Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #910: The Big Picture

Episode Date: February 26, 2022

This is a podcast version of my article where I talk about the challenges of designing Magic when it's a different game to different players.

I'm not pulling my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for The Drive to Work, Coronavirus Edition. Okay, so today I'm going to be talking about a topic that I wrote a whole article about, which I called The Big Picture. But one of the things I enjoy on this podcast is I can take something that I thought was an interesting article and I get to go into a little more depth on it because I have extra time. 30 minutes of a podcast is a little bit more than 3,000 words in an article. Okay, so one of the, the whole point behind this article was, I often talk about the idea that

Magic's not one game, but many games. That really, Magic's more of a game system that shares a set of rules and game components, the game components mostly being the cards. So the idea essentially is Magic is not one thing. You know, we make Magic cards, but the end user could play Standard, Commander, Modern, Legacy, Pioneer, you know, there's so many different ways to play. And that's just constructed. There's limited ways.

You can draft. You can play sealed. There's just so many different ways to play Magic. And one of the challenges, and this is what I, the reason I wrote this article was there's a couple big challenges in making Magic from a design standpoint. there's a couple big challenges in making magic from a design standpoint. And I kind of wanted to walk through them so people understood. Because I get a lot of feedback from the audience. And while the feedback is very valuable, I want to sort of... The whole point behind this article and today's podcast is just trying to explain

some fundamental things about the making of magic. Okay, so the first thing I did in the article is I talked a little bit about how we got to where we got, and then I examined some sort of problems, and then I talked about how the leading philosophies, sort of the guiding philosophies in how we make magic. a little history. So, Richard Garfield and his friend Mike Davis are trying to sell Richard's game RoboRally. For those that have never played, Wizards does sell this game. It is, you're racing robots on a floor. You have cards, you have to program them, but you only have certain cards, you have to figure out how to program them correctly. Anyway, it's a very fun game. So, they came to pitch to Peter Atkinson, who was the president at the time of Wizard of the Coast, which was a small role-playing game company back then. Peter basically said, hey, this is a really fun game, but I can't make it. It's too expensive. I'm too

small a company. But what he said is, the thing I could make is I have access to a printer, I can make cards, and I have access to art. So I can make cards with pretty art on them. Richard took that away and came back with the concept of a trading card game. So from the very beginning, Richard sort of, the entire point of a trading card game, Richard would say it's bigger than the box. And what that means is that each person, when you open a booster pack, you are just getting elements of the game. Like, for example, if I'm going to play Monopoly, if I sit down with someone and play Monopoly, and I open up, you know, the things I'm going to get are the exact same things anybody else playing Monopoly is going to get. You're getting the same board with the same 40 spaces and even the same pieces to move it around.

But with Magic, that's not the case. With Magic, you're getting components of it, pieces of it, and you, the player, are kind of empowered to choose what pieces you want to make your own game. And so that is important. The reason I bring this up is Magic kind of being a game system is nothing new. It is not like it evolved into that from, you know, 1993, from Alpha, from the game first existing. Like, when the game first came out, within the first year the game came out,

people started making formats for it, instantaneously. You know, there was star magic, and there was emperor magic, and there was lots of different ways to play. And even just the idea of, do I sit and build a constructed deck

or I just open up things? You know, limited formats happened very early on. There was a lot, like, even from the very, very beginnings, we gave the game players sort of this game that was very flexible and gave them a lot of power to control. I mean, one of the things that makes Magic the game it is is that the audience has so much input into what the game is.

I like to say that Magic makes you the game designer. And one of the things that's really interesting is whenever I go someplace where there's lots of game designers making lots of different games, how much Magic is popular among that group. Game designers tend to love Magic. And the reason is, is for a lot of them, it was the first time that somebody put them in the seat of being a game designer. That magic really has so much ability to let you shape the game that a lot

of game designers kind of learned their love of game design from just playing magic. Okay, so let me, let me talk through some of the problems, and then I will talk through sort of general philosophy. Okay, so there's a couple major problems, and in the article today, I sort of laid them out. Okay, first is what I call the priority problem. Okay, so this problem is each player sees magic through the vantage point that is their vantage point, that what they play, how they play, is how they see magic.

