Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #932: Magic Design Tools

Episode Date: May 13, 2022

A carpenter has his hammer and drill. What are the most important tools for a Magic designer and how are they used to solve the essential challenges of making a trading card game?

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 talking about tools. Magic design tools. Okay, so if you are building a house, you know, you need a hammer, a saw, a drill, a measuring tape. There's just things you would need to build a house. tape. They're just things you would need to build a house. So I want to talk a little bit today about what exactly, like what tools we have available for magic. And I want to talk about the core challenges of making a magic set, like pulling back a little bit from a big picture. So back in 1993, Richard Garfield invents the trading card game. So trading card games have some inherent weird challenges to them from a game design standpoint. So for example, if you buy Monopoly, you get all the pieces.

You get the board. You get all the cards, both property cards and community chess cards. And you get the little pieces to move around the board. You get plastic hotels. Like, you get all the component pieces you need to play the game. And if my friend John or my friend Shelly, they go and buy the game, they'll get the exact same thing. So anybody who wants to play Monopoly, who's going to start playing Monopoly,

has the same basic components to play with. But in a trading card game, that's not the case. You get a randomized number of cards, and so there's no guarantee exactly what you're going to get. So when we make a trading card game, we have to design in such a way that when you open a certain number of packs, I'll say like six, we want to make sure it's a playable experience when you open six packs. You know, we want to make sure, and that both is the limited experience and what I'll call the casual constructed experience, meaning not everybody, you know, the very enfranchised players buy lots and lots of cards, but a lot of players who play Magic, look, a new set comes out, they buy like six packs of cards and they make whatever

they can make out of what they buy. And so a lot of times when we sort of craft for limited, we are also crafting for sort of low-level casual constructing. Okay, so there are three big challenges that we need to deal with. Number one is it needs to be playable, right? You're not getting all the pieces of the game but that what we're giving you have to get enough of the pieces of the game that you're able to play the game. So even though you're not getting all of it and only some of it, we're making sure that you get enough of it then you can play the game. The second thing we have to worry about is it being balanced slash fun.

You know, we want to make sure that if I open my six packs and you open your six packs, that it's a fun experience if we play each other. I mean, obviously, if somebody opens 100 packs and one opens six packs, there's a disparity there. But if you open the same number of packs, we roughly want you to be on the same footing. I mean, limited obviously works very heavily on this premise. But on some level, if you and your friends each buy about the same number of packs, we roughly want you to be on the same footing. I mean, limited obviously works very heavily on this premise. But on some level, if you and your friends each buy about the same number of packs, we want, you know, the power level slash it to be relatively balanced between the two of you. And the third thing is, we want it to be cohesive. Look, we keep putting out magic sets,

and we want to make sure when you open a magic set that you can tell it's from, you know, that when you open it up you want to know it's streets of New Campana and not Kamigawa Neon Dynasty or Crimson Vow or Midnight Hunt or whatever. That each set has an identity and you can tell that identity from a single pack can tell that identity. So those are three different challenges that we need to meet. We need to make it playable. We need to make it balanced slash fun. And we need to make it cohesive. Okay. So let's talk about how we do that. So the first thing, so there's a bunch of ways to look at the tools. So let me walk you through the tools and then I'm going to explain how we use the tools. So first up is there are qualities to cards that allow us to differentiate the cards in different ways. So the main qualities

that matter are color, card type, mana value, and rarity. And I could also argue creative also comes in here. So creative is a tool I'll talk about today. But when you're talking about differentiating cards, those are the main factors to differentiate. Color, card type, rarity, amount of value, and creative. Those are the five things that make the cards not feel like one another. Now that, and that's important, there also are things that we use to sort of structure the set from a design standpoint. And those are themes and mechanics. And I also say, I'll put cycles here. I use cycles to mean a smaller collection of cards that are linked together in a way that have some mechanical and or creative identity that connects them.

