Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #758: Doug Beyer

Episode Date: July 17, 2020

Doug just celebrated his 20th year at Wizards, so I had him on the podcast to talk all about his work on the Creative team.

I'm not pulling out of the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the Drive to Work Coronavirus Edition. Okay, I've been doing fun interviews and that doesn't stop. So today I have Doug Beyer. Ooh, hello. Okay, so Doug, I'll ask you the question I ask everybody. How did you start playing Magic? I started playing Magic in 1994 with about the time of Fallen Empires. And how did you first see it? Some friends of mine introduced me to it. We

got together when we were all in college. It was actually Mark Purvis, who was a friend of mine from childhood, who introduced me to Magic. And now we work together on Magic in the building of wizards of the coast so that's a kind of a crazy crazy origin story there okay so you start how long did you play

magic before like before like when did you start working for wizards for when you play magic yeah so i joined wizards in 2000 so it was around the time of invasion coming out in the real world and uh and i had been playing since you know six years before that or whatever not quite the continuously yeah continuously i was basically a fan all the way through that and um my first job at wizards was working as a web developer i wrote code um and worked on html on the website and uh but i kept kind of trying to angle my career toward magic as much as i could now i i wrote the first iteration of gatherer the uh card database um and then when uh there was an opportunity to write flavor text from outside rnd to just like pitch in suggestions

for flavor text for cards and so some of my first flavor text was in Odyssey around 2001. Then there was an opening in the creative team on R&D. I applied for that and got it. That was about 2006, around the time of the very end of Time Spiral Block, Planet of Chaos and Future Sight into Lower Wind Block. Yeah, so this is the first interaction.

I mean, you and I interacted before this point, but when I first got made head designer, they put me in charge of the creative team for, I think, for two years. And I was responsible for hiring two people into the creative team. The first was Matt Cavada, who then left and made a slot,

which I hired you onto the team. So that was my... You're one of my two hires ever, so. Yeah, I was very happy to take Matt's slot, and then Matt came back to Wizards of the Coast not that long afterwards. Yeah. So he still got to be around. Yeah, although he's, although I guess he just, anyway, he's been bouncing around in a lot of places in the company. He's been on the show a whole bunch of times, so the long-time listeners know Matt.

Okay, so you got on the creative team you said around time spiral yeah so what what's the first set that you actively worked on from a creative sense so planner chaos was just about pencils down by that time matt cavada was sort of training me as i was i was coming onto the team and he was just about done with with creative text for planner chaos so it was future site that was really my first outing in fact like as i remember the the first assignment the first big thing i had to do in the job was like name 50 new keyword mechanics it was like you know some of them i still proud of to this day some of them i'm like i could have probably done something better than fate seal i don't know um but uh that was one of the first crazy challenges was like hey future site is gonna work on there's a lot of things to name there's a lot

of cards that are like riffs on other cards or you know new spins on things we might try someday that was really fun set yeah that's a complicated set for your first set yeah it's kind of a you know right into the the deep end there okay so you do future site now the next block is lorwyn block correct yeah that's right um so is that your first time sort of uh well you've worked on future site so what was your relationship with lorwyn block uh lorwyn was the first time that i was doing real world building writing so i was able to be in early enough that i got to pitch in to the material that went into that world guide. So that was really fun. And later on, and I was on the development team for Lorwyn, and got to see sort of the connection between the cards that were being developed, like the gameplay was being developed, and also how the flavor was going to match up with that.

And then the last set of that block, Eventide, was the first time that I wrote art descriptions for Magic Cards. So that was my first big outing there. Yeah, you have a distinct, or not distinction, but something that you've been on a lot of design and development teams over the years. I mean, more so than the average, I mean, there's some creative team people that have been on some, obviously, but you've done more so than most.

