Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #914: Initial Ideation

Episode Date: March 12, 2022

This podcast is about my latest Nuts & Bolts article on initial ideation. In it, I explain how one starts designing a Magic set around an idea.

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 today I'm going to be talking about a recent article. So every year I write an article called Nuts and Bolts, where I explain... It's geared at amateur magic designers, sort of giving them tips and tricks about how to design magic cards and magic sets. And meanwhile, for everybody else, it's sort of like just giving you some behind the scenes of, you know, more technical advice of how we do things. Anyway, this year's article was on something called initial ideation. So how you get your ideas and how do you turn the ideas into something more concrete. And so what I thought I would do today is talk about that and then give some examples of sets I worked on to sort of walk through sort of how that happened in the past. My article didn't

give a lot of examples. I thought in my podcast I would give some more examples. Okay, so the idea of ideation is that when you start designing really anything, but I'm talking magic, so magic design, you need to start with an idea. You need to have something you're working towards, something you're building around, that you need to have some direction. Now, here's the important part, and this is one of the main things I will stress. I stressed the article. I stressed on the podcast today. What you start with isn't necessarily where you end. Um, what you start with isn't necessarily where you end.

You know, a lot of the way ideation works is you have an idea, you push toward it, you learn from it, and often it steers you in a new direction. So I'm going to talk about some of my past designs to sort of walk you through this idea. Okay, so I'm going to start with Ravnica, original Ravnica. Um, so what happened was the initial idea was I wanted to do a gold set, a gold block, because Invasion block had been very popular, but because we had done a gold block in Invasion, I just wanted it to be as different from Invasion as it could be. Well, Invasion was all about playing four and five colors, so I'm like, okay, how about you play as few colors as possible to still be multicolored than meant two?

So my first idea when I first started was, okay, I want to make a set about the ten two-color pairs. Also at the time, just a little history, in early Magic, we did not treat the ally color pairs and the enemy color pairs the same. We printed more ally cards, we printed ally cards stronger. In general, we were trying to play up the idea that the allies like each other more, and so for a while, mechanically, we just made it more prevalent and more powerful. We later kind of learned that, look, magic is just better if you can play any color combination, and, you know, pushing you toward five and away from other five just didn't make magic better. So one of the ideas on Ravnica, which at the time was a, you know, a new idea, was let's do the ten two-color pairs

all, and treat them all the same. So that was the first idea. That's where I walked in and said, okay, what is this going to be about? It's going to be about caring about the two color pairs in a way in which all 10 are treated equally. So interestingly, so in initial ideation, what you want to do is grab onto something, pick something. And the reason that something is so important is the way you're going to advance, the way you're going to improve your design is doing something, you know, is iterating, is making a design, playing with it, and then learning from it and adapting. But in order to design something, it is very hard to design in sort of, in empty space.

Make cards is very hard. But if I say, okay, I want to care about thing X, well, then you start moving toward that. You start designing toward that. And even if thing X isn't what you ultimately do, or maybe some tweak on that, it's important early on that you commit to an idea so that you're pushing in some direction, that you have some, like, a big part of ideation is there's something I'm trying to do. It's not that I can't change that do. It's not that I can't change that idea, it's not that I can't adapt that idea,

but that it really pushes me in a certain direction. So, for example, okay, I want to play all ten two-color pairs. So, thinking about that led me to making hybrid mana, because I was trying to think of different ways to express two-color, and the idea of or rather than and was very interesting to me.

And then the very first play or one of the early playtests we had, it had all 10 two-color pairs in it and it had a hybrid. And I remember after the playtest, Henry Stern came up to me, a longtime member of R&DD and Henry's like, Mark I'm a pro player, I have, you know, I've done well on the pro tour, I'm

in the top probably 1% of Magic players, I could not handle this playtest, it was too much and the reason was I remember Henry saying like he had like 40 plus piles. There was so much. It just was too much information.

