Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #764: Brian Schneider

Episode Date: August 7, 2020

In this podcast, I talk with Brian Schneider, former Magic head developer. We talk about the many sets he worked on during his time at Wizards.

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 doing fun interviews while I've been stuck at home and I've dug into the path to find somebody that worked on Magic a while ago. So Brian Schneider, say hello! Hello everybody. So, let me ask you the question I ask everybody when we start, which is, how did you get into magic? Yeah, I got into magic during Revise. My friends in high school, my girlfriend actually, wanted to play. And so we got some decks to play with our friends, and that's how I got into it.

Okay, and so back in Revise, did you play continually up until Wizards, or did you have a stopgap or something? Did you play continually up until Wizards, or did you have a stopgap or something? I played from 1995 to 1998, and then the year before I joined Wizards, I actually had started to stop playing. And was pretty much on the brink of becoming a lapsed player, which I didn't really mention when I worked there. So how did you get to Wizards? What brought you to Wizards of the Coast? Yeah, I ended up being a prominent deck builder in the 90s, in the early days of Magic, and one of my teammates, Randy Buehler, got the job at Wizards, I think a year or two before me. And so he went into R&D on the development side and asked me if I was interested. So it was really just fortuitous.

Okay. Randy got a lot of people in. Definitely a lot of stories that Randy got me in. Okay. So you came to Wizards. So what is the first thing you did when you came to Wizards? I ran the Future Future League. I did a lot of funny things.

I worked on our internal play testing organization to try and figure out how to evaluate cards i think before i got there um there are a lot of things broke things broke while i was there they probably still do um but um yeah i was there to help try to figure out how to get the card balance part of the game right and then i did all kinds of things. I wrote scripts for ESPN when, you know, we've had esport aspirations and worked on Harry Potter and Star Wars and all kinds of different things.

Okay, so the first set that you led was Fifth Dawn, which interestingly, from a trivia standpoint, Aaron Forsythe had been hired at Wizards to run the website. And we brought him on Fifth Dawn as he been hired at wizards to run the website. Uh, and we brought him on fifth dawn as a, he was going to write an article about the experience. And we just gave him an opportunity to try to design stuff. And he did such a great job.

We hired him into R and D, but anyway, you let, so I led the design, you led the development. Um, so let's talk about fifth on a little bit. What do you,

what do you remember about fifth on? Uh, I remember we had this pressure i think um a lot of muradin i think was about playing within like one or two colors and then we tried to force people to you know also like have this option of playing five colors um which i don't think everybody loved um but i think it was, you know, still worth trying. I think there were a lot of really unique, iconic cards

from that set that I remember pretty fondly. But I also, like, if you were to, like, name five cards from Fifth Dawn, I don't know that I could. Well, I mean, one of the things, so the audience understands behind the scenes what was going on, we made mirrodin block let's just say not our finest hour of uh development and uh it broke pretty badly and both so mirrodin and dark steel fifth dawn by the time we were working on fifth dawn we kind of understood that we had messed up and so fifth on what they said to us when I

designed is, you know all that stuff we did earlier in the block? Don't do any of that stuff. And that's why we went to the five-color thing, was we were just trying to, like, we had to do something different because everything earlier in the block was breaking. And so

you led the development for the least broken set in Mirror in Black. Yeah, I think that was sort of a sea change. I remember Mirrodin conversations where one person in particular was like, we're going to push artifacts really hard. This is the artifact theme. There has to be an artifact deck.

We have to make sure that out of the thousands of artifacts that are in this set or in this block, something has to be good. And that just didn't go the right way at all. And I think you see a transition between Fifth Dong, Kamigawa, Ravnica, and Time Spiral. We moved away from doing really powerful cards and created formats that played much better together. But it also took some lumps along the way.

So at some point along the way, when did you become the head developer? Do you remember? I would say when I... I took over at Champions around the point where there was a handoff. Randy was supposed to lead Kamigawa. There's like a long story there where Kamigawa's design didn't come in very well. Yeah. And so Randy ended up like leading a month-long like sojourn into trying to improve

that design and then i took over development from him and that's when i pretty much took over yeah okay um so let's talk a little about shams and kamagawa so you led the development for uh the main set um which was back in the day that the main set did such a strong job of determining what the rest of the block was doing, that usually I was the, well, I became the head designer around that period, but I tended to do the fall sets, and you, for a period of time when you were there, I would do the fall set, and then you would lead, I would lead the design, you would lead the development. So, it's funny, I realized that Champions wasn't mine. Champions was done by Brian Tinsman.

