Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #771: Corey Bowen

Episode Date: September 4, 2020

In this podcast, I interview Corey Bowen, a current member of R&D, one who focuses on Commander design.

I'm not pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the Drive to Work Coronavirus Edition. Okay, so I've been doing some fun interviews. The fun never stops. So today I have Corey Bowen. Say hi, Corey. Hello, everyone. Okay, so Corey, let's start by the question I've been asking everybody to start with is, how did you start playing Magic? Sure. So I actually started playing Magic on my senior year of high school. Me and my friends had just gotten into Dungeons & Dragons, and then we were at a game store, and we were just thinking, hey, if we're getting nerdy enough to play Dungeons & Dragons,

how far can we go? And I remember seeing that they had the little intro decks for uh were uh they were like very cheap or something i looked over to one of my friends and i said hey i get two of these will you get two of these and then we can play together and then he looked over to another friend and said hey if we get two of these will you get two of these so the group of us like six or seven of us all ended up getting intro, and then we just went home and really tried hard to figure out how to play the game. I remember they also gave us a booster pack for free, where my first rare was Enter the Infinite, which I really enjoyed. Okay.

Okay, so how did you get from there, from casually playing, to—so the first time I met you would be your internship. Casually playing to... So the first time I met you would be your internship. Right. So after that, I ended up going to school for game design. I went to a school up here in Washington. And when I went to that school, it was full of a lot of other people who really enjoyed games. But a lot of my close friends and roommates didn't yet play Magic. So I spent a lot of time trying to teach them and convert them into playing

magic um and while i was learning game design and through that i got really more invested in like the makeup of a magic card because i was trying to explain to these people what they can do where they can go the possibilities faced within the game what what would be their favorite play their favorite way to play um eventually i on my junior year of college i was looking for internships um i found a posting for the wizard's internship via my school's websites um and i got really excited about it uh i applied for it i uh tried my hardest on the interview and I got in. And, you know, that's that's the internship. So let's play real quickly for the people that don't understand. So the difference we a lot of when you first come to Wizards, there's often periods of time where

you we've called them internships, like when you win the great designer search, we call that internship. But really, that's not an internship. internship really that is you're being paid for six months uh and it's a what's the correct term uh it's uh what's the name of it they we pay you but it's a external um like in a contract role yeah it's a contract role is what it essentially is but what you were doing is an actual actual internship um where uh I believe, is in college or has just graduated from college. Yeah, they're either on their way to senior or about to graduate. And it's during the summer, and I think it's 10 weeks, if I remember correctly. It was 15 weeks, I think.

Was yours 15 weeks? It might have been 10 weeks. I might just be wrong with that. But anyway, we've been doing it for many summers. Although I think you guys might have been the first of this program, the current program we have. Yeah. I remember that Jules was an intern before me, but he was two years behind. So I was the first intern to come in with the current program we have now. Right, right.

We've had different internship programs, but this is the current program we have now. Right, right. We've had different internship programs, but this is the current one we have now. And to this day, we just had our series of summer interns. I think this is the last week as we're recording this. But anyway, okay, so what was the internship like? What did you do in your internship? Yeah, the internship was really cool. It was, at first I was, like, really starstruck by like, I had like read names of people on

articles, obviously yours. Um, and like Adam Prozac, Dave Humphries, there's all these people whose names I've read somewhere. I like, oh, this is who they are. So I was a little starstruck by that. But, um, I ended up getting over that. It was really fun. I had worked on the set design team of M19 during that. And it was really interesting to sit in the design meetings, figure out what they're looking for, what the process is, how their feedback loop works, other testing.

M19 is core 2019, by the way. Yeah, core 2019. My bad. interesting m19 is core 2019 by the way just yeah yeah core 2019 my bad um and then at some point uh someone approached me with a project that i they were interested in me trying to take ownership for or try out as an internship intern thing so i ended up uh doing the dominaria planeswalker decks mostly by myself with the counsel of Yanni. And through that, I learned a lot about what you have to do to make cards that are more appropriate for a new player audience

and where complexity lines are and kind of really zoning into what audience you're hitting and what card demands, what a card design needs to do to hit the correct audience, especially on a complexity line. So a lot of my internship was, yeah, let's make M19, or let's make Core Set 2019. Let's do some Planeswalker decks,

and then let's sit in on a lot of other various teams. I remember being on some Vision team with you that I believe changed after I left. It was like the Archery 2 thing. Oh, yes. You were on the baseball. Originally, baseball,

