Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #102 - Evolution

Episode Date: March 7, 2014

Mark talks about how the ever-changing nature of Magic impacts its design.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today I'm going to talk about a concept of the game that I'm not sure people think all that much about, although it's a very key part of the game. So, let me start by saying that I believe I was seven years old the first time I played Monopoly, way back in 1974. And let's say I broke up Monopoly 40 years later. How different was the current Monopoly from that first game of Monopoly? Now, clearly, I'm older, and so how I approach it is different.

But the actual game, how different is that game of monopoly? And the answer is eh, there's little tiny changes. You know, free parking used to be a house rule and I think now it's in the rules and they've changed a few pieces around. But the board is

I think identical to how the, I mean yes, I can buy all these newfangled monopolies. But if I just want normal monopoly, I think the board, I mean, yes, I can buy all these newfangled monopolies, but if I just want normal monopoly, I think the board, I mean, while they've redone the board, the actual properties are all the same. And the base game, 40 years later, is pretty similar.

Now, let's say somebody played Magic and went away for two years. And two years later, they play Magic. It might be radically different, you know. I mean, the core core of the game hasn't changed, but so much else can change. The cars have changed. The mechanics have changed.

Maybe some rules have changed. You know, the color pie could have shifted. I mean, lots of things can change. And so today, I want to talk about evolution and how that plays into how magic functions as a game. Because one of the things that's interesting is that there are two types of games, what I will call static games and what I will call evolving games.

So a static game is like Monopoly, which is, it's the game that it is. If you play it now, you play it 40 years from now, it's the game that it is. And static games, eh, change a little bit over time, but not much. You know, I mean, chess, at some point they added the impassant rule and it didn't exist. But I mean, chess has been the same way for, you know,

mostly the same way for a long, long period of time. Now there are other games, and Magic is one of the other games that we call evolving, which says it's an ever-changing game. And in fact, one of the qualities about Magic, and one of the things, like, when you look at our market research, one of the things we look at is the average playing length of a player. How long has the average player been playing? And last I looked, I believe it's somewhere around nine years.

Nine years for a game. Now, for those who don't know much about games, or don't know the stats in the gaming industry, nine years for... This is average. The average player has been playing nine years. That is insane. There are very, very few games that exist

that one person will play for nine years. And not at the consistency that people play Magic. Here's one thing to say, well, yeah, I played Monopoly as a kid, and every once in a while I play Monopoly, so I've been playing Monopoly for 40 years. Eh, how often do I play Monopoly? Maybe, maybe once a year.

And a side note, I'm not a huge... I don't play a lot of Monopoly. But people imagine they play Magic all the time. And so as an ongoing hobby, as a game you're invested in, nine years. I mean, it's funny.

You look at the video games and you can't play a single game for nine years because probably the system has changed three times. It's like nine years ago, you had two previous iterations of the game system you're playing on now. Although to be fair, to be fair, the closest thing evolving game in video games is, you know,

you'll have a game that, you know, Halo, then Halo 2, then Halo 3, which is sort of like an evolving game. The only thing is it makes jumps, where Magic sort of is an ever-evolving game where, like, you know, there's no set one and set two. It's just sort of constantly evolving from stage one to stage two, where if you look at something like, something like a Halo, that there's a stage one and it's that for a while, and they stop, and then a new one comes out a couple years later. Magic is always coming out in some ways. It's always constantly changing and evolving. magic is always coming out in some ways. It's always constantly changing and evolving.

And so one thing I want to look at is sort of how evolving games work and what it means for magic. Okay, so let's explore magic. So the first thing I want to look at is what exactly evolves in magic? And the answer is almost everything. Almost everything. So for starters, the cards evolve.

Meaning the cards you play with, especially if you are focused on standard, right? A standard environment, which is the last two years. Standard is constantly evolving. You know, two years later, two and a half years later, I mean, there's some overlapping cards. The core set has some cards that stick around, but there's radical, radical overhaul, and the cards that define the environment constantly shift. I mean, that's one of the big things that separates. So, let me explain. One of my theories about why magic is popular is what I call the crispy hash brown theory.

