Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #748: Blake Rasmussen

Episode Date: June 12, 2020

In this podcast, I talk with Blake Rasmussen, one of the people in charge of communications for Magic.

I'm not pulling out of my car. We all know what that means. This is another Drive Your Work Coronavirus Edition. So I've been interviewing people from all across Magic. So today I have Blake. So Blake, introduce yourself. Yeah, my name is Blake Rasmussen. Technically my job title is Senior Communications Manager. But a lot of people know me as the guy who runs daily mtg and also does our weekly stream weekly mtg okay so uh the question i've been

asking a lot of people is how did you start playing magic i started playing magic when i was 13 or 14 so i'm 37 now for context well what set was it just first that people have an idea of yeah ice age ice age was my uh first set 94 i was yeah i was uh in our junior high cafeteria and my friend matt uh was sitting with myself and our other friend brian and he had these ice age starter decks and he's like you guys want these and he sold them to us uh because he wasn't that good a friend and uh we we bought them we started shuffling them up and learning how to play poorly at first uh but kind of the three of us played a bunch and then uh brian and i especially played a lot together and it kind of went from there what was the bet you remember the best thing you had in your opening deck your first deck oh man um my the two cards

that stand out in my memory and i don't remember the whole thing so it's entirely possible like i had a necropod and sitting in there that i ignored um but i definitely owned a pirate ship and a um keldrin frost beast the frost beast was like the gold version of thicket basilisk and pirate ship just gave things minus one minus one yeah And yeah, those two formed the basis of the two decks I eventually put together with all the cards I owned. I think one was black, blue, and one was white, green, red. Okay, so you started playing Ice Age in junior high in 1994. How do you go from there to working at Wizards? What's that story?

Oh, man. Well, I kept playing for a very long time. I took a break around Urza's block and then came back during Legions. Yeah. And then kept playing after Legions. And so I was in college around that time.

And when I was in college, I went to a small liberal arts school in the middle of Iowa. And I started playing magic again pretty regularly. And there was a pretty good Iowa crew there. And I also was kind of pursuing journalism at the time. So I was the sports editor on the newspaper at the school. I wrote for a local paper. So I was doing a lot of writing. And one day I'm playing a tournament,

and this is during Champions of Kamigawa era. And I sit down and I'm playing against a guy named Bill Stark, who a lot of people are going to recognize. And we just start chatting. And Bill's like, oh, yeah. And this was I think this was the summer maybe after I graduated from college. And I stuck around the same area because I went to grad school down there. But yeah, we're just chatting. And he's like, yeah, you know, I go to Cornell College. I was like, oh, I went to Cornell College. We never ran into each other. He's like, yeah, well, you know, I, you know, do these things. And one of them is the I'm the sports editor for the newspaper. I was like, oh, I was the sports editor for the newspaper.

And so the more we talked, the more we found out we had in common. And at that time, Bill was on the coverage team for Grand prix writing and um also had his own website the starkingtonpost.com which i will never let him forget about and he kind of he was like oh you know if you're into journalism and writing uh let me introduce you to greg collins who who still works at wizards of the coast and bill actually works at wizards of the Coast, and Bill actually works at Wizards of the Coast too. So he introduced me to Greg. I sent Greg some writing samples, and I started doing like one or two Grand Prix a year. Not a ton at the time, but I was getting acclimated, and I did a couple Grand Prixs, did some coverage, tried me out,

and then I kind of became part of the regular grand prix and pro tour at the time coverage crew kept doing that and then um one day this spot opened up to run daily mtg and due to my background in journalism and marketing and writing um it was kind of a perfect fit and i almost didn't take the job uh because of a girl uh but one day um so i turned down the job and then one weekend i was talking to my then boss trick jared and i was just talking about something about daily mG and he jokes, you know, I does this mean that you're interested in the job? And by this time, the lady and I had had parted ways. And I said, well, what if I am? And he wrote back within 30 seconds and he's like, if you are, don't mess with me.

