Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #867: Unstable with Glenn Jones

Episode Date: September 10, 2021

I sit down with former Editor (and now Game Designer) Glenn Jones to talk about the editing of Unstable.

I'm not pulling out of the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Coronavirus edition. Okay, so as you know, I've been using my time at home to do interviews, which are hard to do in the car. And so today I got Glenn Jones, and he and I are going to talk about Unstable. Hey, Glenn. Hey, Mark. How's it going? So nowadays you do a lot of game design, but back in the day, which we're going to talk about today, you were an editor, correct? Yeah, that was how I got my start at Wizards. So, a lot of the talk today, and I had another podcast with Matt Tabak, so you're my second editor. But one of the things I've been trying to do with these interviews is just show different facets of magic design because there are a lot of moving pieces that I don't think the audience quite realizes until you start interviewing all the

different people that do all the different jobs. Yeah, I agree. Certainly as a former editor, I know that they're just skills and knowledge that I bring to the role that not everyone necessarily has. And that's true of everyone who came from a different background, which we have a super diverse set of professional backgrounds among our designers. Okay, so let's dive in. So Unstable is a really weird thing to edit. So let's just jump into, what was the biggest challenge for you as the editor of Unstable? Well, one of the interesting things about it was it was, if I recall correctly, the second set that I was it was if i recall correctly the second set

that i was the lead editor of it went conspiracy 2 and then unstable which are themselves both like different sets from conventional magic as well so i was kind of like learning the learning on the job but also you know learning with some instruction manuals that didn't quite match up with what we might be doing um so for me it was a lot of you know how much are we supposed to kind of like hand wave through and just be like yeah that's how it works or people will get this and how much of it do we need to try and find like clean magic language that we can lean on uh to communicate the rules more cleanly uh which i think we wound up going a little harsh harder into like this is

a magic card it reads mechanically and functionally like a magic card than the previous unsets had done with unstable uh and i think part of that maybe was just a symptom of my trying to be like more precise as a newer editor as well and also a lot of time i mean the other big thing is 13 years had passed since we had had an unset before and just how we made magic sets had radically changed for sure and one of the things i also brought to this experience was i played a lot with those unsets uh like the first one unglued i played with when i was in like sixth grade i remember buying those packs and playing them at school and then uh unhinged when i was in college grade. I remember buying those packs and playing them at school. And then unhinged, when I was in college, I'd play with my roommates at the kitchen table.

So I had a lot of experience drawing on what were the things that confused me or what were the things that were clear enough. And that guided some of my decision making as well. So why don't we start talking about the main mechanics? So let's start with contraptions. So contraptions obviously assemble. You had to assemble the contraptions. Then contraptions were their own deck. And then you built this contraption that sort of went off,

and every turn different things happen. What were the biggest challenges for you with contraptions? Well, we had to do, first off with it, and I'm sure you and ben at least certainly would remember this well was uh figure out exactly what we wanted them to do and what we didn't want them to do um which is pretty common for an editor when something's like really tricky as you just ask for like what's the list you know what what does it have to do what does it have to not do and then try and work backwards to find a solution that fits. And in the case of contraptions, I think, I even think this was from Vision, was the idea of using the card back to communicate this.

I think that that was something you had originally. Yeah, that was from pretty early on. Yeah. like in line i i actually worked a lot with liz leo uh who was at wizards as a graphic designer uh back then and is now back doing it as a producer on a different team and we really wanted to figure out what kind how much information could we fit on the back how could we organize it so that it communicates the actual mechanisms of contraptions um and also like you know would it how could we match it to like what contraptions were which i'm pretty happy with the final result um i think it's just a really cool

and innovative kind of take it even has magic the gathering on the back of a magic card which was oh something we weren't 100 sure we'd be able to do the whole time so that was the biggest challenge was just working with uh with liz and figuring out how can templating and creative kind of align together to create this frame that has a ton of in-game functionality but also needs to look good and and be enjoyable at resin for the set once we got the the back of the card kind of put together contraptions themselves weren't really that tricky like the rules are relatively straightforward uh we had to you know like make some relatively short text for the back of the card so that it would fit but the actual functionality is like pretty similar it's pretty simple uh you know you flip

it over you trigger it lots of people are familiar with triggering magic cards so that part wasn't very hard right i think i think the hard part for contraptions that for us to communicate well two things one is it was an another deck and just the idea of what does that mean, what does another deck mean? And the second thing is that there were three, what do we call them, sprockets, I think? You know, the idea that you would rotate between these three options of things happening and trying to get people to understand that, like, you know, you were building this thing that not everything happened every turn with something that was a little confusing. Once people got it, they seemed to get it.