And so, for each player, there are things that we could do to make their game better. But one of the problems is that each player has a different priority. But when you are playing, because the game is what it is for you, that's how you tend to think of the game now maybe if you since you listen to my podcast or read my articles maybe I've opened your mind and you don't necessarily think this way and you see it more as

something lots of people do but for most people when they play Magic the game is what the game is for them because they don't have, that's the experience they have you know, Magic is what Magic is because that's because they don't have, that's the experience they have. You know, magic is what magic is, because that's what they do when they play. And so, one of the things that happens is, people are like, okay, I see a problem, I'd like you to fix the problem, and then, for example,

in the article I used as an example, for a long time we did not have a legendary creature that was blue and red that cared about artifacts. Even though we had done blue-red as an artifact theme many times. And people were like, how could you not have made this? Why doesn't this exist? And I remember when Kaladesh came out, we ended up using our blue-red slot to make Saheeli, which was a planeswalker as opposed to a legendary creature. And because blue-red had a huge artifact theme in Kaladesh, for example.

And people were really upset. And one of the things that it's trying to explain is that this idea that you only want a few things, why can't we make those few things? But when you step back a little bit, everybody wants a few things. And those few things often don't line up and

often don't overlap. And that what to you is the most important thing of what magic is to you differs from person to person. And we have millions and millions of players. So this idea of I can't believe they haven't done X yet. Well, we have a giant list. Like whenever people ask for stuff, we have this giant list of we know things people want. But we have to find the right place to do them. And there's a giant list. I mean, if there are only five things we need to do, yeah, we could get them done. But there's millions. There's so many different things that people want that it is not something...

I mean, and we are constantly, like, literally, I like to say magic's a hungry monster. We're constantly making new cards. And we constantly, we are aware of things players want. And we do slowly get to some of them. But there's more than we could possibly get to. And there definitely is this sense of this frustration from the players of, I recognize a problem,

how have you not solved it? Not realizing that the problem is a lot of times very localized, and that there's lots of problems, essentially, for us to solve. There's so many different ways to play, and even within the same format, even if you're playing Commander, playing competitive two-person Commander versus really casual multiplayer,

those are, while they're the same format, they're very different in what they need. Okay, so this leads to the next problem I call the wasteful problem, which is we're going to make things for somebody, but that somebody might not be you. I use the unsets in my example for this one, which is, if you, for example, if the format you play is like, you know, Silver Border or Acorn Cards are not allowed, then they might just be, this is off limits.

This is useless to me. I would never use this product. And so the point is like, why are you wasting time making this product that I would never use? But the point is, Unstable came out. It got played by a huge number of people. We were printed it four times.

A lot of people are playing the unsets. And the point is, it's for somebody. It might not be for you. But there really is this frustration when you see things. Because there's so many things that you want. Why are we making things you don't want? But it comes from the fact that we're making for somebody. We don't make things for nobody.

Whenever we make something, there really is an audience we have in mind. And we spend a lot of energy making sure that every product we make has a big enough audience. Because, right, we don't want to make something so narrow that three people like it. But it's very possible for millions to enjoy something and other millions not to enjoy it. Because not everything is focused at the same audience. Okay, but next is what we call the contamination problem. And this is, I define magic as a certain thing. There's lines that I draw. What is magic? What is not magic? And when you cross those lines, I get upset because now, while I might not choose to play with it, maybe somebody

else I play with plays with it. Like, I can't not be exposed to it in theory. And so, and Universes Beyond is a good example of this, where there's a lot of players very excited, very excited for Universes Beyond, that the idea of playing with other properties in their magic is thrilling to them. But for some players, it is a line that shouldn't be crossed. It is, you know, I don't want not magic in my magic. And so when we make,

I mean, everything from, you know, the Godzilla overlays to Walking Dead, to Stranger Things, you know, upcoming, we have Lord of the Rings, that we did Dungeon Dragons. I mean, there's all sorts of things we do, that this idea of, and it doesn't even need to be Universes Beyond, it might just be, I don't like, I don't like land destruction, I don't like hand discard, I don't like, you know, every person has things in the game that they wish the game wasn't.

they wish the game wasn't. And whenever they have to come face-to-face with those things, they don't like it. And so one of the things that's like, hey, this isn't magic. Could you please keep it out of my magic? We get that answer a lot. But inherently, the problem is, it is for somebody.