Yeah, my happy place is kind of straddling the gap like being that bridge between hey what is the gameplay going to be about and then what is the creative and the the art and the world building and the the names and flavor and the characters and the story i want all those to make sense with each other and uh so I've always enjoyed bouncing back and forth across that line between mechanics and flavor. So, okay, so I'm going to jump ahead a little bit because this is another interaction you and I had that seems to be a great example of you sort of straddling this line.

So I had pitched this idea of a land set to R&D and it took years to come to fruition, because no one really had any faith in it. They finally let me do it, and you were one of the people that I put on the design team, partly because we had to creatively figure out what the world was.

My idea of a world based on land does not inherently mean there's any creativeness to it. So we spent like two months. What happened was Bill gave me two or three months and if we didn't have something good enough, he was going to make a switch to something else. And so we spent all that time working on

land mechanics and trying to figure out how to make land work. And then you came up with a really good idea, so let's talk about that. Well, yeah, so I mean, it turned out that focusing the mechanics of Zendikar on lands was great. It's just that that wasn't a great pitch. It wasn't a good communication.

And it needed to be married with a creative conceit to really sing. And so we got talking about it, and we talked like, lands are cool. They're obviously powerful parts of the game. But what is land in this setting well maybe what what if the lands are like the destinations what if this place is about exploration and we got on this adventure world idea that was like it's a world where people are always exploring heading off to destinations like lands are the cool thing about this world mechanically so we have to make it the cool thing in terms of the setting so we like we

focused on this kind of indiana jones sense of like rushing out of the world discovering these cool destinations and that adventure world pitch kind of brought it together for um for the identity of zendikar yeah and then it was fun because on the back end then we started designing things to match um that's one of the things i don't know if people really understand is the give and take. Maybe you could talk. I've talked about it from my end. You're going to talk about the give and take between design and creative.

Yeah, absolutely. I'm sure you've gotten the question many times, and so have I, which is like, which comes first, mechanics or flavor? And it's like, to some degree, there usually is one seed idea that's either creative or or gameplay but there's always back and forth throughout the process where like uh design has an idea that's sort of like we

want to focus on lands that you know we noodle on that and the creative side and then we flesh that out more and then they got to bounce back to to designing cards and yeah the quests obviously came out of of the idea of being adventure world that wasn't part of the land world pitch um that came out of that interaction and so just about every world that we do starts with an idea that's either creative or gameplay it almost doesn't matter which which side it comes from because there's always this interaction this back and forth where like okay we see what you're messing with on that side we could do this cool thing with this on our side and and back and forth um i mean that happens just about every

world yeah the right there's a lot of give and take and i don't think the average person really like i think people think like it's just one thing more so than it evolves over time and then each side kind of influence things and zenica's a great example where I was very... I really, really wanted land to matter, but once you guys came to the adventure world, we then made what I called the map traps and chaps, which was quests and traps

and the allies. And all that came out of adventure world. None of that was land. All that came out of adventure world. Okay, so... So so not only so let's walk a little bit about the things you do right so um we talked you mentioned that you do names and not just names of cards but names of anything right mechanics yeah talk let's talk a little about naming what what what is the art of naming things um So my first job on the creative team was overseeing creative text.

That's just what we call names and flavor text. There's always a person for each set that is kind of the coordinator or overseer of all the submissions. So we have freelance writers that send in ideas for uh possible names and pieces of flavor text for every card and then there's that one person who goes through all those submissions um chooses them cleans them up creates new ones if there's not one that's really capturing it um and naming is wild naming is like a name is a magic cards unique identifier so um every year we make you know and new cards hundreds or thousands of new cards and that's that many more names that you can't use anymore

um so there's this uh it's it's a interesting challenge you're always looking to um capture like for a keyword or something for keyword mechanic, you're looking to capture what's cool about that setting, what you're trying to get across in terms of the theme of that set, but also leave room for the future. If we want to use that mechanic again, maybe it needs to be generic enough that we can see it in a different context. Yeah, like back when I wrote Savor the Flavor, I haven't done a weekly column as long as you have, because nobody has, but for about four years, I wrote a weekly column just about Magic Flavor, and tons of the columns were just about names. All the different things, like

rules of thumb about what would make a name not work out for a Magic card. You can't violate what the creature type is. You can't imply a mechanic that it doesn't have that sounds like it does. You don't want to mistake the card type, confuse the, you know, names are a huge part of not just the flavor of a card, but how it's used in gameplay. People use these tags to play the game with each other.

