Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #974: Unfinity Design, Part 2

Episode Date: October 7, 2022

This podcast is part two of a four-part series on the design of Unfinity.

I'm pulling out of the parking lot. We all know what that means, or we might not. But I dropped off Adam in college today, and I'm on my way to work. So this is the beginning of Drive to Work. So last time, I started talking about the design of Unfinity, and I did not finish. I went unfinished. So I will continue talking about that. So last we talked about, we were talking about stickers, and I said we experimented with a lot of different ways to use stickers, and in the end we realized there were four ways that

seemed the most useful, which was names, art, ability, and power toughness. Now, meanwhile, so one of the things about this is there are different aspects of the set going on at once, obviously. Stickers were something that we were interested in very early on, that we explored very early on. So stickers started quite early. But something else that also started not quite as early as stickers, but I think it came out of exploratory, and then we started working with it in vision design was attractions. So the reason I'm going to talk about both of these is they intertwine at a point. So the story between them connects. So I thought about just telling the sticker story and then

just telling the attraction story. But one of the neat things about design is how things don't live in a vacuum and things can affect each other. So I want to talk a little bit about attractions and then get to the point where stickers and attractions kind of overlap. Because there's an interesting point where they feed each other. Okay, so what happened with attractions was we figured out very early on that if we wanted to be doing top-down, we wanted to do a top-down amusement park, in order to do that, you know, amusement park slash carnival slash circus, there was, basically what we realized was there were three kind of things that you saw in an amusement park slash carnival. One are the rides, you go on rides. The second are the games.

You get to play games. And the third are the stands. You buy food or you buy stuffed animals or whatever. You get stuff at the fair slash amusement park. And so we wanted to represent that. And the original idea for the attractions was that everybody playing the game was building a singular park, was the original idea. And so if I open up the Ferris wheel, I'm not just opening up the Ferris wheel for me, I'm over the fairest wheel for everybody. And so we liked the idea that when I open up something, that on some level we're building the park as we play. That was the

original idea for attractions. And at first we played around with the idea that just you put your attractions in your deck and you cast them. But what we found was that it worked a little bit better. As I talked about last podcast, we want high variance. And so one of the things that was a little cooler for us was, instead of

you always knowing what you're getting, that there's some randomization to what you're opening. That it's not a known thing. And that got us down the is not a known thing. And that got us down the path of a second deck. So let's talk a little bit about second decks.

Second decks is something we've talked about a lot in design. There's something really cool about having this additional randomized resource. Now, it isn't something that we've chosen to do yet in traditional Magic, but Unstable did play in that space.

So contraptions, we had wanted to do something where you were building contraptions. Obviously, there had been a card in Future Sight, Steamflug or Boss, that hinted at assembling contraptions as a thing. And so I had tried to do it in normal magic. I just couldn't find anything that felt right that sort of captured the

flavor I wanted. And so I decided that it made more sense in an unset, and we were doing a set that made a lot of sense flavorfully in. And it seemed like the perfect opportunity for a second deck because it wanted when you were building your contraption, we wanted the contraption

to be different every time. We didn't want it to be the same. And so having a randomized element into it felt like it would add a lot to it. So we made contraptions. We did it. They were very popular. People really liked them. And it really sort of cemented the idea that a second deck is something players could enjoy. It's a fun resource. But one of the things I realized about making a second deck and using it, it's a lot the way I felt about double-faced cards, which is it is more a tool than a mechanic in the sense that there's

a lot of cool things you can do with double-faced cards. For example, you can make werewolves that flip back and forth. You can make meld cards that turn into giant creatures. You can make cards where you, like MDFCs, where you make choices about what you want to play. Do you want it to be a land or a spell? That there's a lot of, the double-faced card itself is a tool that allows you to make transforming double-faced cards, modal double-faced cards, melding cards. You know, it's a tool that lets you make different mechanics with it. But in itself, it's not a mechanic as much as it's a tool.

And so what I realized was that the second deck is a lot like that. The second deck, all it really is, is it says, hey, I'm a randomized source to allow you to get something in a way that you can't predict. When you do something like lesson learned or even something where you're getting something external, normally you give the player the ability to choose what they're getting. So it ends up being much more flexible and in some ways more repetitive because, hey, if my deck needs thing X, it normally gets thing X. So a lot of times when you're playing something, you're always getting Thing X. The idea behind

a second deck mechanic is you're not always getting the same thing. You have to deal with different things. And that one of the things that I really liked was when you were sort of opening the park, that you didn't know what you get. And so we very early on adopted the idea of using the second deck.

