Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #746: Brian Tinsman

Episode Date: June 5, 2020

Brian Tinsman spent many years designing Magic cards and led sets like Rise of the Eldrazi and Time Spiral. He and I chat.

I'm not pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another Drive to Work Coronavirus Edition. So I've been doing lots of fun interviews, and today I got a blast from the past. So I want to welcome Brian Tinsman. Hi, Mark. Hi, everyone in Mark's podcast land. Okay, so Brian worked on Magic for quite a while, so we're going to go back. Let's go back to the very beginning, which I've been asking everybody, which is, how did you get into Magic? I was on a date with my soon-to-be wife, and we went to a game store, and a clerk at the game store showed us, and I had kind of been avoiding it because I had friends who played, and I I knew that I probably get sucked in and didn't really want to spend the money and but you know I was I was with my uh girl and wanted to show off so uh I pulled out the wallet ah okay I don't know if it earned me any points or not but uh we had fun playing and eventually she became a brand manager of magic

uh anyway so i guess it worked out okay so let's talk a little bit about you and and working at wizards because you you have a an interesting uh path to get to r&d you do not have a traditional path so how did you start working at wizards all right uh i was in business school getting an m and I kind of have a mind that's always turning on something and it had been turning on magic cards for more than a year. And I had in mind I was at the University of Washington and I had in mind, oh, my God, Wizards is in the area. I must target them. I must find some inroads there. And ended up getting into marketing research there. And this was around the time when they had acquired Pokemon CCG.

And they went from something like zero to a billion dollars in sales in like 18 months or something like that. It's like 98, 99, I think. sales in like 18 months or something like that it's like 98 99 i think and all of a sudden they had all the money for marketing research and the projects i was working on and and those kinds of things and so we did a whole bunch of projects uh sitting behind the the you know two meter watching people trying to learn the rules to play magic from the inserts, and also D&D and board games. And it was a really fascinating study in, like, how humans operate and what they get out of games.

Watching, you know, some people, they open the rule book. We had an intro D&D product we were looking at, and one group of, like, five or six people came in. Guy opens the rule book, had an intro dvd product we were looking at and one group of like five or six people came in guy opens the rule book and he says oh my god this is rule book is 80 pages what's going on here and they hated it next group came in almost the exact same words except they're like oh my god this will be just 80 pages look there's spells and and monsters in here wow this is amazing pages look there's spells and and monsters in here wow this is amazing that's our people which we need to build for the people who enjoy what we have to bring and not try to build for everyone okay so you're doing market research okay how do you get from market research to r&d

uh so i was just designing cards because i was fascinated by it and uh eventually just designed a 300 card set or something like that and uh just walked into the office of bill rose was the head of r&d at the time and said hey i still i still is said, hey, I designed a set. Do you want to publish it? Here it is. And, you know, he was sort of like politely dismissive, like, come on, come on, man. You know, we got stuff to do here. And I was about to, like, turn and walk out of the room with my head down.

But instead, I turned around and I said, hey, tell me why. And I sort of like slapped it on his table and said, I really appreciate it. Give me some feedback. later it came back to me with like all marked up with a red pen like a teacher with his feedback telling me that my commons were too complicated and my you know set didn't hold together and this this was like in uh you know oh one or two or something like that like we the the level of sophistication of the design wasn't as high back then as it is now. And, but it was like, Bill and you and Mike Elliott were sort of like the elite of the design people who understood this knowledge.

And I was getting feedback at the highest level. And so it fueled me and I went and designed another 300 cards and another 300 cards and kept slapping them down on his desk until finally they needed someone for a set. And they're like, okay, well, this guy's relentless. Put them on a set. So what was the set? It was judgment. Judgment. Okay.