And so, yeah, we think about naming tons. Okay, so the next thing you do is what we call card concepting. So talk about that a little bit. Yeah, so what we call card concepting is really coming up with the art description or the art brief, which is a set of instructions that go to one of our freelance artists, and they use those instructions to generate the illustration that becomes the art of the card

and KartCon is a great example of being that bridge between flavor and mechanics so you have to know enough about magic in order to look at a card that has no flavor characteristics yet at all and go like, oh I get that this one dub 2-2 with

activated flying, I get how this one dub, two, two with activated flying, I get how that plays in the game. I see what it's trying to do. I see how it might behave during gameplay. And then it's an imagination step. You're trying to unify that set of characteristics with something that represents that thing in flavor terms. And then we take that idea

and turn that into a list of instructions. The artists, I mean, many people assume that all the artists play magic. Most of them do not. And they never see, usually, what the card does, what its stats are. That is not what their expertise is. They only see that art description.

So it's very important that we get everything in there that they need in order to succeed that is not what their expertise is. They only see that art description. So it's very important that we get everything in there that they need in order to succeed at generating an awesome piece of art. And then we get that art in the building that goes together with the card. And now we've done that unification. Yeah, one of the things that we joke about when we make cards sometimes is like,

we know they have to get concepted down the road, like, I have no idea how to concept this! Sometimes we make very neat cards, they play really well, but they're just... You know, a great example is when it destroys one of two things, and those two things have nothing, you know... And, like, destroy a flying

creature or enchantment, you know, what does that mean? Okay, we only get one piece of art so um yeah i remember there was like i think it was like way back in lore when there was a creature that had like basically island home or island walk and flying so this is a thing that's sort of like okay it can hover through the air and yet it it can swim through like it can hit you in the water place or something yeah there's always challenges like that where it can hit you in the water place or something. Yeah. There's always challenges like that where it's like,

where are the people who have to, if the card is doing what design wants it to do, and they're the experts on whether it's fun and doing the right thing or not. We, we have the job of making that make some kind of sense in the, in the story of the game. Yeah. The other problem child they know is when a card has two States, like a double-faced card, you actually get to show both both states but other than double-faced cards it's sort of like

it's this that turns into that and you're like well i can't show you both this and that yeah what you know when we did double-faced cards the situation was always like good news everybody we have double the pieces of art to express the story of this card normally we have like one frame of animation like think of telling a story if all you have is a single cell of your animation or wherever you take one you know moment out of a pixar movie to explain everything that's going on it's very hard um and yeah anything that has like level up or monstrosity or kicker or anything where sort of like the the creature has like oh, kind of like an okay version and a blown up awesome version, you got to pick. Usually the answer is to show the awesome version.

Okay, so another thing you do is world building. So talk about that. Yeah, so world building is the step that comes before card concept and before naming. This is when we are meeting with uh members of the world building team uh to do the work that eventually becomes the world guide or world guide is a reference document that contains it's kind of like the the like tv shows have story bibles this is kind of like the story bible but for a world for a magic setting um so uh a lot of my job is leading world building teams where we get together we brainstorm ideas um like return to ravnica we're heading back to

ravnica what do we want to do differently this time or sometimes it's a new world and the theme is um camelot meets fairy tales what what are we going to do to show that how do we make that world come alive in the art and names and flavor text and story of of the game um and one of the things people realize is that um not only are you building vision the artists are building visuals but you guys have to figure out like who are the people and what's the civilization like like there's a lot of um writing that happens a little bit about sort of the writing that happens yeah so um like all the detail that we kind of think of the world guide as the scaffolding like the the real building the

