Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #924: Making Magic Trivia

Episode Date: April 16, 2022

In this podcast, I talk about my history with Magic trivia and how to make your own Magic trivia.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today I'm going to talk about something that's a passion of mine. Magic trivia. And so I want to share sort of my history with magic trivia. And then talk about how to do magic trivia. I'll give some tips about how you can make your own magic trivia for your friends and family. Okay, so first let me talk a little bit about my history with magic trivia. Okay, so I need to go back to pretty young. I started reading very young, I don't know, like three or something.

And from a very young age, I just loved reading nonfiction. What was really common is I would go to the library, I pick a topic like space, you know, planets or cryptology or animals or so I pick some topic, and then I would get every book I could see on the topic and read every single book. And then at some point, I started getting really interested in reading books on trivia itself. I have a whole bunch of, from my youth, I have books from when I was a little kid of just books on trivia itself. So anyway, always been fascinated with trivia.

In fact, when I was not sure exactly the age, 8 to 10, sometime around there, I heard about this brand new game where the game was about trivia. It was called Trivial Pursuit. And at the time, it was invented by, I think, three

guys in Canada. And the only place you could get the game was in Canada. And my uncle had visited Toronto for work, and he brought home the game. And I remember the history section was all about Canadian trivia, which I didn't know anything about. But

I was just fascinated by this game based on trivia. Anyway, so what happened was I've just, my whole life, very excited by trivia. I love game shows. I really enjoy trivia. Okay, so let's get to the magic part of this. Flash forward to 1994, I guess. So I had this cool idea. I read the very first episode of The Duelist, which was a magazine based on magic.

I thought that it could use a little bit more advanced content. And so I suggested a puzzle column, Magic the Puzzling. It ended up getting put into the magazine. And it was very popular. So much so that very quickly I got a request from Wizards. Basically, Catherine, who was my editor, said, Would you mind if you start doing your puzzles based on upcoming sets? Could you build them on new sets?

And I said, Oh, sure. I just needed to see them. And so in order for me to do, for example, I think the first puzzle I did of a new set was Ice Age. And I said, okay, well in order to do an Ice Age puzzle, I have to see the cards and I have to see the whole set because part of building puzzles, I have to see what component pieces there are.

Like I knew I could build an Ice Age puzzle, but not without seeing all of Ice Age. And there was at the time a little bit of controversy. I don't think they had actually shown magic cards outside the building before, or even if they had, it was very, very rare. And so Catherine got permission, and they sent me what we called a guidebook at the time, which was basically a photocopy of like nine cards per page, and it showed all the cards. of like nine cards per page and it showed all the cards.

And so the first time I ever saw Ice Age, I got an envelope in the mail and I opened it up and it was all the cards from Ice Age. And by the way, at the time, this was before there were databases and stuff. So like the idea of seeing the set all at once, all laid out,

was not something people did at that time. It's not something you saw. Remember, in early Magic, we didn't even share the cards all that often. So it was just to see them all laid out like that was this really treat. It was very exciting. But along with the ability to see the cards ahead of time came a cost. I wasn't allowed to play in sanctioned tournaments because I had advanced knowledge.

And at the time, over the years, that system has changed some. I think nowadays, if you get advanced information, like you can't play in the pre-release or something. But anyway, I was not allowed to play in any sanctioned tournaments. So what I started doing was I started judging. I started helping run the tournaments rather than being in the tournaments. So what I started doing was I started judging. I started helping run the tournaments rather than being in the tournaments. And as I started, you know, helping run things, I had this cool idea one day. What if, you know, after the tournament, what if I ran a magic trivia event? A little game show was how I thought of it. And so I think the earliest one I ran,

which was in Los Angeles, was like a game show. I think there were three contestants, and then there was an audience that could watch. And then the three contestants were competing to see who could win. And then I had some little prize, I think, for the winner. Anyway, it went really well. And so I did another one. And I think over time, I slowly cleaned it up a little bit. The next thing I did is I realized it was more fun to do trivia in teams than as individuals. And I think I was trying to let more people do trivia. So the next version of the game show that I did, instead of having three individuals, there were three teams of three.

