Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #772: Making Magic in the Pandemic

Episode Date: September 4, 2020

Curious how COVID has affected the making of Magic? That's my topic for this podcast.

I'm not pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work coronavirus edition. So I keep saying that my opening for a while has been coronavirus edition, but I really haven't talking about the coronavirus. So today is magic and the coronavirus. or at least thus far the story, of how the pandemic has affected magic and affected me and such. So today is that story. Okay, so the beginning of this story is we have to go back to, I think, January. So in January, I am asked by our in China, if I would come speak at, uh, there was a convention, there's a big convention going on in China and they wanted me to come be one of the, one of the main speakers at it. Um, and I'd never been to China before. I was very excited. Uh, and so I said, yeah, yeah, that, that sounds great. I would love to come to China and, I would love to come to China and speak.

And then I think a few days or a week maybe, a little bit after I committed to say, yes, I'm willing to go to China, we started hearing a lot of news about there was something going on in Wuhan, China and such and that. But at the time, I wasn't – we weren't even 100 percent sure where the event was going to happen and China is a very big place and you know no one really understood the scope of what was going on in Wuhan so um early on I was like oh okay well I should keep my this is something going on in China I I'm potentially visiting China okay I should pay attention so I was actually playing a little bit closer attention than probably most people just because I'm like oh well I might be going to China I need to care about this. And then as things started getting a little bit worse, I started questioning like, oh, should I be going to China? You know, I wasn't quite sure what was going on. And at some point, I think they, there was talk, maybe they postponed it, you know, early on. But anyway, like I said, I was paying attention to this more so than normal, just because I thought I might be going to China. Then I think it was early March. There is the first death in the country from someone from, from COVID. And where did it happen?

King County. So not just my state, you know, not just the state I live in, the county I live in. So for those who don't know, King County is basically Seattle and the greater Seattle area is in King County. So like when the first when the first death is reported from the pandemic, it's not like far away or from distant thing. It's like from a section of town that I've been to numerous times, right? It's well known.

You know, the area it happened in is someplace I know well. And so that was a little bit freaky. Like also, the other thing is, for example, when they found the first murder hornets, they were in Washington. And like, could the end of time stop beginning in Washington all the time? But anyway, so it definitely was something on our minds.

You know what I'm saying? When the thing first started, there were a few hot spots. And the first major hot spot was Seattle, King County. And so it was something we were very conscious of. So it was, like I said, I had already been paying attention to it because of my potential visit to China. Oh, well, by the way, real quickly, that part of the story is they ended up delaying the event obviously because of things going on. And then at some point like all travel got canceled. Anyway, so one day – one day in the future I will – I'm excited to visit China by the way.

It's one of the few places that obviously is very active in magic that i haven't been able to visit yet um but anyway uh that got canceled so i i guess no surprise i did not end up going to china um okay so they report the first death and there's there's definitely a lot of of tension in washington state and king county especially um and then i think it was the so i think the death was early march and then the second week of march a couple major i know amazon for sure and then google or something like a couple of the major um uh businesses in Seattle said to their people, hey, why don't you work at home? And we, Wizards then gave us a little bit of a warning. I think we did a test day.

We're like, okay, for tomorrow, let's all stay at home and let's have a day as if we were at home so we could test things out. And so we actually did, like, we sort of saw it coming. And so we did a little bit of test prep and there's a there's software you need and there's just different things that you know to make it work and so one of the things we did is we did a day where we went home and we had tested now given in the past we had done a little bit of testing for stuff like snow days and things

but this time was like okay real seriously let seriously, let's, and, and, you know, if you needed certain elements or, you know, you could go to the IT department and get things you needed, but there was some time to try to figure that out. And then it was pretty quick. Like, I think a week after we did the test, I got the note, I got an email or a text, I think. It was like, okay, okay, for the next two weeks, just for the next two weeks, we're going to work from home for the next two weeks. And this was like second week in March. So, I mean, it was pretty early all said and done. Like Washington was one of the first places to start shutting down, mostly because we'd had the first death here. And so I started working from home I think in the second week of March is when I started working from home.

And then what happened was two weeks later, they closed – Washington closed the public schools. So I – Adam and Sarah, my twins, go to the high school here. And so their high school got shut down. My eldest daughter, Rachel, by the way, is at college. She's in college in Chicago. And at first, they weren't shutting the college down. So she was staying there. So anyway, school got shut down.