So, what is the crispy hash brown theory, for those that have never had me talk about it before? It's the following concept, which is, when you have hash browns, the best part of the hash browns is the crispy layer on top. Oh, goodness. It's awesome. And at some point, you eat through the crispy layer, and then you get the rest of the hash

browns, and you eat them, and they're okay. I mean, hash browns are good. Nothing against hash browns, but none of it's quite as good as that top crispy layer. And my metaphor is that for most games that crispy layer is the exploration part of playing the game. That, okay, when you first play Tic-Tac-Toe, it's like, oh, this is cool. Well, I put an X there, I put an O

there. And little by little, you start to figure out how the game is played. I mean, I have kids, so I had a chance to watch this firsthand to see, when my kids were real little, you know, they loved T tic-tac-toe. And it was a game of total randomness. I'll put an X there.

I'll put an O there. Like, who knows what's going to happen? And as they get a little older, they start to realize, oh, I see. You know, they start to understand that there's parameters. And eventually, my kids haven't quite got there yet, at least my youngest ones haven't, that you realize, oh, it's a solved game. Like, oh, no matter what, if I understand how to play, I can never lose. It will be a cat's game every game, a tied game every game

if I know what I'm doing. And other games have a similar quality. Like Othello, you start learning the importance of the corners. You know, when you get really good at Scrabble, for example, it stops becoming, like, when you first start playing Scrabble, it's like, ooh, what word can I play? And then when you start becoming good at Scrabble, for example, it stops becoming, like, when you first start playing Scrabble, it's like, ooh, what word can I play? And then when you start becoming good at Scrabble, it's like, oh, I need to memorize the two- and three-letter words.

I need to memorize all the words that involve the top-letter scoring, you know. I need to know every word with a Z in it or an X in it or a Q in it. Because it's all about maximizing the score. And less it becomes about language on some level, and it becomes more about pattern recognition. And I'm not saying that's not fun. I'm not saying that people don't have great enjoyment out of it. But what happens is it moves away from the discovery process and sort of the, like, trying to figure it out to the, you know, you have to start learning the strategies. And there's a lot of memorization usually and studying of the experts.

Chess is similar in that. Once you get good enough, you start learning about opening moves, and a lot of good players have sort of mapped out what the opening moves are, and so there becomes a lot of memorization of understanding what people are doing. And like I said, the rest of the hash browns are good, but the crispy part of the hash brown is the best part, in my opinion. And I believe that the discovery part of gaming is in some ways the most fun. I think you have the highest highs in that part of the game,

the discovery process. And what Magic does is it keeps regrowing its crispy layer. Magic is a game in which... Why do people play for so long? Because that part of discovery just keeps going.

The by evolving, the by constantly changing, it's like you're always rediscovering the game. You know, one of the reasons it's hard to get bored of Magic is

Magic keeps reinventing itself. One of the things, I've said this many times, but in some ways Magic isn't one game but many games, you know, but they're all tied together by a rule system. And so, I mean, this year we're playing Theros.

Last year we played Return to Ravnica. The year before that we were playing Innistrad, you know, and the Innistrad game and the Theros game and the Return to Ravnica game are connected. Knowing how to play one helps you play the other, but you know what? There's different rules, and there's different things

that go on, and there's different things you can do, and the cards do differently, and the environment is different. In some way, Magic Evolution keeps becoming a different game. And that's kind of part of the exciting part, is that you have the investment already built in, you know how to play, and obviously each year there's new rules to learn, but once you know the

basics, learning the new rules isn't too tough. So, okay, the cards evolve, the mechanics evolve, right? Every year we make 8 to 12 new mechanics and we bring back old mechanics and we rotate out mechanics. So let me talk a little bit about one of the ways that we think about this is that, so imagine there's five boxes for mechanics. Box number one is what we call evergreen. And what evergreen means is it's always there. Examples of evergreen mechanics would be flying, first strike, haste, trample, vigilance, you know, things that

are just every magic set is going to have this ability. Next is what I call deciduous, which means not quite evergreen, but what it means for us is the mechanics that we are allowed to use whenever we want. Hybrid is a good example. Any set, any design or any set, hybrid is always a tool available to them. If you want to have hybrid in the set right after a set that had hybrid, a tool available to them. If you want to have hybrid in the set right after a set that had hybrid, as long as it makes sense in what you're doing and it fits into the core of what your set is, fine. So the deciduous mechanics are things in which they're tools that get used usually and that

they're mechanics that are used when we needed them. Usually these mechanics are used on some on a regular basis. Like, in every three to five years, most likely you're going to see this mechanic. And sometimes more than that, sometimes often. You know, cantrips, in my mind, are a citrus mechanic that, yeah, most of the time we use them, but we don't always use them. Okay, next we come to what I call sort of the favorite mechanics. Examples here would be cycling, kicker, flashback.