that slot, meaning the slot after Throne of Eldraine, was going to be a second set set on Throne of Eldraine. And then mid-Vision, we switched it over to make it Return of Theros. So you were on the long-forgotten Into the Dark Woods Eldraine set. Right. I thought that stuff was really

cool. I was a little sad coming back after my internship and that not being there, but I understood why it wasn't. But yeah, that was a lot of my internship. It was just really cool meeting a lot of all these people who are very into magic design and

just learning the ropes it's so much different of what it means to design magic in versus out of the building okay so that was in between your junior and senior year correct? yeah okay so now you go back to your senior year you spend another year learning game design

oh wait quick question by the way since Yeah. Okay, so now you go back to your senior year. You spend another year learning game design. Oh, wait, quick question, by the way. In learning game design, does Magic come up much? So I learned a lot of game design that was focused on digital development. So a lot of, I don't know, I don't think Magic came up a lot in my education, mostly because like half my education was you need to learn how to use these programming tools to prototype stuff. And half my education was you need to understand the different drives and motivations that players have and how to integrate that in a game. And Magic would come up if we were talking about hey this is what collectors like or magic would show up if we were talking about maybe resource systems but overall i didn't have that many lessons that were focused in on magic okay um okay so now you finished your senior year so what what happened how how'd you get back to theards? Yeah, so it was interesting. Actually, like after the internship, I believe I had, it was like, so after my internship, I had the choice.

Choice is not real, but the expected plan was after the internship, I would finish my senior year and then I would come back and work because that's kind of the cadence that they expect with internship is all right finish your senior year and then start working I actually talked to my manager who was Mark Gottlieb at the time and decided that I thought it would be the best for the path that I was on if I just went back to school for just a half a year finished all the courses I believed I needed to finish, and then started on the top of 2018. So that's what I did. And then I got a contract at the top of 2018. I came back, and I was super nervous again, even though I had met all these people. I was like, oh, I'm nervous again.

That's great as a contractor. And then I immediately started working on some different Planeswalker decks, and I immediately started working on the Ikoria Vision team, which I would be on through SET. Wait, wait, wait. We'll get to that in a second. When you got hired full-time, not as an intern, there was a momentous event that happened. Are you aware of what record got set when you got hired?

yes, I think we're talking about the same thing here but I believe I am the first person to be hired on as a magic designer who is younger than the game of magic itself. Ding ding ding ding that is correct, like Jules was like six months older or something but

you were the first person to be younger than the game hired into r&d so yes i take great pride in that and at this point there's a few other people working on magic that are younger than the game but i believe i am among the youngest and i'm still or obviously still the first who was younger than magic you're the first you're're the trendsetter there. Correct. Before we get into it, I want to start explaining what you did once you got full-time, but I just want to explain to the audience, the way the internship works is when you get the internship, there is a possibility that the internship can parlay into a full-time job.

It's not guaranteed or anything, but if we're impressed with your work and stuff during the internship and there's openings and things that's something that can happen and so at the end of your summer we had meetings

and stuff we were talking about what do you think of Cori and stuff like that so we said nice things about you so right

okay so okay so now you start full time so let's talk about Coria you were on the vision design team and the set design team

right for Coria yeah so I was on the vision design team for Coria and I went all the way were on the vision design team and the set design team, right, for Ikoria? Yeah, so I was on the vision design team for Ikoria, and I went all the way through to the set design team. I actually talked with Mark Utley, my manager at the time, again. For me, I really wanted to have a focus on one set. I wanted to figure out, I wanted for my first real team, I wanted to see the whole pipeline of one set. I wanted to sit from the beginning to the end, or close to the beginning because I wasn't exploratory, but I wanted to sit from vision to set so I could realize more what are the

changes and differences so I can have more perspective of was each role neat or whatever. So I entered. Let's do that okay so you were on icoria from almost you weren't exploring almost the very beginning to almost the very end so what was that like yeah it was really interesting um i learned a lot uh vision was vision was very unique like we had this idea of the mutate mechanic you remember i remember envision it was very tribal focused for a while um the set was a very tribal set we were just coming up with these wild ideas uh shooting some stuff we had a list of potential space from exploratory remember at some point in vision we started talking about deck building restrictions