And then my wife's job got shut down. And then I think end of March, they washington just like we're closing everything that's when the shutdown began in washington was about end of march um i think i think the first state to shut down had been ohio and then california and we were like we were third or fourth of the ones to shut down um but anyway uh and then just real quickly personally um in the middle april rachel's school was shut down and then just real quickly, personally, um, in the middle of April, Rachel's school was shut down and then we'd have to fly her home. So then Rachel obviously spent the whole summer here.

Um, anyway, so, uh, so mid-March we got locked down. Oh, and once again, when we first got locked down, it was like, okay, it's going to be two weeks. Uh, and then by the time those two weeks elapsed, they had shut the state down and they're like, okay, well, you know, obviously while the state shut down, we can't be open, the state shut down, and then it just sort of kept going on. Like I said, I, as I'm recording this in August, I'm still working from home, and probably will be for a while, so anyway, okay, so what exactly does that mean? So one of the interesting things about my job is I make magic sets, and I make magic sets at the very beginning of the process.

So what that means is my team, I and my team interact a lot with the creative team, team that i interact my i and my team interact a lot with the creative team uh because a lot of world building there's back and forth of you know um one of the keys to building a especially a new world is you know the the creative team will say well here's the kind of world we're thinking i'm like well here's the kind of mechanics i'm thinking and there's back and forth um like a good example might be like an innistrad where I'm like oh once I started to figure out how we wanted to color code the the monsters I'm like oh I need to spread

the monsters out so like okay well vampires are going to be black and red and zombies are going to be black and blue and werewolves are going to be red and green well I didn't need to go talk with them saying okay well if I'm saying red and green it it has implications. Like me choosing to do things in flavor, they have to make sense of that.

And so there's a lot of that kind of back and forth. So anyway, a lot of my job, I mean, it varies from person to person. A lot of my job is meetings. And there are two basic kinds of meetings. There is what I will call more functional meetings where you're trying to get work done. And there's more informational meetings where you're in a larger group and things are being communicated to you. Sometimes in those larger groups, there's back and forth. Sometimes you're sharing information.

Like a good example would be card crafting where we're talking about some topic. And so there's discussion that goes on in card crafting. But it's a larger meeting usually where somebody starts by talking about whatever the issue is and bringing up all the relevant points about the issue so everybody is up to speed. And then there's conversation about it. There's stuff like Tuesday Magic meeting where that's more of people are giving us information. We have a lot of speakers come talk to us. So we're aware of what's going on in different parts of the company or different parts of the product because R&D is at the start of the product and there's a lot of people downstream from us. Once we're done, there's a lot of other work that gets done that has to be produced and there's a lot of different – between organized play and digital and printing and editing and – although editing technically is R&D. But there's a lot of stuff past us handing off the cards.

OK. So – oh, and then the other big part, obviously, my job is the design part, right, making cards. So what we found was you probably could boil down my job into three major components, which is sort of the meetings, the design part, literally making cards, making mechanics and cards. And then playtesting. So what we found was the meetings worked fine. I mean, to be honest, when you're sitting in a room talking to somebody, it's, I mean, there's a different dynamic, y'all being in your own place

than rather being in the same room together. And one of the things that we do a lot when we're in the same room together is we make use of the whiteboard uh and sort of how we use the whiteboard i mean there's there's there's things you can do online that are but it there's something about that dynamic of being live that is a very different animal so um yeah that is definitely something something that is different. But the general sense of just talking back and forth, that part is actually translated exceedingly well. In fact, it's funny, if you had asked me a year ago, okay, you're going to be at home and have to do your job at home, and you can't leave, how effective would you be? I would have thought less effective than we've actually been.

I mean, kind of the necessity of having to do this has been interesting to learn stuff. So the actual meeting part has been pretty good. The one big change that has gone on is the way we normally, the way I normally run my vision designs is we'll meet twice a week for two hours a week. I'm sorry, two hours a day meet twice a week for two hours a week. I'm sorry, two hours a day. Twice a week for two hours.