It's not for you, but it is for somebody. The final problem is what I call the evolution problem. And that is that magic by its nature, this is kind of true for trading card games, but magic in particular, is probably, I mean, one of the defining traits of magic is it evolves. Is that it keeps becoming

new things. It's not that it necessarily loses the old things, and in many ways, the old things are still there, and there are formats where you can play cards from the very beginning of magic, so it's not necessarily that cards leave the system all that much. I mean, they're things are still there, and there are formats where you can play cards from the very beginning of Magic. So it's not necessarily that cards leave the system all that much. I mean, there are banning and things. But once again, bannings are for formats.

You can choose to play what you want, and you can choose to play, you know, what formats you want. But any time we introduce stuff that is new, there are people that really rebel against it. And 6th Edition cards, I'm sorry, 6th edition rules, foil cards, new frame, new rarity, booster fun, new types of booster, you know, new types of boosters, you know, whatever it is, whenever you make something new, people have issues. And even new mechanics. You know, Alliance has said, now you can cast cards

when you're tapped out. And Lorwyn introduced planeswalkers. And Innistrad introduced double-faced cards. Dungeon Dread has introduced die-rolling and standard. Pick your format. You know, Ikoria introduced mutate, which some people adored. Other people hated.

So whenever we do things, whenever we, like, magic is going to keep making new things like it's the nature of the game and once again a lot of the stuff I'm talking about

is funny it's not even as if magic has changed over time in this regard in 1993 magic was the game about change because the very first

expansion that came out Raimi Knights did things that hadn't been done before and it like one of the cool things about magic is the evolution, is that

it keeps sort of reinventing itself. And the funny thing is a lot of these problems I'm talking about, I mean, I like to say that your greatest weakness is your greatest strength pushed too far. And I think a lot, like, some of magic's biggest weaknesses, like, for example,

one of magic's strengths is there's 20,000 pieces, that there's, there's so much depth, that a lot of times I've talked about people who, one of the reasons they love magic is how they grow bored of things, and it's hard to grow bored of magic, because it's so deep, and it's constantly changing, and, you know, it is, it is something that you really, it's hard to get bored of. But on the flip side of that, it's complicated. It's complex. It's intimidating.

When you first come to a game, like people get intimidated by chess and there's what, eight pieces? You know, eight unique pieces? Magic has, you know, 20,000 unique pieces. It's intimidating. There's a lot of complexity. There's a lot of complexity. There's a lot of wordiness.

And, you know, one of the things about it is that when, you know, a lot of the things I'm talking about, like the fact that magic evolves is good, but it means maybe things you don't like show up. Maybe things you love stop becoming as big a part of the game, you know? And so a lot of these problems are interesting.

Like, one of the sort of meta things today is that Magic is a very unique animal, you know, a unique game, and that one of the challenges of it, the fact that you can make Magic your own, the fact that you have such ability to customize it, really makes you think of the game in a way that you don't.

Like, when you sit down to play Scrabble or play Clue or play whatever classic game you want to sit down to play, there's a lot of universality to those games. Like, if I play with my friend who's never played before, or sorry, my friend and I who've each played the game, let's, we'll take Scrabble as an example, but we've never played together before. There's just an old, there's a rule system we're going to play with and that, you know, we're going to play pretty easily example. But we've never played together before. There's just an old, there's a rule system we're going to play with, and that, you know, we're going to play pretty easily, because every time we've played individually, look,

it's the same basic game. But Magic, maybe I played Pauper, and you've played, you know, 93, 94, whatever. Like, are we playing the same format and stuff? Like, are we playing the same game? Like, the rule system's the same, and there's overlaps. I mean, it is fundamentally the same game.

But it's more of a game system. That's what I'm talking about. Okay, so now let's dig in deep into... I want to get to the crux of the problem. So, there are two things that are fundamentally true about magic. One is that it needs to evolve to live. I like to compare magic to a shark. It needs to keep moving, and it's constantly hungry. Like, a big defining trait of what magic is, is that we keep making more cards. I like to compare magic to a shark. It needs to keep moving and it's constantly hungry.