edifice we're trying to make is the magic set but the the world guide is the scaffolding so it needs and it needs tons of scaffolding we need we need tons of material that can potentially be useful once we make the actual set. For example, Zendikar has three different tribes of elves, and we wanted to make sure there's details about how their costuming is different, how their traditions are different, how their naming is different. So that if one of those comes along in the card set, we want to make sure that we can provide a piece of flavor text that's relevant to that tribe. All that writing material is there to create texture and variety to make the little snippet that you see of this world in the card set feel like this huge, rich world. Okay, another big thing you guys interact with is story. So as a good example of this, just because I know this was your baby,

I want to talk about the Bolas saga as an example of you building something. And this is a very large thing, but talk a little bit about story and the Bolas saga and how that all sort of comes together. Yeah, so we had had Nicol Bolas as a villain for a long time in magic um he had been kind of hanging around and there was a lot of claims that he's very smart and very uh mean and very uh ambitious to to gain power but he hadn't really done much in the story um and we

wanted to create a um a big story that spanned across multiple magic sets and magic worlds, uh, that really played up how cool he was. So I pitched this plan. Um, and it was, uh, kind of in the style of, of like the, uh,

invasion block or, or like, you know, the Phyrexians played out across, uh, lots of different sets or the weatherlight saga played out across many different sets of worlds. Um,

the goal was, uh, play up up nicobolas as a cool villain play up our heroic characters we like we had premiered the planeswalker type and we had focused on you know decided like okay we're gonna really really focus on planeswalker characters as the kind of stars of the brand um all that's great but they have to do something so um we built this with this story arc the idea was from basically kaladesh it was sort of set up a little bit before kaladesh but kaladesh is sort of the official kickoff all the way through hey what if what if this this culminated in uh a beloved world that you know magic players know and recognize, and we crank up the stakes really, really high,

and we have all these elements that build and build and build and converge all on Ravnica, because we have been talking about returning to Ravnica for a third time. What if that's the site of the climax there, where all the good guys and bad guys come together, and we have a giant fight? the climax there where all the all the good guys and bad guys come together and we have a giant fight um that was that was really really fun to plan and work on um one of the things that was uh really fun about it was that it was ambitious but everybody who heard the idea was like cool let's do ambitious you know it was um ambition responds to ambition everyone was like, cool, let's do ambitious. You know, it was ambition responds to ambition.

Everyone was like, okay, let's make an incredible trailer for War of the Spark. Let's make a series of web fiction where we play out all these plot threads. Let's see story moments all throughout. Like every design lead, every creative lead through all of those sets had kind of this extra responsibility of like, oh, we also have to sort of keep moving the story of the War of the Spark and the Bolas arc. And everyone came through. It was really, really cool. So in writing the story, a little bit about writing the story, how does that, like, what role do you have in having story happen in the card set? What role do you have in having story happen in the card set?

Story and the card set is another one of those examples of creative and mechanics interacting. kaladesh not because it was time to see chandra's home plane or to kick off the bolus arc but because like it's time to do a really cool um artifact base set where you get to feel like an inventor so we knew that as as like uh you know that was part of the plan actually in fact i think your initial pitch there was a different order amonkhet was before kaladesh originally and we swapped amonkhet and kaladesh so you could see that that could even have been a more natural way to kick off the Nicol Bolas arc with Amonkhet, where Nicol Bolas was kind of making his lair. But it switched around. So it's sort of like, okay, cool. That's a constraint. That's the right thing for the game to be doing.