And one of the things that I liked about the team dynamic is people know things, but also sometimes it's fun between people that you can figure things out. And as you'll see when I get into trivia, one of the fun things about trivia is you want to sort of get game states where the audience gets to figure things out,

and groups made that a little bit easier. So eventually, I start to come work for Wizards. And when I work for Wizards, the very first thing I learned starting there is Scaf Elias informed me that they were starting a Pro Tour. And I was like, oh, I just, I spent a lot of time running tournaments.

I was very interested in helping them. And so I became the liaison from R&D to the Pro Tour. And so I was sort of Scaf's right-hand man in helping put things together. So I was very, very involved in the making of the Pro Tour. Anyway, when that happened, I became a regular on the Pro Tour. I went to every Pro Tour for about eight years. I head judged the feature match area. I was in charge of the video production on the final day. In the early days, I did the commentary, but it soon became clear there were better people than me to do the commentary.

But I would produce it and be behind the scenes and running it and organizing it all. And anyway, so since I was at the Pro Tour and I enjoyed running game shows at my Los Angeles events, I said, hey, do you mind if I run a game show here? They said, fine. They were looking for content. And so the way I started running the game show at the Pro Tour was I allowed, I ran it kind of like an event. And what it meant is anybody, any team can enter. You could have up to three people on your team.

If you had less than three people, I would help put teams together. So if you had a team of two, I'd find you a team of one, or maybe two other teams of one. But anyway, we would make as many teams as possible. Normally in doing trivia, on the low end, maybe we'd have 10, 15 teams. On the high end, I had as many as like 80, 90 teams. As you'll see, it became a regular thing at the Pro Tour. But anyway, the way it would work is we would have eight rounds, basically done like a Swiss tournament.

And the idea was every round, I would hand out paper and pencil. I would do a trivia round. And then we would grade it. And then if you did better than the team you were playing, you won the round. If you did worse, you lost. If you tied, it was a draw. And then I paired you like Swiss pairings. So winners play winners, losers play losers.

If you draw, often you play someone else who drew as well. And then what would happen is after eight rounds, there would be a cut to a top eight. And then there would be a quarterfinal, semifinal, and final. So there would be three rounds. So usually the trivia was 11 rounds total, if you count the Swiss and the final, you know, the top eight. And the idea was, one of the things that was fun when I got to the Pro Tour was I had access to much better prizes. So over the years, usually I would work with whoever was running that Pro Tour. And there were lots of cool prizes over the years. Obviously always product, but jackets and all sorts of weird and different things.

It was sort of fun. There's a lot of stories about people like, oh, I won this in trivia. So anyway, eventually it became a staple on the Pro Tour while I was there. Every Saturday night we would do trivia. And it's funny, after I left the Pro tour, when my twins were born, I decided I needed to travel less so I could be home with my family. And so I stopped going to all the pro tours. I still will go to the occasional pro tour, but when I went to the pro tours, the pros would always say what they missed most about me not being

there was the trivia being gone. That they really enjoyed the trivia. So that always meant a lot to me. Anyway, so not only did I do, I think I called it the Question Mark Game Show, Question Mark the Magic Game Show. I also, in my Magic the Puzzling, as it got more popular, originally I did one puzzle, then I did two puzzles, and then I did three. When I started doing three, the third puzzle was another type of puzzle. The first two usually were

the in-game puzzles that Magic the Puzzling normally was. But when I started doing the third puzzle, I would do stuff, and a lot of times I would do trivia. And I would have fun with, like, you know, and I'd do different kinds of trivia, like blow up the pictures, and like, what art is this from? I would just test lots

of different things. Also, in my column in Making Magic, the column I do every Monday, I have a reoccurring feature called How Trivial, which is a multiple choice trivia thing where I ask, there's four answers and I ask usually about 30 questions. And they're always themed. I did one on a question from every year of magic when I'm celebrating the 25th anniversary. I did one on vampires when Crimson Vow came out. I did one on the sets that I led.