Like a big defining trait of what magic is, is that we keep making more cards, is that it keeps changing. Like a lot of the charm to magic is that it never sits still, is that it's constantly reinventing itself. That is core to the identity of what magic is. You know, the idea that we put out a set and it's a gothic horror set

and then the next set is Greek mythology, and then it's Japanese cyberpunk. You know, that whatever we're doing, we're putting things out, that there's a lot of different things. And mechanically, we keep inventing ourselves and doing new things, and every set has new mechanics, or maybe there's some old mechanics coming back. You know, the fact that magic evolves is the lifeblood of what it is. The fact that magic evolves is the lifeblood of what it is. Okay, the second truism is the audience wants different things. That one of magic's greatest strengths is that you, the player of the game, get to choose what it wants to be.

But with that comes... Okay, so magic has to evolve to live. The players want different things. So how do we do this? How do we make a game that constantly changes with an audience that doesn't all want the same thing and keep everybody happy? Okay, so here is the philosophy that we've come to. The philosophy is design magic

so that each player has the tools to make it the game they love. One sentence, but I'm going to unpack this, but it's an important sentence. What that means is, it is not our job as the makers of magic to make the wholeness of magic what everybody loves. It is to make magic something

that each player has the tools to make it what they want it to be. That we, that it is, there is some amount of work on the player's end that like, okay, so let me get into this and talk about sort of how we do it. Like, we, we the

makers of the game, in order to make it such that everybody can love it, have to think in some different ways. So number one, we must focus on inclusion over exclusion. So in my speech, I gave a speech at GDC, and then I did 20 podcasts in each of those lessons.

One of those lessons was, if everyone likes your game, but no one loves it, it will fail. And the whole point behind that lesson is, if you want your game to be successful, it's more important that you have things people love in your game to be successful, it's more important that you have things people

love in your game than you don't have things people hate. And the reason for that is, if you're going to make something that's going to make somebody fall in love with it, that is that compelling, that just stirs those kind of emotions, it's going to stir emotions good and bad. The very thing that

someone just adores about your game, someone else is going to hate with a passion. There's no way, like, yes, you can make a game that nobody sort of has strong feelings about it, but that game's not going to succeed. And so, one of the things about Magic that we've decided that's a very important part of making Magic is,

look, we're going to find things that we know an audience wants, and we're going to include them. It is not our job as makers of magic, with some exceptions that we'll get to in a moment, to exclude things. We are about inclusion and exclusion. You, the audience, can exclude

things. You, the audience, can pick what you want to play. But the point is we need to take the things that people love, even if it's not the thing you love, and make sure that each people have the things so that they can make what they want. So we need to fill magic full of lots and lots of different things. So one of the metaphors that came up in this article that I will use as I explain this is the idea of magic as a buffet. So we are trying to make this the most awesome buffet

in the world. And so what we want to wanted to do that is offer lots of cool foods. It does not matter that every person loves every food. In fact, by definition, they won't. You can't even eat all the food. You know, our buffet is so big, you can't possibly eat all the food. And we care more that the food you love is there than the food you hate is excluded. We want to make sure all the food is there. I mean, there's some limits I'll get to, but the idea is, you know, if there's people that love a certain thing, we want

that thing to be there. And, let's say you hate with a passion some food. Okay, don't eat that food. That food is not for you. And I understand that this gets to the contamination issues. Like, well, you know, I just choose not to play with it, but someone else can play it against me. And I understand that this gets to the, um, uh, the contamination issues. Like, well, you know, I could choose not to play with, but someone else can play it against me.

And I'm like, well, that is the nature of social gaming, that you might hate something with a passion and what that thing you hate can be anything. I might hate a certain style of magic, a certain mechanic in magic, a certain creative of magic. I might hate it with a passion. I don't control the way. I mean, you can control who you play with and that you could pick a play group and your play group makes some decisions. You know, if no one in your play group

likes Armageddon, don't play Armageddon. And that your play, your play group can decide that. But that doesn't mean that, you know, we're not going to make things that you personally might not make. You know, we focus on inclusion over exclusion. Next,

we have to be willing to experiment more. The idea that we're going to make things and push boundaries and people might like those boundaries, look, that's inherent to it. For any one person, we're probably going to make something that you, if you were making magic,