Tell me right now. I need to know. And I said, yeah, I'm still interested. I flew out, I think that wednesday interviewed for the job and was hired by the next week and six years later here i am okay so let's talk a little bit about sort of daily what you do so the audience i want to do one of the big things i'm trying to do is um demonstrate to everybody the vastness of magic how many different people work on magic and how many different things there are to do. So what is it? What's your daily day in the life for you? You know, one of the cool things about my job is that my days are never really the same. So as I've been here at Wizards for six years, my job has expanded from this narrow focus of I do daily MTG and

that's what I do to I'm kind of the traffic cop for our communications so I'll write a lot of things still but I will also be the one who manages the calendar and talks about how we should communicate something, when we should communicate, what we should communicate, where we should communicate. And I work with a lot of different teams. I'm one of the people who touches literally every team in the building. And so on any given day, it's filled with a lot of touch bases with different teams, different communications people. I work a lot with the social team. I work with a lot with the marketing team. I talk to people in the tabletop team probably more than just about anyone. And so I spend a lot of my time talking and meeting with people and finding out what they've got coming up,

how we can support them, that sort of deal. And then we spend some amount of every day writing something. Before we got on this call, I was writing another upcoming piece. And then I do still have my hand on the wheel of daily MTG. So, uh, I look at all the content that we put up there. Um, I still update the webpage every morning. My, my son wakes up early enough that I get up in plenty of time to do that. Uh, and then, um, yeah, once a week I do a stream and that day is a little bit different because I spend the whole afternoon, uh, talking to people and, and, and telling everybody about magic stuff. And yeah, so every day is a little bit different.

Kind of depends on what's going on and what we're announcing and what we're not announcing. So a couple of things. Uh, so I'll talk a little bit about how you and I interact. So once a week, you have a meeting where you just say, here for the next, I don't know, four or five weeks, here's everything that's going to happen. We're going to announce this on this day. We're going to announce that on that day. This comes out on this day.

And it's just a calendar of, like, everything that's happening. And it's a lot. We have a lot of things going on. And I always go to that meeting because, okay, what's happening? and it's a lot. We have a lot of things going on. And it's important. I always go to the meeting because, okay, what's happening? What's going on? Obviously, I face with the public a lot, so I like to know we're going to announce stuff.

Yep. And then another thing that you and I do is when it's time to do previews, you're in charge of previews. Do you want to talk a little bit about doing previews? Yeah. Previews are both fun and exhausting. The way we've done previews has changed a lot over the years. But again, I kind of keep that...

My role with previews is a lot like my role with communications where I'm sort of the master of ceremonies. And we have different uh individuals who are responsible for giving out different previews so basically what I'll do is I will um spend a good amount of time talking with uh the people in Studio X who work on any given set the the architect the the leads um the the art directors and just trying to get a sense of what they think and believe is important in the set and then using that to kind of dole out and divvy up previews by like so i'll give a a bundle of cards to the eu i'll give a bundle of cards to our team that interacts with our streamers. I'll give a bundle of cards to the community. So traditional websites like Star City Games, that sort of stuff. And then I kind of make sure that all those various trains don't run into each other. And

I get to manage my own little group of previews and and send them out figure out where they go um but it's just this kind of sprawling thing that uh gets updated constantly as as previews shift and so uh my job there is to communicate that throughout the team and make sure that the public knows what's coming and make sure that previews adequately give the public a sense of what a set is so it's it's juggling a lot of things but it's also it's one of my favorite things because preview season before i started working it was just the coast was it's you know it's christmas that came several times a year and so it's always fun to be part of that so let's give a little sense of scope so So Core 2021 is coming out.

How many different previews are there in a normal Premiere set? Core 20... You know, I've got the preview plan up actually right now. I was like, how many... I did give people like a sense. How many different cards get previewed? So it's going to be different

based on the set. So a core set like this one, there are roughly 200 individual cards that are being previewed now it's not 200 different outlets some outlets get you know more than one if there's a cycle or commons that go together or something like that but yeah 200 individual cards for m21 and i would say for most sets that's on the low end uh And then Jumpstart is another layer on top of that. Yes. Well, that's its own set.

Yeah. So one of the things that, like, so basically what's going on is there's just a lot of information. And there's a lot of things that we as the company need to let the consumer know. And there's lots of different parts of the company. company need to let the consumer know. And there's lots of different parts of the company. It's not as if, one of the things I think people, people tend to think of wizards as one entity sometimes from the outside. But when you're inside, there's many, many entities inside.

