Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #12 - Great Designer Search

Episode Date: December 13, 2012

Mark Rosewater talks about the Great Designer Search

Okay, I'm pulling on my driveway. That means it's another time for Drive to Work. So, I have a special treat for you guys today. Say hello! Hi! It is Ethan Fleischer! Ethan is carpooling with me today so that he can join us for today's podcast. And unlike Macavada, who actually sometimes I carpool with, Ethan decided to join me just to be on the podcast. I thought it would be fun, so here I am. Okay, so the topic I decided for today was the Great Designer Search, which is something Ethan is very familiar with.

So what I thought we'd do first is talk about how it came to be, and then we're going to walk through Ethan's entire run with The Great Designer Search 2, that is. So, Ethan, can you tell me the story, since I've told the story many times, can you tell the public the story of how The Great Designer Search started? I believe, let me see, you had a slot open, a position was going to be available for a designer, and you asked your boss at the time who was... Before Aaron. Randy Bueller.

Randy Bueller, okay. If you could fill it any way you wanted. And he said yes, and so you did an American Idol-style contest to determine who was going to be the next magic designer. Okay, let me fill the gaps in here. That's pretty good. So if you took all the magic sets we've made and counted up looking at expert expansions and core sets, who's made the most? I'm number one, Mike Elliott's number two, number three is Brian Tinsman, number four is Bill Rose, and number five is Aaron Forsythe.

How many of those people were hired to be designers? None of them? None of them is correct. Aaron was hired to run the website, Brian was hired as a business manager for Magic, and the other three of us were hired as developers. So one of our problems for a long time was we had no idea how to find designers. The only strategy was hire people for other things and hope some of them somehow turn out to be designers. And well, it worked a little bit. It wasn't, we had a whole bunch of years where we weren't finding anybody. And so Randy came to me

one day and said, now something we should explain is the developers literally have an intern every six months. They're constantly having interns in development. And design didn't have interns. And so Randy came to me and said, you know, Mark, I put it in the budget. How would you like to have a design intern? And my problem was I didn't know how to find it. I literally, like, I didn't know how to find a design intern. It wasn't like I knew of one and I could just hire them.

I didn't know who to get. And I was inspired at the time by some combination of Project Runway and The Apprentice, I think. And that inspired me to do what we call the job search kind of reality show in which both Project Runway and Apprentice, you're trying to get a job essentially. And if you do a task every week, then you can get that. Okay, so let's flash forward a little bit. So what do you know about the first great designer Search? As an outsider, what did you experience? I was not aware of it when it was happening. I was quite disappointed to have missed out on it.

But there were a lot of challenges to design cards. And, of course, Alexis Jansen was the eventual victor. And four of the participants got positions at Wizards of the Coast, and they all still work there now, Alexis and Ken Nagel and Mark Globus and Graham Hopkins. Yes, so what happened was Alexis came in first and Ken came in second. Both of them got internships in R&D. Graham Hopkins came in third. He also got an internship in R&D,

but not in design. He got one, I forget what, some other section of R&D. And Mark Globus got hired by the digital, there was a big digital initiative at the time. We were doing a project called Gleemax that ended up not sort of panning out. But he got hired on for that.

Well, Graham started as an intern, and then Graham also ended up going to the digital department, and he does programming now. All four of them, by the way, still do magic design. And here's my favorite little tidbit, a great designer search tidbit. Since we had the first great designer search, we have yet to run a design team that hasn't had an alumni from a great designer search, which means that it's been a huge source of design for us. We went from literally not knowing how to find designers to finding this really effective way to find designers.

In fact, the second great designer search, not the first one for some reason, won what's called an INI award, which is an innovation award Hasbro does internally. And so the GDS2, which we will get to in a sec, actually won us an innovation award for Wizards within Hasbro. Okay, so now we do GDS1. We end up hiring a whole bunch of people.

So I announce GDS2. So where you are when I announce that. Oh, well, you announced it on your Twitter, I think? Well, I announced it in my column and on my Twitter. Okay. And I was very excited because I'd missed the first one. I was out of Magic for six months or something and happened to miss it. And so I was like, oh, I've got to do this one.