you wouldn't make. We're going to cross lines that you, if you were making magic, you wouldn't make. Like, we're going to cross lines. But the idea is that if by crossing lines we excite other people, that, I mean, the reason we need to experiment is magic needs to evolve, magic needs to change, and we always want to find new things. And you know what? Some new things we find are going to make you

fall even more in love with the game. Some things you might not like at all, but it is, once again, love over hate. We want you to find things you love, and even if we make things you hate, okay, it's a modular game. You get to pick the things you love and play those things. So, number three. We must default to things being playable. And what I mean by that is, I think there's a little bit of a misunderstanding. Let me talk a little bit about Silver Border, which now is becoming Acorn. Um, when we made Unglued way back when, um, magic at the time was very different than it was now. Most of magic was casual kitchen table play at home, and a different than it was now. Most of Magic was casual, kitchen table, play at home.

And a little tiny portion was organized play. And at the time, there was, I think, two formats, Type 1 and Type 2, what we now call Standard and Vintage. And so the idea originally of the Silver Border was we were kind of pushing in space that didn't make sense in tournaments. The whole point of the unset was there's all this fun, casual things we can do, but that cause problems in tournaments.

Because tournaments need a very hard and fast line. And so we make a lot of rules where we're like, we can't be, you know, we have to be very exact in the lines. And I think a lot of people, unfortunately, looked at the silver border as a means to say, what is sort of real magic from not real magic? And there's never the intent or the point of Silver Border. Silver Border

cards are real magic. Maybe they're not playable in the format you most enjoy, so maybe they're not part of your format, but so are band cards. I don't think people think those as not being magic. And so a lot of people think that we are supposed to use this tool as a means to lock out the thing they want. Hey, I don't care if you

want to have universes beyond, you want to have whatever, pick the thing you don't like. Fine, fine, fine, just have it, but don't let it in my format. But the point is, we want people to be able to play the things they want. So, for example, if we make a playable card that absolutely 100% is something that doesn't cause any

game problems, we are not going to fence it off. We are not going to fence things off because they don't work. The only reason we have Silver-Bordered Acorn is because there are some things that cause functionality issues with the hard and fast rule set. The funny thing is there's a lot of uncards that nobody plays them wrong, no one has trouble understanding them,

but they just, like, a good example might be Triple Strike or Last Strike, which everybody plays correctly. It's just, it's really hard to make the rules function. It's hard to program in the rules. And it's just not worth the energy to do so. So anyway, when we make something, we make something new, we want it to be as playable as we can. I understand there's a place

for, like, Acorn, Civil Border-type stuff because it causes problems in rules and there's fun casual stuff there and I do want to make that stuff. But the vast majority, if I make a card that any format can play,

like it works in any format, I don't want to limit it from being in that format for reasons outside of does it work in the format. The only thing that determines whether something is Civil Border slash Acorn of does it work in the format. The only thing that determines whether something is civil border slash acorn is whether it works

within the rule system. If it doesn't, it should be allowed. That's the whole reason why Infinity is going to have eternal legal cards, because they're cards that there's no reason, especially, like, for example, with die rolling. Like, we said with D&D

that we're just going to let die rolling be something you can play in normal magic, in non-Civil Border magic. And, okay, well, it makes no sense to have some die rolling cards you can play and some you can't play. So, you know, when we make new ones, you know,

we're going to say, okay, you can play this. This is playable. Okay, next. We must rely on the players crafting what they enjoy. And this is super important. We, the makers of the game, don't have the power to craft what people want as much as players do. Because if we said, okay, magic's only going to be thing X, and then everything else we don't make,

well, the game can only be thing X. It can't be Y, it can't be Z. That one of the things about magic that is so lovable is that the players have so much power to create what they want it to be. And what that means is, we have to let the players craft and make things, and us not be the arbiter of things. Meaning that um you know, that we can't use what we make or don't make um, like if we think that it's something that's fun for the game, that people

will enjoy, even if other people will hate it with a blinding passion, we need to put that in and then let the players decide how and where they want to play. If we make something you just really dislike, okay, play a format where you don't play that. Or play with people that all agree that you won't play that. Or

make a brand new format that doesn't use that. But we need to put the power of what does and doesn't get played in the players' hands and not on our end. We don't have the ability, like we the makers of the game game have to make this, like once again,

let's use my buffet method. If we said we're only going to put Italian food out, okay, well people that love Italian food will love our buffet. But a lot of players might go, that's not my favorite kind of food. I want to have food other than Italian food.

