Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #761: Devin Low

Episode Date: July 31, 2020

In this podcast, I talk with Devin Low, former Magic head developer, about his time working on Magic.

I'm not pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another Drive to Work, Coronavirus Edition. Okay, so I've been lining up fun interviews, and I have another blast from the past, so I want to introduce Devin Lowe. Hey Mark, thanks for having me on. Okay Devin, so before we get to all your time at Wizards, I want to ask the question I've been asking all my people on the interviews is, how did you start playing Magic? all my people on the interviews is, how did you start playing Magic? I used to go to gaming conventions with my dad, who was playing a lot of miniature war games,

and I won some random event at some convention, and they gave me like a $10 gift certificate to spend at some vendor there. So I went there, whatever under $10, not a board game, not a miniatures game, that was too expensive. Hey, they got a boost pack soon called Magic. I could buy two or three of those. So the price was right, and there it was.

So I didn't have a rule book. I just had some packs that had, like, Grizzly Bears and Guys, Legion, Forest, and Mox Emerald. And that was enough to get me hooked. So this was Alpha? How far back was this? 93. So Alpha, yeah. Yeah, Alpha.

Okay. With the weird corners and everything. Okay. So how old were you when you started playing? I want to say 14 okay so did you continue playing like how did you get into the game yeah i uh i i had a very small amount of cards for a very very long time uh some of my friends that i was playing with had like bought bought boxes and i was like totally foreign to me i bought like a few packs here and there like

per year and so i had a small collection of magic cards enough for uh like three decks or something it was like a big deal that i could make a deck of all black cards of the color i happen to have the most of i couldn't make a deck of all of any other single color but i dutifully took these with me and taught kids to play at summer camps uh at school and i would like you know play this giant spider deck against this uh hypnotic specter deck uh that's a matchup where i like the spider and uh just kind of see you know just play it out and looking back in those days i can sort of still imagine those alpha artworks in my head and it seems like a different game entirely than one i ended up working on right it has like a mystical aura of like remembering there's holy armor and

that weird guy with the armored horns and a big flail and uh you know you got unholy strength on your uh vampire bats and how cool that was. So did you play continuously from when you started or did you take a break? I never took any breaks, not really. It really kicked into high gear after I got to Harvard and some of the guys there were playing a ton of tournaments and trying to get in the Pro Tour and were very excited about that and trying to figure out how to win the game, how to get inside the Pro Tour, and we're very excited about that and trying to figure out how to win the game, how to get inside the physics of it. And so I started hanging out with those guys,

and Yorma Games was a big influence on that group. Obviously, it has a bunch of Pro Tour champions coming out of there. And we started playing PDQs, and I won a few of them, and I went to three Pro Tours in 2000, and then that eventually was instrumental in me getting to Wizards. so okay how did you get to wizards how'd that happen uh so my mom let me know that uh she knew i loved the game and she told me that my cousin was the nanny of richard garfield it's pretty weird she was like you should go and meet him sometime like you know uh see if you can go say hi i was like oh mom like that'd be so embarrassing i can't just like go say hi to him

like what would i say and i was like too cool and too embarrassing to do it. She's like, no, you should do this. I go, okay, fine. So I went to meet Richard. He's amazing. He's very smart. He had already changed my life for the better by the time I met him. And that was before he changed my life 10 more times for the better by being the grandfather

of something that shaped my whole career. But he was very nice and welcoming, and he offered to play board games with me sometimes with his friends. But I did that a couple of times, and then eventually I sort of harbored a secret thought of applying to Wizards someday, but I kept putting it off, right? It's easy to give yourself reasons not to take the leap and put yourself out there to sort of get judged and probably rejected. But I was reading a latest developments column that was written by Randy Bueller, a column that I would eventually someday write. And he was showing the Vaprof test of what they showed prospective Wizards

applicants to sort of get a sense of how good they were at analyzing the game. And he published this in his column and encouraged people to sort of like send in their answers. And I thought, oh, geez, this is going to prompt 10 million people to actually apply because they'll be interested in the process they'll think they're pretty good answers and they'll want to send them in and try to get the door so i thought uh i missed my chance woe is me i'm a terrible person for not applying before now because now the huge wave is going to come in but the least i can do