Yeah, it was definitely like the fact that you have a separate deck was something that was tricky to communicate. Like it takes a lot of words to say that kind of thing. So we wound up being, you know, kind of careful about it. We put it in the reminder text of the cards in the set um so that we didn't have to put it on the back of the deck itself with the logic being you know if you if you have to have a contraption to assemble it something has to say that there's a separate deck already on the battlefield so we don't need to clarify that on the contraption

cards themselves because you would never be looking at them unless you already had the reminder text in front of you essentially um so we're we're pretty happy with that solve and we did have to do some like kind of odd cut corners and stuff like the reminder text of sprocket one follows sprocket three on the back of the card was something that we arrived at when we just couldn't figure out a graphic design solution that was clear enough um we tried you know like little looping arrows and stuff like that uh among the gears but in the end we're just like let's just make sure that people don't mess this up and just know exactly how it goes.

And there was one other thing that I think threw a wrinkle into things. So the entire contraption mechanic came about because of Steamflugger Boss, a future-shifted card from Future Sight. And we were trying very hard to make everything

that Steamfl Flagger Boss was true. So, for example, I knew that, like, the creatures had to assemble rather than you, the player, assemble. Yep. And that, I think if we had, like, if we were just making the mechanic

anew, probably you would have assembled. But because, like, the way Steam Flagger Boss was templated, the creatures had to assemble. So, like, we, I know we spent some time making sure that was true. Yeah, we mostly just templated all the creatures to be, like, it assembles instead of assemble, which is a relatively small give. Obviously, like, if a spell were to assemble, it just says, you know, like, assembles or could normally. like if a spell were to assemble it just says you know like assembles or could normally i do think steam flogger boss is actually kind of an interesting kind of case study in that throw forward because it you know obviously we did wind up being constrained a little bit by the rigor you

control element as you said but also as a throw forward like you know it's a card that doesn't need reminder text on it since it can't do the thing itself anyway um and that was i think kind of a clever little gimmick that actually gave us obviously a ton of leeway to like make the mechanic whatever we want since i think you you know you didn't really know exactly what it was when we steam flogged in the first place well not only that when we made it we had no intention of doing it uh the problem was aaron aaron used to write a weekly article, and Aaron just said in his article, we have no intention of ever doing this, which you should never say to the Magic Playing public. Because then it's like, oh, now we need you to do this.

Yeah. And we did look at places in non-unsets to try to do contraptions, but what we found was there was no way to sort like fulfill the promise of it in a way that Black Border worked really cleanly with and so Silver Border kind of just let us do things that would be hard to do in a normal set. Like have another deck, for example. Yeah, I mean

I agree with that, although we've obviously like, you know, in recent time come a lot closer to that than maybe we used to be. Like, the dungeon is not super distant from having a separate deck, in a sense. And actually, you know, when we were in AFR, we did play versions of the dungeon that did involve multiple cards,

which was a little closer to contraptions, too. Right. Well, I mean, I do think the unsets are kind of future testing. Like, anything you see in an unset one day, maybe we can do it, you know. There are a lot of things that, at the time the time we, like, it's funny to go back and look at Unglued and Unhinged, there are cards there that, like, why are these even in, like, couldn't these just be done? Like, nowadays they could be done, but at the time, you know, at the time, you know,

mentioning Teammate, we could never do that on, you know, a Blackboarded card. Yeah, I mean, when I was leading Adventures in the Forgotten Realms Commander, obviously we added die-rolling with Adventures in the Forgotten Realms, and one of the first things I did on that team was go back to unhinged and unglued and unstable. And, like, just review the die-rolling cards and see, like, what did we do that seems like it transfers? What didn't transfer, et cetera,

et cetera. Okay. So the other mechanic, which actually I think was a little more problematic was, uh, augment host and augment. So let's go with that one. Yeah. That's all the challenges of host and augment.