and like hey can we make it feel like you're bonding with a monster by you paying this deck building cost of course and that's where companion was coming up uh coming out from um i remember all the different companions we tried or maybe we tried most of those set set. But vision was a lot of, hey, what if this worked like this? What if that worked like that at a mechanical level or a mechanic level rather than a card by card level? We came up with different cycles and we were just really trying to explore what themes and cycles and mechanics would make this set really feel like this set. When we got into set design, would make this set really feel like this set. When we got into set design, kind of the first question was,

all right, we have a big outline of what the archetypes are, but let's start thinking about what the draft archetypes are. And then let's start, so we have all these mechanics, can we fit them into color focuses? I remember that's one of the first times I think I kind of pushed Dave, or at least was a voice to say hey i think red white cycling would be kind of a unique archetype that we don't do very often and would push away from the red white is always aggro mentality that was um a little prevalent i think at the time um so i wanted so we did that we did the archetypes it was really fun i find my my favorite

part about set design or maybe the magic design pipeline is the beginning of set design when you're setting up all the archetypes because i think it's really fun to make all the cards that fit really neatly into those archetypes uh but yeah set design was just a lot of, with Dave Humphreys particularly, it was a lot of iteration off of whatever Vision gave us. So Vision gave us all these mechanics and Dave really wanted to take those to heart, figure out their best executions. And so we were just going over, hey, what's the best way to do mutates? Let's iterate, iterate, iterate. Hey, what's the best way to do mutates? Let's iterate, iterate, iterate. Hey, what's the best way to do companion? We had all these wild companions.

At some point, we had a companion that cared about rarity, which I thought was really funny. I don't know. Does that satisfy your question? One thing I find very interesting is I love getting sort of the outside you were new to it. For example, what did Vision do that you did not expect vision to do like what did vision

design do that you didn't expect it to do um it's kind of interesting like I think what I think I'm gonna flip this and say I expected vision design to care about the archetypes, but they didn't as much as I thought they would. Most of what I learned between vision and set was how much... I felt like a lot of what I learned is that a lot of set design leads treat their sets very differently, and that vision and set were closer together

than I thought they were. I thought they were going to be completely different realms, but I think I ended up thinking that they were closer together than I thought they were. I thought they were going to be completely different realms, but I think I ended up thinking that they were closer together than I thought they were, and that Vision is kind of unique for every set. For Ikoria Vision, we came up with, or we had the mutate mechanic, and we just fleshed out what it was, and we spent a lot of our time saying, we found the fun, let's find find more but i know other sets have a different struggle during vision and so i kind of learned that different vision design teams have different needs for different sets on icoria it was pretty much hey we have this thing that makes

you feel like a monster i wonder what else can go on if that makes sense yeah no no like i said the uh what's fun for me like one of the things that's cool for interviewing you as a younger designer is, like, I've been doing this a long time. So I can think back to my, like, pre-Wizards days, but that was a long, long time ago. Whereas, you know, your pre-Wizards days weren't that long ago. So I like the insight. So that's cool to me okay so beside working on icoria um you also worked on uh core 2021 right you were on the set design team yeah eventually i was on the set design team for core 2021 um i wasn't on it for the whole time i was

more on it for the first half where i got to do my like i said my favorite part of set design which was advocate for my favorite set archetypes my two color archetypes and that's actually how some of i think the more ambitious archetypes came into core 2021 i was also trying to solve the problem of um hey blue green is often an archetype that is not very well defined in corsets what is a blue green thing that i could uh convince adam would be fun for a corset that feels more unique and i had ended up trying to think really hard on what i've seen like what part of magic have i seen people who like blue green really really enjoy like i've seen, like what part of Magic have I seen people who like blue-green really, really enjoy? Like I've seen people play blue-green, I've seen them enjoy Magic the Gathering, what part of

it were they enjoying? And I decided that the part, the thing that blue-green players liked a lot was drawing a lot of cards, and so I was trying to convince Adam, hey is there a form of blue-green card draw that we can make an archetype? And I, my pitch was isn't lore scale quaddle cool uh and then uh they yeah they tried out that and yeah i think it went out well it made a few funky looking uh green cards but otherwise uh i'm pretty happy with it i'm also really happy with dogs i think dogs is a really cool thing in m21 yeah 2021 you like changing up red white that seems to be your theme yeah i just like i just want to flip some known stuff known constants on their head i want to on make archetypes that we haven't really done before.