is to uh try to pitch myself now that this moment has arrived, to at least kind of try to get in at the front of this wave of applicants that's inevitably going to show up. And so I took the test, tried to do a good job, and sort of put together a packet of why I thought I could add value to the company making magic sets. And I sent it to Garfield, and he gave it to a buddy of his at wizards who was bill rose and then a few months later a slot opened up and he gave me a call and we had an interview and he said okay come up for six months and then six months eventually turned to full time in five years and i eventually became the uh the head developer of of Magic at a time when Rosewater was obviously the head designer of Magic. And so it was great to collaborate.

And worked a bunch of Magic sets, worked a bunch of non-Magic sets, sort of warming up to Magic. I worked on a bunch of other Wizards games that would sort of be the more B-list stuff. But I had a great time there. It was a big part of my life. And after that, I went on to work on other hobby games and other card games.

And so it was instrumental. It was a big deal. Okay, let's go back a little bit. Let's spend a little more time walking through the time at Wizards. Okay, so you get hired at Wizards. Okay, so what is the first thing, what's the first magic thing you worked on? Yeah, I mean, the very first thing they had worked on was Neopets and Duel Masters, all these non-magic games, but I had very good work on magic, as many people are,

and so they had a slot on the fifth on development team. They were really close to the end, but I hopped on there with Brian Schneider, I think leading it and, you know, got a couple of cards in the file through whole filling. And it's kind of thing where the people that have been there for five years, the whole filling comes up like, oh yeah, that's one more thing I have to do. My list of 12 things I have to do.

But for a new person there, whole filling is like the most exciting thing in the universe, because you might make a magic card. And so I would put a lot of energy and try to make really good whole fills and try to impress people, get them to file, and I got some in, and that was like already mind-blowing. Yeah, it was very fun. Even today we still do whole filling, and you're right.

The old times were like, not more whole filling, and then you're like, I get to make magic cards and they make a lot of cards, so it's very funny. Okay, so fifth on, so then we moved into Kamigawa Block. Did you work on anything in Kamigawa Block? Yeah, I was a tester only for Champions, and still working mostly on other games. But I was a developer on Betrayers,

and I was a co-designer on Saviors. And it was a time when we were just starting to realize that Mirrodin was going to have a bunch of power level problems and a bunch of Wizards resources that had been historically used on playtesting had been sort of diverted during that time period to work on Transformers and Star Wars, CCGs kind of stuff. I guess not Transformers, I guess Star Wars. And so that was part of why Mirrodin had some power level mistakes in it, to put it lightly.

And I eventually became the first wave of new developer designers that they hired to sort of come and fix that and make our resource bench stronger so that we could find more of those power level problems and fix them before they got out of hand. And so sort of during the Kamigawa year, I think, we ended up hiring myself, Mike Turian, and Matt Place, and Paul Sodisanti. Aaron came over from the website, eventually, you know, sort of a second wave of folks after that. But a bunch of people came into that time, more than R&D in the years previous. Okay, so after Kamigawa Block was Ravnica Block.

So did you work on anything in Ravnica, the original Ravnica Block? Did you work on anything? I was a co-designer on Guild Pact, and the idea of the guilds was something that the game hadn't really had since then, but it was hugely influential, because so many sets since then have essentially had guilds of varying kinds,

whether it's been Return to Ravnica, or whether it's been uh shards or whether it's been cons or something and uh you sort of see that idea of let's take a subculture in this world and give them their own mechanic you give their own color identity and uh give an ethos that will help players uh find the guild they identify with and uh feel kinship to the game through their expression in the guild so So here's a question. You were on at the time. What do you remember? When I first pitched the guilds, it was not universally taken as a positive thing.