Yeah. Yeah. And, and the team was Bill Rose, Richard Garfield, you. Yeah. and me. Like the three highest power in design talent plus me were sitting down for design meetings. And then shortly after that, all three of you got largely pulled onto other projects. And I was left to be the design lead. Although you stayed quite a bit and mentored me quite a bit, but you know, suddenly I found myself as design lead on a magic set with Bill, Richard and Mark.

on a magic set with Bill, Richard and Mark. And I, apparently I was kind of fearless and just plowed through and was churning out ideas. And I kind of had this attitude that like, you know, I may not have the most experience or knowledge, but no one will beat me in amount of creative output. And I just churned out ideas. And I think you did beat me in creative output as you did everyone. But I did pretty well for myself anyway. Okay, so you did Judgment. So what was the next thing you worked on? Say again?

What was the next thing you worked on after Judgment? I got put as lead designer again, and that was Scourge. Yep. What do you remember of Scourge? It didn't get the dragons theme. I mean, the whole block was kind of like the first tribal theme matters set um and scourge was trying to wrap up some of those loose ends and and develop some of the cool things that had been started in in the first uh in the first two sets and ended up with a Matters theme that was kind of shoehorned in late, but ultimately took you with some awesome new stuff in it.

Yeah, one of the interesting things is, when you handed over the design, the dragon theme wasn't really there, right? Yeah, right. yeah right it had a couple of really great dragon cards in it but uh it was more during the the development and tuning phase when it really uh became the theme of the set anything else you remember about scourge i don't know do you have any uh memories of it i'm trying to think i wasn't on i wasn't on scourge i remember it uh it had a weird development because they added in the dragon theme. No, let's move on.

So, okay, you did Scourge. So what was the next set you did? It was on the Mirrodin team. Oh, man, what an awesome set. That was... I remember that one real well. That was you, me and tyler bielman and mike elliott okay we'll talk about talk about being on the mirrodin

what's your memories of mirrodin that was that was uh we knew we were going to do an artifact theme set and we had decided to really go all in on it and we knew a lot more than antiquities was sort of the artifact set that had been done before which was like so early that it was you know didn't really hold together and I remember very well our meetings about how to do equipment. And it was pretty controversial. We went back and forth on a few ones. And I remember you were advocating for a version of equipment early on where you could equip and move it around as an instance during combat. And I was advocating for equip as a sorcery and uh we we finally figured out that it would make combat too complicated to have multiple equipments out

there that could be like bounced around and and you know in order to make it uh play well the cost would have to be pretty high and And so you're a fierce arguer but I remember silently congratulating myself for being on the winning side of that. And eventually you get your way in Darksteel too, right? Well, we ended up making some

they weren't in Darksteel, they were in the final set. Fifth Dawn had a cycle that you could, in instant speed, change them. And one of them was horribly broken, but I just liked the idea of somebody tossing somebody's sword mid-combat. Maybe that was a bad idea. Yeah. No, I remember the discussion was

when the equipment dies, it just drops on the ground, and someone else can pick it up, and somebody was like, yeah, yeah, that's how it works. We went through a lot of different i remember on equipment we went through a whole we knew we wanted to do equipment like that we from day one we wanted to do equipment but we went through a lot of different versions of equipment yeah and there had been like early artifacts that are you know sort of champions or whatever, where you can tap to give a mini giant growth to something

or things like that. And none of them were quite right. They were themed as equipment, but it wasn't a mechanic, and they were all awkward. Okay, so that's equipment. Do you remember anything else from Mirrodin? Affinity or Entwine or Imprint. Oh, Imprint. You and I have a lot to do with Imprint. Do you remember this? Yeah, that's right. Were we arguing over Imprint? No. So

here's the origin of Imprint is I had made a card, basically what ended up being Soul Foundry for a set. And the rules manager was like, what are you doing? This is crazy. And then you made a card in Scourge, I guess. It had the same shtick of pick a card and then you care about the card. And when I saw you made that card, I'm like, I made a card. I'm like, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. Maybe we can make this a mechanic.

And so we did it in Mirrodin. But it was based on you and I had individually made a card that were just completely separate cards. But both of them required you to set a card aside. And it just dawned on me that we could make that a thing. And I thought that was kind of neat for a customizable equipment, you know, customizable artifacts. Oh, yeah.