So how do we make sense that we're going to kick off this story in Kaladesh? So we work with writers. We work with artists. We work with the people working on the concept push. It's the concept art generation stage for the World Guide. All these creative people are working to figure out what each character is going to do. What are their motivations? Why are they showing up in this plane for this set,

and how is that moving forward the general goal of we want to eventually get to a point where Nicol Bolas tries to make this play for ultimate power and eat everybody's planeswalkers back. Yeah, it's funny. I remember when you first pitched it, I was excited. I loved the grandiose of it. And it was a three-year plan, but we didn't tell everybody it was a three-year plan. We actually set it up so you thought the first year was going to end,

and then instead of the Gatewatch winning, they got horribly destroyed. And like, oh, no, no, it's the end of Act 1. It's not, you know, it's not the end of the story. And the thing I always remember is it ended in a giant war of planeswalkers. And I always said to you, I have no idea how we're going to do that. But it sounds cool.

Yeah, the pitch was always, like, what is... We wanted to focus, like, what was important about the magic characters. And we wanted that to be the villain's focus. So, like, what is unique about these characters they're all planeswalkers so what if that's exactly what the villain wants he wants all these planeswalkers and yeah i had no idea like when we were pitching it it was much closer to the kaladesh end of things than the war of the spark end of things and the the details of how exactly we're going to execute on this finale, where theoretically dozens or hundreds of planeswalkers

were all showing up on the same world at once, I was thrilled with... I mean, Dave Humphries, I credit a lot in terms of figuring out, like, yeah, I think we can just have one planeswalker in every pack. What if we just did that? And he found a way to make the gameplay of that actually fun and work out. So that was really cool. It was just kind of like the concept behind the story

drove expanding what we thought a magic set could do, which I thought was just like a great role for a creative. Yeah, one of the fun things sometimes is, and this goes both ways, is like when I was given War of the Spark, it was sort of like, okay, it's this giant war. Then I'm like, okay,

let's assume, I just said, okay, it's this. Let's assume there's lots of planeswalkers. How would you make that happen? And I don't think I ever would put 36 planeswalkers in a set. But I'm like, okay, let's assume I have to do that.

How do I do that? And then you figure that out. And there's a lot I have to do that. How do I do that? And then you figure that out. And there's a lot of fun in doing that. And, you know, I like, just like sometimes we give you guys cards, impossible cards to concept. It's fun sometimes you go,

here's the creative concept. Can you make this work, please? And sometimes one of the neat things is we do both what we call top-down design, where it's like Greek mythology set or something, but sometimes it's, hey, we have a cool idea, we have a cool world, could you make this, how do you mechanically, and then we have to figure out how to do it on our end,

so it's kind of neat watching the back and forth. I remember I had made a very amateur version of a trailer in PowerPointpoint um that that i showed around the building to kind of like wouldn't it be cool this was for for war of the spark or what we were codenamed milk at the time so it was like the milk trailer and uh it was just hacked together and the end of it just had like this rapid fire shot of all the the art of all these different planeswalker characters and this like dramatic music.

And, you know, I just like thrown it together over a couple of weekends. But, you know, it, it, it's kind of stirred something in people like bill Rose was like,

yeah, I think we should just figure out how to do this. And that, you know, to some degree that's, that's what pitching is. That's what's you, you like get people hooked emotionally on like

I don't know how we're going to do that but it would be cool if we did and then the rest of it is smart people can figure out how to execute it. Okay well speaking of pitches I'm going to segue into one last thing that I want to make sure we get to which is another of your babies. So talk about how Jumpstart

came to be because you were really the creator of Jumpstart. Yeah, that was a fun project. So there was a sort of a call from our VP, Bill Rose, that was like, hey, if you have five-minute pitches on any idea you can think of that could be something for Magic, bring your pitch and give it. So I put together this idea that has been kind of noodling around my head um i always felt that like there are a lot of people who would like throwing together a magic deck um and playing on the fly but who don't have the patience or the the you know the knowledge to sit through like a booster draft where there's tons of decisions to make. You have to evaluate

all these cards. So Jumpstart was the idea of what if you're just instead of the unit being a card, the unit is a theme. So the theme could be merfolk or angels or whatever. And you take that theme and you just put them together.