But the other sets we're going to talk about later today. So of the stuff you led, three of the things I led the design for. So anyway. So okay, so Champions. Let's talk about Champions a little bit before we get to... Sure. What do you remember of Champions of the Kamigawa? Yeah, I think it was a challenging set.

I think it was tough from the design perspective. I don't think the team bought into the notion of doing a Japan-themed set. They didn't work really well together. And so you just kind of felt it from the development side that what was going to come in wasn't going to be loved fully. And so working on the development team, that same sentiment, I think, translated, where it's really nice to work on a product like Ravnica or even with Onslaught and Muradin. There were things you could immediately love about it. And I think it took us a while to get to the place where we were pretty happy with it, or at least happy with what it could be.

Again, it was kind of an unpopular theme, which didn't help. Again, it was kind of an unpopular theme, which didn't help. Set-wise, yeah, I think eventually in the last couple of months, I think the team came to appreciate the design much more, partly because I think we started cutting casting costs, but I think there were some missed opportunities, partly because we didn't challenge sort of prevailing opinion at the time like there was a logic that you couldn't make things uh strictly better or strictly worse than something else so we ended up having casting costs that were just kind of inflated because there was this weird parasitic design all over the place with spirit and mystic and etc and so

we ended up making a set that kind of tailored to itself instead of like the whole of magic and it just it was really like fun to play in isolation but it would have been a better one-off set and certainly uh a good learning experience but i think if we had another month or two we probably would have deviated from that a bit more maybe put instant and sorcery on splice instead of putting it on whatever that mechanic was you know it just wasn't splice on arcane the funny thing is i came to you with the idea of doing splice on instant or sorcery and you're like had you just come three months ago you could have talked i totally agree with that i wish we had done it and afterwards like i thought about like

how do i wish we would have done these blocks better yeah it's not that hard to figure out how to do champions better except like the theme was kind of tough um i wish we had put more power level into it you know if you're going to put in these fun new mechanics like i think you need to make them sing the split cards the flip card i think we could have done a better job with we just we were a little bit scared of our own mistakes in muradin and you know that's its own mistake. We needed another month or two and we didn't have it. So it turns out that Shamsi Kamangal block, interestingly, was kind of the changing of the guard

in some ways. So what happened was Randy had been overseeing development, even though he was the lead, he had been overseeing development. He was the director. And Bill, who was the VP, was doing design. And it was during this block that they they randy font said fine you be head developer he said me you be head designer and you and i sort of took

it like in the middle it didn't really happen during the block because it happened in the middle of the block um but the first block you and i sort of our reigns was ravnica so that that went a little better than uh thanta Kamigawa. For sure. So let's talk about Ravnica. So what is your memory of Ravnica? I've talked about Ravnica on my podcast infinite times, but what is your memory of Ravnica?

I think everyone really liked the idea, which made it, the energy around it was really good. And so people were very supportive of what it was trying to do. And from a development perspective, it was trying to do and from a development perspective it was pretty easy like to try to build an environment around letting people cast their gold cards in thematic ways. I think from a development perspective we try to avoid having like anything be overly powerful and if you look at like the constructed formats and even

the limited formats of that time, they were probably the most diverse that I ever saw. Maybe it's been beaten. From a diversity perspective and from a gameplay perspective, I think it was kind of a special block and a special window of time. The sets that surrounded Ravnica ended up having very fun formats that went along with it. So it just partnered really well with everything around it. So one of the things I know they were nervous, development was a bit nervous about when I first sort of pitched the guild model,

was that the block draft was a really weird ask from you guys. Do you want to talk a little bit about that? What is it like when each set has different color pairs? How did you guys figure out how to make that work i remember there being a big fight about whether it needed to be four guilds or five guilds in the beginning um i think ultimately we trusted you but i think it's because we play tested both and then just concluded that 433 was going to be more elegant yeah um it could have blown up in our faces.

Like, with Bithon, I think it was kind of unpopular. Yeah. But, you know, I think that was a case where, you know, your instincts were right and we got out of our own way. Do you have any... What is your favorite memory of Ravnica, just working on Ravnica? working on Ravnica? I think my favorite memory of Ravnica...

My favorite memory from that period is kind of similar from my favorite memory. We worked on a Star Wars game at some point. Yeah. So we had a Star Wars trading card game that we did, yeah. Yeah, you and Richard designed it, and it's kind of a similar story where there was, like, on the Guild Pack design team, there was a blocker preventing good ideas from getting across.