So if we the makers of the buffet only include Italian food, then all we've done is we've shrunk the game to the game about Italian food, right? We don't want to do that. So what we do is make this massive buffet with lots of foods, and we're going to put foods you

wouldn't touch in a million years. That's fine. Don't eat it. But we, you can't ask for us to not put the food out. There's people that love that food. So we're going to put the food out. Um, and we're going to let you pick what to eat, not have us determine what you eat by what we put out. Okay, number five, we must generate feedback that helps us. This is where, actually where I use the buffet method. One of the things to be aware of is, I love getting feedback. Um, but the most important feedback to me is why somebody

loves something. So like, hey, hey, you, you made, I'll use my buffet metaphor, your chili was amazing. I love your chili. It's the best chili I ever had. That says to me, ooh, we should make more chili like this. Or whatever experiment we did with our chili, maybe try other different kinds your chili. It's the best chili I ever had. That says to me, ooh, we should make more chili like this. Or whatever experiment we did with our chili, maybe try other different kinds of chili. Like it says, oh, chili is ripe for more kinds of things. We should experiment with chili or do more things like chili. And especially, they love this chili. We should make sure that this chili is something we make from time to time

because, wow, we're getting feedback people love this chili. So we should make this chili and chili like the chili. It's also really good to get feedback of, I would like this chili, or like, I would like, oh, this carbonara was too peppery. I love carbonara, but you made it a little too peppery.

If you made it a little less peppery, I would love it. That's really important feedback for us because that says, okay, we were close. There's a way to change what we're making to make somebody fall in love with it. The feedback, and I'm not saying I don't want this feedback, but it's the harder feedback to take advantage of, is I hate chili, or I hate lasagna, or whatever it is you hate. If there are people that really, really love lasagna or love pasta carbonara or love, you know, chili or whatever, pick your food. If you hate it with

a blinding passion, I want to know that if enough people hate the chili, okay, maybe we think twice about how much chili we do or maybe we do chili on special occasions or whatever. But if there are people that love, love, love the chili, I'm less inclined to listen to the haters of the chili than the lovers of the chili. Because the lovers of the chili are the people that are eating the chili. The haters of the chili are not eating the chili. And as long as there's an audience for the chili,

I want to make the chili. And so it's really important in sort of focusing on why and how are people loving things. It's not that we don't know. Look, if you hate something, I want to know. And I want to know why you hate it. I'm not saying I don't want to know that. And if enough people hate something, that will change their behavior.

But the important thing to understand is if you hate something with a blinding passion, but somebody else equally loves it, your hating it doesn't make us not care about the person loving it. And as I explained earlier, we care more about somebody loving something than somebody hating something. So if there's a thing we make that's part of the game that people absolutely adore and you hate, well,

don't play with that thing, but we're not going to not make it because you hate it if other people really are loving it. The final thing is, the sixth lesson was, we must understand what hurts the game. So there are two categories of things we do not do. So I want to make things that everybody loves, but there are

two categories that we have to be careful of. One is what I'll call bad game mechanics, which is, there are things that harm the game. My example in the article was the color pie. The color pie exists for a reason. That if every color does everything, it hurts the game. We don't, like, we want you choosing colors. The colors

do a very important function. I've done a whole podcast on the color pie and why it's so important. So there are things we don't want to make because it hurts the game. Yes, people might adore a red spell that just destroys enchantments. There's a reason we don't make that. That there's things we do that we do have to make

what's right for the game. So there are things that would harm the game. We're not don't make that. That there's things we do that we do have to make what's right for the game. So there are things that would harm the game. We're not going to make those. Second is we do not want to make things that violate our values. There are stereotypes that are harmful. There are, you know, there are things that people might want us to do that they would enjoy that would be harmful to other people in a way that we feel violates their values. And then, by the way,