Do you remember your take on the guilds? Your first impression? I mean, I don't think, I don't remember being anti it or for it. I know it's the iconic Mark Rosarner story to say, I pitched this cool idea and rnd told me no they're going to stick to the butt but then i kept persisting and then i won out and then the players loved it victory mark rosalder and it is true that has happened many times but it is it is a funny uh iconic story and this is probably one of those two but i don't remember being uh pro rnd i think the thing that it wasn't the the thing that threw people in rnd was that we had to make a draft for all

three sets, and I think the real worry was we couldn't have these colors here, these colors here, these colors here, and make a draft that would possibly work. I think that was the biggest worry. It was also weird to them that this set had a red-blue card, and

no other set had the red-blue card. That was weird, but... I remember that Torment and Judgment had come before this, and Torment had more black cards than they were in the Magic set, and Judgment had more white and green cards than they were in the Magic set, and those have been, like, pretty popular,

at least by our understanding. And so that sort of opened their way a little bit to have color imbalance, right? And say, like, it's not totally insane to have a set with all the colors on balance. It is funny to me how the random marketing folks at the time were like, well, what if players don't realize that there are any guilds in the set? And R&D's like, guys, this is not a problem.

That's one thing they're going to realize is that there are guilds in the set. We're like, no, no, no. We think some people might just not even pick up that there are guilds. And so they insisted we add Ravnica City of Guilds to be the set name and not just Ravnica, because they really want to know there are guilds there. And by the time the set came out it seemed preposterous that they would possibly not know their guilds there. They're all over the art, the names,

the flavor text, the abilities, everything. Yeah, it's funny. So the two people so I and Brady Dommermuth who was the head of the creative team at the time we and I were fighting against that and then he and I went on vacation on the same week and that's when they changed it. That's funny.

It's also a classic Wizard thing of if there's some card that only one person on the team likes and they go on vacation, the card's inevitably going to be killed while they're gone. It's very dangerous to go on vacation. All the things you like will be toast. Okay, so the next block after that was Time Spiral block. So this is the first time you led something, correct?

Yes. I remember... What did you lead since? You and I know. It was Planar Chaos, which I think that Paul Sassanti was on the design team for, Paul was the lead of, and... The lead was Bill Rose, but Paul was on it.

Okay, and so I was going to lunch, and Paul was in the car, and we're talking about Planar Chaos, and how, like, oh, it's going to be all this crazy stuff, and we're all a little worried about it, and I literally said something like, like, I feel bad if the person's going to, like, leave that development team. And then Paul was like, Devin, they're saying that it might be you leaving that development team,

which I hadn't heard before. And I was like, uh-oh, in that case, in that case, it'll be fine. It'll all work out. No problem. But it was scary at the time to think about breaking the color wheel in dramatic ways and planar chaos was going to fool around with having all the colors do different things the structure was the past an alternate present and the future and so part of the alternate present was what if you use the

same color philosophies but express those two different mechanics and so red is all about sort of short-term gain and who cares what the consequences of the future and so what if you gave red some ability to uh return creatures to their owner's hand on the basis that that was a short-term solution that sort of didn't think about the future because the creatures would just come right back next turn and so red got some bounce spells and uh there were a bunch of other color pie shifts that were not typical were sort of uh things you would never do, and we were going to do them all. And then they were also talking about maybe doing purple in that set as a sixth color, which

was very terrifying to me, and I'm very glad we didn't do. We did explore that in the design. We ended up sort of not going that path, but we did really, really explore it. At the one set, we're like, maybe we'll do this. It's a brand new color pie. It's an alternate reality. What if it had six colors? So we did explore it, but we didn't end up doing it.

Yeah, the planar chaos to this day is one of the things I'm like, I'm not sure we should have done that. I get people all the time defending things by showing me planar chaos cards as proof that the color should do it. And I'm like, okay, guys, please stop using planar chaos as the...

