Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #769: Jim Lin

Episode Date: August 28, 2020

In this podcast, I talk with designer Jim Lin, one of the original Alpha playtesters and longtime R&D member.

I'm not pulling out of the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work, Coronavirus Edition. So I've been doing fun interviews and I will continue today with Jim Lynn. Say hi, Jim. Hi, everyone. Okay, so the question I always ask everybody is, how did you learn to play Magic? And yours is a very interesting story. So how did you learn to play Magic? interesting story so how did you learn to play magic so i learned to play from scaf elias uh i can't remember if this was december of 1991 or january of 1992 anymore but scaf and i were working to um we were going to be running a miniatures game at a local gaming convention in philadelphia so we were getting together to kind of plan what we were going to do as part of that game and at the end of what kind of our planning

he's like hey i've got this cool thing to show you and he pulled out these two small sets of cards they were i don't know i think maybe one by two or something like they were teeny i mean you know and he said this is a game that a friend of mine has invented. I think you'd like it. You should play it. And so we played together. And so that was my introduction to Magic.

So this is, so Magic came out in August of 1993. So this is December of 1991. So this is pretty early on, right? Richard's early playtest cards, what you're talking about was he photoc pretty early on, right? Richard's early playtest cards, what you're talking about was he photocopied stuff, right, and then just cut them out?

Yeah, I don't know if he photocopied or if he printed. I mean, all I know was they were on, you know, essentially construction paper, you know, printed black and white, you know, with I was never involved in making the actual cards, so i don't know

um how they did it exactly i would just get cards i mean um but yeah there was there was just you know there are these little teeny cards about you know uh like i said you know that had a little bit of text on them and like usually to make it easier to tell remember what the card was there was some piece of you know like cartoon art or you know image that richard found somewhere that he put on them i think in some cases he'd sketch something you know that kind of thing or someone sketched something i don't know like i said yeah i never was um uh i wasn't you know living down at upenn you know richard and scaf at the time so um i mean i never did so as as a result you know i wasn't really involved in the guts of making it basically the the playtest cards so okay so what was early magic play that's like what was magic like

in december of 1991 so early magic play testing is was really funny i mean the way it essentially worked was um you got given your starter thing which was um i don't even remember what it was whether it's like a starter deck plus some of them are bushes but it was all it was essentially you got this big pile of cardboard cards given to you and then you made your own deck and you started playing people and we played for ante and then you could trade and so you know over time you know you started with like this really random collection of cards you try to build a deck from and then as you played other people and traded with them your deck got stronger and we would just get together you know you know either you get agree with one person or there'd be nights where a group would get together you just play with each other and play for ante and then trade you know and so and then build decks

basically and so then talk about the game afterwards so how did you give feedback obviously part of this was for richard to gather feedback so how was the feedback given to richard oh i mean some of it was in person but some of it was um trying to remember if it was via email or some kind of like rec you know list you know what i mean like like uh um so i mean i i think it was some kind of lister that we would email into if i remember right but i could be wrong on that it could be just we had like you know we just emailed all each other i don't remember anymore so so you would have notes and then there was you know some get together show where we talk about stuff so okay so how did early magic differ from what got released in 1993

uh i mean in terms of the rules you know it was pretty close you know the card set changed quite a bit as we play tested obviously uh and i mean you know before magic came out i think no one had any sense of how big it was going to be so we were effectively playing with much smaller card pulls than you know actually happened in reality right you know like i mean you know so i don't remember the exact numbers let's just say though you know for argument's sake, because this wouldn't be too far off, that we gave everyone in the group one starter deck and 10 boosters.

But, like, we never added cards to the pool at the beginning for a long time, right? And so that was, like, essentially, you know, if there were 30 of us playing, you know, the universe of cards that were being played was 300 boosters plus 30 starter decks, right? So, I mean, it was a very small set of cards that were available to the world, right? You know, like, so, you know, there was, you know, so common cards, there's tons of, you know, you could build, you get lots of them. But, you know, some of the rare cards, there was probably like one copy of it amongst everyone playing the game. And so later on when we were getting ready for the final release of Magic, we knew some cards were too powerful.

