Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #970: Joel Mick

Episode Date: September 23, 2022

Only one person has been an Alpha playtester, Head Designer and Brand Manager for Magic Joel Mick. I sit down with Joel in this podcast to talk about his time with the game.

I'm not pulling out of the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work at home edition. Okay, so today I have a guest from way back in early magic, Joel Mick. Hey, Joel. Hey, Mark. Okay, so Joel, I think you have, you are the only person I believe that did the following three things, which was you were an original playtester, you were head designer, and you were brand manager of Magic. I don't think anybody else has done those three things. I mean, together, individually, obviously. That's probably true.

But, you know, everybody in the world has some unique combination of things that they've done. It happens to be mine. Okay, so we'll start from the very beginning. What is your first memory? How did you first get involved with magic? I was playing bridge at the University of Pennsylvania Bridge Club while I was in law school. And Richard played bridge at the Bridge Club as well,

and so did Barry Wright, who you interviewed a few weeks back. And I started playing bridge there. And Barry was my bridge partner. And Richard was enlisting people to playtest. And the bridge club players made good playtesters. And so I got roped in. Okay, so give me your first impressions. When you first saw Magic, what were you thinking?

What was your very first sort of impression of it? how to optimize your deck and which cards your opponent had in their deck that were good and you'd wonder what other cards existed and as you learned more and more about what cards did exist and start thinking about cards you might trade for to make your deck better it was clear that the game had incredible depth and and just really hooked, hooked people. So do you, in a way that bridge bridge can do that also, but I mean, magic really do that. So what is your earliest memory? Do you remember the first deck you made or what do you remember?

Like what was your early strategies? You remember? Wow. I don't know that I remember early strategy. I know in the beginning, the idea, there were a lot of cards that were at common that were really, really good, like Ancestral Memory, which became Ancestral Recall, and Time Walk, and Starburst, which was one and a red. one and a red uh also take an extra turn uh actually literally your opponent loses their next turn um and so clearly if you've got enough of those kind of cards in your deck uh your deck would be really really good but it wasn't apparent to everybody in the beginning which cards were that powerful and so the idea was kind of try to figure out before other people which cards are really good try to trade people for those cards or win them from them in ante to make your deck better so I just really understand so give me a sense of original play testing so what would if you were going to play test

what would a typical sessions be like well in the very beginning richard handed out i think it was like 60 card decks and you would play your choice of 40 out of the 60 cards so it was very similar to uh first edition starter decks which if anybody has ever opened and tried to build a deck from first edition starter decks or for matter, from the starter deck product that existed for several years when Magic was first published, you realize, wow, there's five different colors of cards in here, roughly equally distributed, and there's five different land types. And you realize, wow, I don't, like, I'm not going to have a well-oiled machine

basically right uh and so basically everybody built a minimum 40 cards everybody built three color decks because that's basically all the land you had was to you know support at least you're gonna be playing at least three different colors of amount of production of land um so yeah it was the power level was low and for that reason it wasn't actually that easy to figure out which cards were super good because in the context of a 40 card deck one ancestral memory and the rest of your blue cards aren't that great and sometimes you don't have blue mana when you draw it just like it's not that great so uh at what point did he allow trading because i know at some point you could start trading with other people and that starts solving that problem right yeah so well the

initial the initial um idea was you would just play for ante and that would create uh cards flowing around dynamically which would keep the game interesting for people because they would be able to keep changing their decks a little bit at a time as they played. And some people thought that was fun, and some people just absolutely hated it because, as you can imagine, if you lose what you consider to be your best card in ante, or even, you know, you have a lot of good blue cards and you have five islands in your 40 card deck and you lose one of your islands. It's horrible. Like it decimates your deck.

And so that wasn't very much fun for people. So yes, Richard added in trading as a way to allow people to kind of make up for if you lost a card and the person who won it didn't really care about the card. Okay, so do you have a favorite story from playtesting? Well, what used to happen was that there were obviously the common, uncommon, and rare cards the same way that there were in first edition. But if everybody only had one starter deck, you can imagine like first edition starter decks, they have two rares out of 115 or something. So most people didn't see most rares. They didn't even see most of the uncommons, probably. And so rumors would start to go around about, oh my God, did you see such and such person, the card that they have? So an example, a good example is Chaos Orb, which was called Sphere of Annihilation.