That's awesome. I had forgotten about that. And, yeah, I remember. And I think we didn't have all that many imprint cards in the set, so we kind of had to fight for them because it was weird rules. Yeah, we didn't have a lot. You know, we didn't get permission to do it, but it turned out I'm really glad we did.

Okay, so after Mirrodinin what was the set you did after mirrodin so uh i was lead on champions of kamigawa which was uh supposed to be sort of like a a theme or world and stories uh matters set and it was the first time since Legends that we really wanted to pack a set with a lot of Legends and it was fun to work on but ended up being really weird. I thought Brady Domymuth did a ton of research on world building and worked with me really well to put the the kami and and all these strange themes together um and we had a spirits matters theme which like you wouldn't normally go there for gameplay but because it was like a an ip a story world themed set. That's where we went with it. And then I was also on

Saviors of Kamigawa 2. And then Mike Elliott was on Betrayers. Yeah, you had two sets in a block. Not a lot of people have done that. Yeah, and it was kind of a strange place because I don't think anyone on the Magic R&D side was really comfortable with, we're just going to go all in and build our mechanics around the themed story characters. And it went through a lot of revisions.

I think Soul Shift got added in late. Yeah, I'm trying to remember. Well, I mean, I know a bunch of Champions of Kamigawa happened in development because I was on the development team. I wasn't on the design team. But Splice and the flip cards,

those were both in development. Those weren't from design. One of the challenges, just so people, I don't know if people know this, Bill Rose, it was Bill Rose's idea to do a top-down set. And we had a lot of arguments about what the top-down set should be. And we ended up choosing Japan. Do you remember the runner-up? Was it Egypt?

Yeah, Egypt was the runner-up. In fact, that very first set that I slapped down on Bill Rose's set was Egypt-themed. Yeah, the one lost Egypt set. The dictum that Bill put at the time was that he wanted to build the world first and do the mechanics

second. So instead of like now when we do a top-down set that are very integrated, like we work with the creative team to make sure that the choices they're making allow us to make interesting mechanical choices. But you got put in a weird thing where the world got built first and then you had to make mechanics.

And one of the challenges is mechanics just are not as flexible as creative and I know that one of the challenges of that it's a great lesson to take away and for a while I sort of felt like I had some regrets because it was not

regarded as a very successful set but on the other hand it was so distinctive and had so much quality and charm, and it's not the kind of thing that we would ever do again for a long time or maybe really capture that kind of flavor ever. So just so you're aware, on my blog, the number one request on my blog by far is people want to go back to Kamigawa.

It is the number one request on my blog. Awesome. Good job. You're request on my blog. Awesome. Good job. You're my people out there. I love you. So, okay, so you did champion saviors. You really kind of, you veered left. I mean, we do that a lot on the third set.

But do you remember the theme of saviors? Yeah, it was hand size matters. Yes, hand size matters, exactly. Yeah, and I was really attracted by the novelty of it and like, let's play in a different way to care about here. You know, here's here's a feature of the game, a number that you don't normally care about at all. Let's really explore the design space there and see what we can do with it. And then I think ultimately, I mean, there was some fun to be had there, but it made you do a thing that you don't normally want to do, which is don't play your spells and your cards, all right, just to save them up.

So it was kind of pulling in two directions. Yeah. It was an experiment that I feel like didn't quite work out. Yeah, one of the things that I think of your designs is you were very committed. You were going to do something, and you were very committed to that thing. As we see as we go along. But you definitely, that's the, when I remember your designs, like you were passionate.

You wanted to do the thing you wanted to do, and would do it and you would fight tooth and nail for that thing yeah my i i kind of naturally uh i i really played a lot of i probably overvalued uh novelty and doing something that's never been done before uh like you remember the bartle scale with you know socializer killer I'm like way way out there on explorer yeah but you love doing things we hadn't done before yeah yeah I get ideas that have never been done before and I want to

prove that it's possible like yeah okay so let's keep going the biggest one in my career is draw triggers which ultimately Yeah. Okay, so let's keep going. The biggest one in my career is Draw Triggers, which ultimately happened. We'll get there, we'll get there. Okay, so we're going to order.