That's harder to say than it should have been. Twice a week for two hours. That's normal. So we do four hours of meetings a week. What we found in this new system is rather than do two two-hour meetings, we tend to do four one-hour meetings. The dynamic of it is actually a little bit easier to do a one-hour meetings. The dynamic of, it is actually a little bit easier to do a little bit every day

in smaller meetings than it is to sort of sit in one. That's one of the biggest things we've discovered is that part of what we're trying to do in this new world here is figure out the dynamic to how to make things work.

So it turned out that the smaller meetings, the bite-sized meetings work a little better for online. So we switched over to that. The informational meetings still go on. The way – so for a lot of you probably working at home as well. But like essentially there are meetings where everybody gets to talk.

Like there's meetings where everybody's ahead and anybody can talk. And then there's meetings where only certain people can talk and it's more of a presentation. You know, wizards will do do whole employee town hall type things. And then even in R&D, the Tuesday Magic meeting, for example, still happens, but it's more presentations. The way it works there is you can ask questions.

There's a thread to ask questions and stuff. So you can ask questions in the thread. But anyway, the larger group meetings are happening. The individuals, the group meetings are happening. The individuals, you know, the team meetings are happening. The trickiest part of the whole thing of being at home has actually been playtesting. We've found solutions. And it's not like we're not – we are playtesting.

So it is something we've found ways to do. But it's not – like if you had asked me, for example, in a meeting of talking in meetings, I would have said, oh, I don't know. Maybe in person it's better. I'm like, oh, it's different. But actually it's been just as productive. Play testing has been a little bit harder. I mean not that we haven't play tested, not that we aren't play testing. We are.

We're actually doing a lot of play testing. But it's definitely been the thing that it's not as smooth as just shuffling cars and playing somebody right across from you. That's the largest differential to me. It's the thing that we're always sort of trying. It's the one thing that if you told me, like, okay, we're here for another year, it's the thing that I would spend more time on. We've found workarounds, and there's numerous different workarounds. But it's the kind of thing that I think has the biggest differential. The other interesting thing, the final part of it, is the design part, right? And that part, one of the byproducts of being at home is there are a lot of distractions that happen at work,

some of which are good. One of the biggest things that is different for me is what you call crosstalk. So a crosstalk means I'm at my desk, I'm talking about something with, like Ari sits right next to me, so I'm talking to someone with Ari, and hey, we're in the pit, we're there.

Other people might hear us talking, and it's very common to chime in on a conversation. So Ari and I might be talking about a set that he and i are working on but somebody else who's sitting two desks down who's not on that team might hear it and just chime in an opinion you know i'm saying and so um the biggest thing that is different to me is there's less cross talk um and we're trying to find ways to mimic some of that um like one of the interesting things is there are people, for example, that I saw every day at work that now I don't see as much just because I'm not directly in meetings with them. Where – like, for example, Eric Lauer, who is my equivalent on set design.

Eric and I sit – our desks are right near – we're like kitty-cornered from each other. But anyway, back when I was in the office every day, Eric and I talked all the timeks are right near, we're like, we're like kitty-cornered from each other. But anyway, on, back when I was in the, in, in the office every day, Eric and I talked all the time just because we're right near each other. Um, and now we have to sort of go out of our way to talk to each other just because we're not, he and I don't overlap in meetings. He's doing set design, I'm doing vision design. Um, I mean, I mean, every once in a while we overlap, but it's, it's more infrequent than frequent.

And so somebody who I used to talk to every day, I have to go make more effort to talk to rather than something that just kind of happens. And that is my biggest – in fact, the biggest difference – playtesting is a part of it and then the crosstalk. Now, on the plus side, one of the side effects of sort of working at home is there's a lot of stuff that kind of chews up your time in small increments. And one of the things I found hard was I just – trying to find time to design at work. I literally just have to design cards. It's harder than it is at home. At home, I just have blocks of time. Like your schedule is so regulated because it's just just like you choose when you're interacting with people. Where a lot of times at work, what would happen is, you know, I'm in the middle of doing something, but then I

hear something. So you get dragged off into things. There's a lot of positive to that. There's a lot of positive to, oh, this thing I didn't know about, I hear about it and then I get involved in. But there's also negative in that there's a lot of sort of time chewing that happens so one of the interesting things of being at home one of the pluses has been I've just been designing a lot more cards I've just been doing more actually raw design

which I enjoy one of the things that's interesting is you sort of move up the design ladder if you will you get more and more responsible for larger and larger things. And so the tactical sort of card making, you get to do a little bit less of that because you're worrying about bigger things.