But at the time, people's mindset was, well, no one's going to buy that many boosters. And so there are going to be a few time walks out there. It's not like, you know, someone's ever going to get a bunch, you know, more than one in their deck. It's probably fine. Right. And then, you know, as soon as the product actually hit the streets and we were like, Oh, that was a bad assumption. Right. You know, like we just totally underestimated how much people would be into magic. And we had kind of completely playtested the wrong environment.

We were essentially playtesting something much closer to sealed deck play than constructed play when we playtested Magic. So, I mean, like I said, we did do trading, and so it wasn't as limited as sealed deck play, but it was not very close to true constructed play, where people were just like, okay, I'm going to go out and get this exact set of cards and make a deck from it, right? play but it was you know not very close to true constructed play where people were just like okay i'm gonna go out and get these this exact set of cards and make a deck from it right i'm gonna

ignore how rare those cards are if i have to you know open a billion boosters or do a ton of trading or you know buy singles that's gonna happen like we just weren't thinking about it in that way and so you know the decks were really different i mean like i think my clearest example of how crazy the decks were is um um there's a couple of them like you know i remember uh having a conversation with bill rose or he was talking about his deck and he was like i only play things that fly or you know our creature kill spells everything else is garbage and then because essentially you know this is where we had a good extent of either tempo or character manage i pulled out a deck that was basically a bunch of low and medium cheap creatures because that's

all i've been able to assemble and crushed his deck because essentially you know the flying things were too slow to keep up with me his creatures kills all things like terror which was you know more expensive than the creatures that i was you know or the same cost of the creatures i was playing and there was no card advantage right and so you know and then the other really funny example is in an attempt to show everyone how broken ancestral recall was charlie catino assembled a deck that was nothing but islands merfolk and ancestral recalls and it was pretty good it beat a lot of people's decks now obviously if you have like i mean he had at that time ancestral recall was a common card so

i think he'd gotten i um i think he'd gotten something like 20 or 30 ancestral recalls by trading and people didn't realize how good it was at the time at first and by playing for ante and so obviously if you have 20 or 30 ancestral recalls you don't really want to pair it with a bunch of 1-1 creatures but that was what Charlie did

because that was the easiest thing for him to do what else can I put with my ancestral recalls I don't want to put too much land in. All right, I've got to play some cheap creatures. I think at one point he experimented with maybe he got a bunch of dual lands or got some and put some Savannah Lions in, the 2-1 creature. So he'd have a 2-1 creature instead of a 1-1 creature he tried to beat you down with. I mean, he was just trying to show just, you know, I'm drawing a crazy number of cards.

It doesn't matter that my other card is not very good. You just can't handle the fact that I've drawn three times as many cards as you have, literally. Right. You know, and so, I mean, it was just I mean, the decks you look back on, they were laughable. I mean, so the other thing I've heard about stories about the playtesting is because people were trading that you someone would start hoarding something. And you hear rumors that someone's like and that the value that would start going up because people like I know so someone would start hoarding something and you hear rumors that someone's hoarding, and the value of that would start going up because people are like, I know so-and-so wants it, so I'm going to trade it for more

because I know there's more value toward it. Yeah, I mean, there was a lot of that. I mean, I was involved in less trading just because most of the playtesters either were students, mostly grad students, or worked at or lived near UPenn that was not the case for me uh like i uh i was going to upenn part-time but i had a full-time job and i didn't live near upenn like i don't i'd have to come down especially in the evenings around the weekends to be there and

so you know my training centers were much lower just because it was it had to be when we had big group to get get together so i mean i mostly uh you know so just because it had to be when we had big group to get together. My decks tend to be lower powered because I just didn't have as much access to cards as people, and I was mostly getting cards by playing for ante and that kind of thing. I described the deck I beat Bill with. One of the advantages of that deck was if I lost a card from it, I had another card that was almost as good or was the same card, right? You know? Yeah. So, like, my deck never really got worse.