We did talk through avenues of how you could, you know, I could just put the Ferris wheel in my deck and cast the Ferris wheel. But the other thing we found was by making a second deck, we then got to make cards in the main deck that represented things, for example, people that worked at the carnival. We got employees at the carnival. I think there's some performers as well. But mostly, one of the things we did

real quickly is we realized that we wanted to have, we wanted to introduce some new keywords. And so we introduced a couple main keywords. One is there are employees. These are people that work at the Astratorium. There are performers. These are people that work, but they perform. So they're not, they don't just work there. They're performers there. So we got, that performer's got their own type. We also made robots, and the robots work at the park. All the clowns happen to be robots, but the robots are not all clowns. There are robots that aren't clowns. And the idea when we made the robots was they are singular in function, meaning the robot is built to do one thing. And whatever that one thing is, they do that thing. They are all in.

And we felt there was a lot of comedy there of just robots that are very dedicated to the one thing that they do. And we had a lot of fun, for example, with the clowns, that each clown robot didn't do all the things clown did. They did one thing clown did, but really well. So if they throw pies, they can throw pies. If they're a mime, that's what they do. They're a mime.

There's lots of fun things of clowns to do. All sorts of different clown functions, as well as other robots. We also decided, and this actually came late in the process, to have guests. And the main reason for that is we wanted a lot of guests on cards and for a long time, if you were guests, you were just,, you're a human or you're, you know, whatever you were.

We have a lot of different guests, though. So we decided that we wanted, I wanted to represent the guests. So we ended up making a guest creature type. There also is an alien creature type because there are a bunch of aliens in the set. And we want to introduce that. And both alien and robot were kind of hitting the science fiction element. We wanted some science fiction words showing up there.

There are a few other introductions. I think we had the first porcupine. But there are those are the main functions in the park. For the attractions, mostly the employees are who

open up the park. I think the way we did it is the performers give you stickers and the employees give you access to the attractions and give you tickets. Anyway, sorry, I'm deviating. Okay, so the early version of the attractions was you're making a park, so when someone opens an attraction, you didn't know what it was, but it would be off your deck. And early on, we decided, originally they were their own car type, they were attractions, they weren't another car type, and then there were three subtypes of attraction, which was ride,

game, and stand. So early on, we wanted to give each of those a clean definition. So let's talk about games first. And this is the one that carries over to the final product the most. The idea with games is in the past Unsets, we have done mini games. And mostly what a mini game is, is stop your normal game of magic, play a game, but a short game, not a very long game, something that's usually, you know, 30 seconds to a minute, something pretty short.

And the idea was that if you won the game, you could get a prize. Now, early games, in the very early version, involved everybody. So when somebody went to a game, everybody played the game. Everybody who was in the game. All the players played the game. And the idea was oh, the original idea for attractions was we're making

a park, everybody's there, everybody's involved and that if I open up the Ferris wheel, anybody can go to the Ferris wheel. If I open up you know Dart Throw, anybody can go to the Ferris wheel. If I open up, you know, a dart throw, anybody can go to the dart throw. So, okay, the first problem that started opening up with attractions was, okay, so I'm spending resources. So if I have a creature that opens up an attraction, some portion of the cost of that creature is opening the attraction, right? So I have spent some resource.

I open this attraction. And then what tended to happen was we tied mana to the attractions so that it costs something to go to the attraction. It wasn't free. So you're going to get something out of it. So, for example, let's say we make a concession stand. Well, that will get you food. Or we go to the information booth.

That'll get you a card. Or maybe we go to a fortune teller. That will scribe and show you the future. You know, we would find things that were sort of cool. And so the original idea was that you would pay mana to get the effect. So you weren't getting the effect for free. would pay mana to get the effect. So you weren't getting the effect for free.

But the problem is, if I opened up something and I made an attraction, I spent my resources. Usually, because I spent my resources to open the attraction, I didn't have the resources to go to the attraction. So the way the gameplay would work is,