These are mechanics that we know deliver. We know do the job. And what I would say is probably in a 7 to 10 year period, you're going to see them at least once. you're going to see them at least once. Next, we have the semi-regular, not quite regular mechanics, but sort of, they're things that we've done once that I think we'll probably do again every once in a while. If like every 20 years you saw this mechanic, it's kind of like, it's not quite as good as the regular mechanics like cycling

and kicker, but it's something like, if you have the right place to put it, that I imagine it coming back. Like, it's a mechanic, what's a good example of this kind of box four would be something like wither, which is, I don't expect to see wither all the time, but I do imagine that just there's a right place for, oh, just wither's the perfect, yeah, it just feels right, and wither comes back. And I don't think we'll see wither all the time, and wither's not something I see on lots of occasions, but every once in a while, when it just really fits what we're doing,

I can imagine seeing it. The fifth category are things we do, and then that's it. One and done. Now be aware, we never plan for things to be in box five. We always hope things are at least in box four. We aim for box three. We have hope that maybe things show up in one or two. And the interesting thing is, you know know take something like when I made

Mirrodin, okay, so we made Mirrodin equipment ended up becoming a one, became evergreen every set has equipment or you could argue I guess it's evergreen, I mean you could argue it's deciduous in that I can imagine us doing a set or two without equipment, but it's probably evergreen

in the same set you know, we had imprint. We had entwine. We had affinity, you know. And so, like, okay, well, imprint's probably a four. It's like, eh, in the right place at the right time, I could see us bringing it back. But it's not something we're going to do all the time. Affinity, probably it's a four or a five. I'd like to say we bring it

back one day, maybe not Affinity for Artifacts. And Entwine, Entwine's another one that's like between three and four. I like Entwine. But like, you know, we did it, and it kind of became Evergreen. Other ones became something that maybe we revisit, we revisit. You know, in Innistrad, for example, double-faced cards, in my mind, ended up being a three. People really liked them. And I feel like it's something that we're going to do. I'd be surprised if every ten years you don't see double-faced cards. You know, and also Morbid ended up going over really well.

That's another mechanic that I think probably falls in the three category that I'd kind of be surprised in ten years you don't see Mormon again. But, you know, you think of like Dark Ascension, you know, like I said, maybe, what's it called? It's called Desperation in Design. The one which you, if you have a low enough life, then you get the extra bonus. That's something that I, I don't know if we're doing again. If we're doing again,

it'd be, you know, maybe a Ford in the right place that perfectly fits, you know, maybe we'd do it. So anyway, mechanics are something

that we evolve and that, you know, there is some things that come back, but there's a lot of things that we, you know,

we constantly are making new things. Every set will have new mechanics a lot of things that we, you know, we constantly are making new things. Every set will have new mechanics. Every block will have new, you know, new mechanics. And we, now, one of the things that's interesting as we evolve is how we evolve has been changing. I talk about this, that one of the things that, the two big things that has happened over time as we evolve, if we've made two changes. Oh, actually, well, let me, I'm jumping ahead of myself. So we evolve cards, we evolve mechanics, we evolve themes. So maybe I'll make a point here, I'll jump to it later.

One of the things that has happened, and I guess what I'm trying to say here is not only do we evolve the game, but we involve how we make the game. That R&D itself evolves, design evolves, development evolves. And that one of the things you've seen over time is how we treat the game and how we think of the game has changed. And the two big things that have changed over time, one is the scope. What I talk about is when you first started playing in alpha, the scope was on card level. That Richard really was maximizing every card, making every card as flavorful as it could be. And then with time, we pulled back a little bit.