I mean, eventually I started winning randomly some good cards, right? So then I could build more interesting decks. But it was, like, this weird deck that, like, I could never get worse, no matter how many games I lost, because, you know, I'm losing, like, you know, like essentially bears, right? I keep losing my bears, but then I have more bears. And so, you know, another'm losing, like, you know, like, essentially bears, right? I keep losing my bears, but then I have more bears, and so, you know, another bear goes in there, right? You know, and it just, you know, that kind of thing.

So, I mean, my experience was pretty different than a lot of the other playtests because of the fact that it was effectively remote in some ways. Okay, so let's flash forward a little bit. Were you at Gen Con when Magic premiered? Let's flash forward a little bit. Were you at Gen Con when Magic premiered? I am trying to remember which is the first Gen Con I went to.

Well, I mean, do you remember being at any of the events when Magic first started showing up? Were you at any of those events? I mean, I was at a really early Gen Con. I'm just trying to remember if it was the first one. Well, 94 had the first World Championships. 93 was the introduction of Magic. I don't know if that helps you. Yeah, I mean, and this is the thing I'm trying to remember. A lot of these things have gotten fuzzy in my mind.

I kind of believe that I was at the 93 Gen Con, but there's some chance I'm getting it confused with the 94, right? I mean, I know for sure both of them involved crazy, like, this is an issue, the farm marshals are getting involved, you know, lines near the Wizards of the Coast booth, you know, for people standing in line trying to buy magic, right? You know, and I mean, you know, you know, and, well, sorry, I must have been out there in 93, right?

Because I guess by 94, Gen Con, I actually worked full-time at Wizards. Yeah. So, and I definitely went to that one. I definitely went to one as a non-full-time employee. So I was there in 93. Okay, so what was it like taking this game that you were in playtesting, that, right, was this little tiny game that started just blowing up into this big thing, this phenomenon? What was that like? little money we raised to print magic i mean literally it was a like i mean i pitched my college roommates on did they want to put a little money into magic they all said no and then of

course like five years later like man we should have totally listened to you when you said we when you said we should put some money into magic right you know i put a i put a few thousand dollars which i mean looking back on it now i definitely could have put more but at time, it seemed like an enormous sum of money to me to put into something speculative. Right. You know, you know, of my own money. And it was like literally, you know, we raised just enough money to print Alpha. And then when we sold Alpha, we used that money to print Beta. And so like there's just kind of like pay as you go thing that happened right and so it's pretty crazy right you know it was the net result

of that was there were massive shortages where it was like you know no one can find alpha because we didn't print very much of it right and people really wanted it right so okay so um you go from being a playtest so how did you transition to working at Wizards? How did that happen? So, I mean, after Magic came out, you know, Wizards approached a group of us.

It was most of the Ice Age Design group, which was me, Scafalias, Dave Petty, and Chris Page to work on Magic you know, part time, essentially. Right. So we were also living in Philadelphia. Scaf, Dave and Chris were both grad students. I was both a grad student and had a full time job.

And so we would get together on weekends and do it over email, you know, and, you know, comment on stuff that was coming out, you know was updating the rulebook or the next card set or fixing errors that were in alpha, trying to make what was supposed to be on the card for real, that kind of stuff. And pretty quickly, it became pretty obvious that this wasn't really working out for either group. Wizards, understandably, wasn't very happy about the fact that you know we really

weren't spending that much time on it because we didn't have the time right you know so it was like you know like in my situation you know i'm working a full-time job i'm going to grad school and you know at the same time i'm trying to work on magic right and so you know i was young so i probably wasn't getting very much sleep but i probably still wasn't spending more than 10 hours a week on magic right and you know um so it was the kind of thing where you know wizards was kind of frustrated about you know i mean it wasn't like they didn't understand but they just it became very obvious to both sides that like this whole part-time thing wasn't gonna get it done right and so eventually um wizards approached um the four of us and three of us decided to do