So, okay, after Saviors of Kamigawa, what's your next set? That is going to be Time Spiral. Time Spiral. Okay, let's talk Time Spiral. They gave me another lead after that. Yeah. On a super cool...

I gave you... Oh, my God. Time Spiral is... Once we get into, like, wrapping stuff, now I'm head designer, so I'm the one that gave you Time Spiral. Yeah, thank you. It was the man you were on the set.

Yeah. And Forsythe contributed to it, too. Yeah, yeah. He was on there doing fantastic work as he does. I remember it was his... He was really pushing

for having the time-shifted cards in there. Well, the time-shifted sheet was my idea, but he was the person that we put in charge of it. Yeah, he built out the list. Right. I mean, it was my idea to have the time shifted sheet, but once we knew we were going to do it, we assigned Aaron to be

responsible for it. So Aaron was responsible for the time shifted sheet. Yeah, and it was your framework to do past, present, future. Yeah, yes, yeah. Past, alternate, present. Yep, that was my...

Yeah, so what a fun set to go through and start to collect the best mechanics and keywords from Magic History. And again, that was at a point when we didn't repeat past keywords a lot, right?

Yeah. We'd done a few, but not a lot. Oh, crap. Yeah, we did Storm, man. That's something I should have said from Scourge, right? Oh, yeah, yeah. Storm's your baby. Oh, dude.

Yeah, I should call that out. Okay, talk about making a storm. How did you make Storm? The dubious honor of one of the most broken ever uh again again paying attention to some number that happens in the game that you don't normally pay attention to and you know early on when we were wow now you've got a little mini quest here which is how many spells can i play in one turn and And, of course, when you haven't played with it a whole lot, you're thinking, oh, three or four maybe, right?

Yeah. And so we're kind of designing for that. And then in development, I didn't realize what a big deal it would be to have it be on play trigger instead of on resolution trigger. I

should have gone back and raised a red flag there, but my mind was on to the next thing, I think. But hey, we've got development teams, too. Do you know i have a scale called the storm scale that talks about how likely something is to come back to a standard legal set yeah so yeah where's companions uh okay so we're in time spiral so any other things about time spiral before we move on um Like, yeah, the,

the untact or lands cards. Yeah, the free spell stuff. Yeah. How did that get through? Yeah. Yeah, I mean,

Time's Fire was fun. I mean, if you knew the mechanics, Time's Fire was a blast. It just, if you didn't know the mechanics, it's like, hey,

new player, here's 20 mechanics. It was a little overwhelming. Yeah. Okay, so after Time Spire, what was the next set you did? Let's see. I was on a number of other sets, kind of. So, like, next is Lorewyn Block.

Were you in any of Lorewyn Block? Yeah, yeah. You were in Shadowborn. I was even tied a little bit. I think I did. Yeah. Contribution. Right.

Were you on Shadowborn or just even tied? I think I was just even tied. Even tied. Okay. I did retrace. Yeah. And quite a few cards for that set. Yeah, and you made... What's the white-red guy you made?

The upgrade guy. Oh, yeah. That would inspire a whole mechanic down the road. Yeah. I'm blanking on his name, but the audience knows. Okay, so after Eventide, then what are we getting into? We're getting into Scars of Mirrodin. Not Scars of Mirrodin, sorry, Shards of Lara.