Anyway, I've done different ones, and there's usually some theme. And occasionally I will do other trivia in my column. For example, I just did one where I gave you some number of things and said, which came first? Like, here's two items, which came out first in magic? So anyway, oh, and if you guys listen to this podcast, which apparently you do since you're listening to this, I do do occasional trivia things on here. The way I tend to do trivia on my podcast is I will get lists of things, to do trivia on my podcast is I will get lists of things, sort of like what are the most commonly used creature types. And then the way I'll talk through the list is I'll ask trivia questions about them. And so see if you can figure out who number one is for my trivia question.

So anyway, if you like magic trivia, I've provided and continue to provide lots of magic trivia. Okay, now that I've talked about my love of trivia and my connection to magic trivia, I want to talk about how best to do magic trivia. So I'm going to give some advice on how all of you can do magic trivia as well. And like one of the things about magic trivia is that it's a lot of fun. We have a very great community. And that people who are into magic are often very into magic. So it is prime for trivia. You know, magic has a lot, you know, we have almost 30 years of history. And there's lots of cards and lots of expansions and lots of story.

And there's infinite things to talk about. So it's prime for good trivia. But how do you make it good? So I have a bunch of steps here. Okay, so my first tip on making magic trivia is you need to think of it as entertainment and not as a test. The goal of fun trivia

is you are trying to make an entertaining, like you're trying to create a form of entertainment in which you're using the trivia as a form of entertainment. Yes, people are testing themselves, but the goal is not to, you know, the goal is not to make it something that, like you want people to enjoy themselves. You want people to have fun.

So as I go along, you'll see this is a reoccurring theme. That's why I started with this, is you are trying to make it a fun experience. And there's things you can do that will make it a more fun experience. So always in mind when making a trivia show, think of it as entertainment. Think of it as

like puzzle making and game making have a lot of overlaps. The big difference between puzzles and games is usually puzzles has a unified solution. Like normally in a puzzle, you're trying to get everybody to the same solution, usually. In games, you want each person to find their own solution.

So games tend to have you go apart more. Like how somebody wins a game usually isn't the same way that somebody else won a game. But puzzles, usually someone who solved the puzzle solves the same way, or at least the solution's the same. Maybe how they solved it was different. Okay, okay, next tip. Do not make it too hard. The number one problem that people have when I see trivia is they make it too hard. The goal is not to stump your audience. The goal is not to show how smart you are or how much you know. The goal, again, is to make an entertaining experience for the people playing.

So what that means is pick your average person. What I mean by the average person is somebody who is invested and generally knows magic. So I'm not talking about somebody that doesn't know magic at all, but take someone who is excited to be there, who thinks that they have some chance, you know, to do well. Maybe they do, I mean, you know, I'm not talking about the best players. I'm not talking about the people who actually win, but just people who, look, they're excited, they know the topic, and they expect to do decently well, or they expect to do, you know, halfway decent. The average player should get between 60% and 75% of it.

That they should be getting... The way I like to think of it is you want them to get, if you were grading it like, you know, in school, a C or maybe a D at worst. Like, you kind of want them to get a C, right? You kind of want to get them, on average, you want them to get about 75%. You want them, like, you don't want to get all of it. You want, you know, you want, like,

you're asking trivia, you want some things that are a little bit hard. You know, it's not that you can't, it's not that you can't stump people ever. And it's not, like, part of the, if everybody gets every question, that's a failure. if everybody gets every question, that's a failure. If everybody misses every question, that's a failure. And in fact, if they miss too much, that is a failure.

You want to err on the side that the people that came invested and should be able to get the majority of what you're asking. Not all of it. You do want some challenges. You do what you like. It's part and parcel. It's fun.