I can also remember arguing with some guy named Mark Rosewater where he kept saying that the structure block was past, alternate, present, future, which definitely is a nice kind of rhyme to it, right? It makes sense in your head as a cryptic. And I would say things like, look, Mark, there's a bonus sheet in Planar Chaos, and it has these color-shifted versions of old cards where you're used to seeing a black knight from alpha and now it's a red version it's still uh two color mana for two two first strike pro white but now it's red instead it's called blood knight so this is really a alternate version of the past all these are past cards we're working on they're not really alternate cards of the present and so in a way it's past

alternate past future uh and i was like you know trying to try to convince mark that there's something wrong with the past present future uh modeling and mark's trying to convince me and trying to help me get it and i'm like not getting it he's like getting more frustrated and eventually he's like devon what's going to sell better past present future or past all the past future and i was like i was present future he's like exactly it's like okay mark you win past all the present future and you were right so um and, that is a version of an iconic Park World Store story,

by the way, because, uh, there's you saying something, maybe you get sick of the mud and then you convince

me to be triumphant. So, so there you go, there's one. So, uh, there's a lot of stories by the way,

where I was wrong. I, I tell the stories where I was right. So, um, they, they say that people

who, uh, write the history have lots of control of what happened. So, yeah, that's one reason to do a few have lots of control of what happens. Yep. That's one reason to do a few 700 podcasts and 20,000 articles. Okay.

So the next block was the Lorwyn block. So Lorwyn, Morning Tide, Shadowmoor, Eventide. So let's talk about that. So you led, what set did you lead? I led Lorwyn. And it has a very dear place in my heart. I really have a lot of affection for it. We worked so much on it, and the thing we cared about the most

was just having all the tribes have a very strong mechanical identity and having them feel a certain way and play a certain way, and that when you played Giants or Treefolk or Kipkin or Merfolk, you would really feel like you were doing that. And also to sort of fix some of the problems that Onslaught block had had as the tribal focus block in the path that had been popular but had some problems in it, like it

had Sparksmith as a common that said 1R 1-1 Goblin, Cateel, X damage to target creature, and X damage to you, where X is the number of Goblins you control. And so if you play 2-2 Sparksmith, your opponent's like, okay, here we go go i'll play some kind of two two more for three you're like well play a second goblin and turn three pass the mark of this deal two to your creature two to

me if the rest of the game you have this like common the taps to kill your opponent's creatures uh and the game was just just just over that point and um onslaught block constructed had like a ton of very powerful rats like slice and dice and Dice and Akroma's Vengeance, and that made the tribal matters theme kind of problematic because it's not fun to play a bunch of clerics on the board and then a million powerful rats destroy them all the time. And so the tribe that was able to overcome that were the goblins because they were hasty and could get through all the rats and everything else, and the sacrospects could get around the rats,

but the other tribes all kind of got crushed by that. Yeah, the other big thing... Oh, sorry, go ahead. No, no, you, please. Well, the other big thing I know that I was a big proponent of was getting them out of one color. Like, one of the problems in Onslaught is if you wanted to play goblins, they were red.

That's what they were. And it made less diversity of deck building because your only choice was red, so you just played the best red cards. And so all of the tribes were at least two colors, I believe, in Lorwyn. A few of them were more than two. Yeah. And Lorwyn was also the very first set to introduce planeswalkers.

And that was a very hard project. And a lot of things could have gone wrong. And it kind of blows my mind that the fundamental Planeswalker structure, we basically got it in Lorwyn the first time out. I mean, the first time we published it, not the first time we integrated on it internally. And it has held since then, where they have loyalty, they offer three abilities, they also have an ultimate, they often have a plus ability and sort of a moderate minus ability. I know we've done some variations variations on it since then but uh

fundamentally that structure was good and of the original five garrick williana johnny chandra jace all those first five got deconstructed they were all like good and limited um and none of them were like overpowered or insane and so like so we really delivered on a very hard ask to make the Planeswalkers good the first time out. Yeah, I've talked with Aaron about that too, that it's kind of mind-blowing how correct we were. Yeah, it's mind-blowing how correct we were. They're all kind of printable now.

They're all pretty close. Yeah, no, it was... I mean, we did spend a bunch of time, as people who know the history, FutureSight was originally going to do them and then we didn't think we had them right so we spent more time

and then we, Lorwyn, we thought we had it. Obviously we did, but, um, okay, so,

uh, did you work on anything else in that block? Um, I, let's see, I was a co-designer and developer

on Shadowmoor. Um, I, I remember that one of the, one of the issues with lauren also is that um it was trying to deliver on a cutesy fairytale world that would set up the horror of the world turning evil and shadow more happened right lauren is uh uh bubbling brooks beautiful meadows pretty happy campers the terrors that's uh names like pie in the face that were just like, that's as close you get to violence. It's like a pie in the face.