Did you work on any of the Shards of Lara blocks? Yeah, Shards of Lara was broken to... Oh, right, you were on the band team. You led the band. Yeah, I was leading the band team. You extended your baby. I'm not extending, Exalted's your baby. the band team you led the band yeah i was i was leading the band team yeah and uh you extended your baby i'm not extended exalted your baby yeah exalted was the one i was pushing for it was it was pretty clean pretty simple um i was skeptical i didn't like it at first but uh once i played it

i came around but yeah that that was a great example of uh of something where once people played it they were like, alright, this plays well, and it gained a lot of support. Okay, so after that, did you work anything else on Shards of Alara Block? Yeah, I was on the Alara Reborn team.

You were on the Alara Reborn team. Okay. Aaron led that, right? I'm pretty sure Aaron led that. I'm almost positive Aaron led that. I'm almost positive Aaron led that. Yeah, yeah, you're right. Okay, so after that, we get into Scars of Mirrodin. Did you do any of the Scars of Mirrodin block? No, I don't think I was.

Okay. I was on Magic 2010. Oh, okay. Magic 2010. What? Magic 2010. Magic 2010. What? Magic 2010. Magic 2010? Yeah, M10.

Yeah, that was kind of a watershed base set too. Yeah, yeah, definitely. We really re-envisioned what base sets were going to be and kind of went back to Magic's roots and started reprinting standalone set keywords. Yeah, yeah. No, that was a big set. Yeah.

I was on that too. Mm-hmm. Okay, so after Magic 2010, then we get to Zendikar Block. Mm-hmm. Did you work on the early part of the Zendikar block? I did the first plane chase in between there too oh yeah, you did the first plane chase first plane chase, yeah that was when we were starting

to do these kind of side dish sets I don't know what you want to call them but they're more of a regular thing and we were experimenting with different ones. Yeah, there's a lot of plane chase fans out there. We've made two plane chases so far. There's a lot of call for a third one, so

maybe one day. Yeah, and I was the one who came up with the roll-a-die idea. The plane or die? That was yours? That's cool. Every card has The Planar Die. That was yours? Mm-hmm. Oh, that's cool. Every card have both a trigger and an ongoing effect.

Oh, that's cool. Okay, so in Zendikar, I know that you led the last set, but were you involved in Zendikar or Worldwake? No, I wasn't on the design teams there, although I was playt testing and so contributing cards here and there let's talk rise of the odrazi because that i know that's your baby oh my god i love that set so much it was fantastic so let's talk about what happened there how'd that come to be so so we started we knew that we were going to have this theme of giant monsters that rise up and try to destroy the planet.

And I believe it was Ken Nagel who was telling the stories about how he used to play StarCraft. And him and all his friends would just sit back and turtle up and then build battlecruers and make all the battle cruisers smash together in the middle of the map and so from that uh came the the phrase battle cruiser magic and we said okay this is going to be a new way to play magic again the novelty right yeah we're going to allow people to turtle up and put out some huge stuff and smash them together. And it had never really been reasonable, like in Draft or Seal, to be putting out 8-8s and having them battle in the middle of the board. And when it happened in playtest, like the first time we had the set all put together and people were dropping 8-8 commons and then smashing them together,

it was like I was cheering. People on the design team were like, yes, battle cruisers are happening. And we made sure that there were multiple routes to make it happen, right? Yeah, there was level up and there was – Level up and you had sort of like an aura theme to it so you could get like the little Voltron guys that would build up to be able to take on an 8a and then you would just get eldrazi's that would uh drop on the board and like normally you're not playing eight eight drops in in most limited environments but like you've got a little

little spawn that you can sacrifice to get extra mana and we had a whole bunch of extra uh you know man mana boosting and and uh really a lot of it was about the commons we had a lot of one threes and two fours and things like that that would just stop the the early combat from happening but then those little guys crumble when the big boys come out so and yeah it took a while to make it all work well but oh i was i was so happy that it worked so well. And then the Titans just really caught people's imagination, too. I was so happy with that. Okay, so then, actually, I realized I got things out of order.

Then was Scars of Mirrodin Block, but you weren't involved in that. But following that was Innistrad Block, which I know you were involved in. I don't think you did Innistrad or Dark Ascension, right? Right. Abyssinian Destroyored was your baby. Yeah, they were giving me third sets. Yeah, that was your specialty.