I'd open up the Ferris wheel or the dart throw or the concession stand. And then my opponent or opponents, if I'm playing multiplayer, usually had first dibs at it. So I spend the resources, I open up something, and then my opponent goes, oh yeah, sure, I'll go visit that. And they tended to get to use it first. So it was sort of a feel bad right so the thing we then tried is that okay is there some

way by which you the owner of the attraction got to use it first so the first thing we tried was just letting you go first that when you open an attraction you got a free use of the attraction and so okay

so if I'm going to open up the concession stand, I just get food right away. I don't have to pay for it. I just get a free use of the thing that I opened. And we're like, okay, well, that way you get a free one and everybody else who wants to use it, they have to pay for it. So you're up, you know, you got a reward for your thing. But what we found from that was it's still, that wasn't quite enough. So we then tried this version of tickets. And the idea of tickets was that when you opened up your park, you got tickets. And your tickets, you got enough. I'm sorry, I'm messing this up. I think the way we let you go for free

when we first made it, the way we let you go for free was that when you opened up your attraction, you got tickets. And tickets, you need so many tickets to go visit the attraction, whether it was a ride or a game or a stand. And so the idea was you had to pay tickets to do that. But you, the person who opened it, got tickets equal to one visit. And the idea was that tickets were something you could acquire,

and I think there was a cost. Any attraction could sell you tickets, basically. I don't remember the value of tickets. Maybe it cost two for every one ticket or something. Any attraction, you could buy tickets. So essentially, let's say, for example, it costs three tickets to go on something, and tickets cost two mana. Well, I can just pay six mana and go on it.

Or if I had some tickets, maybe I turn in two tickets and pay two mana. You know, I could offset whatever tickets I didn't have. And so the idea originally with tickets was, okay, in order to visit the attraction, you have to have so many tickets. You can spend mana to get those tickets, so for all intents and purposes you can spend mana. Or, because

tickets were a resource, we got things that give you tickets. Or maybe you earn tickets. Or maybe it's a side effect of other things. Anyway, so we did the version where you got a free use and then your opponent had to pay for it. And that still didn't feel good. The playtesters were still like,

why am I putting out... Like, for example, you would have a game where you put out a resource. Let's say you put out the information booth that draws your cards. And then, you got tight on man or something, and your opponent drew more land. And all of a

sudden, they're using your information booth to get ahead and draw cards, and they beat you because of the information booth that you played, and that felt not great. So, the next thing we tried is, like, okay, well, what if, whenever somebody uses an attraction, it gives tickets to the owner of the attraction? So, my opponent goes to the information booth, if it's my information booth, well, yeah, they're using it, they're drawing cards, but they're giving me tickets

to allow me to draw free cards, the idea. So while they're spending mana to draw cards, it's letting me get free cards. So we tried that version for a while. Okay, so now let's pick up our story, because this is where stickers and tickets,

or I'm sorry, stickers and attractions overlap. Oh, wait, wait, before I get there, sorry, I'm jumping around. Let me talk real quickly about the different kinds of attractions. I started talking about games, and then I deviated, sorry. So we decided there were three types of attractions. Games would mean that you play a game, and if you win the game, you get a prize. The earlier version of this was everybody played the game, and the winner of the game got a prize. So this only exacerbated the problem, right? I pay Manny to get a dart throw. I do the dart throw,

and my opponent would win the dart throw. And then, like, I paid for the thing, I paid to go to it, and somehow they got a prize. It just didn't feel good. We then explored a little bit about only the person that entered could win the prize and that the other people were just trying to stop them from winning the prize, but they couldn't win the prize. So we did try that.

Stands very early on were resources, right? So the idea of much like the concession stand or the information booth, we had a gift shop. Like you could go and you could purchase something, right?

A stand was like we're selling something and usually it was like, well, pay some mana and get, usually it was something tangible. We were loose at what tangible meant. You could get a card. You could get life. You could get a token. But usually you were getting some resource was the idea if you went to a stand. Then the rides, I think the way the rides worked originally was you would, I think

originally you picked a creature, like a creature went on the ride. I would go on a ride, I would pick a creature that went on the ride, and then it would enhance the creature in some way. So the earliest versions of rides, you would choose one of your creatures to go on the ride, and it would enhance the creature in some way for having gone on the ride. We would later find out that's a little bit restrictive, and so rides ended up being a little more miscellaneous. So like games, you played a mini game to win a prize.

Stands, you got some sort of resource. Rides were most other effects. More than not, it tended to interact with your creatures just because most effects interact with creatures. But we decided that it didn't always have to do that.

So anyway, okay. So we made games and rides and stands. Okay. Now let's get back. Let's go back to stickers. Okay. So what's going on with stickers is early on we had name stickers and art stickers

and ability stickers and power touch stickers. Name stickers and ability stickers, we made cards that cared. So we made cards for example that interacted with names. We made cards that interacted with art. Names was a little bit easier than art because

previous unsets had messed with names. Names is something that normal, traditional magic cards can't mess with because all cards are the same in all languages. And anyway, it's something that, like, in normal magic you can care about if it's the same name or if it's a certain name, but you can't care

about, like, starts with a certain letter or has two words in it. And we had messed with this in previous unsets. It's like double header, cared if it was a two word name, stuff like that. So it was, it wasn't that hard for us to care about names. We'd done stuff like in the past. We mess around in space there. And then in art, we, what we found in art was it was very subjective.