Yeah. Oh, host and augment. That one was definitely a bear in a way that contraptions weren't, because it was just a pretty dramatic shift, both in what we expect a magic card to do, and also just our process. A contraption is kind of simple in a way, like the front side is just a magic card, the back side is like a new back, but you can just print text. Not too tricky. But augment host is in this space where it's like, it definitely is supposed to be a magic card, like it should look very much like one. But we need to offset text in some really

peculiar ways, which our process is not generally designed to do in the first place. So there was a lot of work with typesetting, which is a different team, to figure out what were the, you know, actual possibilities here, like how long could an ability be like where could we put it how long how wide can things be like you know there's got to be some overlap between the cards what's the correct amount of overlap what can we do that gets repeated over and over which wound up kind of being defined by the card type since the length of like you know creature m dash is basically consistent on every card. But of course that's not 100% true,

since we also had the hosts that are artifacts, and we had to figure out a solve for like, okay, how does a host artifact creature and a host creature work? Because they have different size pipelines, which we wound up kind of leaning in for all of these to the idea that these are this like dr moreau type slap dashed together creature vibe like let's lean into that with the type setting and frame design like it's going to look a little weird and maybe a little awkward and let's pretend that that's how it's supposed to look right like we've got the graph paper nailed onto the card like that's that doesn't

that's just you know a hokey kind of yeah this is you know somebody put this together right now That's just a hokey kind of, yeah, somebody put this together right now. We've got the artifact kind of broken off of the type bar and slapped into the rules text box so that it's always visible whenever you're host or augmented. So those are kind of the tricky things that we worked, again, with typesetting and Liz Leo to figure out how do we make sure that that all the information people need to know is always communicated and then the art directors had a whole different uh thing that they had to work through which was that large metal bar representing where the creatures are merged together like how do you write art descriptions and get art that's going to make sure all of these creatures are combining in ways that are like compelling. And I don't want to say not ridiculous, because obviously they're all ridiculous. But we wanted to kind of make

sense. When you merge two together, even though it's crazy, you're like, okay, yeah, now I have this thing. It looks like what it is. So Dawn Mirren was our art director, and she was the one that came up with the bar. Because what happened was, when we originally made the card we we drew a little

sketch of it it was like a like a merfolk ninja or something like the front was a merfolk back with a ninja i think or show it was a shark ninja the front was a shark back with a ninja um and i sort of showed that to dawn and she's like well that only works because you drew it that way you like i every every left side and every right side have to go together um and then she came back and said, okay, well, what if we do this little bar and then, you know, the far right side of every card has the bar and the far left side of every augment has a bar, and then you just put the bars together, and, like, that was

her solvent, and it worked really well. Yeah, and it kind of, it's, philosophically owes something to, like, that tradition in stage magic, too, right? Where, like, you just have two incredible things and then like a small curtain or something and there's there's something in there you don't know what it is but that's where everything's happening and that's the bar the bar is where the magic happens here

yeah the other interesting thing about trying to make host and augment work was um the combinatorics of it were very complicated in that, like, any left side had to go with any right side. And I remember the big breakthrough we had in design was the idea that we do inputs and outputs, so that the left side's always an input and the right side's always an output, so any input could go with any output. Yeah, I think that was a really charming execution. It also kept the story of each side intact,

because it's not too difficult to do uh outputs that you know feel like a dog or a cat or whatever uh in the context of the set and that that helps the flavor a lot uh we were also coming kind of recent relatively recently at the time off of uh theros when we were in the design period here it was like i don't know two two years after or something when we were working on the sets. I mean, I know it was in development for a long time, so it kind of predated Theros in a sense as well. But I know when I was working with Ben Hayes in development,

there was a lot of talk about, you know, like how do we want to make these work in kind of a way that Bestow had similar issues where it's like, you know, we want to make sure that if you're trying to augment onto something, like it's not super easy for your opponent to just two for one you constantly or disrupt you in these weird ways uh we wanted to make sure you were getting to do the thing um since it's a pretty fun thing and it's a mainstay of the set so we wanted to encourage it

yeah and there are a lot of like as fan concerns like if you look at the set there's a lot more hosts at low rarities and augments at higher rarities because if you get a host by itself it's just a creature with an enter the battlefield effect but if you get an the set, there's a lot more hosts at low rarities and augments at higher rarities, because if you get a host by itself, it's just a creature with an enter the battlefield effect. But if you get an augment by yourself, it's unplayable. And so we did a lot, we had to support it and make sure that, like, you're going to get a host way more than you're going to get an augment. But yeah, it definitely, it turned out really well. And like I said, it's one of the mechanics that people always ask me to sort of put in a normal magic set, and I'm like, the biggest problem is that it requires something like the art thing, which is really weird and silly, and works in an unset, but I don't know if we get away with that in a normal set in quite the same way. I mean, we came pretty close.