And I ended up being the person to break the hold. And so in my mind, it's like helping people who have good ideas get them over the finish line. For me, that's what I remember best. It's more like enabling others others to like do the best work in terms of the sets i don't i'm that's a long time ago yeah the uh it was very funny that like uh it's sort of like in the beginning when you do new ideas there's people that are kind of opposed to them but then after they're successful like everybody loved them like history gets rewritten and you know so yeah i think for

me the memories of like working with with you and aaron and devin and the team on making something people really loved i think that's what i remember the people stick with me more than the the game sure and one of the things that's not i mean radnick in some ways was really um a watershed kind of set in the sense that it really really reshaped a lot of how we thought about things and how we made things. I mean, the fact that we've been back there twice already, I mean, it's clearly a fan favorite. So there's something about it. It's funny because

one of the things that as a designer that tags me is I always want to keep innovating. And every time we go back to Ravnica, everyone's like, don't change it. That's what it is. Please, can I make something? Can I further evolvenica, everyone's like, don't change it! That's what it is! Please, can I make it something? Can I further evolve it? And it's like, no, no, we love it like it is. So, it definitely is

this thing we keep revisiting, and we very much revisit it as it is. And one of these days, I keep wanting to revamp it a little bit. I'm like, come on, let me shake it up a little bit. So, okay, speaking of shaking things up, the next block, holy moly, we shook things up. Time Spiral Block.

So what are your memories of Time Spiral Block? It was, you know, so complicated to try and build something that would, it was basically like building an entire block out of a cube. And so, like, the way I tried to work was very intuitively and empathically, and so I'm trying to take all of this crazy information and make it make sense. Oh, I just realized something.

I didn't design Time Spiral. Brian did design Time Spiral. I did Future Sight, but I did not do Time Spiral. I did Fifth Dawn, I did Ravnica, but Champions and Time Spiral were Brian. Yeah, I think with Time Spiral. So I did Fifth Dawn, I did Ravnica, but Champions and Time Spiral were Brian. Yeah, I think with Time Spiral, it was again like we were in development.

It was about a month in or it was early days and there were developers who were like, this isn't workable. And it was just a really hard design to work with from the start. And I think we kind of leaned in on the nostalgia and the complexity in a way that certainly in retrospect, I wouldn't have done again, but that's what I think, you know, me, Devin, Aaron,

probably you were like drawn to at the time. And so we took a gamble there and I wish we had put dual lands in the set, but I mean, we, we, yeah, we, we, we definitely leaned in. I think what happened was we wanted to make a nostalgia set and just said, I mean, we, we had, we had such fun making this set. It was so fun to design. It's fun because Modern Horizons is a set that, like, we kind of revisited this idea.

And I have so much fun with Modern Horizons just remembering, like, there's something about designing and just you can do whatever you want. You know, you have all the tools at your disposal that is a little intoxicating, especially when you have all the nostalgia mixed in, and, um, but here's my big memory of Time Spiral was, um, we had a lot of cool concepts, but it was a little rough.

Brian turned in a set that was structurally, like, there were a lot of cool ideas, but it wasn't structurally all there, and I know you spent a lot of time sort of building a lot of structure in, that's my memory of Time Spiral, is you did a lot of reworking of taking a lot of Brian's cool concepts and the team's cool

concepts, but giving a little more structure to it. Yeah, I think if you played for Magic for five or ten years, like, you really appreciated that set and that block. Yeah. And I think you can see the love that went into it, but certainly the bar was way too high for anyone who

was new to the game. Yeah, it definitely taught us some stuff. Okay, so think back. So you were... How long were you at Wizards for? Six years. Okay, so what are you at Wizards for? Six years. Six years?

Yeah. Okay. So what are other fond memories you have? Like what's the magic card that you're proudest of having made? Yeah. I think on Kamigawa, I realized driving into work one morning that you could use the legend rule to make for really interesting effects. So the dragons ended up coming from me. Or I was inspiration for all the Kamigawa dragons.

But, you know, it's funny. I remember at the time designing over 100 cards, but I couldn't tell you most of them. It's funny when I'm working at one of these tech companies and there's a bunch of people playing magic. I'm like, oh, I made that. But I recognize more than I recall. If that makes sense. Well, what was your. So one thing that's fun when I go back to talk to people from from long ago, I talk a lot about wizards now in my podcast and stuff, but I don't talk as much.