So the interesting thing about that is one of the things I learned very early on, because I was pushing very hard toward all 10 colors, was it was creating problems. Oh, well, it's hard for players to deal with all that all at once. And it was that information, along with other factors, but really started pushing down the idea of, well, what if not all the colored pairs are in every set, right? Remember, at the time when we were making Ravnica,

the idea that we're going to do the 10 two-color pairs and four are in the first set and three are in the second set and three are on the third set was pretty radical. It wasn't like – I remember when I first told people that, their initial thought was, well, you can't do that. And sort of what I said was, well, it's by exploring this option of taking something and pushing it that I learned from it. exploring this option of taking something and pushing it that I learned from it.

And the other big thing was one of the things I realized as I was doing this is the need for the color pairs to have an identity. And I worked very closely with the creative team. Brady Donovan ran the creative team at the time and there was the whole team. team uh brady dominoes ran the creative team at the time and there were there was the whole team um and brady from listening to me sort of explain my needs came back with the idea of the guilds he's like how do we give identity to them and he he came up with the idea of it's a city world and they represent these 10 guilds and that once i brady sort of created that i really latched on to it and said okay well what if the whole thing is structured around the guilds and then we could chop it up and stuff like that? But a lot of the thing that sort of today's lesson is I didn't start Ravnica saying it's about the guilds.

There weren't guilds. That wasn't at all what it was. It was much more saying I'm trying this thing. And then as you get feedback, it slowly changes. So let me give you another example of that. Cons of Tarkir. So when Cons of Tarkir started, my initial idea was I wanted to do a draft. So I knew the block was going to be large, small, large.

And I knew that the last set, the way we had done it up to that point was large set, you know, in the magic year starting in the fall, northern hemisphere seasons. Starting in the fall, you would have a set, a large set. Then you'd have a small set. And then in the past,

if it was like large, small, small, you would draft them all together. Then we started doing a large set as the third set every other year. And the large set would be drafted separately from the first two sets. So just trying to shake things up, do something a little bit different. I said, what if we have large, small, large, and the small set is drafted with the first set and drafted with the second set?

So the large set would come out in the fall. You draft that. Then the small set would come out in the winter. You draft a large and small set. Then when large set would come out in the fall, you draft that. Then the small set would come out in the winter, you draft a large and small set. Then when the large set came out in the spring, you wouldn't draft the fall large set, just the spring large set with the small set. So that's where I started. I'm like, okay.

And I literally, I remember like an exploratory, in fact, I think Concertier was the very first exploratory design team. Ethan Fleischer had just won the second grade designer search, and Sean Main had come in second. Both of them had been brought into R&D, and I was trying to help flex their muscles

and stuff, so Exploratory originally was just a means by which to let them sort of explore, and it ended up being so useful that we adapted it as something that we do. Anyway, and I remember I said to them, okay, guys, I want to do large, small, large, in which

the small set is with each thing. What does that mean? You know, that's where we started. That was the idea that we started with. And, you know, what if you were traveling from A to B, and the large set is A, and B, and then maybe the small set is the means by which you travel to the boat or whatever.

You know, and so the boat is at the first place, and the boat set is the means by which you travel to the boat or whatever you know and so the boat is at the first place and the boat's at the second place we took a lot of different ideas of what this could be in the end we came up with this idea of a time travel story where there are two timelines that there's a timeline you go back in the past and the past is the past for both

timelines something changes in the past and then now now there's a different timeline. And as we start embracing that, that's when we start getting into the idea of, okay, well, what's a cool place to change? What can we change? How can we change it? And that's when the idea of, well, what if it was this sort of warlord-torn world.

So I think – once again, I think this was Brady's suggestion. The idea of it being Sarkin's home world because we knew Sarkin idealized dragons. But what if he came from a world where the dragons had been killed off? And what if Sarkin decided that that was a bad thing and he wanted to change that? So he went back in time and changed it. So now that he saved the dragons and now the dragons have taken over the timeline.