I'll feel like an idiot if I don't at least try to get a job working as a designer on my favorite game. and at least try to get a job working as a designer on my favorite game. So I was working full-time at a bookstore. What bookstore? Powell's City of Books in Portland, Oregon, the largest new and used bookstore in the Western Hemisphere or something. Great store. And I was also freelancing as a web designer so I was pretty busy and you know raising

three kids so a lot of work there but I was like okay I can squeeze in a few extra hours for this it'll be fun a few extra hours it was fun so I didn't take it very seriously I was like oh there'll be thousands of people entering there's no way I'm gonna win this thing but I'll kick myself if I don't at least try it so really, so the rules at the time were, for both of them, is I think there were three things. A, you had to be at least 18, legally. B, you had to be able to legally work in the United States because the job was here. And three, you had to be willing to relocate for the internship

to Seattle because obviously you had to be willing to relocate for the internship to Seattle. Because obviously, you had to come work at the company. And remember, by the way, the Great Designer Search, the prize was a six-month internship. That was the prize. Okay, so walk us through. So what was the first thing you had to do was? We had to write an essay first. Oh, right.

You had to write 10 essay questions. Each one right. You had to write 10 essay questions. Each one was, I think, 500 words. Yep. So that was 5,000 words. Yep. So walk us through that. The idea was we had to come up with a concept for a plane, for a set, for a block. Come up with a concept for that. Oh, no, I'm sorry.

That was the third one. Yeah, that was the third one yeah that was the third one first one was a series of essay questions about various magic design topics like what was the worst mechanic in standard or something what was your least favorite mechanic what was your favorite mechanic uh are you a timmy a johnny a Spike? Man, it's all blurring together. It's been like two years. Yeah, so what happened was, one of the things I wanted to do when I made the first GDS, and the means to get in was very similar between the two, was I first said, okay, this is serious. I know a lot of people say they'd like to do it, but I want to kind of weed out the people that just say they want it from those that really do want to do it.

And so we always start with an essay question, which are really hard questions, and 5,000 words. Like, look, you want to do this, prove to me you have some dedication, and show me that you know something. And so the first thing's always an essay test. Then, and we had, the first GDS had a thousand some people, and I know we had more on the second one than the first one. In fact, by the way, GDS2 holds the record for being the most people ever applying for a job at Hasbro.

Wow. Okay, so we had an essay question, and then the next thing, you got to a multiple choice test. Talk about the multiple choice test. Well, it basically was a test your making magic knowledge. Almost all the information in the multiple choice test was from your articles. So I had been an avid reader of your articles and even during some periods when I wasn't playing Magic I still read your articles because

I thought there was a lot of great game design knowledge there. So how many questions were there? Fifty. Fifty questions. And I think you had to get I think you could miss up to eight I think? Yeah I was pretty had to get, I think you can miss up to eight, I think?

Yeah, I was pretty close to the line. Yeah, I think you had to get 42 right to advance to the next part. How many did you get right? I think I got like 43 or 44 right. Okay. So I was no Max McCall, that's for sure. Max McCall got 100%. Yeah, he's the only one in two different GDSs to get 100%. And Max now works full-time at Wizards.

The other interesting thing is Billy Moreno, who currently now is a full-time developer, missed by one question. Yeah. It was pretty vicious. Some of the questions were a little hard. So from over 1,000 people, 101 people made it past the multiple choice test. Right. And to be fair, by the way,

I think it worked is, I said I wanted 100 to make it, and then I rounded up to whatever the next answer was, and it turned out that 42 was the cutoff for 101. Okay, so if you make it past the multiple choice test, what was the next part? Alright, so then I suddenly realized, whoa, this is getting serious, right?

I'm in the top less than 10% here. I got to get a little more serious. But so the next thing we had to do was describe our vision for a block, a hypothetical block that we would want to be leading. And we would have to illustrate our vision by using card designs, half of which we designed and the other half of which were designed by other people on the internet that we worked with on this wiki that Wizards had set up. So let me jump in real quick and explain why we did that.

So what happened was the first GAS was very successful, but what we discovered in the first GAS was we were really testing players' abilities to design cards. And the skills that we were looking for this time was a little broader. We wanted people that not were just good at card design, but were good at two important skills. One was holistic vision, meaning I had the idea for a larger thing,

and I was putting the pieces together. And the second was the ability to take other people's ideas and incorporate them into your own. So in order to do that, the first GDS, each assignment was independent. Make gold un-cards. Each had their own assignment to do, and they were unrelated. With this one, they were all going to be connected. Every assignment was going to be on the same world that you had to give me. So for the test, I made them show me their world.

Also, we wanted to test your ability to work with other people, and we wanted to give everybody access to participate because according to the way the rules work, you had to be able to work in the U.S. to apply, but we wanted to make sure people that couldn't match that criteria could still show us what they could do and be involved. Okay, so now tell us about your world. All right, my world was called Eppolith. It was a Stone Age world in the first block.