And it was overly cutesy in order to have a horrific reveal when Shadowmore flipped the world on its head. Some sort of eclipse happens, all the good creatures turn evil, all the pleasant things become sinister. And now the world's like nice and creepy. And so much like horror movies that start with an idyllic uh start in order to sort of deliver a uh terrifying reveal that was what it was going for on the creative side but the problem is that in a movie that the horrifying reveal happened 20 minutes in and in lorwyn's case you had to wait six months to get

the reveal of shadow more and that was too long it was too cutesy and too pacifistic to be what magic was for three months or six months and so uh that creative was a little bit problematic it was nice that like shadow could finally like uh deliver the the ghastly horror but i thought that um in terms of delivering a cool storbook world that the uh throne of eldraine did a better job at like delivering storbook tropes and also got to do actual human grim's fairy tale storbook tropes whereas lauren had no humans and you can't do humans fairy tales that go to lost without humans okay so on shadow more so uh shadow more played around with hybrid do you have much any stories of messing with hybrid um i thought it

was fun that it enabled uh monocolor decks in some ways you could sort of say i've got all these uh rg rg like like gruel gruel gruel hyper mana cards and some ractos ractos ractos hyper mana cards i can play them both in mono red uh or i can play them in their own respective color pairs um i thought that uh chrome is a good example of something that was not well-liked when it was presented because the flavor was nothing, and having it come back as Devotion in Theros was a lot more popular because the flavor delivered why both the mana symbols and the card were helping you. The notion of why it would help you to have a bunch of cards in the board that have red green hybrid costs in their uh

upper right corner of the card like why would that help you the chroma answer was i don't know because the wizard did it and uh in theros the idea that fasa is pleased that she has many worshipers that love uh blue and the more blue mana symbols they have in their corner, the more devoted they are to blue, obviously. They don't want to come to the battlefield, they don't have double blue rounds, they must love blue. And so she'll be really impressed when you have a bunch of, you know, Lord of Atlantis or equivalent double blue cards

around. That really delivered the flavor much better, and so the mechanic that was basically shunned and even tied became popular in Theros. So there's another reason, by the way. I mean, you're correct. I think the flavor was a big thing. The other problem is Chroma didn't have a consistent place it looked.

Like, this Chroma card cared about pips in the graveyard. This cared about pips on board. So there wasn't a consistent... Devotion said, hey, I'm just caring about this one thing, and it allowed you to make a deck about it because all the cards cared about the same thing.

And that... So anyway, there's a mechanical, I think, mistake made because all the cards cared about the same thing. And that... So anyway, there's a mechanical, I think, mistake made with Chroma as well, as the flavor, I agree, was kind of unfocused as well. But anyway, it's a great example of how we try something and it didn't work and we sort of said, okay, why didn't this work

and figured out how to make it work. You can't always do that, but Chroma was a good example. Okay, so next, after Lorwyn and Shadowmoor, was Shards of Alara. What's your memory of Shards of Alara? Yeah, I was the lead final designer,

lead final developer of Shards of Alara, and it's another sentence here to my heart. It sort of took the guild structure from Ravnica and extended it to three colors. And one thing that I sort of tried to get Brady on board with from a creative standpoint was that with three colors, we have an opportunity to not say that each three-color shard is defined by the three colors that it is,

but it could be defined by the two colors that it isn't. And so if Bant is the by the three colors that it is, but it could be defined by the two colors that it isn't. And so if Bant is the white, blue, green triad, then what would it mean to have a world where there was no chaos and there was no death? And so in Bant's case, what that led to was they don't fight to kill each other, they fight for honor and in tournaments and to have these sort of like honorable duels and so that ended up feeding into exalted that uh tinsman uh sort of pitched and his

sort of mini team delivered in that you're each gonna have a tournament or duel that means you should pick your best fighter line up behind him cheer him on and then send him out the battlefield to hill joust the other guy it's not gonna be a sort of raucous melee a bunch of guys hacking each other with axes it's gonna be two noble warriors with a bunch of sigils on them, and they're going to fight each other. And so that's a cool example of how to do some creative and have the creative eventually affect the world building. Okay, so question for you. Were you on any of the mini-teams? I'm trying to remember.