But once we got there, once we said, okay, it's Khans into dragons, okay, well, how do you represent Khans? And that got us down the path to having, you know, in order to have Khans, you're like, well, we want different leaders. So that got us down the path to having you know in order of conjugal we want different leaders so what that got us into started to do factioning and originally i think there were four factions and then uh the creative team said oh we have a fifth faction really like because

the factions were all based on different elements of like asia um different parts of asia and anyway they came back and said five and then once we had five five, I'm like, oh, well, you know, we're going to want a color balance in five. Like with four, we did color balancing, but four is always weird. Where the way we originally did it was there were two threes and two twos, kind of what we ended up using in Ixalan. Anyway, but when we got to five and it's like, okay, we need a color balance.

That's when I'm like, oh, you know what? Something we've never done before is wedge. We had done Shards of Alara had done, I'm sorry, yeah, had done Shards, had done Arcs, had done a color and its two allies. But we had never done a set with factions with a color and its two enemies. And as we were trying to build it, we're like, we were kind of halfway there. I'm like, oh, this could work. And so that started becoming a wedge set. Um, and the reason I bring Tarzan, uh, I bring up, I'm sorry, Khans of Tarkir up is it's a really good example of where I started and where I ended. It changed a lot. There was a lot of variance in what happened.

Um, and then that's, that's a big part of ideation. I want to sort of stress today is that, you know, it's only by exploring each thing that we got to the next thing. It's only by making it a time travel set that we needed to come up with a cool world that we could swap. And only,

you know, that got us to cons and dragons, and cons and dragons got us to factions, and factions got us to wedges. So each decision led to the next decision. But that wasn't... One of the things when you're making a magic set is you want to sort of let the set sort of become what it wants to be,

if that makes sense. And so it's important that you have a direction and a drive, but it's also equally important that as you learn things and pick up things, that you adapt to those things. That you say, okay, I'm learning something new. Like, it's very easy, for example, in my Ravnik example, where we have this playtest and I'm giving the feedback that it's too much. You know, there's other directions I could have gone, but I was like, okay, well, let me take that into account

and say, how can I do what I want to do, but adapt to that issue at hand? So other times, you know, when you're doing ideation, there's a lot of different ways to go about it. So let me talk about a different set. Let me talk about Ikoria. So Ikoria, we very much were interested in capturing sort of some trope space. I think the initial pitch was Monster Island. And for those that don't know, like, there's a bunch of different movies like Skull Island and stuff like that where there's a bunch of monsters on an island

and the monsters fight and they're isolated from everybody else because they're sitting on an island. But we said, okay, well, what if we make our version of that which is just, it's a plane. We don't need an island. The whole plane is it.

A plane of monsters. Can we play up monster tropes? And we spent some time and so one of the things that I talk about in my article is an important part of ideation usually is what I call the whiteboard moment. You don't actually

have to have a whiteboard. I just, in meetings, we use whiteboards. But what I mean by that is some brainstorming where everybody is putting up their ideas and you all could see each other's ideas. So, for example, with Ikoria, we said, okay, we want to do monsters.

Okay, well, let's write up all the source material. What is everything we've seen in pop culture? What are all the tropes you expect? If I tell you it's a monster set, what do you expect? And what we did on the whiteboard is we really filled it up and wrote lots of different ideas of sort of what that could be. And then from that, we sort of picked something that we thought would be, you know, what was exciting to us. And the idea that really excited me was the idea of evolution. Like a big part of monsters is not only are they monsters, but they change.

And we're like, okay, could we make a world in which, you know, I guess the two big things, one was evolution, and the other big thing was the idea of there's some bonding between sort of humans and monsters. And so we really sort of, like, a

big part of what made Ikoria Ikoria was saying okay we want this idea what does this represent you do your whiteboard and then go okay of this idea here's what I'm drawn toward here's the thing that I think is interesting and like evolution for example magic is a very creature

centric game the idea of things changing with time is compelling magic is a game you know that adap. The idea of things changing with time is compelling. Magic is a game that adapts over time, that things change over time. So the idea of what have I got creatures that over time sort of adapted, involved and became different was really