The idea was that for each set in the block, there would be thousands of years between them. There would be some kind of a time travel or time distortion plot. So that in the first set it was the Stone Age, and in the second set it was the Bronze Age, and in the third set it was the Iron Age. And the people, you would see sort of common cultural threads and animals evolving between the different blocks, but they would have rapid technological change over the course of these thousands of years. So what happened was I read 101 entries,

which each were, I think, 3,000 words long. And I did that all in a couple of days, by the way. I sat on the couch by R&D and just read them all day long. My brain was melting. And then what I did is I graded each one, and I gave it a plus, a minus, or like a neutral, a neutral sign. And ended up there was enough pluses that I said, okay, there's enough people that were on the thumbs up.

I'm just going to look at those. And then I re-looked at those, and from it I think I picked 15 ones I thought showed merit. And then I self-graded them, and then I showed them to a whole bunch of R&D people. Aaron and Ken Nagel and

Mark Gottlieb, and most of the designers I had. Globus looked at them. All the previous people from the, you know, Graham and Alexis and Ken, and Globus looked at them, Aaron looked at them, Gottlieb looked at them. All the people I had basically who were my designers. And then from them, they gave me feedback. And what ended up happening was, I think basically they all agreed on seven of them, and then there was kind of a tie

for the eighth slot and then I ended up being the deciding factor to get the eighth person in but you were you were one of the seven you were everybody kind of agreed that you were one of the ones for the finalists now note that in the first GDS I had originally I had 16 someone dropped out so I had 15 people in the finals for the first one. That proved to be a lot of work. In fact, real quickly, so the first GDS, when we put it together, I had no idea what I was getting into. I literally, like, oh, I watched The Apprentice. Okay, we could do that.

Donald Trump can do it. You can do it, right? And it was a crazy amount of work. I mean, in fact, the first, I remember this, because Scott Johns was the editor of the site at the time. So we put together the first great designer search, and Scott informed me that the first episode of the great designer search was longer than every other thing on the website combined that week. It was, I mean, it was thousands and thousands of pages long. I'm not pages, we're in slums. And so the other thing is

the first time through, we made them do a challenge every week. And we said, okay, let's make a few changes. Start with only eight, so we have less people, but only take out one per week rather than multiples per week. I think we did the same number of challenges. And the other big thing was we spaced them out.

So instead of having one week between challenges, we had two or three weeks. And we did this, A, to give the designers a little bit of a rest, and B, to give us a little more time to get it done. Okay, so do you remember your first challenge? I do. So your first challenge was comments. I think,

right, pick a color, color of your choice, make comments. So I knew, I received feedback from my, on my

initial essay submissions. And so I'd gotten this strong vibe from you, like, the theme here is evolution,

and I want to see more dinosaurs. Now, when I was a kid, I was a huge dinosaur nut. I loved dinosaurs. And so I was like, oh, you don't need to twist my arms and get me to design a bunch of dinosaur cards because that will be a lot of fun. So dinosaurs seem very green. So I was like, okay, let's just take the easiest path here. This block wants to be green in general.

I'm going to start with green and see where I can go from there. Yeah, so be aware. I think what happened was I loved your idea of the block. I loved the evolution idea of time elapsing, and I think what I said to you was, okay, I like the idea that you're starting in the Stone Age, you know, but look, if you're going to do prehistory, do prehistory. That's what I said. Let me see

some dinosaurs. Let's not do real prehistory. Let's do like all the fun things from all of prehistory and kind of mash them up together like alley-oop or something. Part of what we do in Magic is we say, well, let's take some inspiration and go to town and do everything that's fun. Like, oh, we're going to do, you know, Japanese Spy World, let's take some inspiration and go to town and do everything that's fun.

Like, oh, we're going to do, you know, Japanese Spy World. Let's see some samurai and ninjas, right? So I wanted to see some dragons. I want to see some dinosaurs. And I said to him very strongly, I think your block is neat. I believe your theme is evolution. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. Yeah, yeah.

Okay, so explain what you did to try to is evolution. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so explain what you did to try to capture evolution. So I wanted to sort of boil down the whole concept of evolution into a single mechanic. Well, not a single mechanic. I was going to try to do a different mechanic for each color.

And I started with green, and I think I found my mechanic very early on and it turned out to be very good. I had this mechanic called Evolve and it basically meant whenever a creature with greater power than this creature enters the battlefield under your control, you can put a plus one plus one counter on this creature. So when new, more powerful predators or whatever come into the environment, the existing creatures evolve in response. Obviously, that's not very scientifically accurate. Individual creatures don't evolve, but it was a metaphorical evolution. I'm going to jump in here because your memory is faulty.