Normally a cycle is like our horizontal cycle, one of each color. But there's vertical cycles. There's different ways to do cycles. And when I say cycles, I'm more talking of connective tissue things. There's a bunch of different ways. Cycles is the most common way to do this. I'll just call them cycles. But anyway, you have your themes, your mechanics, and your cycles. That's the way that you mechanically can structure the set. Finally,

we have some tools that have to do with how we control what you, the audience, see. And that is as fan and collation. So anyway, I'm going to talk through all these tools and talk about how we use them and why they're important. Okay, so first up, I'm going to talk about the differentiators. Okay, so first up, color. So color ties into the color pie. Color is super important because we want you to have lots of different opportunities and experiences,

right? We want you to be able to make different decks and have, you know, we don't want every card to go in every deck. We want to have differentiation of experience. We want you to be able to have, you know, one of the cool things about Magic that's, you know, not unique to Magic, but something that Magic does that not a lot of games do, is you get to be the designer on some level. We give you the component pieces, but you choose what pieces to play with. That's not true for, especially for tabletop games. Digital does this a little more.

There's a little more game customization in digital. In tabletop, there's less. I'm not saying none. You know, role-playing games let you do it. There are games that let you do it. But as far as the kind of game Magic is, it's something that Magic does more so than most other tabletop games. And a big part of the experience is we want to make sure that there are different qualities in the deck and the decks differentiate. Also, another important part of the colors is we want to make sure that there are strengths and weaknesses to what you do. That if I play a

certain deck and my opponent knows I'm playing that deck, they have the ability to have answers that they could sort of adapt their deck to deal with my deck. And that's one of the fun things about an evolving metagame is that as people learn what other people are playing, they can make changes. And the colors are a core part of that, of having both a differentiation between things and chopping up the abilities, making things different, making things work differently,

and building in strengths and weaknesses so that you can sideboard against things. Okay, next. Card type. So card type is important because it helps us have different functionality. That creatures do something different than instances of sorceries. And even instances of sorceries have timing issues about when you can play them. You know, artifacts, enchantments, planeswalkers, each one of them sort of has a functionality that's a little bit different.

Now, enchantments and artifacts are very similar in gameplay functionality, but they differ in how things interact with them. So if I'm playing against a red-black deck, hey, me having an enchantment is a little bit different than me having an artifact, although these days we do let black destroy enchantments somewhat. Not quite as easily as green and white. But card types let us control when you can play something, how you can play something,

and sort of the larger value of what it can do. Mana value lets us control when you play it. So, sorry. Instants and sources control what part of the turn you play it. So, sorry. The instance sources control what part of the turn you play it, but mana value is about what part of the game you can play it.

So one of the things that's really important is we want to have some control of when things happen. And so mana value allows us to say, oh, this is something that will happen early. This is something that will happen in the middle of the game. This is something that will happen later in This is something that will happen in the middle of the game. This is something that will happen later in the game. And mana value also, or the mana system, also lets us tie into color. So the mana system lets us interact with color.

And it allows us to sort of have a range. Like another issue, the reason the mana system is in the game, is Richard wanted to make sure that your deck had a lot of different cards and that the different cards had different values as the game progressed. Part of what you want to do for any game is you want it to expand as the game goes along. And so the mana system allows you to have things that are good early game, but not as good later game, or things that are great later game, but not as good early game. And so things have different value at different times. It makes you have to differentiate what you put in your deck.

You know, I've talked before about the queen problem, that Richard first, that's how he, when he first thought about the trading card game, like if chess was a trading card game, why wouldn't you just make your deck nothing but queens? You know, one king and everything else is queens. And the answer is you have to find ways, and color and the mana system are two of the big

ways to differentiate them. Rarity, rarity is important because it lets us gate effects. It lets us gate how often certain kinds of things can do and it lets us mostly it gates sort of impact and complexity. Meaning that there are some things that are very impactful in the game that we want to happen but we don't want to happen too often and Rarity helps us control how often that happens. So we might have certain effects that were're like, wow, this just is a blowout in limited casual-conducted games. We don't want you to have a lot of it. Okay,

we put it in Mythic Rare, it's not going to show up very often. And if it's super rare, you'd have multiple of them, for example, at the same time. And so rarity is a real important tool for us to sort of control that. Creative, when I say creative, I'm bunching together a bunch of things.