exciting. And so we started with monsters but monsters led us into the idea of evolution and into bonding. bonding um and so you know that's another big part of ideation is start with your big picture do some of your general brainstorming to figure out well within this scope like a lot of part of early ideation is saying okay if i said to players it is thing a you know we're doing a monster set well what

would they expect? And part of that is looking at tropes and pop culture references and maybe some historical references and stuff. What do people know? I talk about resonance all the time. But a big thing of when you make a set is you're always looking at what is the resonance in the set and what is the nostalgia in the set. That I want to emotionally connect with my audience and so anyway probably a topic

for a different podcast but um so with icoria it's like what where do we think the fun is where do we think the cool moment is and then we have to both find that for the mechanics and find that for the creative and ideally if we're doing our job correctly, we're overlapping that. You know, with Ikoria, it's like, okay, we want evolution to be cool. So we talked with the creative team and they spent a lot of time going, how do things evolve? What does it look like? And so there was a lot of talk back and forth about, well, let's figure out mechanically how to evolve. Let's figure out sort of visually how to evolve and creatively how to evolve.

And that really sort of sets the set down on a certain path. Okay, so let me use a different example of another sort of top-down thing. So let's talk about Innistrad. So Innistrad was, we really started by saying we want to capture a genre trope. We want to capture, you know, gothic horror. What did that mean? We have our whiteboard moment. We read all those things up. And that was

a good example where we found three pillars. And this is a really common thing that happens sometimes in ideation is you want to have you can have multiple ideas. It's not

that you can only have one idea, but the ideas need to be connective and the ideas need to be ordered. And what I mean by that is you have to understand what idea is the most important idea because when your ideas run into each other, one of them has to trump the other.

So, for example, in Innistrad, we came to sort of the tent pole or the tripod, I guess. The three things that really we realized. One was we wanted to care about monsters, that a big part of horror is the monsters. So the idea of vampires and zombies and werewolves and ghosts. We really – the idea of monsters being a thing and that you could warp and build a deck around and that there's a play pattern that matched to monsters and this is how zombies attack and this is how werewolves attack, that was important. The second thing was this concept of dark transformation, that a lot of what makes horror horror is something might start innocent but become something less innocent.

Or something could be horrific and become more horrific. The idea of transformation was a big part of horror. And the third part was sort of the role death plays, that there is a very, you know, a key part of death mattering, and we wanted that to matter. And then a big part, by the way, that that led to is as I started getting all the component pieces, I also realized that there was a feeling that I wanted, that there was an emotion that I wanted. And this is another big part of the ideation process is what am I trying to evoke out of my audience? When they play, if I want to capture something, what play experience am I trying to capture?

And so, for example, for Innistrad, I love this idea that it sort of invoked fear. That things would happen and you, the opponent, would get kind of nervous. Like, one of the reasons, for example, that Morbid was really interesting was, let's say my opponent attacks with a creature. Well, I could

block and kill the creature, but, oh, is that what they want? You know, like, every time something dies, you're kind of afraid. It could mean bad things for you. Or likewise, you know, take, like, the werewolves, where you play them, and you know under certain circumstances they get worse. And you're like, uh-oh, is that circumstance going to happen?

And you have to worry about that. And so there's a lot of what shaped sort of where Innistrad went was sort of an evolution. Like it started with, okay, it's about Gothic horror, but then that had to mean something. And that's why the reason I keep bringing back whiteboarding is there's a couple of important parts of sort of early iteration, ideation.

One is that you need to understand the idea space you're thinking about you need to explore that idea space sort of prioritize what seems interesting to you generates cards that do that and play test it so for example let's say dark transformation matters okay well how are we doing that and we have to figure out what that means and how we represent it and then we got to try it and play it. A good example early on in Innistrad was, I really wanted the werewolves to be the cornerstone of our dark transformation. I mean, werewolves, that's the essence of a werewolf. Half the time they're a human and half the time, or not half the time, but some of the time they're human and some of the time they're a werewolf.