It has been many years. Well well i'll say this i i know the three mini teams i was on i don't think you and i are on the same mini team so i ran esper i was on naya i was on band it's possible that i was like a big customer for the mini teams and so i was not on them so that i could like critique them work more aggressively you know what i mean oh that might have been true okay um i do remember that the black red green triad aka jund um came back and wanted to do prey or devour i guess it's called and i and some other helper said no no no it's not going to work well to have a bunch of uh cards in the same shard uh that all want to sacrifice a

bunch of creatures like devour devour something like it says something like devour two but when this comes into play when this creature comes into play you may sacrifice any number of creatures for each creature you sacrifice this way put two plus one plus one counters on the creature you just cast right so you're gonna play a dragon it's gonna eat a bunch of its other little goblin uh tokens and he's gonna become a huge dragon and sometimes they dragon it's gonna eat a bunch of its other little goblin uh tokens and he's gonna become a huge dragon and sometimes they also said after you do a lot of sacrificing uh do you damage equal this creature's power to to some target and so they'll give you some further benefit for sacrificing guys or just something based on uh the power that makes it worth a lot

of sacrifice guys and but it was true then and it's true now that it's not good to like have your deck have 12 guys and then say, sacrifice three creatures, you put this into play, because where are all these creatures going to sacrifice? And we did do things in the Shard to give you, you know, make two Goblin tokens and have some guys make saccharines when they die and make a bunch of O1s you can sacrifice

and ways to get them food to eat. And that was a big part of the food chain identity of Jund. But we just knew that a million things like that wouldn't be good, and so we were trying to say, well, the key word should be death triggers, and whenever a guy dies, you get a benefit, and that way it works in combat, it works in the blood of your dudes, it works when you sacrifice some things, you can still have three or four big creatures that sacrifice a bunch of creatures

that come into play and give benefits, and they can trigger all the death triggers, so that'll all work out. bunch of creatures that come to play and get benefits and they can trigger all the death triggers so that'll all work out um but uh bill rose and others were emphatic that it's just cooler to eat a bunch of goblins make a giant dragon than to like get little incy weency triggers on uh guys dying and so we should headline uh giant creature devours others get big and uh have the quiet part be a bunch of creatures carried by death triggers that are support staff

but they are not key worded or ability worded. And I think that was wise and that devour is a more splashy mechanic even if it's not something that like Spikes are big fans of.

Yeah, so the team I led, as I said, I was on three of the many teams, was the Esper team. And so the big thing we did is just made all of our creatures artifact creatures. Right. And we made colored artifacts also we did is just made all of our creatures artifact creatures. Right. And we made colored artifacts also.

Yeah, colored artifacts. They were colored artifact creatures. Now a big thing in the game, right? It's become evergreen, whereas that was once a weird one-off set theme. Yeah, that was the first time we had done colored artifacts, I think. Maybe Future Sight had one, I think, to sort of say... Oh, right, right. Future Sight had done the throw-forward for it.

In fact, the funny thing is the Future Sight card was meant to be a throw-forward for New Phyrexia, not, right. Future Sight does a throw-forward for it. Right, right. In fact, the funny thing is the Future Sight card was meant to be a throw-forward for New Phyrexia, not for here, but we needed it, so I did it here. Right. I remember that was, when we first pitched that, it was just people thought it was fun but quirky. Right. So.

But it turns out to have a mechanical uh play value to like have our decks longer than some decks and it makes it less likely broken etc etc so i think it is good to have um you know witch's cauldron kind of stuff that is color identified okay so uh i'm i'm not too far from my work so the last thing i know you worked on was the Zendikar block. Worked on Zendikar. So what was it like working on Zendikar? Yeah, I can remember Mark relentlessly pitching his vision for the set and trying to get everyone on board because he kept saying, you know, it's all about lands, right? He wanted to do Landbop for years.