Yeah. Absinthe Restored was also super fun to work with. That was Soulbond. Again, that was another mechanic that people were sort of skeptical of but then they played it and uh it caught on quite a bit in within the development team but the big one was miracles and for years i don't know on other sets I had been trying to get through some kind of

something happens when you draw this card and there were all kinds of rules problems with it there were all kinds of objections Do you know Tempest tried it? Do we wear that? Oh yeah, you told me that We tried in Tempest and i can't work we gave up

on it you you told me you know brian you're you're you're gonna have a tough battle here if you if you keep fighting this but uh you didn't give up advice and uh and miracles ended up being um sort on the edge, you know, and some of the objections that the development team had ended up being true. Like, you know, if you draw this and don't show it first and put it in your hand, there's going to be a dispute and it's going to be trouble. Yeah. Should I talk about the power-up mechanic? Power-up your deck mechanic?

Sure, sure. That was from... Didn't happen? Yeah. I don't think it's actually ever going to get used. Okay, but what was the power-up mechanic? So this is a mechanic that says you have cards that sit outside your game. Oh, yeah, we called it the forbidden mechanic.

Yeah, forbidden. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, forbidden cards. You may not put this card in your deck. And then other cards would say that when you play this, shuffle a forbidden card of, you know, such and such characteristic, shuffle it into your deck. So as the game goes on,

now you've got... And there are crazy cards. The Forbidden Cards were crazy cards. Yeah, right. Stuff that would never be printable. Right. You used to joke, like, it's double lightning bolts.

R, do six. These are crazy things that you never could actually make. Yeah. And the thing that I loved about that was, like, once your deck gets powered up like oh every drill much more exciting you're just like come on come on i want this and

and miracle sort of did that too so i was happy that miracle ultimately played that role but of course forbidden uh ended up being forbidden yeah you know and and just in playtesting we had terrible trouble with it because of course you forget that those cards in your deck and you don't take them out and you're going to get dq'd and uh it's just a it's a nightmare it it might work in like uh online magic or something like that yeah yeah it might. Automatically, but man. That was a brick wall. So, Advent of the Shored, was that your last set? Yeah, that was

my last set. That was your last set. So, like I said, I'm almost to work here, so we managed to get through your whole set. I had, like, a dozen other CCG sets on Duel Masters too. You know what I did point out? Duel Masters was kind of a testing ground for us to do crazy stuff.

That was the first place where we did double-sided cards and melt cards that were considered way too crazy and then eventually did find their way into magic sets. Yeah. No, no, no. So, I mean, obviously, I'm talking about magic. You did a lot of other stuff, too, Jess, but this is a magic podcast.

We talk magic. Yeah, okay. So is there anything, I'm almost to my den. Is there anything else you want to say? Anything to wrap up your time on magic when you think back to your magic days? Man, so I probably left in 2011 or something like that. And man, do I miss it.

It was great. I was there for 10 years. And it was fun just about every single day. The best thing about it was working with a bunch of people who were so interested and excited and just energized to be there and be doing what they're doing every day and, and coming up with new ideas. You know, I talked about how I love novelty and it was always new, always interesting. So I really, I look fondly on my, on my time there. Yeah. No privilege. We miss you. It was I, I liked having you around. So yeah.

Yeah. I got to be the. I got to be the boss of Ken Nagel and a few other magic designers and help them succeed the way you mentored me and you helped me succeed early on too.

Ken's now a veteran, so he won't feel old. Yeah. I want to say I really appreciate the mentorship you gave me and a lot of the opportunities I got were because you advocated for me and helped me live up to my potential.

I was glad to hear it. You were a fun and passionate designer. But anyway, I'm approaching my den, it looks like. So we got to wrap this up. 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 thank you, Brian, for joining us. Thanks, everyone. Thanks to all the fans out there. I love you. Okay, and I'll see you guys all next time. Bye-bye.