And it's kind of scary that the humans become the werewolves. Like, you know, half the time, but some of the time they're human and some of the time they're werewolf. And it's kind of scary that the humans become the werewolves. Like, you know, vampires are always vampires, but werewolves have this dual state to them. And so we wanted to capture that dual state. And we tried a whole bunch of different things. I mean, double-faced cards is what one, but we had an early version of day night. We had a bunch of different versions of things we were trying. But that all came about because we were trying to execute on the idea that we had. And that's why it is important early on,

you know, the steps that I recommend is have an idea, map out the idea, brainstorm the idea, clump things that you think are interesting, order them, then make cards out of them, then play them, then get feedback, and then loop around. That is the iterative loop early on when you're trying to make something.

Okay, so now let me tell you a story where things go horribly astray to talk about how, hey, sometimes your ideas don't necessarily work. And that set is Scars of Mirrodin. Okay, so the original idea of Scars of Mirrodin was when we had first visited Mirrodin. Okay, so the original idea of Scars of Mirrodin was

when we had first visited Mirrodin, we had a plan. The Phyrexians are a big villain, part of magic from very early on. And they had sort of been wiped out in the invasion, in the Weatherlight Saga. They had been sort of destroyed. But we wanted to bring them back.

I mean, they're awesome villains. And so we came up with a cool way and we planted the seeds in Mirrodin. In fact, if you read the book, in the first two pages of the book, you see the main bad guy find oil and it goes

into his fingers. Really early on, we're setting up the Phyrexians being there subtly, but we sort of set it up, and we knew when we came back that we wanted Mirrodin to become New Phyrexia. So the original plan, when we started, was the set, the fall set, was New Phyrexia, and then all year, the whole block was set in New Phyrexia,

and then at the end of the set, there was going to be like a Planet of the Apes moment where you're like, New Phyrexia, wait a minute, this is Meriden! Bum, bum, bum. And so I spent a lot of time early on trying to understand what the Frexians were and, you know, what does it mean to be a Frexian?

We did all our whiteboard work and they're toxic and they're viral and they're adaptive and they're relentless and get the essence of it. But one of the things I was having real trouble with is sort of wrapping my brain around what was the block about. You know, it's sort of like, I mean, is it about infighting of the Phyrexians? Like, what is it about? And so what happened was basically I was spinning my wheels and having real trouble.

And for the only time ever in my 20 plus years, Bill, Bill Rose, the VP of R&D, was unhappy with the progress and actually said to me, I will give you one more month, but if I don't see progress, I'm going to take you off the set and I'll put somebody else on. And that's the only

time that I've ever been threatened with that. And I really was spinning and having trouble. And so finally, I had to take a step back and said, let's stop assuming things I assume are true. And I said, okay,

what is the coolest part of this idea? And what I realized is the coolest part was Mirrodin falling to Phyrexia. Like, we had kind of skipped over the best part. And so I came back and sort of said to Bill, I go, Bill, I think we're telling the wrong story.

Instead of telling the story of new Phyrexia, why don't we tell the story of Mirrodin becoming new Phyrexia? And so, you know, that was a lot... So I pitched that to him, and then what I basically said is, the first set, the Phyrexians are there, but just, you know, that was a lot. So I pitched that to him. And then what I basically said is, the first set, the Phyrexians are there,

but just, you know, a smaller percentage. The middle set's this giant war where it's half and half. And the last set, they've won, and now it's the new Phyrexia. And then Bill's the one that came up with the idea of, well, what if we didn't know what the ending was? What if we advertised two different sets, and it wasn't until the set came out you knew whether Mirren won or the Phyrexians won?

And then, like, for example, the middle set, Mirren and Besiege, became this thing where at the pre-release you gotta pick a side and you gotta fight, you know, what you wanted to be. But anyway, it's a good example

where we started down a path and then came to a dead end. Like, sometimes when you're ideating, not everything will work out. Not everything has something, you know, sometimes you try it on a path and it's a dead end. Like, sometimes when you're ideating, not everything will work out. Not everything has something, you know, sometimes you try it on a path and it's a dead end, and you have to realize, I need to back up. I need to look at a different path. And so, let me, sort of, my major theme of ideation is, one of the things I discover, or I notice when I work with younger designers or less experienced designers is that they really have a fear of making decisions and going down the wrong path. Like a lot of times, like they'll come to a fork in the road and they'll like make decisions so it'll work for either way.