And when we talk about messaging, well, okay, this group cares about these products and this group cares about this event and this group cares about, you know, whatever. And I know a lot of your job is wrangling just giant volumes of information. Yeah, I mean, it's making sure, like I said, that the cars don't crash into each other. They're, you know, if we just let everybody announce things when they wanted to or needed to or whatever, we'd have we'd have two major announcements on the same day and maybe one would get lost or maybe their proximity would confuse people that they're related in some way. Maybe their proximity would confuse people that they're related in some way.

Or maybe we've just got this awesome thing we want to do, but it gets overshadowed by this other thing that's not related at all. And we want to just give those things time to breathe. And then on the other side, there's only so much that people and fans can digest at any one given time. people and fans can digest at any one given time. And so we need to make sure to spread things out so we're not having some sort of communications pile up all on the same day. So it's a lot of figuring that out. Okay, so now another aspect of your job that we haven't talked about yet. So right now we've talked about we have information and we want to give it out. But another aspect of your job is monitoring the community. And sometimes our messaging isn't proactive. It's reactive, right?

Something's happening and we need to react to it. So do you want to talk a little bit about reactive sort of communications? Yeah. So we have a couple avenues for reactive communications. If it's something major in reactive, we'll often do it on the website where we'll write a full article and try to spread it wide. A lot of times though, our reactive messaging is through social. And so our community managers do a lot of that work. And I work with them to kind of make sure that our reactive messaging

is consistent so that we don't say one thing on the left hand and a different thing on the right hand. The community team does a lot. We work really closely together and we have stand-ups several days a week and they'll say, hey, this thing's really bubbling up. I think we need to say a thing. Does this work? And I'll be like, yeah, that works. Say it. Or maybe I'll say, you know, that doesn't quite work because this other thing that you might not be aware of or we're about to say this and that kind of says something different. And so it's not quite true. And so a lot of it is, again, information wrangling there and just working closely with, you know, when we're talking about the different teams that I work with,

that includes our communications-focused teams like the community team. What, explain the community, for the audience, what is the community team? What do they do exactly? Yeah, the community team, they wear a number of hats. They are technically in our marketing department, but they do a lot of our communication stuff so there are there are real people between our behind our social media accounts and so they do a lot of interacting with fans they are um they are our finger on the pulse of the community so not only do they do interactions but they create reports that let us know you know this thing was received very

negatively this thing was received very positively uh we need to watch out for this um this thing bubbled up over the weekend so what the the literal first meeting i have every week monday morning is just a sync with everybody on the community team or related to the community team and the first question i ask is just what happened over the weekend. You know, a lot of times if there's tournaments or events or just chatter and they say, hey, this thing happened, this thing happened, this thing happened. I think we need to address this. I think we don't need to address this. So, yeah, they are our finger on the pulse of the community and often our mouthpieces as well. So is there any we've covered a bunch of your job. on the pulse of the community and often our mouthpieces as well. Um,

so is there any, I, I, we've covered a bunch of your job. Is there any aspect we haven't really hit yet? Anything that you do that, like, this is also a thing I do that we haven't talked about.

Uh, I mentioned the streaming. So we do the weekly MTG stream. Um, that is one of the more fun parts of my job i actually really enjoy that um and when tell people from people that might not know when is when is that if they want to see that stream when when can they see it it is on thursdays on twitch.tv slash magic and runs starting at now 2 30 p.m it used to be p.m., but that interfered with my kids' nap when we started working from home.

So it's now 2.30 p.m. Runs about an hour usually. You can also catch it on YouTube afterwards, and we also upload it as a podcast. The podcast is kind of hit or miss because sometimes, because it is a stream, the visual part matters. But we try to make it podcast-. So yeah, that's on, that's on Thursdays. I host that alongside Steve Sunu. Uh, and you know, my job there

isn't just hosting it. I, I guess I do what you would call, um, uh, producer roles kind of confusing cause we have an actual like producer of the stream, but you i invite the guests i set uh again the calendar um i'll create the content lineup and the show rundown for each show um so i i'm the i guess director booker producer all kinds of things for that one so it's uh one of the things I find interesting is, because I went to school for communication, so ironically, a lot of what I studied parallels a lot of what you studied. And one of the things that I always find fascinating about magic is that there's so many different audiences that care about so many different things, and we produce so many different products, so many different audiences that care about so many different things. And we produce so many different products that the,

the noise there's just so much going on any one time that just sort of, I, I, I do not envy your job and it's a very hard job. Yeah. It's, you know, it can be hard sometimes.