But I enjoy the card part. I really like designing cards. So that has been, it's been fun. That's the part, the, it's funny. I try to look at, you know, I'm an optimist to heart. So I'm like, okay, so what's good and what's bad? And like, the good part of this has been, it's really made us rethink about some of our processes. And in some level, when you have to change the dynamic of something, it makes you appreciate what was there. And so it really has made me have a better understanding

of kind of what I valued at work that I didn't know I valued. And so that's been very – that's been useful for me. And like I said, it's been very interesting. Vision Design is in a weird place where, like I said, we have the least amount of interaction with other people because we're just at the beginning of the process. We have the most of kind of like, we can invent in a vacuum to a certain extent. There comes a point where we're interacting

with people, obviously. We hand off to people and things. But especially the first half of vision design and most of exploratory design is really us in our own space trying things out. And so the ability for people

to kind of be at home and do like, it's a little bit easier to do the homework and stuff. And so that just more people are producing larger amounts for the homework. So from a design standpoint, from a pure design standpoint, just a lot of cards are getting made. And I think that is going to – I'm really happy.

Like that part of it has been really, really good. And I think a lot of our vision stuff has just had more increments and our exploratory has been able to explore more things. So anyway, I think that's been good. All in all, I will say this, that I think when Magic comes out two years from now, that you guys are not going to – I don't think that it will be clear what we made in office and what we made at home. I think our processes have been pretty good and that's going to be invisible to you guys. But anyway, behind the scenes

it has been definitely interesting on our end about that. Okay. Now, that was talking a lot about behind the scenes making magic. There was some other issues I want to talk about with COVID that became important to us. So one of the things was

whenever something happens you really have to look and see what are the ramifications. So one of the biggest things on the – like I've been talking internally like making a magic. Now let's talk about putting magic out there. So magic, there is tabletop magic, paper magic, and there is online magic. Online magic obviously has actually done quite well in a pandemic, because when people are at

their home, and this is the way you can play magic safely, it has been something that we anticipated would get a lot of people, and it turns out, yes, people like playing magic, and here's magic online and magic at the Gathering Arena are both very fun ways to play magic from your

home. So those obviously have attracted a lot of people. The other interesting thing that I found was the number of people that said, okay, I want to play Magic. How else can I do that? And just watching, for example, Commander has been very robust online. There's been a lot of different ways for people to play and people setting up webcams. Anyway, it's been neat watching the audience adapt to the pandemic. What we found was

I mean, we were, to be honest, we were a little worried early on in that, oh, no, no, like, you know, Magic's a game all about people interacting with one another. What happens when everyone's locked in their home? But it turns out that people will find ways to interact with each other even locked in their home. And that part of it is people playing

with people who they're in lockdown with. Part of it is people playing online. Part of it is webcams. And anyway, it has been, I really have enjoyed watching kind of the magic audience step up to embrace magic, like through the lens of the pandemic.

Okay, we love magic. How can we still play magic? So that's been very, very cool. Another big thing on our end was one of our big concerns is the stores are a very important part of our ecosystem. Yes, I mean, yes, obviously we have digital magic and stuff, but also we have tabletop magic.

And the heart of tabletop magic, well, there's lots of people playing at their kitchen tables. That's always very important as well. But in-store play is a very big part of it. And one of the things we were concerned about was all the stores that had to shut down. So Wizards took a couple steps to help the stores because, like I said, it's something very important to us and it's a big lifeline.

So we did a couple things. One was we had put out mystery boosters. So Gavin had made, had come up with this idea for, basically they were magic packs that just had, I forget how many, but 1,700, 1,800 cards, possible cards in it. And they were pickups from old cards. And so it just was a smorgasbord of old magic.