Obviously, it was pretty different with Mutate and Ikoria. It's definitely very different, but I see a decent amount of Host and Augment in the aspirations of Mutate, at least. Yeah, definitely. And the other interesting thing about Host and Augment is the fact, I mean, we had MELD technology, so the rules, I think MELD predated this. The idea that you have two cards that represent

one thing. I mean, Unglued obviously had BFM, but... Just having a lot of rule support for, like, what does it mean when two things are one thing? But we had... MELD had existed, I think, before this, so we had hammered out a lot of that, and plus BFM existed long ago. Yeah.

Okay, so let's talk about a few other smaller mechanics in the set. So outside assistance was something where we involved other people. So I want to talk a little bit about templating and writing cards where you're involving people not playing the game. Yeah. uh there was an oddly significant uh concern that we make sure to template the card so that participation wasn't uh necessarily capable of becoming involuntary or uh skewing violent i think my my favorite one of these is the uh i think it's gimme five where you get what you get one life for each person who high fives you in the next 30 seconds so that's really specifically

templated. So you have to hold your hand up and be like, come on, everybody, give it to me, as opposed to each person you high-five, where you might be inclined to try and run around the room slapping people on their hands, which is not the desired intent. So we reviewed kind of carefully the outside assistance cards to make sure that people could get involved if they wanted to and not if they didn't. There was a pretty enjoyable moment when we were doing some play testing.

I remember with kind slaver where Tim Aiton, who was, was another editor was requested to come and play out a turn for somebody for Ben. Yeah. For Ben. Yeah. And just savagely alpha attack Ben's creatures into a suicidal swing and told Ben to never do that again.

Yeah, like, don't ask Tim to do this. Yeah, but, you know, Tim did have to be asked and did consent. So that was in keeping with the spirit of what we were trying to do. So, okay, so here's another thing. So, okay, so here's another thing. One of the things that's fun is, as an editor, you get to have a lot of sort of influence in things. And I don't think the average person even realizes how much influence an editor actually has on a set.

They have a huge amount of influence. So I just want to talk about some cards, really, where you were able to put a little bit of Glenn on the card. Sure. So let's start with one of my favorite, Extremely Slow Zombie. This was a very clever little editing touch. Yeah.

Kelly Diggs and I worked together a lot on this set. Kelly was the creative lead. And so the reminder, normally there's a pretty simple process of the creative sends creative text to the editor, they review it, make some markups, debate some stuff, and it kind of just goes back and forth until we're done.

But with Unstable, there was a much more, like, in concert approach of like, you know, what can we, what can we do with each thing? Like, what can be the, it was almost like we were top lining flavor text in a way. Like with art, you know, we top line, this is kind of what the card should be. be like you know novella mental is supposed to be like a flying book like that's the gag but also like how does the reminder text reflect the story of novella mental uh with which we leaned into the variable uh card text as opposed to variable card art which is another whole other thing um and novella mental is actually cool because i got to write i wrote the novella for novella mental uh i think because if i recall correctly, we had like, you know, flavor text writers

who were submitting various things. And I think nobody had submitted for novellamental. Um, and so I told Kelly that I would take a swing at it. And then we wound up pretty, pretty much just printing that. Uh, and then extremely slow zombie returning to that, uh, the brains gag across all four cards. extremely slow zombie returning to that uh the brains gag across all four cards like i i think that was kelly's idea was the the slow speech indicating like it's it talks so slow it barely moves from piece to piece with like it just takes you know a year for it to reach up towards you