Creative means the art and art concept, the name, the flavor text, and just the overall concept of what the card is. What does the card represent? What is the card doing? You know, that is a very important part of um making cards feel different making like i talked about the cohesiveness you know one of the ways that we really identify a set the creative elements like we're going to make a lot of giant gross how do we make the giant growth in one set different from the giant growth in other sets there are some mechanical ways to do that i'll get to that

in a second but another big way to do that is flavor. Even if you have the word giant growth, the exact same spell, the exact same name, how you concept it, how you flavor it, what the art looks like, you know, what the flavor text is, all those little component pieces really can give a lot of differentiation. And so creative, and the other thing that's important for creative is if we do creative well and are careful with what we pick to represent things, I have a fact I call piggybacking. And the idea of piggybacking is I use elements the audience is familiar with from resonance from other things to understand game mechanics because, oh, because, oh, I get it. This bird flies.

Why do I know that? Because birds in real life most often fly. I associate birds with flight. And so using that flavor makes it easier to understand how it functions. And there's a lot of things like that where, oh, we want you to get the sense that it's this way. Well, we're careful in how we choose the creative so you can understand that. Okay, now we get into themes, mechanics, and cycles. So themes, well, let's do mechanics first.

Mechanics are, look, in every set, we want you to be able to function a certain way. And one of the ways we get to shape each set to differentiate the set from other sets is we use mechanics. Now, obviously there's every mechanics that we use all the time, but a lot of mechanics are like, it's just for the set, and usually the identity of the set is core to

some of the mechanics. Oh, you're playing in Zendikar, oh, they're land-based mechanics. You're in Strixhaven, they're spell- based mechanics. You're playing in Innistrad, it's a top-down. The mechanics are reinforcing the flavor of, oh, look, you can make a zombie deck, or you can care about things dying.

We let you do things that are inherent to, you know, the mechanics, when done correctly, reinforce the feel you want and the flavor we want, and then the gameplay itself is another tool to have the set feel differently than other sets. Cycles are a similar part of that in that we want to have connective tissue and want to have things like, let's say we're at a strict saving, oh, having dorms reinforces we're at a school, or having teachers, or having classes. You know, we can do things and we can use the structure of cycles and other groupings

to really reinforce and play up what that feel is. Themes is a larger thing. A lot of times with themes is the idea that we have mechanical cohesion and that we handpick themes so that they reinforce the mechanical themes and the creative themes. But, you know, it's used as a means to draw forward and make things feel like they belong together.

Okay. As-fan is short for as-fanned. It's a metric we use to talk about how often something appears. So, for example, an as-fan of one 1 means, on average, in this booster pack, you know, this set, this quality of card will show up at an As-Fan of 1, which means one card per pack. One card per pack will have this quality. As-Fan really involves using rarities and numbers as a whole

to talk about sort of how often something shows up. Finally, collation, we have to print on sheets. The way we make cards is we have sheets, the normal sheets are 10 by 10, sometimes they're 11 by 11. And the idea is we print cards on them and we cut them up. But we get to choose what cards are next to what cards on the sheet. And when we make a booster pack, we actually will have runs of cards. What that means is we're chopping up the cards. The way you make a booster pack is there are hoppers, eventually, and different hoppers can have different things in them.

For example, there's a rare hopper, there's an uncommon hopper, there's a common hopper. But even in the common hopper, you get multiple common hoppers so that you're dropping from different places. Because one of the things we want to do is we want to create this sense of true randomness. But in fact, as I'll discuss in a second, it's not truly random and you don't want it to be truly random. Okay, so those are all the main tools. Color, card type, rarity, mana value, creative,

themes, mechanics, cycles, as-fan, collation. Those are our tools. So let me now talk about, in conjunction, how do we use those tools to make this set playable, to make it balanced, and to make it cohesive. Okay, first up, let's talk about making it playable. So as-fan and collation do a lot of heavy lifting here. So let me talk about collation a little bit. So collation is, we want to make sure that certain things show up in the packs.