And I recognize that you can't just do that with every archetype. You need some grounded space, but I think there's a lot to explore with the red, white, and blue, green because they're often like the set mechanic thing or aggro slash ramp kind of deal. Okay, so

one of the things that happens at Wizards is people sort of start learning where they're, like, they start concentrating what they do, just because part of getting good at something is doing it again and again. And so a very common thing is you tend to find sort of, not that you can't do a bunch of different things, but you tend to find your center, right, the thing that you sort of focus on. that you sort of focus on. So Ikoria is also, I think, where you started to find sort of your center, which was you were in charge of Commander for Ikoria. Yeah. Commander 2020. And just to let the audience know, one of the major roles you do now is you do a lot

with Commander. So I would love to talk a little bit about Commander 2020 and sort of your transition into being one of the Commander people. Yeah, of course so before i came to wizards i played a lot of commander because it was the easiest way to get my friends to play the game um especially in a kind of a low competitive environment i do like draft a lot but i just like played commander a lot more for that reason. As I mentioned earlier, as an intern, I made the Dominar Planeswalker decks. And then when I came back and was hired,

I made the Ravnica Planeswalker decks. And then I made the War of the Spark Planeswalker decks. And then I made the Eldraine Planeswalker decks. And that was just like in this cycle of, hey, I'm getting practice making pre-constructed decks for a targeted audience with a focus on identity. Because Planeswalker decks share something with Commander decks where there's an appeal to the identity of the character on the front of the box. And then I made some of the Theros Planeswalker decks, although I handed it off kind of late into there. And then when we were talking about the Ikoria Planeswalker decks,

at some point someone was like, whoa, whoa, whoa. I have this really great idea. What if we just make Commander decks and say, like, the Commander set is in Ikoria, and then we don't make Planeswalker decks because that kind of takes up that slot. And they're like okay let's do that but uh who should lead it it's like okay well who likes commander and has been making the products in the slot for a while and who do we think can do this and at some point someone asked

me uh if i was interested and i was like am i interested like i've been on icoria for the past year i love icoria i love commander i've been doing Ikoria for the past year. I love Ikoria. I love Commander. I've been doing these pre-constructed slots, or pre-constructed decks for a while, and I am hungry for leadership opportunity. So I kind of jumped on that, was very excited to do that. I had Glenn Jones on the team who had led C19,

Commander 2019, to help mentor me through a little bit because it was my first lead and I had actually not been on a Commander product beforehand. I just was already in love with the format because of my experience playing it. So I started leading Commander 2020 and I remember when it was in Vision, I had sent the vision lead

ethan flusher a document that was hey i've been on icoria for a long time here's kind of my initial thoughts and ideas of good deck building directions because i remember they immediately did not their first idea was not just guy cycling but I really wanted it to be just guy cycling. So I sent that to Ethan and he said, yeah, that's a good idea. Let's do it. Um, and so, I mean, everything just worked out really well in terms of my timing to finally get to work on Commander 2020. And when I was leading it, it seemed to be going well. I was really focusing hard on figuring out how to be a good lead, how to lead my team well and communicate well. And I actually had one-on-ones with a lot of

different leads in the building to try to ask them, hey, what can I be doing to be a lead? What are some teachable skills I can learn to better suit this role, so they ask me to do it again, basically. And I remember at some point wanting to put in the partners, the partner with commanders in that set, and that went swimmingly. I don't know. That's basically how I got there,

and I really enjoyed that product. So real quick, just so a lot of people might not know this, when you're leading a product like Commander where it's a deck based product, usually the way it works is you have team members equal to the number of decks that you have, and then each person takes a deck,

right? Is that how it works? Yeah, that's how it works. Yeah. So, I think we went into Ikoria knowing we were doing the Wedge, because we built Wedge into the set of Higher Rarities. And I think the impetus to jump to Commander in the first place was we knew we had three-color identity,

and Commander tends to like more color identity stuff. So what is your... Well, actually, first I'll ask, what did you learn? What was your big takeaway from, from leading that project? My big takeaway, I learned a lot, like a lot of my takeaways were, what is it like to lead a team of five? Just like a team where I have to delegate and make decisions. I learned a lot about making a hard decision versus kind of wavering on everyone's opinions for a while. I figured out that, oh, actually, we move a lot faster if after everyone gives me their opinion,

I just choose one that my gut or that I feel is is a well-placed decision instead of thinking about it for a few days um and sometimes you think about it but sometimes you just need to move forward when you have so many cards to make i learned a lot about i learned even more about audience i think like i i've said this a little bit earlier and how much plans of architects taught me how to design cards to a certain audience, but with Commander, there's a lot of different ways to play Commander, and I had to really focus in on what cards would be for what different audiences, and cards for spiky Commander players, cards for more deck-building, puzzle-y players, cards for people who just want things, crazy fun things to happen in their game.

