it's in exploratory design. Okay.

If they don't know it, we'll learn it right here. It's called kayaking. And there's a fifth editor? You said five editors. Who's the fifth editor? I did say five. We recently hired a very cool guy named Jeremiah Goad. He works, he doesn't do card sets. He actually works exclusively on packaging and inserts and things that aren't card sets. So that's his specialty. Okay. So I'm almost home here – or not home.

I'm almost at work. I'm almost – it blurs when work is home. I'm almost to work. Is I supposed to be in a car or something? Well, no. I'm at home. I'm being honest that I'm at home. So I wonder – we need to wrap this up. So is there any final thing you'd like the audience to know about what you do that they might not know?

How does the editors, I don't know, anything about editing you want to give a final shout out about? I would like to give a final shout out to the following 22 things that your listeners may not realize that i do uh there are each of the editors kind of has their own kingdom i guess specialty area of specialty yeah area of expertise um mine is by far the weirdest. I get involved, I get myself involved in a lot of side projects. Every set that comes out, the new mechanics, we put together a video that kind of puts the spotlight on new mechanics. I write and I'm the voice of those. I'm also involved with our new game spell slingers uh which is a magic inspired

digital game uh so i'm the lead editor and i do a lot of rules work on that game uh of all the wizards employees i am the tallest so i will often reach in the kitchen sometimes people need dishes or a replacement for iced tea, and I will reach up and get those. That's a true story. That is a service I provide. If at any point we are back in the office, I will show you this. No, I don't know.

What else do I do? I do things. The other thing that Matt does that is outside his editing purview is you do a lot of outreach with the public. And back when we had events, you would go to events and be boisterous and entertaining. That's kind of coming from my judge background. I really like live events. I think magic tournaments are awesome.

And I kind of like going and putting on a show and entertaining people. I have an incredibly massive ego. What's that like? Going out and feeling the love. That's very exciting for me. No, magic events are awesome. It's a really good time. I like hosting events.

I like sitting on panels. I like being on podcasts. If anyone out there has a podcast, you too can get in on that. I'm right here. You're on my podcast. We have done a couple blog-a-tog lives we have, we have, yes

those are always fun we do those at conventions where we do blog-a-tog but it's in front of an audience and usually we'll have a fake steering wheel and whatever yeah, yeah, yeah imagine having some sort of like event or podcast where you fake being in a car imagine, imagine that

but hey, it looks like I'm approaching my desk. What do you know? I'm in my den. We went a little over three minutes, so we had a little traffic in the kitchen. So anyway, I'm now at my desk. I'm now in my den. So we all know what that means. It means it's the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic,

it's time for me to be making magic. So I want to thank you for being with me, Matt. I appreciate your time. It is time for me to be making magic. So I want to thank you for being with me, Matt. I appreciate your time. It is not time for me to go make magic. It is Friday afternoon as we record this. It is time for me to, I don't know, check turnip prices? Something. So anyway, thanks for joining me, Matt.

And guys, I will see you all next time. Bye-bye.