Oh, I didn't know that, but that's a cool question, or I should have known that, or whatever. Or I guessed this, but it was that. I'm not saying you don't want your audience to know everything, but you want to err on it not being too hard. You would rather people get more questions than less questions. Next thing,

part of thinking it out of this experience is trivia is best not when it is either they know it or they don't know it. The best trivia is something in which you give the audience tools so that the audience can figure out the answer. Now, there's a couple ways to do that. One is sometimes you can give them extra clues. You know, sometimes, for example, if you ever watch, like, Jeopardy, oftentimes they'll give you,

I guess it's an answer on Jeopardy, but they'll give you the quote-unquote question, and they will include extra sentence or so that, like, gives a pun or narrows it down. Like, for example, if your question is too hard, maybe you want to tell people the color of the... Let's say you're asking about a card, and it's too tricky. Tell them the color or the expansion or the card type. Like, it's okay to make it easier for them.

And whenever you can build in any kind of what we call handholds, meaning in puzzle making, what that means is something where the player learns something and it helps them get to the next part. Oh, I know this. So I'll give you one of my favorite types of puzzles that I used to do on the Pro Tour on the game show to give an example of a really good example of a neat handheld puzzle variant. I used to do what's called an alphabet puzzle.

So I would say to everybody, write down the alphabet, A to Z. And then I say, okay, you have five minutes or something, three to five minutes, whatever. And then I pick a topic. Maybe it's expansions. Maybe it's legendary creatures. Maybe it's instance.

You know, maybe... I pick some topic, a magic-related topic. And then they had whatever amount of time I gave them to fill in, and they got a point for every letter that they got. But once you have an A, you're done, right? You don't need to get a second A. So the cool thing about that was the puzzle starts very easy. Okay, let's say I say expansions.

Well, just start by naming any expansion. Kamigawa Nyan Dynasty, you got your K. Strixhaven, you got your S. So the idea is early on, the first stuff comes very easily. But what will happen is at some point, you start getting the easy things, and then it starts getting harder for you. And so the cool thing there is it starts as a puzzle that starts easy and ramps up in difficulty as you go along.

My one advice, by the way, if you ever do an alphabet puzzle is if not all the letters are there, tell the audience how many letters are missing. Not which letters are missing, but how many. So let's say, for example, I gave them, like, I don't know the answer to this, but let's say, like, I know there's no X expansion. I might say, oh, there's no expansion starting with two of the letters. So they know that there's 24 answers. So when they find 24, they know, or they think they found it at least.

In other examples of handholds, I talked about how trivial. I do multiple choice. Why do I do multiple choice? Well, because it's a neat handheld. And the way multiple choice works when you do multiple choice is, normally what you want is you want your correct answer. You want an answer that is very well could be the correct answer. So you want something that people might really think is the answer.

And then of the remaining two answers, you want to make them a little bit easier to figure out. Usually one of the answers most people should know is not the answer. Oftentimes it's a joke. You know, oftentimes it's funny. It's something to make people laugh, not because people will think it's real. And then the next answer is kind of not as easy as that, but if you know something about the topic, it's easier to rule out. That something about knowing the topic can make you rule that out. And so, when you craft it, you want to think about that.

It's like, oh, okay. My multiple choice is designed such that I'm giving you some real answers, but I'm giving you some answers that you can figure out aren't real answers as well. Or, for example, I just talked about a puzzle I did of which came first. Notice I just gave you two things. So, A, one of the nice things about that is kind of the worst you can do is 50-50, right?

If you just guess, you get 50% correct. And, you know, I made sure to sort of give things so that, like, the handheld of that is, let me think about when I experienced it. Oh, when do I remember doing that? And I can think about my interaction with the game. Okay, next up. Oh, the trivia that you're doing should be entertaining as trivia.