And then there's two ways. As fan of collation, there's two ways to do that. And when I say things show up, I don't mean the exact thing, but I mean something from that group. So let me use creatures as an example. When we make the game, we want to have threats. We want the game to end, we want to have threats. We want the game to end. We want to have answers. We want you to have ways to address those threats. But because we want the inertia for the game to end, meaning we want the idea in game design, and I had a podcast on inertia,

is you want to make sure that there's more ways to make the game end than make the game not end, because otherwise you can get in a state where the game never ends. So you want more threats than answers, so that the inertia leans toward the game ending. That is important. But you do want both threats and answers. Okay, creatures are the best threat in the game, in the sense that they're permanent, they sit on the battlefield,

and they have the potential to do damage turn after turn. The way you win the game is getting an opponent from 20 down to 0 most of the time. So that is the win condition. So, creatures are important. Okay, so how do we make sure you have enough creatures? Oh, well that's as fan of collation. So what that means is, we make sure, so

for example, we like creatures to be at 55%. And what that means is between all the cards in the set, 55% of the cards in the set, 55 to 60 depending on the set, but a minimum 55% are creatures. So for example, at Common, Common has, I think, technically 101 cards, but I'm going to say 100 to make the math easy. The 101th card is a weird thing. So there's 100 cards on the common sheet, 10 by 10, 100 cards. So the way it works is that

if we put 55 creatures at common, that means that out of the 10, so in a butcher pack, you have one land, one rare or mythic rare, three uncommons and 10 commons. Of those 10 commons, if we give you 55% creatures at common,

55 of the 100 at common, that means just at common, the Azphan's five and a half, right? That out of the 100 cards, you know, out of the 10 cards, you'll get five and a half creatures out of your 10 cards. Now, we also put creatures at uncommon and at rare so that the overall Azphfan is between 7 and 8.

It's like 7.5, I think. So that means that every booster pack you open will have, on average, between 7.5 and 8 creatures. That is the average of a booster pack. So, how can we guarantee? So let's say you open 6 packs. If you open 6 packs and you have 7. half, that means you have 15 times three, it's 45. So you're going to get about 45 creatures.

And now those are going to be spread out between colors and things. We're not saying, by the way, that if you play with just six boosters, you're optimizing. Part of the fun of limited is, hey, you're doing the best you can with what you got. And in limited, we have you play with 40 cards. In Constructed, you know, you can over time build up stuff over Constructed. But we want to make sure that the starting point

is valid. So, for example, by controlling the As fan of creatures, we guarantee when you open that you're going to roughly get enough creatures. Now, once again, when I say average, that doesn't mean every single booster pack has exactly the same number. There's give and take. There's a flow. But, and this is why collation is important, we can control in collation how often we seed in things. For example, in collation, we don't put all the creatures together

on the spells together, because when we drop, then you would have spell drops where they're all spells, or on the spells together, because when we drop, then, you would have spell drops where they're all spells, and if you end up two pools of spell drops, you might not get creatures. But if we mix creatures with spells, any time we do a drop, if we're dropping three or four or five, whatever the drop is, it's going to include some creatures, because we make sure the creatures are mixed through. because we make sure that creatures are mixed through. And at the same point, not only are we caring about... I mean, we're caring about card types, we're caring about creature,

and we're caring about not just creatures, but the other card types. We want to make a mix. We want to make sure that you're getting some instant sorcery, some enchantments, some artifacts. Planeswalkers are usually mythic rare, so occasionally you get it, but that's less of an Aspen issue,

or really a Collation issue, because there's so few of them. But anyway, so we want to make sure you're getting a nice mix of card types. We want to make sure you're getting a nice mix of colors. We want a nice mix of mana values. And Rarity is...

I mean, the Collation... Rarity is built into the Collation, so you're going to get so many of a certain Rarity. So that is by nature structurally built in. That's not even randomized. You will get so many, you know, in six packs you'll get six rare slash mythic rares because that's how the structure works.

So the idea behind all that, behind having the collation and the Azphan to take all the card components and make sure they're, you know, that's the way to make sure that you have the component pieces you need

to be able to play and it also ties into the balance to make sure, so like for example, we do what's called power balancing. So we,

and we set design, play design, I don't do this, but we, for every card, we'll go through and we'll assign in a rating, usually talking about I don't do this, but we, for every card, we'll go through and we'll assign it a rating, usually talking about

limited. So in limited, how good is this card? And they'll get a rating. And then, when we're making the sheets and we're doing the collation, not only are we mixing up colors and card types and mana values, we're also mixing up power level.