it uh chris decided he didn't want to do it um to come out to move to seattle and work on uh magic full-time because that's the only thing is we were all living in philadelphia which the coast is obviously in seattle so you know there was not just that we weren't working full-time it was a three-hour time difference you know it's all over you know email and we're talking about 1993 email right you know and so like i mean it's i don't want to say the internet wasn't a thing yet but but it kind of wasn't a thing, right? Like you didn't go to websites in 1993, right? Like you went to like Lister's and stuff like that, right? I was using that back then.

Yeah. I mean, like it, you know, it was just nothing like the thing that is now where, you know, you can imagine having an important group working remotely. Isn't that crazy? I mean, at the time it was just basically completely insane. So, you know, in the spring of 1994 you know three of us moved out to seattle and to work on magic full time essentially so okay so prior to moving out you guys actually had started working on a design right so ice age was the first design you guys worked on, is that correct? Yes. I mean, we had actually been working on Ice Age Trum before when Magic released. I have a picture that someone sent me because they had found it in their garage and scanned it.

From this big summit we did at UPenn, I it must have been in like early 1993 um and so there's a bunch of us you know it's there's all the like essentially all the philadelphia play testers plus peter and lisa stevens and a few other people from seattle in this big classroom in at upenn. Right. We published that picture in the Duelist, the Duelist fifth anniversary, uh, had that picture in it, in the article about magic. Yeah.

And so, you know, and at that thing, we agreed to like, you know, our plan for magic, you know, which is laughable when you look at it back, you know, when you look at it now. But we had this, you know, idea of, you know, the first release would come out, it would last for a while, and then we would do a second release. And at the time, we were really thinking that, you know, that would be kind of like a sequel as opposed to an expansion, right? Like there was going to be the first set, and then like the second set, which was, at that time, we had agreed it was going to be

the Ice Age groups that would basically replace all those cards, right? You know, and you wouldn't play the two of them together, you'd play them separately, right? You know, and... It's going to be called Magic the Gathering Ice Age, right? Like, the first set was Magic the Gathering, sorry, the first set was Magic the Gathering,

the second would be Magic Ice Age, right? Is that how it's going to work? Right. And I'm not even sure if this was... This might have been before we had figured out that we were going to have to call it Magic the Gathering. I don't remember anymore, right? Because that was kind of relatively like, oh, crap.

Well, we can't trademark magic. That's an issue. So what are we going to do to give ourselves a trademarkable name we can protect? I remember that being a late scramble. Like, oh, crap. what are we going to do to give ourselves a trademarkable name we can protect? I remember that being a late scramble. Like, oh, crap, what are we going to do? We've got to redesign the card backs because we can't trademark magic. Do you know where the Gathering came from?

I think it was some idea of both the idea of gathering mana and also gathering the cards. There was some kind of brainstorming on it. But email brainstorming on it. And I think a bunch of ideas got thrown back and forth and people kind of liked the double meaning of the gathering in our minds at the time, I think. But that one's really fuzzy to me it was like it was definitely one of the like oh my god this is something we need to resolve in like the next 48 hours because you know we're supposed to send stuff to the printer you know next week but this is we have to redo all the card backs right you know because the uh um and and you know this is kind of funny now to think about it because i mean i'm sure right now you know i mean i don't know but i'm i assume that you know the way which is that the cards back because they have a file

for the card back they have not changed in ages that just keeps getting reused right but i mean at the time like every card had its own back file right i mean like like there was a big grid of fronts and backs and like you know you know because that you know at the time people were short like i did i actually did some like i'm in a not for magic but for netrunner i'm in a file and i'm copying pasting elements from one card to the other cards they're supposed to be the same in an effort to make them the same so i'm sure that was how the backs were done too it was like they had to copy and paste the back file, the back image across the grid 121 times.