um but i do have the kind of amusing regret every editor has regrets that nobody else probably even knows or thinks about because they know something that nobody else does in general cases and for me one of my like more nuanced editorial regrets in magic is that we didn't start with winter so the winter zombie could be which is just like that slight miss on we got to like 99 of the best joke so you also worked um i know it's an amateur auteur one of the best joke. So you also worked, I know, so amateur auteur. One of the things we did in the set is we did a bunch of alternate versions of cards. Real quickly, behind the scenes of that is when we were first trying to get the set done,

one of the things we had negotiated was because Unsets sort of paved new ground, there's new digital printing, and so we designed the set originally to play into some new digital printing. And so we had a lot of variants based on what we could do with digital printing. And then, by the time it got time to make the set, digital printing hadn't

yet got there. And so we sort of had to jettison a bunch of our ideas for that, and so that ended up being some of these alternate variants of things. Some have different rule text, some have different art. Amateur author had different art, obviously. And so Callity came up with this very clever thing where it was a kid performing in a play,

and then each play was from a different famous plane of magic. I think it was like Ravnica and Theros and Innistrad and Zendikar, I believe. Yeah. And then there's a little poem that was written for each one, like a song, like from the play that's being performed. Yeah, I know that Kelly, I don't know for sure that Kelly wrote the plays.

I think he did, but it's possible that some of those came from the flavor text writers as well. I'm not 100% sure there. I know I didn't know for sure that Kelly wrote the plays. I think he did, but it's possible that those, some of those came from the flavor text writers as well. I'm not a hundred percent sure there. I know I didn't write the poems, uh, that, that were used in the flavor text. Um, but I did, uh, work with Kelly on them because I actually, uh, went to school for English and history. That, that was, those were my majors and specifically like creative writing in English so I actually had taken some poetry classes uh I am I wouldn't consider myself a poet but like I'm academically like aware of kind of how they're supposed to work and the general flow and stuff like that so it was amusing to me that you know I would get for the first time in my life I was using my a part of my English degree which is already kind of hard to use in general uh and this time and it was the poetry meter uh to work out like how could these uh these flavor texts feel like they were from a musical and also feel different from each other because right it's important that they're not the same musical like the whole gag is that it's four different plays uh with different names so there are little variations in their meter or the tone, you know, like some of them are really silly and goofy, and then some other ones maybe seem a little bit more

dramatic at times. But all musicals have like a little bit of a lighthearted element to them in general. So we made sure to incorporate that. So another interesting thing, I think, Unsets have some tools that the editors don't really have access to normally and one of the interesting tools we talked a little bit about the frame but the art that when we make an uncard we sort of have the art can be a component of the card

in a way that in normal sort of blackboard or magic we don't necessarily get it clearly shows what's going on but it's a usable piece of property at times. And I know that one of the cards I know you were trying to fix was Baron Von Count. And you had a clever solution using the art, so I'm interested to hear how that came about. Yeah, Baron Von Count was tricky. We wanted to do kind of a countdown shtick, which we've since done a little bit in some other cards, like sagas are actually,

you know, kind of like a countdown-y type thing. But for the specifics of Baron Von Counts, we didn't really have anything like that in the tank or any ideas. But one of the things Kelly had recognized was as one of the things we were allowing ourselves to kind of do in the set was to put, you know, language and characters in some of the art where we might normally not have uh since we weren't localizing the set in a bunch of languages uh and so that gave me the idea for baron von count of to actually use the art as a gameplay aid where we could create these like larger numbers um somewhere in the art and people could slide like a small bead or whatever across the card to kind of get the vibe of counting down. And Kelly and Dawn were game to give it a go.

And I was really happy with how it came out. I think it's like, I don't even think people honestly like use it that much because dice are so available. But it was a novel exploration and I think adds to kind of the silver-bordered charm of the Baron himself. And then we also get to reference it later on the clock card as well. Yeah, actually, I think from the data I've seen, Baron is one of the more popular

unstable commanders. Yes. Might be the most popular unstable commander. He's up there. They're all pretty cool, though. I've seen a decent number of them at various commander tables. So the... Another interesting thing that happened in the set

was two cards in the set reference IPs outside of magic. And this was... At the time we did it, no one had done it yet. I think the Hasbro cards, Hascon cards came out before us. But we actually did it before anybody else,