And so as soon as there was a rumor that there was this card that somebody could flip onto your playing area and it would destroy all the cards that it landed on, then people would start spreading their cards out all over the table because they were worried that the person that they were playing against had a chaos orb. So I guess that's kind of my earliest memory of a story. And I know you're a fan of chaos orb, right? Well, it's interesting. So yeah, there were some playtesters who enjoyed the, uh, the physical aspect of it and the randomness and the sort of lightheartedness of chaos work. Um, and there were others who felt that the game should be just purely mentally a strategic game. And, you know, I honestly can't remember. I,

I think I'm probably in the camp of it should just be purely a strategic game, but it's a little hard to separate because our first fix for Chaos Orb slash Sphere of Annihilation was basically to turn it into a Vindicate. And a Vindicate that you needed to flip, right? So basically the way it's played in old school today, right? You target a card, you flip it, it either lands on that card or not, and if it does, you remove, you destroy that card.

And so that worked a little bit better because it didn't cause the play area to get all spread out everywhere for very little reason. Okay, so you guys are playtesting. So Richard recognizes that at some point, I don't think anybody realized how fast, but at some point, Magic would need more content in theory.

So he had the different teams work on sets. So the team that you worked on was a set called Menagerie, which the audience would know better as Mirage and Visions. So talk a little bit, how did Menagerie start? How did you guys decide that's what you were going to make?

Well, so there were a couple things going on. One was continuing to playtest cards with different casting costs or various playtesters

would come up with cards that they would like to see and you know richard everyone has their own opinions richard has his opinions he had the cards he designed um and and so the group that includes bill rose and myself and charlie catino um basically started developing our own expansion uh which was a version of the base set with various things costed differently and with other cards added in. So it's... Yeah, I don't know.

That's how it started. Yeah, the thing I should explain to the audience just so they understand, early on, the idea of expansions wasn't that it was sort of additive. It was kind of like like here's the new version of Magic right that was the original idea it's like okay we have

the magazine for August and then now it's September August magazine isn't sold anymore because everybody's already read it here comes September's magazine everybody buys September magazine okay so the next I'm going chronologically here. So the next thing is magic comes out.

So I'm sort of curious from your perspective, sort of the phenomenon that magic became. What was that like experiencing it? As someone who knew magic before it came out, what was that experience like? Well, my experience was different from the experience of somebody like Peter Atkinson, who was meeting with all distributors and going to conventions and setting up booths and doing a retailer tour with the product. law school passed the bar exam working as a tax attorney and so i went a couple times to game stores to do some demos uh with some people when there were some demos set up in the philadelphia area um but you know this is back before the internet is you know is huge even before um uh the use group usenet groups or whatever were huge so i didn't really know i mean yeah i was to me my time was just spent sort of designing and

and play testing the cards in for menagerie which became mirage but what was the first time you kind of realized like this is going to be like, this is going to be big? Like, this is going to be, like, I don't think anybody could have assumed the scope that it became, because it's kind of hard to imagine something of that ilk. But when did you realize kind of it was going to be a hit? Well, Richard very generously gave all of the playtesters shares of stock in Garfield Games, which was the name of the company that he created that owned Magic.

And so eventually, as shareholders, we got shareholder reports and you would get these reports and it would show like quarter one revenue, a million dollars, quarter two revenue, two and a half million dollars. Quarter three revenue, five million dollars. Quarter four revenue, ten million dollars. Well, you don't know where the exponential growth there is going to end. But looking at something like that, I think it's pretty clear that it was a huge hit. Okay, so you're a tax lawyer and then you become an employer wizard. So how did you go from that job to working at Wizards?

How did that happen? Well, I came out to the Seattle area to visit Richard and his wife at the time, Lily. And I guess Richard must have, in the back of his mind, been thinking that he needs somebody to come in and lead the design of magic going forward so that he can remove himself more completely and just focus on designing new games,

which was much more of an interest of his than just continuing to create quote unquote derivative uh products although just how derivative uh everything in magic is today or not uh i guess i won't go into um since i think that it's it's well i guess i will go into it'll say, I think it's amazing that after so many years, the product can come out with new cards and new ideas that people are still excited about. Because I do remember Peter and other people saying, after a couple of years, wow, how are you going to keep coming up

with new things to keep magic fresh and not just have to circle back to reprinting things. So yeah, Richard was looking for somebody. Richard sort of interviewed me without me realizing so much that I was being interviewed and just kind of planted the idea of, hey, you know, is this something that you might want to do? So what was it like? So, I mean, I guess Richard Technic was the first head designer. You were the second head designer.