You were forgetting something. What am I forgetting? Okay, so what happened jump in here because your memory is faulty. You were forgetting something. What am I forgetting? Okay, so what happened was in your first thing, you had evolve. All evolve meant was when thing X happens, I get a plus one plus one counter. Right, but for green that was a bigger creature. And then in the second one... No, no, no, no, no. You had a bunch of... In fact, every creature with evolve evolved slightly differently. Oh, did it?

And I said, that's too much. And I said to you, well, at worst, at least have each color have its own way to evolve. Oh, okay. And later I would say, you know what, screw it. You have a good one. Just make that evolve. But the first thing you turned in, every evolved creature evolved differently. Oh.

But one of them, luckily for you, one of them had the, if a bigger creature comes out, and I said, I like this, this is good. And I said, I don't think you need so many. And right, what I said to you at the time was, look, green should have no more than one. At bare minimum, each color should evolve one way. You shouldn't have each individual creature evolving differently because it's too complex. Later, I would go on to say to you, you know, I think you have something cool. I don't think you need every color to have a different one. Look, just do this.

But that came later. So week two was I picked a color for you, and you designed that. Right. So what happened then? and you designed that. Right. So what happened then? You assigned me blue. Okay. I think you thought it would be the hardest one for me to do. I'm sure I did. And so I came up with an alternate evolve for blue, which was, I believe,

when you cast the second spell in a turn, the creature gets a plus one, plus one counter, which was sort of like a storm deck kind of thing, play lots of spells, and it was pretty fun. What was the flavor for that? The flavor there was more about, I believe my concept was planeswalkers were coming to this world, and to like, because it was really primordial, they could get this, like, raw creative energy from it or something.

And so they would go there, and they would battle. And all their spells flying around would cause havoc and cause the natural evolution of the plane to change. Like, all this magical energy infusing things would cause the creatures to change in unexpected ways. And instead of evolving the way our Earth evolved, you would end up with griffins and dragons and things evolving eventually. So what was my feedback to you on that? I don't remember. I don't think you liked it nearly as much as the other one.

Well, I remember you... It was confusing to have this thing where there were different triggers you were looking for that all had the same output. It was like you want to have a unified input like landfall is always the same endpoint. A land entered the battlefield under your control and it had different outputs but you were always looking for the same thing. Did a land enter the battlefield? Whereas with having five different evolves, which all do the same thing, but trigger in five different ways, if you had one for each color, then it's much harder to keep track of.

It's much more complex. So I think you won the first challenge, right? Yes, I believe I did. Okay. And I know you won two of the five. Did you win the second challenge or not until later? Or did Sean win the second challenge? I think Sean won the second challenge.

So, by the way, one of his big competitors was Sean Main, who would later also go on. Sean's route to getting hired was a little more complex than Ethan's. So anyway, skip ahead. I can tell by how far we are to work that I need to speed our story up. We're going to end before we... Okay, so essentially what happened was you did well. And it was pretty clear going into the final challenge that you and Sean, barring some disaster, were two of the final three.

And then there were a couple people competing for the final slot. And Scott Van Essen eventually ended competing for the final slot, and Scott Van Essen eventually ended up pulling the third slot. He won the final challenge to take the third slot. Okay, so we invite you to Wizards. Let's talk a little about that. So what happens? You come to Wizards. So I was feeling, I felt very confident about all of my submissions. I felt like everything had gone very well there.

You invited me here to Wizards. I had a sleepless night in the hotel right next to Wizards. And Scott Van Essen and Sean Mayne and I all went in for more challenges. We were all sleep-deprived, and we were all sort of competing against each other but rooting for each other too. It wasn't quite a zero-sum game where, like,

because it was obvious that the first GDS, four people had gotten jobs out of this. It was like, well, maybe we could all get jobs out of this, you know? Okay, so what happened was we invited you in two big things.

One is we had what we call the gauntlet, where you get interviewed in three different interviews by a bunch of different people. Basically, there's a design interview, a development interview, and a management interview. How did that go?

I think I was... I wasn't quite awake yet for the design interview, so I wasn't quite warmed up yet, but I felt like I did really well in the developer interview and the management interview. I was also interviewed that day for a couple of other jobs at Wizards.

So if I hadn't won the big internship working for you, I could have gotten some other types of jobs. Yeah, we try to maximize stuff. Since we flew you in, there were other people that were interested, and so we lined up as many interviews as we could. The idea being that you guys had proven yourself, and so we wanted to give you other options. And then we had a design challenge, a live design challenge. Oh man. Explain the live design challenge. Let me see.