And so it was this big panic. Okay, so Ice Age was meant to be Magic Part 2, the next evolution of Magic. So how did that come about? How did Ice age come to be i mean i think you know i mean the playtest group had kind of broken up into in a couple different ways it was partially based on who knew who before the playtesting started because like richard was kind of the

nexus of this and you know he knew people through a lot of different ways like you know the ice age group was mostly um uh people he knew from his phd math program um plus i knew scat from college and so i kind of got lumped in with them like there's another group that was more people that richard knew from his from participating in the upenn bridge club and then there was a i think there's a couple other groups like you know that richard knew from his from participating in the upenn bridge club and then there was a i think there's a couple other groups like you know where richard had met people and discovered they like gaming just like he did and and um so so the groups that kind of group broken up you know based on kind of who knew who beforehand and also because a lot of times you know the way we play to imagine it would be like you know the group that knew each other would get

together you know but again this is before cell phones too so you know organizing like you know 35 people who don't know that way each other very well to get together is actually kind of a big pain in the butt right you know back then yeah and so it was mostly like you know the four of us would get together a lot because we all knew each other and we're socializing anyway and so then we would just play magic right you know so each of those groups kind of developed their own philosophy on what they thought made a good magic set and what was fun and magic and what wasn't fun and so you know we you know so we kind of formed this group and you know we kind of had some ideas what would make you know a good second set um you know i think one of the things we had talked about in the big

summit was wanting to have the sets feel pretty different flavor wise right you know and so i forget now where ice age came from but i know it's pretty early on we were like oh we want to do like a cool winter like you know snow set with a lot of very different you know feeling heart because of that so okay so and then you you worked on ice age how long how long from the beginning of ice age to the end of ice age how long did you guys work on that i mean it was years i think i mean so ice age got published when like 95 summer of I mean, I am certain that we started working on Ace Age informally as early as 92.

We probably didn't really formally call it Ice Age and really get serious about it until after that summit in 93. So it was at least a couple years we were working on it. But we had been meeting as a group and talking about what we thought was good

and exchanging card ideas for probably six months to a year before that. Do you have any favorite stories of the making of Ice Age? I mean... I'm trying to remember making vice age i mean it's funny um i mean i have mostly stories that are funny because they because we we did a bad job right like i mean i think the couple uh and then I guess I have one funny story. Like, I remember that. I mean, it's kind of shows you how tired we were and how young we were and how giddy we were in these late night sessions.

Like one of my definitely fun stories is remembering the night where we're like we came with a Lurgo wave. And like there was like a good 20 or 30 minutes of Hans run. It's the Lurgo wave when we thought about flavor text right you know just going back and forth with each other and coming with crazier ways of saying that and just you know being like um but then I remember like we spent all this time designing that terrible card that I mean basically the mechanics didn't fit on the card and so I don't think the card ever really worked was a uh this was kind of probably one of my pet projects so i definitely need to take most of the uh the blame for this the uh although i don't remember if this ended up being an ice age or in um alliances the which one the the i'm trying to remember what the card finally got called it might have just been

called ice cauldron when it got released ice cauldron yes we have much more we had some much more complicated name for it based on like like that was based on some mythology we had found right i think and then like with the ice witch and stuff like that but then so we we had something much longer as the name but then it didn't fit and also though you know by the time time aces came out you know the kind of the brand team or what was it really the brand team then but the the group in charge of naming and flavor text was trying to you know strip out references to earth essentially right and so some of the stuff that we named things on just got removed right so how much were you influenced by like scandinavian type that seems like there's some norse and scandinavian and some of that was was yeah i mean i mean you know we definitely some of us were pretty into that

stuff and so we definitely were looking into that area right you know and for inspiration on you know card ideas you know just like you know for rabianites richard obviously had looked at you know at the actual rabianites right you know we we definitely and there's a lot of you know classic mythology in in the original magic right you know so we definitely were looking into that area i mean so lurk wife i kind of feel like that name is is either like a an actual like scandinavian monster or like we took an actual Scandinavian myth and modified it slightly. I mean like, but it was inspired by something,

you know, like, like, um, some Grendel like thing up there basically, you know? So, um,

like there, and you know, there's, there was, um, you know, there was, you know,

quite a bit of that in terms of designing early magic sets. So real quickly, we don't have a lot of time left, but I want to hit there's a few other sets that you worked on. So one of my favorite sets of all time you guys designed, which was Antiquities.