And they're sort of on the fence. They won't commit to a path. And what I say to them is, guys, pick a path. You know, picking no path, you're not going to find the solution. Pick a path. Maybe it's the wrong path,

but you're not going to know that until you go down the path. So pick a path, try it, go full throttle, try to make it work, and then if it doesn't work, well, at least you learned that's not the right path.

Now go do the other path. But if you spend all your time sort of straddling and never picking a path, you don't learn those things. You sort of like, you end up in this weird middle ground. And so a lot of sort of my ideation article in today's podcast is stressing the value of the idea is not that it's necessarily the right idea, but it is something that pushes you in a direction and teaches you.

Like, one of the things I always say is there's three outcomes of a playtest. Things go amazingly well. That's relatively good. That's a good playtest. Things go horribly wrong.

That's also a very good playtest. You learn a lot from that. Things go, ah, okay, not great, not bad. That is the worst playtest. Things go horribly wrong. That's also a very good playtest. You learn a lot from that. Things go, okay, not great, not bad. That is the worst playtest. You know what I'm saying? If things go really, really well, you can learn what's succeeding, why people are enjoying it. If things go horribly wrong, you can learn where

mistakes are and you can figure out what's going on. It's when things sort of don't really commit in a direction that becomes the hardest. And so what I like to do is push toward things. Like, for example, my Ravnica story. Was it the right thing to have 10 colors, you know, 10 color pairs all in one set? Well, I'm like, let's go, let's go, let's do it. I would not have learned the lesson I had had I not really pushed it.

You know what I'm saying? Had I sort of just done it a little bit. Had I made it so it's, you know, it's mostly not multicolored, just a little sampling multicolored, we wouldn't have learned much, and that wouldn't have been something that's exciting. But really pushing and making it the theme made you go, okay, if I want to do this theme, I learned something.

You know, I learned I've got to break them up. Ten is a little bit too much all at once. And it got me down to pat. And the funny thing is, that lesson, the idea of breaking things up, is something that helped pay off in other places. You know, there's good lessons that you learn. And so, I think really what I'm trying to explain today is ideation is a great tool to take an idea, make it something workable. But there's a lot of work and iteration that comes into that. But as somebody who is making a set,

it is ever crucial that you find ideas that you commit to and go for it, you know, and see. And that it is so much better to try something and fail and learn from it than never learn anything. And I think a lot of people, when they first start designing, are hesitant, you know? And the thing I like to say is, look, you got to break some eggs, you know? On some level, if you never cross the line in your design, if you never do something you're not supposed to do, how do you know where the line is, you know?

Like, if you're always playing things safe and never trying anything, you know? like if you're always playing things safe and never trying anything you know it's very funny because one of the things I've learned is you never really know where the line is until you test where the line is like if you had said to me double face cards before Innistrad I might have gone oh

cards with stuff on the back that might have sounded crazy to me but in the moment when I was trying to solve the problem we were trying to do werewolves it was the perfect solution and like you know it it's much easier to embrace things when they solve problems and so that is what i i like when i'm in the ideation process is be bold try things you know it is much better to try something and fail and learn from that and learn why it doesn't work then never push boundaries, never try things.

And so if you're at home making your own set, look, be bold. Try things. That doesn't mean it won't work. It doesn't mean in the end it's the right decision. But it will teach you and it will be something that really helps you find what it is you need to do. Anyway, guys, so that is all about ideation so there's an article

I wrote on it so if you want more detail once again there's things in the article the article is a little more I lay things out a little bit clearer if you want

a recipe sort of how to do things but anyway that is on the website you can go read that but anyway guys I can see 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. See you guys next time.