So that is another, I guess that's another tool. I didn't talk about that specifically, but we do understand what the powerful cards are. We have a rank system to know in formats how powerful we think things are. And there's flux there. Whether something ends up being as

powerful has a lot to do with outside factors. So we grade things on the percentage chance of doing well in a particular format. Now, we have much more control of limited, for example, where we know what the other things are going to be than we do in constructed where it's not that we don't know what the other things are,

but the combinatorics are a lot more difficult. Knowing what the dominant deck is in standard is much, much trickier than knowing how people play limited, because limited's a closed system. So anyway, we make sure and we use these tools. So one of the things to understand, this is an important promise on randomization to understand.

So randomization doesn't quite work the way people think from a practical... I mean, it does work the way people think from a realistic way, but as far as practice, it's a little bit different. So let me use two dice real quick to explain this principle. So let's say I have two six-sided dice. So I could roll one through six on each of the dice. So there are 36 outcomes, right? I can roll a one on the first die and have any of the six outcomes on the second die,

a two, any six, and such. So if you roll two dice, you have the ability to roll anywhere from two to twelve. Two is two ones, twelve is two sixes. Now, you only have a one out of thirty-six chance to roll a two, because you have to roll exactly two ones, and you only have a one out of six chance of rolling two sixes. Now, seven, you can roll one and a six, six and a one, two and a five, five and a two, three and a four, four and a three.

You have six out of thirty-six chances of rolling a seven, and that a 2, 3 and a 4, 4 and a 3. You have 6 out of 36 chances of rolling a 7. And that's basically 1 out of 6. But if you look at the extremes, so to roll a 3, you have to roll 1 and 2 or 2 and 1. And to roll 11, you have to roll 5 and 6, 6 and 5. But you have the same chances of rolling a 2, 3, 11, or 12 as you do of rolling a 7. Even though 7 is the expected,

like 7 is the thing you most likely expect to have happen. And once again, you're more likely to roll 7 than anything else. You're more likely to roll 6 and 8 than anything other than 7.

But you have just as equally a number of chance to roll the external stuff as you do the internal stuff. That you have just the same number of chance of rolling 2, 3, 11, and 12 as you do a 7. And so what that means is,

and this is an important part of correlation, is we want to create the experience that feels random, but you don't want to be truly random. The actual randomness would swing too high. Like if we controlled nothing and just, if we literally randomized every booster pack, let's say we had this technology I guess in digital we would in theory

where every common is just a random common. We just have something that, you know, we roll an eye for a hundred-sided eye and, oh, we rolled a 17, you get this card. If we actually did that we would not control whether it was playable or whether it was balanced.

That the swing there would be too high. And that the reason we do a lot of stuff with collation is we want to regulate the swing. It's not that you can't it's not that it's not random in the sense that who knows what rare you're going to get or who knows what commons you're going to get. But we do control

A, what commons tend to clump together. We do control sort of what qualities are distributed. So you'll make sure to get some of those qualities. And so while you can, I mean, weird things can happen. It's odd to get a butcher pack with literally no creatures in it. You can get four or five. Maybe that's the extreme, I think, of what can happen. Or you can get, you know, 11 or 12.

But we do sort of consolidate, so it falls around where it needs to be, and we use collation to do that. The other thing is, I talked about wanting to be cohesive. The biggest things about being cohesive is creative and mechanics and themes and cycles. You know, we want to use things that say, when I open this pack, how do I know it's this pack and not another pack? The creative is the absolute biggest way. You know, if I open up a pack and I see cyberpunk-y Japan, I'm like, oh, this is probably Kamigawa. And if I see, you know, 1920s mobsters, I'm like, oh, this is probably Kamigawa. And if I see, you know, 1920s

mobsters, I'm like, oh, this is probably New Capenna. But also the mechanics will vary. So, you know, certain sets have certain mechanics. So if I open up and I see Reconfigure, well, I know Reconfigure's in Kamigawa. Oh, I know this must be a set. You know, this is a Kamigawa card.

And there are also thematic themes that are run through mechanically and stuff so um and that is the stuff that we do to make sure that when you open it up it is telling you what it is and we use those components so the reason that today i'm trying to explain to you is i talk in passing a lot about the color pie or the mana system or asfan or collation. Like, I'll talk of these in passing. But when we build the sets, from our end, when we have to make magic,

there's a lot more structure. Like, I've talked a lot about how when you make a magic set, you need a design skeleton, right? Because there are exact things and exact mixes that you relatively need. That a magic set's going to need certain effects. You know, that from set to set,

you know, we might do giant growth differently, but there's a giant growth at common. There's a way, you know, usually at instant speed, every once in a while at sorcery speed, but there is a way to boost creatures and make them bigger in combat that is core to part of the green experience.