There was all these different ways to play and enjoy Commander, and leading a set of it, I kind of got to realize what previous Commander sets had done in the past to build all of these different Commander feelings, and I wanted to also represent all those Commander feelings in this set while also feeling a lot

like Monster World, if that makes sense. So, okay, so while you've been working on Wizards for a little while, we have a long lead time. So, this actually, earlier this year was the first time something you worked on, well I guess Core 2019 came out, but as far as something you had worked on extensively.

Like Ikoria, you were there for all of Vision and all of Set Design, and you made the Commander decks. What was it like to have Ikoria come out? What was that like? Ikoria coming out was really wild. It was a little bit hampered by the current state of the world and how much I had to be inside my apartment. But it was really exciting watching people react to cards. I think to some extent every designer is like this, or maybe every creative worker or person is like this. But I was very anxious about my output.

person is like this but i was very anxious about my output um i think one of the things i took away from leading this set was the realization that i don't think game designers will ever feel finished with their work um i think that they will hand something in and then still think that there's stuff that they could have worked on um or improved about it so i felt very anxious um because i'm also an anxious person i really wanted people to like and enjoy it i really wanted this thought and work i put into it to succeed um and so when i saw a lot of different positive comments about all of these cards and even some cards that i thought were going to underperform. There were certain audiences who I did aim them at who ended up telling me that those were some of their favorite cards. They really enjoyed those cards that would underperform for different audiences

but hit those other audiences very well. So it was really, really exciting. I think you learn a lot seeing your first product release because you really only get the feedback of your peers and other designers um while in design but when it's released you get the feedback of like thousands of other impressions uh tens of thousands of impressions maybe but i don't know i was really excited uh it was great having Ikoria and the commander set come out because with the main set, I just saw all these fun rares and mythics that I thought were goofy and cool come out

and hearing people's reaction to those. I was like, yes, I made these because I wanted you to feel charmed by them. And when the commander set came out and people would attach to different legends I made for different reasons, it's like, yes, I made those. So you would be excited about them. I'm glad you are excited about them. I'm glad you noticed this little thing about this weird monster. I'm glad you noticed that this card has this kind of interaction.

So that was just all really, really cool, really overwhelming. And I wish I could have gone out and played and pre-released with people with them. Yeah. But alas, I have not been able to. Yeah, one of the side effects is funny. One of the perks of this job is the amount of feedback you get on the work you do. Yeah.

You make something and then millions of people play it and they share the information with you. And it's very humbling in a lot of ways just because, like, when you're in the building making something, you know, then when it goes out to the world, like, there's just all these people.

Like, it's one thing to, like, intellectually understand a lot of people are going to play it, but it's another thing to see them playing it. So... Yeah. Yeah, I'm looking forward to when we are in better times and i could attend a physical

command fest and i could roam the tables counting cards that i've helped or had a hand in and seeing how much fun those players are have are having so any other as we're i'm almost to my desk here any other like of your time at Wizards any other last things you want to talk about a lot of my focus at Wizards have been

stuff that I don't think I can talk about yet all this cool stuff you've done right there's just like been a lot that i've worked on that is yet to be released a lot i'm working on right now that's at the forefront of my mind um i guess like for commander players listening to this like hey get excited like commander's really cool and we love commander and listen i'm on it man i'm gonna make it great for for all of you.

Yeah, there is, once again, we can't say everything, but there is lots of Commander goodies coming your way. Right. So, okay, well, it was fun talking with you, and like I said, one of the things I've been trying to do in the interviews is show people, just all the different kinds of people working on Magic, and last week I talked to somebody that had been an alpha playtester, you know, going all the way back to the beginning of magic. And you were one of our young,

one of our younger sort of designers. So it's, it's nice seeing that, you know, like I said, you're someone who grew up on magic rather than someone who like, like I, I was well out of college by the time I met magic.

So it's cool. But anyway, thanks Corey. Thanks for joining us. And guys, I'm so good. Oh, thanks Mark. So I'm at my desk now, which means we all know that means, means the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. So Corey,

once again, thank you so much for being with us. Thank you so much for having me. Guys, I'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.