And what I mean by that is, if you have a spectator who is not at all trying to solve the puzzle, it's nice if your trivia puzzle is fun for the person who's not even trying to solve it because the trivia itself is interesting. For example, when I do a trivia column, I make sure to not just give the answers,

but give explanation to the answers. And I try to pick trivia that's fun and I try to make my answers interesting. So that, let's say you're doing my, you're reading my trivia column, and you don't even want to answer the trivia. You just want to see the answers. When you see the answers, it's interesting. That the column, or the game show, or the experience is fun,

because the trivia unto itself is fun. So what makes fun trivia? Usually it's something in which it's something the audience hasn't thought of before. Like for example, on my blog the other day, somebody asked for dragon trivia. And so I did a little bit of research and I found a little bit of a neat thing. So my question was, red has 116 monocolored dragons. What color has the next most number of monocolored dragons? Now, let me structure why this is a fun trivia question.

One, you're saying the audience has, okay, well, I can think about when I played, how often have I seen mono white or mono blue or mono black or mono green dragons? I can think back and I go, oh, I remember such and such. Oh, but that was a cycle. So there was one of each. When did I remember seeing them? And it gives you something to think about, right? And another fun thing about trivia is it's not that the audience needs to necessarily know the answer, but they want to get a general gist of it. Like, you know, sometimes like, well, I don't

definitively know, but knowing what I know and thinking about what I think, I can make an educated guess. And a lot of trivia, that is fun. The educated guess is fun. But the answer here for this question was white. What mono white, there's 17 mono white dragons, there's 14 mono blue and mono black dragons, 14 each,

and there's 10 mono green. So the reason that's a fun trivia question is it's not quite what you expect. Most people, what I found was, they thought that blue or black was number two. In fact, I thought blue was number two. And when I actually did the research, I said, oh, that's kind of cool. So it's kind of neat trivia,

and that's something you can try to figure out. You know, there's some handhelds built into it. But when you learn it, you go, oh, that's interesting. So it's fun when the trivia itself has entertainment, an entertainment aspect to it. And once again, my reoccurring theme here is when you're making something trivia, you are making more

entertainment. It's about entertainment. Okay, next. One of the things that really can make trivia take it to the next level is having fun themes. That, for example, one of the things that I really enjoyed when I was doing the game show was every round I would do something different. And this kind of ties into my next thing, which is you want to mix up your trivia. So having a theme and mixing up trivia kind of ties into my next thing, which is you want to mix up your trivia. So having a theme and mixing up trivia

kind of go together. What I meant by that is, hey, maybe it'd be fun to do flavor text. Maybe it's fun to do art. Maybe it's fun to do talking about expansions or story. There's a lot of different magic players that care about a lot of different things.

So you want to mix up the trivia so that you're not... Like if all of it is art trivia, well, someone that doesn't know art isn't having fun. But someone who knows art gets to shine in the part that's about art, but the person that doesn't know art doesn't feel like, why am I doing this? Also, because you can mix it up, you can pull up and do themes.

And one of the things that's really fun is, so let's say, for example, I'm doing flavor text. There's a lot of ways to do flavor text. You know, the low-hanging fruit is, I read the flavor text. What card is that? Another way to do it is, I tell you the card name, and I read the flavor text, but I leave one of the words out. Can you fill in the blank? Another thing might be, maybe I say two cards, and I say, you know, there's a word that appears in, you know, all three of these cards' flavor text. What word do they share? Like, there's a bunch of different ways you can do it. And one of the fun ways when you're theming things is finding different ways to approach it.

And because I used to do a game show every Pro Tour, which was, you know, many times a year, I would always try to shake things up. And I had certain go-tos. Like, I liked my alphabet puzzles. I did those a lot. Another fun theme that I liked that's similar to an alphabet puzzle, it has the same kind of handhold qualities, is where I would say, okay, I will give you so much time, I will give you a topic, and I need you to get this many things. Like, I need you to get up to 20 things in this topic.