That if you're playing someone playing green and they have open mana, and they attack with a creature that's smaller than your creature, you know, there is a, okay, this exists, this is a tool that's there. And so, there's a lot of the structuring that goes into it, and

one of the things that if you're a new designer, like, understanding what goes where in the color, understanding the color pie, super important. Understanding the mana system, and what goes where color, understanding the color pie, super important. Understanding the mana system and what goes where and how much things cost, super important. Understanding card types. What do each card types do?

What do the card types not do? You know, how do you make something and where do you put it and what kind of effects are instants or sorcery? Rarity, there's a lot of rules for sort of what goes at what rarity. What makes it common? What makes it uncommon? What makes it rare or mythic rare?

What blurs the line? What could be either common or uncommon? What could be either rare or mythic rare? And why, you know, not just a matter of what goes there, but why does it go there? A lot of these, the systems, it's more than just knowing that this color doesn't do that. It's understanding why

the color doesn't do that. And then understanding why the color doesn't do that. And then as you keep going, like, when we build our sets, you know, as-then is something we're constantly looking at. We have to think about the qualities we want in the set. What do we care about? What is its as-then? We have to, I mean, collation happens later in the process, but we do have to care about, okay, now that we've figured out what our themes and our mechanics and all this stuff are,

how do we divvy that up? What do we care about? What, now that we've figured out what our themes and our mechanics and all this stuff are, how do we divvy that up? What do we care about? What are we making sure is spread across booster packs so that every booster pack has that experience? Another common tool that I did not talk about is nowadays we also will make slots for specific things. That's something we've been doing for a while. If you open Dominaria, there's a legend in every pack. If you open up Innistrad, there's a double-faced card in every pack. We've been doing more of

sort of like, you know this thing exists. Your strict saving has from the bonus sheet, has the mystical archive. So, one of the things we've also been playing around with, another tool, is shaping what is the booster pack and what comes in it, that that is a tool itself that we can shape and that we can sort of control.

We have our defaults, but some sets will say, okay, in this set, in place of a common or in place of an uncommon, we're doing this thing. And that thing will definitely, having an ass fan of one, meaning have a slot in the booster dedicated to that, is very powerful, not just in controlling what gets played, but in communicating a message. That, you know, if you want to know that Strixhaven is the spell set,

well, having the Mystic Archive in every booster pack and that I get to see this especially cool-looking spell that really draws your focus, reinforces, oh, that there's a spell theme that's here. And, you know, sort of the point of today's talk is to explain that, like, all these tools work in conjunction. You know, I can't talk about color without talking about mana value. I can't talk with Aspham without talking about collation.

I can't talk about themes without talking mechanics. That all these component pieces are woven together and that for the people that make the game, there is a lot of sort of craftsmanship behind all these tools. That these tools require a lot of knowledge to use correctly. And

so anyway, like I said, it's I think obviously you guys were aware of these things all exist that are, you know, like everything I today, all these tools existed in alpha. But all these tools have been refined over time. Yeah, the five colors existed in alpha. But we've done a lot of working on figuring out how the color pie works and tightening it up. Same with mana values.

A lot of early magic. We've learned a lot in how to sort of make mana deals a little bit tighter. You know, anyway, I could go through all the tools. But all the tools, we've learned and we keep making things more efficient. And we keep adding things, like the idea of adapting what a booster pack is.

Another tool that I didn't talk about, for example, that we experimented with is like the frame. We've been doing more stuff with the frame. I had a whole podcast on talking about how we use the frame. But these are structurally things that we use that, you know, just like a carpenter has his trusty hammer or his drill or his saw or whatever, whatever tool he's making use of. These are the things that we, the magic designers, use every day to make sure that you all get a playable, a balanced, a cohesive, and a fun set. Anyway, guys, that is my chat today.

I'm now at work, so we all know what that means. This is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. Hope you enjoyed today's talk. See you next time.