We pulled back to sort of the mechanics. And then pulled back to the theme. And then pulled back to the overall feel of the set. And then the block. And then the structure of the block. And then meta blocks. And, you know that one of the things about magic is we keep pulling our focus back to look at more things so we've gotten

more and more holistic over time and now just you know once upon a time you know if we had an awesome card and then the vacuum was just neat we would make it and now it's like oh but no no it has to fit in the larger thing what we're doing and that if we have awesome cards we save them for the right place to do them, you know, that you don't just do an awesome card just because you can do it, you do an awesome card in the right place, and then when you get neat ideas, you save them, and the other thing that we do that's changed, another way our needs evolved, is that we start earlier and earlier, that we do more and more advanced thinking and planning about the set.

Once upon a time, it was like, okay, time to make the set, let's go. And then we started getting to the point where we thought ahead and we started picking themes ahead and mechanics ahead and now we do advanced planning ahead. We spend more and more time sort of plotting where we're going. And one of the things that's funny is every time I think, wow, we've gotten pretty advanced in how we think about it, and then we just keep upping our game. We keep notching it up.

And that's another thing that is very interesting in the way the game evolves, is that it doesn't just evolve in the game itself, but behind the game. The other big thing that evolves when you look at Magic is, I keep talking about that to me, the heart of the game is the color pie. And the reason it is, is it gives a proper feel to everything. And while the core philosophies have been changed, the execution of our color pie is a constantly evolving thing. Like one of the things that people always ask me, they want us to print a document that shows what color does what. And we're very hesitant to do that because that document, it's an ever-changing thing, you know, and that anything we put it, we write down just might be different

tomorrow. And that, for example, the game started and fog was in green. And then at some point we're like, you know what, fog maybe makes more sense in white. It's all about preventing damage. White's very much about preventing damage and damage, you know, protection. And then we moved it to white. And then we played with it for a while and we're like, oh,

well, it's thematically fits in white, but white doesn't need it. And so we moved it back to green. And there's been a lot of cases like that where we figure out what things want to be and where they are and we shift around how things handle it. You know, and sometimes things shift back and sometimes things continue to shift and you know that um for a while in r&d we had this idea of um there was a thing

for a while that we called the ultimate base set and the idea was that all our work doing the core sets was just us figuring out the perfect version. And then each one was us inching closer to what the perfect version was. And eventually, we'd have the ultimate base set, the ultimate thing that would be, you know, the perfect introductory, you know, like, this locked core set.

And eventually what we realized is, no, what makes magic magic is the core set isn't locked. The things are always shifting and changing and that there's nothing that's a given. Like, one of the things I was very happy with is we did this little thing where we were tracking what cars had stayed in the corset the longest. We called it Corset Survivor.

And I was very happy when the day... So, finally, it was Giant... Giant Spider won it. It beat out Giant Growth. Giant Spider was in every single core set. In the next core set, we didn't include Giant Spider. And why?

I mean, there are a bunch of reasons why, but the reason I like to believe why is I like the idea that Magic has survived, I mean, barring basic land, Magic has existed now in standard without every card. That there's no card that magic needs. That magic needs a mix of cards. It's not that magic doesn't need some stuff, and we want something from the past.

But the fact that magic has existed without any one thing. That magic isn't any one card. No one card defines magic. It's a collection of cards that define magic. And I think that's really cool. I think that's kind of neat. So here's another thing

that I think is important and maybe it has to do with the mindset of how we think about it is that magic is a collaborative game meaning it's a collaborative

art form if you will meaning that when I write a story, if I'm a writer, I write a story, I have complete control. I can do whatever I want. If I want the main character to do something, well, no one else is there to tell me they can't,

and I do it. But in Magic, you know, I oversee the advanced design, and often I'm leading the design. But even when I'm done, even when I've been living with a file for, you know, a year and a half to two years, and then I hand it off to a developer,

that developer is then the new set of eyes. And while I consult, a different set of eyes are looking at that. And the creative team are doing their thing, and the editing, and there's so many people involved in making a set, and that while I definitely can push a set in certain directions, I don't have complete control.

And in some ways, no one person has complete control. And so one of the things I talk about in, when you're working on a set, is I like trying to understand what the set wants, and the way I explain this is, when I playtest a set, I sort of get a sense of a feeling from the set, and like this, I mean it's not literal, but the set speaks to me, that the set sort of tells me about what it needs, and then a lot of the relationship I've created over the years, a very intuitive one, is sort of learning from interacting with a set what it's missing or what it wants. And then finding a way to give it to that.