And so the one thing that we found that people mostly agreed with was hats. So we ended up deciding that we would do hats as of a low-rarity art theme. And then the stickers, we could have hat stickers. One of the things we wanted is we wanted the art stickers to mechanically matter at times. And so

I think over half the sticker cards have hats on them so that you can put a hat on a creature and now it gets benefit from hat rewards. There are other art rewards at higher rarities. But we tended at common, uncommon, mostly the art matters is hats. Anyway, and we also made sticker matter cards. I should mention that.

There are cards that care if they're stickered. Sorry, I think the cards that care now care if you have a stickered permanent. Originally, they only cared if they were stickered, and it was just more useful if they cared about something being stickered rather than themselves being stickered. You can sticker them. It just was a little more useful. And we also had cards that affected things that were stickered,

and those tend to care about what kind of sticker, like grant an ability to a creature with an art sticker, grant an ability to a creature with a name sticker, stuff like that. Anyway, so we made cards that cared about name stickers and art stickers. The problem we found was that ability stickers and power toughness stickers

just mattered so much more. That if I can give an ability to a creature, yeah, yeah, yeah, I can change its name and maybe there's a card or two it interacts with. Changing name, changing art could matter. And every once in a while it did matter. But what we found was abilities always mattered. Power toughness always mattered.

So what we were finding when we were playing with stickers was that nobody was using the name or the art stickers. They were only using the ability and power toughness stickers. And we got it, right? Like, you know, I could change the name of my creature or I could give it flying. I think I'll give it flying. Or I could change it from a 2-2 into a 4-4. Yeah, I'll change it to a 4-4.

Like, it was, those had such immediate end. Like, there wasn't a combo. The names and art, like, well, you had to then have other cards that cared. Where the ability and power toughness, it automatically cared right away. And so what we found was people just prioritized those, and nobody was using the names or the art stickers. And the sadness was the name and the art stickers on some level more fun in that it's fun to just change things and add things. And like the names and the art stickers are a lot of fun to play. And from a just pure, I'm doing weird things with stickers.

And so not only were people using ability and power toughness stickers, but they were kind of commenting that they were kind of sad that they couldn't use their art and name stickers. And by couldn't use, I don't mean they weren't allowed to use them. I just mean, like, the game encouraged them not to use them. And I've talked about this a lot, that one of the big things about game design is you want the fun to be the right strategic thing to do, right? You don't want to say, well, the right thing to do is this boring thing,

but you could do this fun thing. Now, you won't win if you do the fun thing. You'll win if you do the boring thing, but the fun thing exists as a concept. That's not good game design. You want the fun thing to be the correct strategy. So, what we realized was we needed some means, like, there had to be some cost for the

ability stickers and the power toughness stickers. That if everything was equal, you were always going to do those over the names and the art stickers. Even though the names and art stickers I think had, there's a lot of sort of inherent fun. Like, sticking the art stickers is a lot of fun. Just literally, that is. Okay, so

we realized that we needed a resource. Okay, this is where the things collide. Well, we had this resource that we invented for attractions, tickets. And so we said, okay, well, what if we use tickets for the sticker resource? Like, what if we just use tickets? We're at an amusement park carnival, you know, like, tickets made sense. What if we just use the tickets?

And so what we did is we ended up putting a ticket cost on the ability stickers and the power toughness stickers. on the ability stickers and the power toughness stickers. Okay, so the first problem we ran into was it is very hard to use a resource system when two different mechanics want to use the system. Because the attractions want you to balance it for the attractions, and the stickers want you to balance it for the stickers. And they had different needs, right?

Like, for example, it was important for the attractions that we had an exchange rate to mana because we needed you to be able to go on the attractions even if you did not have the tickets. But the tickets really needed a gating to sort of protect cost, right? And so they didn't quite line up. The other thing was we wanted to gate uh

the power toughness and the ability stickers we didn't really want mana outs for those like we did want that for the attractions but we didn't really want that for the stickers the idea wasn't like well you could do the sticker if you just had mana to cast it because even then you still were encouraged to do it so we wanted like, it was important for the stickers that you had to slowly build up the resource over time. We didn't want you doing the giant sticker right away. We wanted you slowly earning the right to that sticker. And if you tied the tickets to money, it was hard to make that happen.