What was it like sort of being head? I mean, I'm the fourth head designer. So it goes Richard, then you, then Bill, then me. This is the order. So what was it like in the early days? Like what was the head designer being like back in, you know, 94, 95? Well, it's interesting because I can't speak to exactly what your responsibilities are, but when I came on, all the designs of Future Magic products were being done freelance by these independent groups under royalty contracts and there was no control over the quality of these designs. And it's

not a good way to run a company to have that little control over what you're planning on publishing. And so, you know, initially my focus was not so much on designing cards myself, but really on recruiting people who I felt like would be good designers and would, with me, be able to develop a philosophy for what makes good magic cards, what mix of cards makes for a good magic product. Okay, so that seems like a good segue. So, um, do you remember, uh, your interview with me when you interviewed me for a job? I do. You were such a cute guy. I couldn't resist. So, so here's this. Honestly, I do not remember that much, Mark.

Okay. So let me, I just want to tell the audience, this is a funny story. So I tell Mike Davis that I'm willing to work at Wizards. And Mike Davis is like, okay, when can you start, basically? So nobody, only one person, you were the only person to do an official interview with me.

Everybody else was like, I know Mark, he's fine. So the interview you and I had is you made me play a game with you. And so the deck I played, I played this deck that the whole point of the deck was I beat you in a weird way that you don't know how I'm beating you. It was a very, like, I'm slowly strangling you, but it was a very bizarre deck. And I managed to beat you in the game. And you're a very good magic player.

I mean, I was, I didn't know whether I was going to win or not. And I managed to beat you. And you were very impressed with my deck because it was just weird. It was like, you didn't know what it was doing. It was one of those decks that kind of, like, it beats you, but you didn't understand how it beats you, and you were impressed with my deck, and so people ask me how my interview with

Joel went, and I go, I beat him, and they go, that's good. That's what Bill's response when they said that I beat you. Bill goes, oh yeah, that's good. That was a good interview. Well, now I understand why I don't remember the interview. Because I purposely try to block out anything where I lose. I see. I see.

But yeah, you were my only interview for Wizards. No one else interviewed me. You were my one interview. So, okay. So next up, Mirage comes up. Because I'm sure if you talk to other people, like Joel Rose, he will tell you, he sat in interviews that had 15 people, representatives from every single department at the company, and did nothing for an hour. The secret of my success is I freelanced for like 15 sections of the company,

so everybody knew me because I had done the job for them. I think that was the secret. Okay, next up. So one of the first sets I for them. I think that was the secret. Okay, next up. One of the first sets I worked on when I got there was Mirage. Let's talk a little bit about your set finally comes out. What is that like to see Mirage actually get to the public?

This is going to be an anticlimactic answer. Okay. I left Philadelphia and moved to Seattle in late 1994 to work as lead designer for Magic. And the other five people who were designers of Mirage were in Philadelphia. So at that point, I basically stopped working on it. And Bill Rose continued to lead the designing and the play testing of it in Philadelphia.

So by the time it came in and it went through R&D for development, which, again, I mean, I've looked at the card at the file with all the cards in it. some comments, but I didn't feel attached to it in the way that I might have if it was something where I had just been sitting down and, you know, sort of working straight through designing and developing it and then seeing it published. So do you have a favorite card in Mirage that you did? Well, I like Lion's Eye Diamond because we figured out how to fix Black Lotus. We made this horrible card that looked like it would be, like, as good as a Black Lotus. But then it was horrible. And it wasn't. So here's my, I'll own up to my contribution to this problem.

So when Lion's Eye Diamond came in in development, originally it tapped for colorless. And in development, I'm like, well, if it's it's gonna be a bad Lotus it should be a bad Lotus and so I changed it so it made color rather than colorless. Now maybe it's still broken with colorless but I feel like I contributed a little bit to it being broken by adding color to it so my contribution to Lion's Eye Diamond. Okay so next up you leave being head designer to become brand manager of Magic. So how did that happen? Well, it happened because the person who was brand manager of Magic,

when Wizards acquired the license to Pokemon, they moved this person who had a business degree, an MBA, over to manage the Pokemon license and the publishing of Pokemon and so forth. And they needed somebody to take on that role for Magic. And I guess I had done something sufficiently well as they desire, you know, and seem to know enough and have enough of a vision for what magic should be, that they selected me to do that. And also that there was a good replacement for me that I felt comfortable with.