And one of the neat things about how we make magic sets is we start, we have a jumping off point, and then we let it go where it's going to go. You know, Time Spiral started out a set all about time and time-based mechanics. And the whole nostalgia thing that ended up really taking over the set,

that wasn't there when we began. You know, that a lot of what happens is we start one place and that we let the process and let the set sort of take us where it will. And that's one of the things, by the way, that is neat in that in an evolving game, there's nothing in static games. Static games are fun. Some of my favorite games are static games. But the thing that endears me to Magic is that it is something that, like, one of the things I've heard a lot is when kids get into magic, and I talk to their parents, and I say, you know, why do you think your kid got into magic? which is a parent will say how their kid was really smart,

and they were just bored of everything. That, like, you know, they were having problems in school just because nothing could keep their attention. And then they got to Magic, and Magic was bigger than them. That it wasn't something they could just crack. That it was, you know, like, one of the things, for example, that I talk about in development is, why do we make broken cards in development? Isn't development learned enough by now? Isn't development figured out how to do things that

we just can avoid having broken cards? And the answer I give is, the goal of R&D and development, as well as design, is to make a set for the players to explore. And if we make something simple enough that development can figure out what works and what doesn't work, then the audience will figure it out. You know what I'm saying? I mean, development is, you know, a handful of guys. They're good, and they're top players, but guess what? In the real world, they're top players.

So if we can figure it out, then you can figure it out. And so what development does is they make a system so complex that they can't quite figure it out. And sometimes things don't quite go the way they planned. But if they didn't make the system complex enough that even they couldn't figure it out, then, you know, if they could figure it out, you all figure it out. And then magic would be much less fun. You know, like one of the joys of having an evolving game is allowing the audience the crispy hash brown discovery time. You know, that I love, for example,

one of the things that's a lot of fun is we do reprints. One of my favorite things to do with reprints is bring back reprints that mean something different in the context. That's like, you know this card, and this card meant something, but in this set, it means something different, and you've got to figure that out. You know, or in most sets, we do thing A, but in this set, we're doing thing B. Why are we doing thing B? So one of the big fights we have in R&D all the time is,

one of the things I'm a fan of is, and not a lot of them, but a few cards that just do something weird that isn't the way we would do things. So, for example, this came up during Shadowmoor, where we had a lot of themes with minus one, minus one counters, and there's lots of ways to remove minus one, minus one counters. So what I wanted to do was make a, in fact, we did something similar to this, but I wanted to make, it was either like a 4-4 flyer or a 3-3 flyer, and then I think what I wanted to make originally was a 4-4 flyer that came into play with 2-1-1 counters,

and it's costed as if it were a 2-powered flyer. So, for example, imagine, you know, 2-U, 4-4 comes into play with 2-1-1 counters. Now, look, normally we do 2-U 2, 2, flyer all the time. All the time. And the idea is, I love you open a pack, and this can even be in common. We were like, okay, this is weird. Why are they doing this?

You know? Because what I find is Magic players don't go, I don't get it. They'll go, oh, okay, why are they doing this? Why would this set want this? Why didn't they just make this a 2-2? And I think it's kind of fun to do some of those cards to make people sort of question what's going on

and want to explore the environment. The other big thing about an evolving game, by the way, is that I think it challenges the players in a way that's very different. So one of the things is, growing up, I played a decent amount of tennis. My parents were big tennis, my parents were both very into tennis, definitely encouraged us, my sister and I, to play tennis. And one of the things I learned is, the way to get better,

probably in any sport, tennis is what I did as a kid, is you want to play people better than you. And why is that? Because the way you get better is pushing yourself. And I feel gaming is a similar thing, which is if you want to get better, you need to play games that really push you.