I, the, the mantra I always say to myself and I, and I fully believe this is that uh you know when you're when you're wading through angry posts or uh people calling you names or whatever that it all comes from um a place of passion they're they're passionate about magic and you can't really have anger without passion and the day magic is in trouble is the day people lose that passion so i don't take the anger or the shots or anything personally even when they are personally directed i just i acknowledge that it's coming from a place of

love and passion for the game and that's a good thing and then all it is is is figuring out what do we do with it from there what lessons do we take away from it that sort of thing so uh i don't mind that part of my job most of the time most of the time though sometimes it can wear on you but um yeah we all love magic it's funny i mean i uh i'm in the same boat in that uh when the audience decides to be upset i i get a lot of the anger directed at me but i agree that my my i have a similar mentor to you which is always what is someone trying to say that beneath beneath anger, beneath whatever, there's a point they're trying to make. They care, right?

They're passionate. What are they trying to say? What is the message they're trying to say? Maybe they're not saying it in the nicest way possible, but underlying any one message, there's something they're trying to point out. Maybe they don't like something. Maybe there's something we did that we could do differently next time. They don't like something. Maybe there's something we did that we could do differently next time.

You know, there's a lot of... One of the things about communications that I find is that there's a lot of valuable information out there because the audience does a good job of understanding what they like and don't like. They're the audience. And the players want to communicate. And that a lot of good comes from, hey, we do something, we get responses from people,

and that can change how we do it the next time. So I do enjoy the communication with the public. I agree with you. There's times it can get a bit hairy. Well, I mean, you know, some of my favorite interactions I have with fans is when they start off hostile, and I start interacting with them and they start seeing me as a person. And even if they end up disagreeing, it comes away as a good conversation where like more understanding is fostered. And I think, you know, even when those start off angry, I enjoy how those go,

because they usually end respectfully, even if we don't necessarily see eye to eye. So I enjoy that sort of stuff. Um, so how much, how much magic playing do you get to do on the job? How much magic playing do you get to do on the job? Less than I used to. I, you know, we used to, I mean, obviously now working from home, it's, it's changed quite a bit. We used to have like Friday drafts and I used to be able to participate in our sealed leagues and stuff like that. When I started and my, my focus was just on daily mtg my time was much easier to manage and like play in

the various leagues we had at work and so i got to play quite a bit more at work you know commander leagues that sort of thing um as as my responsibilities grew and i as i had more meetings and as i you know became a father and and that and couldn't you know stay after work uh necessarily to to play in a league it became less and less I still play a good deal of arena right now it's how I spend a lot of my lunch breaks um and I'll even grab some games if I have a little bit of time before a meeting and it's not enough time to actually start and finish a task. So I play enough magic. Enough, yeah.

Yeah, it's funny. Since we're working from home, most of my job has been pretty easy. The face-to-face meetings and stuff and design is easy. It's the play testing that's definitely proving challenging. Yep. I would imagine that, uh, being in person just makes things a lot easier to sit down and play magic. Yep. Yeah. One of the things I've tried to do is, um, do I've tried to at least try out a lot of the ways people are connecting online.

Um, you know, because a lot of part of my job too, is communicating to people, Hey, you have this option. If you want to keep playing magic, here's an option. So I've been trying out a lot of different ways. I, I use discord, um, to play a couple of different formats. Uh, I've done commander online. Uh, I'm probably going to do Command Fest Online. I got a camera set up, obviously, because we're streaming.