No one ever let him do it. This is another example of everyone else being a stick in the mud or Mark passionately pursues an excellent idea and triumphs. But one day he started saying Land of Palooza instead of saying Lands Matter, and that made it more exciting and silly somehow, and people got a lot more interested. And then he started saying the sense of maps, chaps, and

traps. And maps were a thing you must follow that eventually gets you to a treasure if you do it right, and eventually became the quest mechanic in Zendikar, those enchantments that are, you know, search for such and such, put a bunch of counters on them, and then once you get some counters, because the actions you took, it right and eventually became the quest mechanic in zendikar those enchantments that are you know search for such and such put a bunch of counters on them and then once you get some counters because the actions you took it it explodes and does something awesome right it says it says something like whenever you uh attack the creature put a quest token on this quest and when

you get seven quest tokens on it it flips into something awesome it explodes into something else those are the maps and then the traps were the allies we're just sort of a modified slip sliver mechanic of a bunch of dudes in five colors that work together to make awesome Collector effects. And then the traps were things like Mind Break Trap that say when your opponent does the wrong thing, you can play this for reduced costs and suddenly screw them.

And so all those things did go the distance and in modified form did make a descent. So match traps and traps became reality, as well as Land of Belize. Well, what happened was once once we started with lands, and then we added the adventure world, and so it was all the land mechanics plus the adventure world mechanics. Right.

So, yeah, the map shafts and traps were the adventure world part. And, like, honestly, like, if you'd said, like, quests, allies, and traps, I think it would have, like, gotten less traction, but, like, literally making things rhyme, got in people's head, made it fun, made it silly, and it's like, Mark's communication background strikes again, and you found a way

to pitch the idea to make it more catchy, and that did pay off. One of the things I don't think people realize is how much the internal selling is important. There's a lot of pitching. A lot of the job is a designer, and as a video designer, too, that's a lot of the job is convincing other people that this will work. Okay, so we're

not too far from, from work. So any final memories of working on magic? Any last thoughts? It was a dream come true. When I was a kid, I had a, there's a board game dragon magazine called file for team.

It's all about making board games. And the joke of the game was that as you try to push these board games through the different departments, like, you know know concept and design and art direction and editing there's a million chances that the the games will get diverted to file 13 just to garbage so your games are canceled all the time and like hardly anything ever comes out and that that's that's the joke of file 13 and that game has a uh a stage of the game's evolution called playtesting and it says something like uh playtesters are paid but getting the name in the back of the game's evolution called playtesting and it says something like uh playtesters are paid but get the name in the back of the credits but you can't eat the back of the credits and so they

usually end up starving to death in a cardboard box and that has stuck in my head is like if you work on games you will starve to death in cardboard box and i was sure that you could not like uh you know feed yourself or definitely not feed a family or send your kids to college if you work on games and so when i went out to wizards at first i thought oh this this can't be a career but it'll be like a fun sort of like after grad school uh job to take and when i got there i saw that uh you know people had kids there they were raising them they like uh were functioning adults in normal societies not about fuel and cardboard boxes and this is like a thing that is plausible to sort of have a career in and so uh that helped me realize that i could do that too and eventually sort of like become a full-time uh game designer and tabletop and uh video games and so it was it was

weird that it it had never crossed my mind to like pursue game design a career until the whole thing came up and so it's wild how many coincidences there are in life, how many opportunities there are all the villages and luck I've had is just astounding but I'm very grateful I got to spend some time there so anyway yeah, like I said, one of the fun

things of doing these interviews is getting to talk to people that I've worked with for a long time that I don't get to work with currently so I miss you, Devin. I did enjoy working with you. Yeah, it was fun. Good times. We did make a lot of good times. Okay, so apparently 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 about magic, it's time for me to be making magic. So Devin, I want to thank you for being with us. Thank you for having me. Appreciate it. And everyone, I will see you next time. Bye-bye.