Bill liked the pitch. Other people liked the pitch. It went to a hackathon, which is kind of like an intensive brainstorming session where we try out lots of ideas in a short amount of time. And I led a hackathon team for Jumpstart. And then it was fun enough that we put on the schedule and and built it in and turned it into a real product well to be aware that was the hackathon that modern horizons came out of and so modern horizons got done right away and your project because it was more complex we talked a little bit about the complexity like what what made it so hard why was it so hard to do

well there it was hard on a couple different axes one was just manufacturing like literally the robots at our you know manufacturing vendors are the wrong kind of robots to make jumpstart um so there's like new machines in the world now that can make jumpstart packs um the other aspect is just that it's uh it making jump start puts way more onus on to uh us essentially on onto designers to make these little half decks uh make sense so their mana curve has to be figured out they're uh having the right kind of like removal and creatures and enough lands and utility effects, all that we had to figure out so that when you jam any two of these together

it's a fun experience. And so there was just way more, to some degree with a booster pack there's absolutely lots of playtests to make sure that any particular draft you can generate a fun experience. But this one was like, we don't know

what two themes you're going to shuffle together. And this one was like, we don't know what two themes you're going to shuffle together and we're going to make 46 different themes or whatever it is, 121 different deck lists. And we have to test all these possibilities and make sure that no matter what two you pick, you have a deck that you have a fun time for

and you don't sort of blame the product if you have bad time. And another problem I know that came up was not every theme had enough cards to make the theme work yeah so there were there were some theme ideas that we loved uh devil the devilish packet the packet was um a good example where we loved the idea of um what if one of red's uh boosters was focused on devils but there just weren't enough devils or or devils that you want to play in the game yet it seemed like there would be a lot but there kind of weren't and or they

fell at weird places in the in the mana curve or whatever so for that kind of thing we had to create more new cards to kind of fill in the gaps to like a devil themed legend that would really be your awesome rare in that pack or, um, you know, sort of utility mid range, you devil that's not rare or that sort of thing. So, um,

I'm, we're all, I'm almost to work here. Uh, so is there any other, before we wrap up, is there any sort of, uh,

other creative element we didn't hit upon today? Something else that you do that, uh, um, the, the other main thing that, that is my sort of pride and joy is is working on uh far future planning for for magic sets and worlds like you're involved aaron's involved some other people are involved and we we call it arc planning um and it's just

looking at uh the the plans that we have for way, way in the future beyond what anybody is currently working on. That's really exciting to me. We kind of list out, what are all the possibilities? Are there worlds we could return to? Are there worlds that we need to do that we could create new? That's always really exciting because that's the farthest future that people in the department are looking. Yeah, it's one thing that I don't think people, I mean, I tell them this, but the, like, for example, we have an alphabet codename right now, right? So the codenames are A through Z.

Archery was the codename for Throne of Eldraine. So to give people a sense, Throne of Eldraine was the start of this. That's A. I think we know what U is. Yeah. Yeah, U, I think is the farthest we're sure about. So just give people, and be aware, you know,

we don't, the codenames don't have a letter. So these are all premiere sets that don't have, that aren't core sets. And like, we have some confidence in what we think U might be. So's give people the scope of things that is many many many years that doesn't mean we're working on it

yet because a lot of what Doug's talking about is advanced planning but so anyway Doug it is I've made it to my desk so it was a joy having you on and I hope people one of the reasons I keep getting, I'm trying to get

different people in the building on my show here is, uh, so you can realize all the work that goes into making magic cards that I think people think, like, I come up with an idea and we're done. That's it. We made a card. Um, but there's so many, so much that goes involved. So it's fun to hear from you and hear all about the creative process. Thank you so much for having me.

But guys, I'm at my desk. 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 thanks, Doug, for coming on. Thank you. And guys, I will see you all next time. Bye-bye.