And I believe most of the people in R&D working on magic felt comfortable with, which was Bill Rose. Okay, so there's a bunch of things you introduced. I mean, I'm sure I don't remember them all, but I remember a few of them. So I just want to talk through a few of the things that basically I introduced when you were brand manager. You and your team introduced this. First up was rarity symbols. You also introduced collector numbers,

and you introduced premium slash foil cards. Those are all things that you guys introduced. So where did that come from? What was the idea to do these things? Well, I think it's a very natural thing to think about doing that with a collectible card product. There was a lot of hesitancy and there was a lot of internal debate and a lot of people who thought that those were terrible ideas. And I think what happened was there was just underlying fear that taking steps to make the product more appealing to collectors would in some sense be taking away from or moving the product in the direction of a collectible at the expense of being a game. And my feeling was that even players are collectors.

It's a collectible card game, right? Like, even if you don't want to collect full sets, whatever, even if you're not really into collecting in the sense that somebody who collects baseball cards is into collecting, since that's about all you can do with baseball cards is collect them. If you were purely a player,

you still needed to collect cards to have cards to play with. So... Yeah, so let me explain something the audience, once again, might not be aware of, is Richard's original vision in the very beginning of the product was wizards was going to give no information.

You, you, you would have no idea what, what the cards were, what rarity they were like, you know, um, I know for example,

we didn't print deck lists or in the early days, you know, that Richard really had this idea that like you learned about magic by going out in the wild and, and like kind of experience you were talking about earlier in the playtesting, where you didn't know a card existed until someone played the card against you. And I think Richard really had this idea that there's this mystery of what all was in the set. Yes. Yes, that's definitely true.

And I think that was what kept the product early on. If you number the product well then you like oh what what is number 63 like it has to be alphabetically in between this like you start learning about the product if you label it i think that's why early on they didn't label it because i think it went against richard's original idea like no one knew what it was well that that was definitely part of it but you know there there was also these experiences with sports cards. You know, they would get bigger and bigger and bigger dollar volumes would go way down and prices would go way down. And so there definitely was like a business case reason for apprehension about moving magic in the direction of being collectible, which, again, I don't feel like these things moved it in the direction of being collectible. I feel like these things made it in the direction of being collectible. I feel like these things made it a better collectible.

It's sort of like saying, oh, we're going to improve the quality of the art on the cards, right? Or we're going to improve the quality of the printing process, right? So the fonts are easier to read and cards will crisper and better. Well, that's not making it a worse game. Like it's making the overall experience for the user better, but it's not really making like the game itself, the game mechanics any better, right?

So I guess that would be sort of my analogy, but people were very, very afraid of what happened in other industries that were purely collectibles yeah i mean one thing i mean this has been true for my time at wizards is usually when you try something new that you haven't done before when you're really pushing in brand new space in some way that there's apprehension because hey it's working everything's going great why why do we need to make changes? And I think ironically, one of magic's strengths

has been its willingness to constantly make changes and adapt. I always say that the biggest risk to magic is not taking risks, is not pushing and trying new things. Which is why you're in the position that you're in. That's why I'm here. It's true.

So do you have any other, like, sort of your time as brand manager? Any other sort of stories or thoughts of, like, what do you think of when you think of that time? I know that's a couple years. Yes, well, I'll own up to it. The reserve list. Excellent decision. I stand behind it. Okay.

That's a bold statement. Yeah, it's a bold statement. Yeah, it's funny. So, like, when did you leave Wizards? What year did you leave Wizards? 2000. 2000. So, for the audience, it's like 2000, like around Invasion.