So I've gotten to play a good bit of Magic literally for my job, which is kind of the greatest thing. Okay, so we don't have too much time left here, but I'm trying to see if we've talked about a lot of the communication stuff. We talked about the preview planning. We talked about you doing the live shows

and things. Anything we're not hitting? Anything left? Any major part we haven't hit yet? Hmm. Um. Not major. I mean, there's always things here and there that because I have the kind of 360 view of the company, I end up getting involved with. That's just, hey, did you know this group is doing this? And that might be a great thing to synergize with what you guys are doing and so i do a lot of

random stuff and get involved with a lot of random projects that aren't necessarily communications projects just because um you know i'm the first one to see that x is happening over here and y is happening over here which is really cool um and because i'm a long- term player and I've been involved in the competitive scene and both in coverage and as a player, I often get invited to things Studio X is doing and discussing just because they know that what I'm saying is coming from the vantage point of kind of, What I'm saying is coming from the vantage point of kind of, I'd say, a medium player who who is nonetheless very interested in being good at the game and enjoying the game at a semi competitive level. So that's really cool that I get to be involved in some of that stuff that isn't necessarily part of my job description. part of my job description but wizards has this and especially studio x has this really cool way that you know you draw in other people just because you know they love magic and and have some affinity for some part of the game which is awesome one of the things that we try to do in in r&d slash studio x is um one of the resources we have is all these other people

that really love magic that are in the building not that I'm in the building but normally in the building and that's a resource that we do play tests and do rare polls and all sorts of stuff to try to make use of these people

because we do the product and we see it every day sometimes it's hard to step back and really evaluate it because you're just too in it. And it's nice to have other people in the company that we can say, hey, take a look at this. What do you think of this? And that is always cool. Yeah, I enjoy that. Another thing about your job that you sort of mentioned, but let me highlight here, is that you produce a lot of material.

Like, for example, a lot of times i will get uh like faqs i'm not sure how many times you write them but you're definitely the one who distributes them um something's coming up here are the questions here are the answers to the questions that you might get um there's a lot of prep that goes prior to communication that if we're going to say something and we think the audience might respond uh we want to prepare, especially what we call the talkers. I'm one of the people that talks with the audience. And make sure that the people

that are communicating have the information. So if someone asks me a question, I can go, oh, here's the answer to that question. And there's a lot of communication is producing materials so that people have things that so we know and we can see things like i said you put our schedules um there's a lot of paperwork i don't know if people realize like the amount of paperwork that comes along oh yeah i have i have spreadsheets for days open on my laptop and word documents and it's, keeping people on the same page is not one page.

It's a lot of pages. Yeah, and it's, I know, I'm always texting you to ask you questions. Like, is this true? Can I say this? Can I say that? Uh-huh, especially when you're writing preview articles. Like today.

Like today, yes. Yeah. Yeah, because I'm writing my, pretty like i'll write my preview article but i um i don't know exactly when i write a preview article what is known and what's not known and so i'm bugging blake all the time saying okay when i read this article do they know this or do they know that uh just because it matters how i write the article whether or not the audience knows something. And so, um, that gave, it's like today I,

I bugged Blake and it's essentially, so. Yep. Fridays. Fridays. Yes. Fridays. Friday's my writing day.

So, but I don't, I'm not writing previews every day. So it's previews where I tend to bug you when I'm writing, when I'm writing random design article, I don't have to bug you so much. I don't have any information on that. That's not my area.

Um, anyway, uh, we are, uh, coming to my desk, as they say. So, do you have any final thoughts? Any final things you'd like to say to the audience before we wrap up?

You know, my thing right now is that, you know, we're all stuck at home and this COVID thing is not going to end anytime soon. And it's wearing thin on a lot of people and you know we talked earlier about uh how hard it can be to to deal with you know angry people on the internet but i i just want to encourage people to be good to each other

and this isn't for for me or for mark where you know we we have chosen to to interact with people in an angry way. But, you know, other people, we're all having a hard time right now. And my mantra is just kind of, you know, be good to each other. Be good to each other where you can and spread goodness and enjoy, which sounds a little trite. But, you know, do it because we the world's in a tough spot right now, and we don't need any more negativity on top of just what the world has presented to us anyway. So, yeah, be good to each other. Okay. Well, I am now approaching my desk, as they say.

So that means this is 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 Blake as my special guest so thank you Blake thank you Mark and guys I will see you all next time

bye bye