So what we ended up realizing was we couldn't do tickets for both. We could do tickets for stickers. We could do tickets for both. We could do tickets for stickers. We could do tickets for attractions. And what we had found was tickets were the perfect answer to our sticker problem. They did a really good job of addressing the sticker problem. And we were suffering on attraction. So let's jump back to attractions for a second. So what we found was we could give you lots of, like, the general challenge was i i spend my resources for something that could benefit my opponent and we try to give you all sorts of resources you get a free use you get tickets when they use it so you get extra resources and no matter what

we did no matter how much we try to like make it fair for you or even good for you like strategically good for you once again the fun thing has to be the right thing so we did a lot like make it fair for you or even good for you like strategically good for you once again the fun thing has to be the right thing so we did a lot to make it strategically correct okay i'm going to open up the information booth yeah yeah yeah my opponent might get a card or two but i'm going to get more than that i'll get free cards out of it and the more they use it the more free cards i'll get out of it so. So we were able to make a system we thought was balanced. The problem inherently was that the playtasters just felt bad. It didn't matter how much we had balanced it.

They still felt bad. It wasn't a good experience. When you played something and then your opponent won and you felt the thing you played won the game for your opponent, no matter how much we rewarded you, how many free uses you got, no matter how much we sort of balanced it, when the game ended because your opponent used your resource, it just felt sucky.

And during the whole process, I had really wanted to make the... I loved the idea of build the park and then everybody access the park I really liked that idea from a holistic viewpoint it was a really cool concept it was a really neat idea that you're opening the park

and when you open the Ferris wheel there's no Ferris wheel to open the park anybody can go to the Ferris wheel and we stuck with that for a while and finally I realized that it just... I couldn't find a way to do that that didn't have

this negativity tied to it of somehow I'm... My opponent's winning because of things I did. I helped my opponent win. And we tried all sorts of things and finally we said, okay, okay, okay. Oh, the other thing that was guiding me a little bit

was I was sensitive to the fact that it was a second deck. I'm like, unstable, use the second deck. I really like the resource. Normal magics won't use a second deck. I don't know if we're anywhere near that happening. Maybe one day, but we're not near it now. And I like second decks. There's a lot of, like, um, it's really, it's a particularly fun high, high variance mechanic,

um, and I, I did enjoy, like, I decided that I wanted to use the second deck, um, I mean, the team decided, uh, in that it just added a lot of fun, a lot of variety and a lot of, ooh, what's going to happen now? You know, and it also allowed it, it also allowed us to make the things we wanted to generate it. Like we wanted the employees and things like that. Like it, the flavor was working really well. But early on, I was really nervous about it being too contraption-like. And so one of the reasons I think I was really, but let's make the park, and it's everybody uses it.

It just felt so different from contraptions. But one of the things I finally said is, okay, look, let's make it what it wants to be. Let me stop worrying about contraptions. Let's make attractions awesome. I don't want to make attractions less awesome because I'm trying to make them not contraptions. Let them just be their own thing. And so, basically what happened was

we said, okay, okay, let's assume you open it up and only you can access your own attractions. That's how magic works. That's how, you know, you do things and you have access to them. And I said on some level, you know, you can think like the park has all these things, but you have access to them, your opponent doesn't.

And then, I think we also decided to make them artifacts. Only because it just made it easier to have answers to them. When they were their own card type, like, everything to deal with them had to be in the ecosystem that we were making.

Where we made them artifacts, all of a sudden, like, the set just with them had to be in the ecosystem that we were making, where we made them artifacts. All of a sudden, like, the set could have ways to deal with artifacts, like it did, but if you were just playing with normal magic, if you were just mixing with normal things, there just were answers to it, and it just made it easier.

And the reason I sort of steered away from that was contraptions, but I'm like, look, they're objects or things. Magic does tangible things as being artifacts, as artifacts are. When it's the idea of hope or something, fine, that's an enchantment. But if it's like a thing, like I could destroy that thing, I could shatter that thing, it's an artifact. And like, okay, it made a lot of sense. The things you're building made sense as artifacts. So we made those artifacts.

And then the big idea was... Oh, I'm... I got to work and I'm realizing I'm getting to the end of my time here. So I think I'm at a good point for the next part of the story, which is we figured out attractions weren't working.

We figured out that we needed them to be something that individual players used. But we needed something special. We needed something about them. There was something missing. So the next time I'll start talking about how we figured out how to make attractions work. Anyway guys, I am now at

work. I hope you're enjoying this. This is a little bit longer of a tale because I was super, super involved in this act. So I hope you're enjoying having a more lengthy series talking about this. But anyway, guys, I'm now at work. So we all know that means that this is 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.