And then I would name something, and just like, hey, can you come up with 20 things that fit this explanation? And sometimes what's fun on those ones is ones in which people can name some right away. But oh, can you dig a little bit deeper? Yes, there's the obvious ones. You know, like, for example, if I say, name 20 cards that have been restricted and vintage. Okay, well, there's low-hanging fruit there. There's some very obvious cards. But then it's like, okay, I've named the obvious things. Okay, maybe there's some less obvious things. What are those? Or maybe, you know, in trivia might be, name cards that were restricted and then unrestricted. You know, stuff like that. Okay. Next thing is I want you to, what it's saying is match your medium. And what that means is, is there's a, whatever you're doing in trivia, whether it's doing live in front of people at my game show, whether it's written down like my column, whether it's maybe on a podcast, so it's audio, whatever your medium is, you want to, you want to sort of maximize what you're doing. So for example, when I'm doing my

column, sometimes I can use visuals. I know when I did my game show, sometimes I would do things that were visual or audio and on a podcast, I can do audio things. You know, that part of what you want is, part of making a fun trivia experience, if you will, is all these component pieces. But the thing that my sort of my last reminder to everybody is you can be creative in how you do trivia. There's no, trivia is not just about, oh,

I read a question, they give an answer, and that's trivia. I mean, that is trivia, but there can be more to it than that. You can do true or false. You can do colors, for example. That's a fun one. You know, the answer is always a color. The answer is always a number. Maybe the answer is a card type, because we're doing

magic trivia. Maybe, you know, maybe you're saying, you know, maybe the answer is a planeswalker. Like, you know, you can do a lot of fun things where trying to get your, like, trying to get some style to your theming and your questions. That it's fun. It is fun to sort of present it in fun ways and lean into things. It's fun. Like, one of the things that I had a lot of fun with on the game show was because I was giving them paper and pencil,

there's a certain kind of thing I could make them do. And also in the game show, I had a timer, right? I could say, okay, guys, you have so much time and this much time, go do this. And there were certain puzzles and types of things I could do there that might not make sense in my column. But in my column, I have access to hyperlinks, and I can show pictures, and I can hide information in my column so I can click and reveal,

so I can control when people are seeing things in a way that's a little bit different than how I might do it, for example, on a podcast where you're just listening sequentially in the order that I'm going to do it. And there, for example, when I do my trivia on the podcast, it's more about, hey, I'm asking questions and giving a little bit of pause and then right away giving the answer because there's, you know, where in my column I can make you go back and, like, you can go back between things easier in written form. But anyway, the big takeaway from today is I love magic trivia. And you know what? A lot of people love magic trivia. Like I said, the number of people that just have fond memories, even today when I see people that talk about game shows from ages ago, you know, or even talk about

some of the trivia that I'm doing now in my column and stuff, that there are a lot of magic players that really love trivia. Not all magic players. They have different things. But if you have a store or maybe you guys get together at your home, that trivia is a lot of fun.

And if you've never, ever tried making a trivia thing, I'm trying to encourage you today. The reason I'm telling you how to do it is so you can do it. And, you know,

there's a lot of neat ways to do magic trivia. There's no one way to do it. There's a lot of ways. And the other thing, by the way, is there's nothing wrong with finding magic trivia elsewhere. Like I said, go search online. Look up how trivial. I've done a bunch of, or just search

my name in trivia. You'll find a bunch of different trivia. You know, there's nothing wrong with taking magic trivia questions from elsewhere. You don't have to invent them. You don't have to make them. But it is fun to kind of find new things. I did enjoy sort of creating trivia in the sense of finding neat

things to ask. But also, there's nothing wrong with finding existing trivia and reusing that. But anyway, I'm encouraging you all today, if you at all have any inclination, to try running trivia. Like I said, I've had a lot of success with it. And because magic is so community-based, because magic is so—it's a lifestyle. People are so invested in it, or at least a lot of people are very invested in it.

It is just a great source material for trivia. And so that is my spiel for today about Magic Trivia. I think it's a really fun thing. It's a neat aspect of the game. I love playing up different ways to play Magic. And Magic Trivia is one of those ways. Yes, you can play Magic

without even having a Magic card in front of you. So that is my thoughts today. So I encourage you all to go play magic. Trivia. But anyway, I'm now parked. So I, you 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. I'll see you guys next time. Bye-bye.