I think it's when Invasion came out was 2000. So, and one of the things that I always enjoyed when you were the the brand manager was you always had a great grasp on sort of like there's a balance like magic is a game but it's a business and you know this how do you make sure it stays an awesome game but still it's a good business and it's you know makes sense and um you know behind makes sense. And, you know, behind the scenes. It's not going to be good business in order to continue to be a good game, right? There's, I mean, the value of having hundreds of people in R&D right now

compared to when I worked in R&D, we had, I don't know, I was able to staff up to like six people total. Yeah. I mean, there's just so much more that you can do to create better experiences for more people. And that's purely a result of the business being a good business, enabling that to happen. Yes. Yeah, I've made this point many times to people, which is, hey, the healthier Magic is as a business, the better it is for the game.

Because we just have more resources and we can do more things. And there's things we're doing now that we couldn't. Right. When I started, there was four of us at the time that were full-time. You were the head designer, and there were four of us, me and Bill and William Jockish and Mike Elliott. And, like, we were every development team. Every time there was development, we were the development team. And there were other people around, like, Scaf and Jim and stuff that would, like, occasionally do stuff, but, um, there were a lot of other

products and stuff going on, so, like, there were only four of us and you that were, like, magic's what we did, you know, we were doing magic most, and even, even us, we were doing other things from time to time, although majority of our job was magic. Um, okay, so, almost, I'm almost at my desk here, so we're not too far from, being to work. So I know you have a fascination for sort of old cards that, you know, one of the you shared with me, for example, you have some

old Chaos Orbs in your collection of just things. In fact, it's very impressive. You have, you owned the Chaos Orb that Zach Dolan played in his winning 1994 World Championship deck. And it was chewed by his dog? What was the story? Yes. So years after he played the deck, he sold all of his magic cards.

But in the interim, his dog had gotten to the cards and chewed the corner off of the Chaos Orb. the cards and chewed the corner off of the uh the chaos sword and so he didn't bother to sell it because nobody can do anything with a chaos orb that's not structurally it doesn't have structural integrity anymore um so he just kept it and i guess at some point somebody found out about it and thought that it would be a cool piece of memorabilia and so they got it from him and it's gone through a couple different hands until I just got it myself. Yeah, so I know that you have a fascination for sort of just old magic cards. I mean, it's...

As someone who obviously has been playing magic longer than almost anyone on the planet, it is fun looking back, and I have a fondness. I remember... I mean, I started playing Alpha, so not quite as early as you, but I have a fondness for a lot of the early days and early cards it's always fun to look back and see them uh yeah absolutely so um most people they're they have a very strong

nostalgia for the first set of magic that they played when they came in no matter whether that set was you know five years ago or 25 years ago. So for me, it's Gamma playtest cards because that's when I came in. So, you know, I've saved my Gamma playtest cards over the years and traded and bought additional ones. So I have a collection of Gamma playtest cards as well as a couple subsequent playtest card series. gamma playtest cards as well as a couple subsequent playtest card series.

And also I started collecting the beta artist proofs and sending them to artists to paint versions of the image on the back. So those are sort of my current sort of niche collectible. Yeah, that's cool. That's pretty cool. And we do have a website, actually. Go ahead. What is it? AncestralMTG.com, where you can see some of the cool stuff that I collect.

Are there gammas? If people want to go see old playtest cards, can they see old playtest cards on there? Yes, they can see old playtest cards. Yeah, so by the way, I did a podcast, guys, a little while ago on playtest cards, and the original pregame playtest cards. Yeah, so by the way, I did a podcast guys a little while ago on playtest cards, and the original, like the pre-game playtest cards

are really cute. They're like an inch and a half by two and a half inches, I think, and they, there was Xerox, Richard Xerox stuff, and like all the images on them are like he cut out pictures from things and, you know, they're very charming. Yeah, they really are.

And they kind of prove that at its base, as much as all these other things add to magic, it's the game design is, you know, really all it needs is the game design. So I'm at my desk. So any final thoughts, Joel? Any last thoughts on your time with Magic? has been over the years and to feel like I left it in good hands.

I mean, I feel like you talked about a few of the things I did while I was at Wizards, but really I think the most important thing that I did was finding and promoting people who would be good stewards of magic over the years. And so I'm very happy about that. And so I'm very happy about that. I actually just found out recently that currently the three longest tenured employees still at Wizards are Charlie Coutinho, Bill Rose, and you. That is true. That is true. I've hired all three of you. Well, good work.

Good work, Joe. So anyway, guys. So, Joe, I want to thank you very much for being with us. This was great talking with you. Thank you for inviting me. And for everybody else, I'm at my desk, so we 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 all next time. Bye-bye.