I mean, the reason tic-tac-toe is not really thrilling for most adults is there's no pushing tic-tac-toe. You know? And there's other games even that aren't solved like tic-tac-toe, but they're just, you kind of know the base strategy, it's just not that much fun, and then either you play something that doesn't understand the base strategy, and then you win because they don't understand it, or you play something that does, and then you're just, you know, a lot of times the nuance is not there, and that

one of the things that an evolving game does is it keeps the players on your toes. And like I said, one of the things that the belief in R&D is while we want to make sure to keep complexity in check, I have no problem pushing, well, what do we call strategic complexity? There's three types of complexity I talked about. There's comprehension complexity, do you get what the card does? There's board complexity,

do you understand its role on the battlefield? And there's strategic complexity. Do you understand the ramifications of what the thing means? And both the board and the comprehension complexity we have to be careful with. That can make it very hard to learn how to play. Strategic complexity is nice because it's kind of hidden,

meaning you don't see it until you're ready to see it. And so I'm fine. I like testing players. I like pushing. When we talk about complexity, we want to make sure the game is easy to learn. But that doesn't mean we want to make the game easy to master. We want a minute to learn a lifetime to master.

Okay, more than a minute to learn. And so one of the things about a evolving Games is that I get to constantly do that. I get to keep surprising my audience. I get to keep pushing in ways that are different. I get to surprise them. One of the other things that Evolving Games do that I love is that there's not a lot of surprise in Monopoly once you've played Monopoly enough times. When I sit down and play a game in Monopoly, I might be surprised by the interaction

with other people. Monopoly has some interaction that comes with it, and people could surprise me, but the game itself is hard to surprise me. It's the same thing. Where Magic, one of the things I love as a game designer is that I get to surprise my audience every year.

Not even every year. Every set I get to surprise my audience every year. Not even every year. Every set I get to surprise my audience. Multiple times a year, I get to do something. Like, one of my favorite things is I love watching previews. And one of the things that's funny is there was a director that said

that one of his favorite things to do was to go to premieres, you know, go to screenings where people are seeing the film for the first time, and watch not the film, but the audience. And that one of the things is, he wants to see the reaction of the audience. And so when sets get previewed, I do the same thing, which is, we work very hard on our sets.

I love seeing the players' reaction. And I love initial reactions. One of my all-time favorite memories is Invasion was coming out. And we had made a conscious choice to not reveal the split cards. Now, it turns out that

a sheet got on eBay and... Anyway, the hardcore rumor mongers knew about it. But the average players did not know about the split cards. And we had not advertised them. We had not put them in any of our previews. There were five of them. They were uncommon.

And so I went to the pre-release. In fact, it was in the old Wizards. We had a tournament center by the University of Washington. And so I'm down in the basement watching people open packs. And I watch this guy open a pack, and then he turns it sideways so I know that he got one, and his face just, like, he couldn't contain his excitement. He couldn't believe what he was seeing.

And it took him a minute to understand what was going on, and then I could see the light bulb going off, and this giant smile came to his face and he turned to his friend and he showed it to his friend and it was I don't know just it was one of the things that I love about my job is I feel like I get to bring joy to the world and that I love seeing feedback because it it is fun when you get to do something that makes people happy to see them actually being happy. That that was a great moment

where I literally made someone super, super excited and I could see it, you know. And remember, I fought so hard to get the split cards and that's that, that, you know,

I talked about this when I talked about Tempest, my very first podcast, that getting split cards, not Tempest, when I talked about Invasion, not my first podcast, but an early podcast,

getting split cards in Invasion Tempest, when I talked about Invasion, not my first podcast, but an early podcast, getting split cards in Invasion was a major, major feat that Bill Rose and I managed to accomplish, and so being able to go and see it and see the reaction, that was an awesome, awesome thing. Anyway, I can see work, so I've got to wrap this up. Mostly what I was trying to say today, just

think about that, is that Magic is a very special game. It's not the only evolving game. There's other evolving games, but it is very special in the way it functions, and that it is a neat thing to work on, because I get to kind of constantly help reinvent

what the game is, and I get to sort of watch the game change itself, you know. I mean, obviously I have a hand, but in some ways it's sort of like we put impetus in

and see what the game does and respond. It's kind of like writers talk about how you make a character and then put him in a situation and then see what he does.

I feel the game has a similar quality to it. But anyway, thank you very much for joining me for today. Like today, sometimes I like to do different topics and today was more of a thought piece, thank you very much for joining me for today. Like today, sometimes I like to do different topics, and today was more of a thought piece, if you will. But as much as I like talking about magic,

even more, I like making magic. So see you guys next week.