And just, it was trying to capture the essence of chaos magic, where just like, who knows what's coming your way? And so it was a seal that just had such wide variety of what you could open. And it was very nostalgic, and you could see all sorts of old, cool things. And we had done those at conventions, very popular,

and then we had done a store version for people playing stores. We had sold those. They had sold very well. People liked them. So we made a second printing of those, and then what we did is we just gave it to the stores. Instead of selling it to them, we gave it to them as a means

to help the stores help make some money for themselves to cover some time, obviously, when they were shut down. Another thing that we had done is we also worked with Magic the Gathering Arena so that people could run events on Arena but connected to a store to allow store owners to sort of get their players linked together

so that, you know, help keep them. One of the big things about the lifeblood of stores is the bond that happens between all the players, the regulars of the store. And so we created a system so people, store owners could set up and let their regulars play against each other online. Another big thing that we did was,

oh, I didn't talk about the impact. I'll talk about it, Corey, in a second. So, well, I guess I'll talk about it now. One of the things I was going to say is we allowed them to sell pre-release kits. I'm getting there in a second. But one of the other things we did is we allowed the stores to, normally, if you want to play in a pre-release,

you have to play in the store. And for the first time ever, we allowed stores to sell pre-release kits to let people play at home for the pre-release, to play in their home with the people they were obviously at home with. So let me talk a little bit about Ikoria. So one of the other big things that happened is

Magic has a schedule. One of the things that's really interesting you know 27 years into the game is magic is is a train that's on its tracks you know and um we don't we don't miss our dates like when something's supposed to come out it's supposed to come out um and uh covet has definitely done a few weird things. One is we actually ended up delaying the release of tabletop, of Ikoria tabletop. We had to push that back a bunch of weeks. Just because we – everything was shut down and we didn't want to – well, sorry. It did come on tabletop in certain regions in the world. The majority of the regions, it got delayed.

And then we did allow it, we decided that we would allow it online because that's how people could access it and we wanted people to play with the new set and so Ikoria did come out on time, like on Magic Online and Magic Arena but it got delayed

in most of the world in tabletop. Now it eventually came out, and like I said, the other thing is we worked with stores. Some stores, for example, while they couldn't have in-play, most of the stores couldn't have in-play play because of the pandemic, they were able to open up and sell stuff. And so Ikoria, while it came out late, did come out.

And like I said, it is not, it's the first time I can ever remember, like especially a premiere set, of it not coming out on the date it's supposed to come out. Like normally if something gets changed, it's like months and months and months ahead of time. Like a year from now, we're going to shift this by a week. But like as far as from the end consumer part,

like it comes out the day we say it's going to come out. Like even when we shift things, it's way, way ahead of time. It's not, this was a very different animal from magic. And one of the things that's really interesting also, I don't know if I can cover this, is when the pandemic first happened, there was so much going on. Like, events were a big deal, right?

A big part of magic is all these events. And early on, you know, we started shutting things down, and then eventually it was clear we had to shut everything down. And so just, there's so many people in our company doing so many different things trying to,

like, one of the things, not only were we working at home and once again, this is a little less me. I work two years ahead so there's a lot of people in our company that are working on things that are much more up to date.

For example, another big thing that happened was we print a lot of magic product and we print all over the world. And because of COVID, different sections were shut down and maybe certain printing plants were closed. I know, for example, that we had Jumpstart, for example, was a product. It's a very complicated product. It's a brand new thing it just requires some uh printing processes that are not something that every printing place can do and um when one of the

places that can print it closes down well we have to just wait till we can print more and so um there definitely were a bunch of you know like not only did icoria get delayed but there definitely were printing things where we couldn't i mean jumpstart had this weird like, not only did Icoria get delayed, but they definitely were printing things where we couldn't. I mean, Jumpstart had this weird thing that not only weren't we able to print as much as we wanted to print, but demand was also higher because people really loved Jumpstart. So a combination of really high demand and just lots of sort of COVID-related issues meant that, like, that product, I mean, even now, I mean, it's not a limited run, meaning we'll print to demand.

So more is coming. But there's a lot of people and there's certain sections of the world I know right now that haven't even got it yet. And they're like, when can we get this? And, you know, we're working through a lot of that. Like one of the big challenges on our end of this whole pandemic has been just infinite new problems to solve that you've never solved before. Like, okay, we're all working at home. We have to solve that problem. You know, there's all these printing issues we have to solve that you've never solved before. Like, okay, we're all working at home. We have to solve that problem. You know, there's all these printing issues

we have to solve. There's all these, how events are done and now we're trying to do stuff online. And, you know, it's, anyway, one of the things that hats off to my fellow coworkers in that these last five months have been, there's been more scrambling than I've ever seen in the sense that we're constantly reacting to things and there's all sorts of new problems we've never had before.