there's a difference between I don't like this being part of my game and this thing is insulting to me or something that really harms me or what I am. And this second one is tricky. It's hard. It's also, you know, but Wizards from the very beginning

has always said, look, we want to make sure we have diversity, we want to make sure we represent our players, and we don't want to do harmful stereotypes and stuff, so like there's a lot of stuff we try not to do and so that's the second category but anyway the real lesson hopefully of today

if you listen to today's podcast or read my article is making magic is very hard. And that we, the people who make magic, have this major challenge in our way, which is that the players want such different things. And so we are trying to make, to use my buffet metaphor,

we are trying to make the most awesome buffet ever. The best buffet in the world. The best game in the world. And the way we're going to do that is we're going to offer all sorts of cool foods in our buffet. And we're going to keep making new foods and offering new things. And we're going to keep expanding our buffet. And we want you all to find things to eat that make the most amazing meal possible. But in doing that, we're going to make things that aren't what you would have at your buffet, that aren't what you want as part of your meal. And sort of the takeaway from that is we have to empower you, the audience, to find the ways to make the meal you love and avoid

the things you don't want. Now, might other people sit at your table and eat food you don't like? They might. I mean, you do have a lot of control over who you want to play with, if that's important to you. But one of the things I'm trying to finally use my metaphor is that one of the great things about this game is that you can

play with other people, and you can learn what other people love. Maybe that chili that you think is horrible, maybe if you see someone else loving chili, maybe you'll give chili a second chance and you'll find out chili's not as horrible as you thought it was. Maybe the chili is actually good. And so that is a big thing. That's sort of the big picture that I'm talking about today is we're trying so hard to make a game that is lovable by so many different people. And in order to do that, we have to make a lot of decisions

that might result in us making things as a component of the game that you would not make, that you don't enjoy. But it is not there to upset you or annoy you. It is there so that somebody else who is not you, somebody who, to them, that is the thing that makes magic what it is. The way I like to think about it is, think about what makes magic special for you. Think about what makes magic the awesome game it is.

Why you love magic. Now imagine there are other things that you don't like, but are what give that feeling to somebody else. We don't want to not allow that other people to have those feelings to fall in love with the game the way they fall in love with it, just because it's something

that is not what you love about the game. And so hopefully, the reason I wrote this article, the reason I'm doing this podcast, is to make you realize kind of my meta-lesson here, and this is a good life lesson beyond just magic, in that understanding other people, understanding other viewpoints, other beliefs, other likes

and dislikes, just understanding why somebody else might enjoy something in a way different than you enjoy it, or that someone else might value something different than what you value. That understanding that and recognizing that will make you a better person, uh, make magic a better game. You know, that it is important to understand, like, one of the big things that I've learned from being a game designer is that there's so many other vantage points,

and it's so easy to only see your own vantage point, but when you start to understand that other vantage points exist, and you can start to see other people's vantage points, that opens up your world. And I honestly, like, right now, I bet there's something in magic that you hate, that you are just not exposed to, that you just hate on principle, that if you actually got exposed to and played with it, you might actually enjoy. And you might never know that because you're never exposed to it, because you you, you, like, it's kind of like, um, people who dislike a food and then one day they try the food and you're like, oh my goodness, I, I like this food. I've not eaten this food for years because I thought I didn't like it,

but I try it and now I do like it. Um, but anyway, that, that is my big lesson today is that magic exists the way it exists for, for important reason, and that the idea that there are things that other people enjoy that might not be your cup of tea, it's not a bad thing. It's a great thing. It's one of the joyous things about the game. The fact that somebody else can play the exact same game you're playing, and the game to them is something completely different, but you and they love it. Like, it both comes to your heart.

You both find a way to bring it and love it, even though what you're loving isn't quite the same. That is an amazing and cool thing, and one of the great things about magic that I love. And anyway, that, that is why, that is the big picture. That is why we make magic the way we do. So anyway, I hope this gave you some thoughts today,

and like I said, a little more introspective and philosophical, maybe, than some of my podcasts. But that's the cool thing about the game of magic. It can invoke really strong and interesting things in us. But anyway, I can see my desk, so we all know what that means. It means it's the end of my drive to Magic. So instead of talking Magic, it's time for me to make a Magic. Hope I gave you guys something to think about, and I'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.