So you were there from 99, 98? 2000 to 2006. Oh, 2000 to 2006. Okay. So what was R&D like? What is your memory of magic R&D? You know, I think a lot of it was asking ridiculous theoretical questions and then talking about it half the day, right?

of it was asking ridiculous theoretical questions and then talking about it half the day right um and so there there were how many how many uh iq points would you give up for height yeah the basketball and things like that um and so it was always this kind of like it's almost a humor style that i don't encounter anymore but um oh i should give the actual question so the audience can... The actual question was... This was a SCAF question. How many IQ... For...

What was it? I guess for giving up... 10 points for an inch. Oh, was it 10 points for an inch of vertical leap? I think it was... Or height. Or just of height.

No, no, no. It wasn't height. It was... The question was how many IQ points would you give up? And I think it was for a certain amount of vertical leap in basketball. That was the original question.

I think there was extrapolations of that. And Scaf, anyway, one of the things, if you ever, I do a comic trip. I name a comic trip. There's a reoccurring comic I do where people in the pit are just asking random questions and we're wasting our day answering silly questions about, like, if you could clone one of the seven dwarfs to fight a war, which one would it be? And stuff like that. Yeah, it was definitely a silly and playful environment.

I definitely felt like one of the more serious folks in terms of, like, trying to keep everything on the rails. But it was fun, for sure. Okay, so we talked about the stuff you led. Were any teams on that were interesting? Let's see. What was the first team? Do you remember the first team you were on? I worked on Odyssey, maybe.

Odyssey, okay. I think. That's a long time ago. Do you have any memories of Odyssey? That's the set I led, I designed for. Odyssey? Okay, Bob. Randy led the development for that,

I believe. Yeah, I think I ended up breaking some cards that people probably never saw. There was a card called Detapt. I think it was Unsummon, but you could Unsummon two creatures very quickly for, like, you and one you. And I ended up having, like, kind of absurd decks.

You could do really crazy things with, like, things going to the graveyard that in development you get to, you know, kill on turn one and two much more reasonably than you do in the real world. So I got to do a lot of card breaking. A couple things still got through. So that's interesting. So one of the things, I mean, still to this day, is we like to hire people that are very good at deck building

because you guys have the skill of identifying things in the file that might be problematic, and then you build decks to prove that they're problematic. Now, did you ever... One of the things I always find... Not that I do a lot of that, but I always... Whenever I had a card I really liked, I always felt bad putting in decks

because I didn't want it to get nerfed. So I remember... I think that's a pretty common thing down there. Yeah. I remember, though, I once, when I was... What was it? It was for Urza's Destiny. I made a mono white playtest deck that had four copies or some number of copies of Yawgmoth's Bargain in it.

And it was a replenish deck basically. And I had no way to cast them. I just was going to, I discarded them to like, whatever the white discard gain life. There was like a cycle in that thing. But anyway, I remember I mentioned it once online that I made that, and people were mocking me for it. And I'm like, it was a brutally good deck.

I don't know why everyone was mocking me for it. Yeah, I think it was funny coming to Odyssey. It just seemed like a lot of the stuff that... You know, a lot of stuff hadn't been caught yet. So it was a lot of fun to beat people. i think my initial record was really good uh but that that changed over time yeah one of the things that i

think your track record um i mean you and randy and a bunch of people that the early development in magic was not our our strength uh and really there was a period of kind of ramping up development uh of which you were a key player there, of just like, for example, talking about just getting things into place, like systems into place so that you could figure out and evaluate stuff.

I think that you were the progenitor, and then Eric Lauer did a lot after you, but nowadays, they have all these tools and all these things that they do about, you know, one of my quotes I say a lot is that I feel like the early part of magic is very art and the later

part of magic is very science. You know, that I'm making whatever I want to make, but later on it's like you have to make sure everything works and put it through the system and, you know, there's a lot of calibration that goes on. Yeah, I think in terms of creation, the world has changed everywhere in that regard.

So we have a little bit of time here. So I'm curious, what magic memories? Do you have a good magic memory? Something you, your time at Wizards, six years? Yeah, you know, there were a series of pranks. I didn't prank you,

but there were a series of pranks that happened in the early 2000s. Wait, did you do them? Did you do the pranks? I may or may not have pulled the pranks. Did you do my prank? I didn't. I don't know. I think I have an idea of who did your prank,

but like the one related to goldfish and farming, I'm familiar with, but the one where the eggs that like cracked and we all had to smell it for weeks, not vetted by development. So real quickly for the audience who might not know the story. So in R&D for a while, there was a prankster.