And that has been definitely something that's been – it's been very interesting to watch. Mostly – I mean I guess the big thing to me is the reason I'm sort of telling the story is i just want you to understand that much like this has had a big impact on all of you it's had a big impact on us uh and on magic and i'm making magic and such oh my final story before i wrap up for today is the impact on drive to work itself uh so one of the biggest impacts for me which is is very interesting, is I do my podcast on my drive to work. Well, what happens when you stop driving to work? So what happened originally was I – back in the day, normally I would get like six to eight weeks ahead. And part of the reason is I drive into work four times a week.

I – Fridays I work at home. And so I only needed two podcasts a week. So I sometimes would get ahead. I'd record a podcasts a week. So I sometimes would get ahead. I'd record a lot a day. Sometimes I'd re-record. But it wouldn't be easy for me to get ahead. So I normally would be six to eight weeks ahead. So the first thing we did is we didn't know how long the thing was lasting.

So I just played the podcast that I had. But I was slowly burning up the back load I had. And so I then decided, okay, well, if I'm going to be stuck at home and doing podcasts, I figured out I had to do podcasts at home. There's no way I was going to run out of podcasts. So I said, okay, if I'm going to do podcasts at home, let's do something I can't do in the car. And that one of the things, my number one request I get is people really, really want me to have guests. And one of the problems of doing a podcast in my car driving to work is, well, a few people live near me. I can occasionally drive Matt Cavada to work or something. But most people don't live anywhere near me. And a lot of people, they'd like me to interview,

like Richard Garfield or something, like don't even work at Wizard. So like it's not even, you know, it doesn't even make sense. Like at least Wizard's employees could choose to drive to my home and some of them have. But anyway, what I realized was I had the opportunity to do interviews. There's all sorts of people. Like one of the things about working on magic for as long as I have is I know a lot of people. I know a lot of people that have made magic. I know a lot of people external to magic. I just know a lot of people.

So it's been fun sort of interacting with lots of different guests. And I honestly didn't know how long the pandemic was going on. Like I didn't know how long we'd be stuck at home. So I was like, oh, I'll just do interviews until this is done. Uh, and then eventually I'm like, oh, okay, this is not ending for a while. So I decided, okay, um, I do enjoy these sort of solo podcasts. Um, I said, okay, what we'll do is, uh, I'll, I'll continue to do the interviews because those have been really fun to do.

The audience seems to really like them, but I'll, I. But I'll revert back to having one of them be my normal sort of monologue podcast, if you will. But anyway, so that's what's going on. So my plan right now is to do one interview a week and one sort of solo podcast. I'd love to get feedback on that, by the way.

If you guys are like, more solo podcasts or we love the interview, whatever. I'd love to hear from you what you guys like. And also, are there people you'd love for me to interview that I haven't interviewed yet? I'd love to get requests from people you think would be cool interviews. Anyway, what I'm saying is I would love some feedback

on what you guys would like. Just like we're adapting Making Magic, I'm adapting and making my podcast. So, like right now, I'm walking in my basement recording my podcast. This is not normally how I do my podcast. So this is new to me. Anyway, mostly what I was hoping today's podcast would do for you is explain, A, yeah, this has been weird for me too.

This has been weird for us at Wizards. And just like the the pandemic has shaken up the whole world it's shaken up us but the good news and it's kind of the big message i want to say is look we're making magic uh it is not slowing us down there's really we're making really cool stuff uh and um i do think when we finally put this stuff out like two years from now that you're not gonna differentiate between what was made in the building and out of the building. I think we've done a really good job of figuring out a system so we can keep making magic awesome. So anyway, hopefully all you are doing well and you all aren't going two-star crazy.

One of the jokes is when I work in my den and then whenever I leave my den at the end of the day, I always say, honey, I'm home. And so that's become a running joke because normally I have a half-hour drive for those like you who listen to this podcast. Anyway, so that, my friends, is magic in the pandemic. I hope you guys enjoyed this podcast, but it looks like it's time for me to get to work. I've arrived at work. 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. Okay, guys, I'll see you next time. Bye-bye.