just they didn't come out necessarily first. So I want to talk a little bit about the Sword of Dungeons & Dragons and Go to Jail. Yeah, I know that the Sword of Dungeons & Dragons was pretty easy to get get done and we were pretty stoked to be able to include it in the hascon thing too it was mostly just you know we had a meeting with some dnd art directors and magic art directors i think i think just don and kelly and myself and maybe a few other people about like you know what should this look like what are the

gags that we can do that like tie it in like the gold dragon was a particularly delightful one um to us was you know we didn't want to say like red and white or whatever we were thinking about doing at the time but like just a gold dragon like what that's a thing in dnd it's not really a thing in magic but um there's nothing saying we couldn't do that uh so we decided to take that that angle with it and i really enjoyed also having the art for the token be like it's tearing right out of the page of a Dungeons and Dragons book I thought that was really cool

the other note that changed the card when we talked to them was we originally had you roll three six sided dice and they changed it to a 20 they asked us to change it to a 20 sided die yeah yeah we were happy about that and happy about getting to say a D20 as well. Yeah.

So that card, we could just go next door almost and ask them, hey, can we do this? But go to jail was like a whole different thing because that's like a Hasbro property. So we have to talk to a lot of different teams and people that we don't necessarily communicate as often with about about you know like hey what would you like this to do what would you not like it to do uh what can we call it um and in the end i think you know we got to a pretty happy spot where the card is like immediately recognizable as a backwards shot at monopoly if you're familiar with uh monopoly at all even the pose of the ogre is reminiscent of the spot on the game board. And then mechanically, the doubles are spot on. So yeah, I'm pretty happy with those. And they are really kind of the first universes beyond cards, in a sense, which is pretty cool.

Again, another way that Silver Border takes a step ahead of Black Border. Yeah, one of the things that I think is real important is how much kind of not having the rules that everybody else has lets us try things, and then down the road people go, oh, it paves ground for things, which I think is pretty cool. Yeah.

So I can see my desk, so I'm almost to work here. Any final thoughts? Any final unstable thoughts, the things we didn't, I didn't bring up. Uh, no,

I mean, it was a super cool set to work on. Uh, like I said, you know, it was pretty early in my career at wizards and I considered it like a huge opportunity, uh,

and, and a privilege because it was just such an unusual thing. Um, and it's kind of fascinating how much of looking back on it, like little bits and pieces of it have shown up in other sets, like, you know, as we talked about, like mutate and various things like that. So yeah, super glad that we got to work together on it. I think this was like the first time that we really worked together on anything actually was unstable. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, it's funny because the other big thing about sort of the designer-editor relationship is there's a lot of give and take.

Like the editor very much is trying to figure out how to execute, but the intent is important. So there's a lot of discussions of, okay, what exactly do you want this card to do? That happens all the time. The editor says, what are you trying to do with this card? And you walk through, and then a lot of times the editor will come up with clever executions in ways you hadn't thought about, and like, oh, I like that. That wasn't how I

intended it, but yes, that's a cool way we can execute on it. And Uncard's more so than normal, because whenever you're trying to do something we've never done before, there's no template. There's no previous card to look at. And so cards more so than the average i think um the designing editing relationship is even more important just because you're paving a lot more new ground

yeah and i also think there's a the ratio of like importance of destination to importance of execution is kind of different like the destination is much more important in Silver Border World, whereas, yeah, in Black Border World, we have to pay a lot more attention to the specifics of the execution to make sure it matches everything around it. Yeah, and that's one, I don't know, I mean, I'm obviously a big fan of unsets, but one of the things that's really, really fun for me is

that the unsets will lean a little more into, what's the fun version of this verse, and what's the technically cleanest, clearest version of it that I think Blackboarder really has to kind of follow. And it's nice sometimes to go, you know what? People will want to do this. Let's lean in that direction. And that's kind of fun

to do. Yeah, I agree. Well, 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. But I want to thank you, Glenn, for being with us. Yeah, happy to do it. And as always, it's always fun to talk unsaid.

So thank you very much for joining us. Anytime. Okay, guys. Enjoy your desk. Oh, sorry. Okay, guys. That's it for this week. And I will see you all next week. Okay, guys. Enjoy your desk. Oh, sorry. Okay, guys. That's it for this week

and I will see you all next week. Bye-bye.