I think there's not one prankster. I think it was a series of pranksters because numerous people have now over the years said, oh, I did some of it. So I think it was multiple people. Mike Donate has. Mike did yours, I think. What? Mike did yours. So anyway, one day I'm about to leave town, I think, and I'm stopping the office to grab something.

And my desk is cut. Every every inch of my desk is covered with eggs. My desk, my chair, eggs, my shelves, everything's covered with eggs. And then there's a live bird in a birdcage on the eggs. And the funny thing was, I had to leave to go on vacation, so I couldn't even clean it up. So I'm like, I took a picture with it and then I had to go. And then other people cleaned it up.

And then they put eggs in this card box that no one realized when they cleaned up that there were eggs in the card box. And then months later, there was a smell that we were trying to figure out where the smell was coming from. And it was that egg box. So which pranks did you do? I was tied to There's a smell that we were trying to figure out where the smell was coming from. And it was that egg box, so.

So which pranks did you do? I was tied to the farm. The first one was Henry's farm. Oh, right, there's bales of hay and Henry's desk. The trick was they would pick somebody's desk and they would do stuff, right? Yeah, I think Andy Collins. We essentially built an aquarium in cups and put them all over his desk. And he had, I think, like 100 goldfish to deal with.

But the eggs, I'll – The eggs wasn't here, so. Yeah, it's funny. I've referenced this. I say we call we refer to it as the mad farmer because it started with the farm and so but that was a mystery for a long time

now see you listen to my podcast you learn who was the mad farmer well part of it was Brian that's great yeah one of the things that's a fun thing to talk about. The after hour,

you know, the sort of, one of the things that I love about R&D is it's a group of gamers and so there's a lot of gaming that goes on. And it's,

even to today, although I miss a lot of it because I go home with my family, but there's a lot of after hours gaming that goes on at Wizards. Well, back when we could actually go to the office.

Oh, yeah, I remember that. What else? I'm just trying to get people a sense of, I guess this is sort of 2006 Wizards. During my time, you know, there was an active basketball game. A lot of people from the company would go and play basketball every day. I think one thing I liked about Wizards is it was very inclusive. So the whole team would say, hey, we're doing lunch today. And there would be different groups that would go off and either play games or have funny conversations about just a very creative vibe.

But it was very open and not very exclusive or niche-y. Everyone was just there to have fun and that's rare. I think that's actually really special. So I'm trying to think. I'm almost to work. Is there any final sort of thoughts on your time on Magic or

on Wizards in general? It's funny. I definitely liked working in that medium a lot. Having worked in tech for the last decade, I think magic's a really special medium to design for. You can essentially just change a couple of knobs, write in some words, and you have an entirely new object

that you can understand really quickly. So the pace of being able to make a game or work in a game where like you can feel it really fast i think um that was pretty unique um and there aren't that many formats where that's true maybe technology will improve and we'll be able to make um experiences that you can like make as an empath more quickly um but as an intuitive person like magic's magic was like bar none in terms of uh mediums that were fun to work with in a very human way it's just not the way technology works at this point so i do miss that yeah one of the you mentioned which is very interesting to me is um whenever you go to tech companies that there's always people that play Magic there.

Yeah, absolutely. There's some correlation between the desire to create something and the love of Magic. I find there's a high correlation between that. It's true for game. Whenever I go to GDC or something, every game design studio has a Magic League. You know, it's just a thing that...

Every tech company has a Magic League. Yeah. It's like, it's just, there's something about like how the engineering mind works and how magic works. Like there's a real symbiosis there. So any, so I'm going to wrap up now because I'm at my desk.

Any last thoughts? Any final things you, looking back on magic in your past? Yeah, I think for me, it's like, where is Magic going to fit in? I haven't played a lot over the last, since I left. But with, I have two kids and nephews,

and so there'll be a point where like, I probably re-enter on their behalf. And so. Oh, the next generation will pull you back yeah so it probably you know five years from now maybe i'll i'll send you a an email about what you do here um but uh i guess there's some kind of like in my mind there's a horizon where i'll probably uh see what you've been up to okay well i'm excited to find out what let me know when she do so anyway uh i am now 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 thank you, Brian, for joining us. All right. Thanks, everybody. Thanks, Mark.

Okay. I'll see you guys next time. Bye-bye.