So I want to talk a little bit about making of Antiquities. How did Antiquities come about? I mean, I think Antiquities came about because, I mean, essentially early on, we kept underestimating how much demand there would be for Magic and how many new sets we did. So, you know, the original set came out. There were some reprints. Richard did Arabian Nights. And that thing flew off the shelf.

Some people were like, we need another set. and that thing flew off the shelf some people were like we need another set and so i i mean maybe i remember wrong but i think we designed antiquities and something really crazy short like across two weekends because it was like we need another set designed by x day and you know and so like i think we like i think the four of us pulled like two all-nighters across two or three weekends and and you know came up with the outlineiquities, and we had a little more time to flush it out into actual cards. We really liked the idea of doing something centered around artifacts. Artifacts seemed really popular to us in terms of what people liked. There weren't that many in Alpha we kind of felt like this is a cool space to explore in um we created some pretty fun story stuff with um urza and mishra and the the brothers war and stuff like that um uh so i mean like um how did that come about how did you guys come up with the brothers war how did that mean, it was one of those weird things where, like, you know,

there was an Urza card and a Mishra card in Alpha. And we noticed some weird patterns. I mean, like, eventually, like, you know, Urza had two sets of glasses and Mishra had nothing, right? You know, and so we eventually had this running joke, which never really made it into the flavor text, but put some oblique references and i think that essentially they were like you know twins except urza got both heads and misha had no head was our running joke and right and so you see like these things were like urza keeps having two sets of headgear and

misha never has any headgear right so that was like our silly running joke was like, you know, Urza got both heads, right? And one of the cool things about it was you did this archaeology thing where it wasn't that the story was happening, it's that you were digging up things, learning about the story that happened long ago. How did that idea come about? I mean, I think that was, you that was inspired by the idea of artifacts themselves.

I mean, the name itself implies that these things are kind of from a lost age. They're not new, right? And so I think we really leaned into that idea of – I mean, and I think – maybe I'm attaching something after the fact to it, but I think that was Richard's original vision for artifacts was these were kind of like lost relics you know and that's why there were so few of them in the original set right you know um and so i mean there's some balance reasons you don't want to go too crazy with artifacts obviously just because since they're colorless you know they go into any deck in some ways and so you have to be a little careful about you know how many of them you do but so i think we really were just trying to lean into that whole um you know discovering large lost relics

i'm sure in the back of our minds we had some you know indiana jones getting through the temple you know getting the you know discovering all the cool stuff thing in our minds right you know so well that's cool so So, I'm almost to my desk here, so we have to wrap up. So, any last thoughts as looking back on your time on Magic? Any final thoughts about sort of what you remember of that time period?

Oh, I mean, I mean, obviously I'm really proud of what we created with Magic. I mean, it still amazes me how much we got wrong but it was fine because we got the most important things right you know i think you know i don't think we can take full credit for that some that a little bit of that is luck but i think there is quite a bit of design in there like i think at the heart of it we did kind of understand

what made magic a great game and preserved that part of it, you know, even if we got lots of the details wrong, whether it was the timing rules or, you know, how we were to the cards originally and stuff like that, right, you know? So... Okay, well, that's... It's fun. One of the things I enjoy talking to

people from way back when is just... I mean, I've been involved with Magic for a long time, but you predate me, so hearing some of the super early stuff is always fun for me. So anyway, I'm 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 magic,

it's time for me to be making magic. So thank you, Jim, for joining us. It was great being here. Thank you. And guys, I'll see all of you next time. Bye-bye.