It was, I remember we had to design cards for Future Sight. Right, so we were assuming it was Future Sight and we changed the card, but the card we changed already was locked in and it had a name that had to fit in a certain slot because of the collector numbers and had art to it. It had Steamflogger Boss's art, I think. Was it Steamflogger? Is that right?

Yeah. We had to design a new card for Steamflogger Boss. Right. Okay. That's right. It had to fit in between whatever card was before Steamflogger Boss and after Steamflogger Boss. Yeah, S, N, and S, W, or something. Right.

And this is something that actually happens, by the way. I've done this. Where, like, a card is really late. The art is done. The name, because of collector numbers, it's pretty much locked in. And so we have a little bit of wiggle room. And so they had to come up with a new card that matched the art, that fit, I guess it was Red Rare. it was a creature, the name had to work.

Do you remember what you tried to think of? I blew it. I blew this one. I totally messed it up. I remember I designed a card called Sockdolager, which I would definitely like to see a card called Sockdolager eventually, but not with Steamflogger Boss's art. I designed some kind of a burn spell, and it had nothing to do with Steamflogger Boss's art. Oh, also remember, because it was Future Sight, Steamflogger Boss was a future-shifted card. So it had to be a card that hinted...

Well, I'm trying to make it hard, come on. Right. You did better than you obviously thought you did. So one of the things that also, that I don't know if they realized at the time was it wasn't just the design work we were also seeing how they defended what they did and how they interacted with the other people and just sort of how they presented themselves

because one of the big things is the test kind of taught us you had the skills we were now trying to see did you fit in, would you be a good fit in R&D? Yeah, do we want to work with this guy? And the way it works is I am Donald Trump to the apprentice of the designer search.

And so the resulting internship reports to me. So it was my call. The other thing I should stress, as HR stressed to me, what we are doing is a job actually we're hiring somebody and there's all these rules we have to follow because it legitimately is a job

interview. And as a reporting manager, I had to single-handedly make the call because it's a job. I actually had to pick somebody and it was very hard because any three of you could have done it. I mean, Scott, for example, had been in the previous top eight, right?

Scott had back-to-back top eight in the Great Designer Search. The only person to do that. And both you and Sean had won two of the five challenges. And as history has borne out, we both worked out. Yes. And like I said, the Great Designer Search has proven to be really good at actually finding talented designers. But I had to make i had to make a call and in the end i decided that uh you had shown more potential during the course

of the great designer search um uh i really liked what you had done oh another another big plus for you maybe you won this week one of the challenges was i gave you somebody else's design to do and i gave you john Lugg's design. And John had walked into the tournament with what I call the front runner. Like I thought he had a really good premise. I thought he was playing in a very interesting space. And John ended up coming in fifth I believe. But anyway, I really liked how you sort of took his idea and found some new and innovative

ways to use it. And that is hugely important. A lot of designing is not necessarily taking your own ideas but taking other people's ideas. That's why we had the wiki. And I thought you did a really good thing of sort of giving John some shape that John did not. And I've done a lot of animation work before I came to Wizards and so that's very collaborative and you very much have to like don't draw this in your style draw this in somebody else's style because we're doing this project and everyone needs to draw the same way or the animation will look weird and if each scene is drawn in a different style

so you really have to you know let your ego go and just do what's best for the overall project and I certainly did my best when I was working on John's set during GDS. So what happened was you won, and when you won, you got the internship. And then you came and you worked for six months, and I assume that was probably nerve-wracking. It was a bit nerve-wracking, especially since I moved my family out here partway through the internship. So it was a big risk.

And then after six months, that's the funny thing. I think I was out. I think Mark Gloves actually told you that we decided to hire you. Yeah, I think that's true. Yeah, something happened when it happened. I wasn't even willing to get to tell you that we were going to hire you. But anyway, we tried you out for six months, and we were very happy. And so we hired you on full time.

I'm very happy. And it's funny, because when Ethan and I were first figuring out what to talk about, because Ethan and I have worked together on four sets now. So Ethan was on gatecrash design and you were on Friends design and you were on Romans design and now you're leading your very first set with Countrymen and all those sets. I led Gatecrash or half the time I led Gatecrash so I gave the reins to Gottlieb. I led Friends and then Nagel led Romans but both of us were on the team. And now you're leading Countryman, and I'm on the team, sort of as a little safety net for you. None of those sets have been released yet, so there wasn't very much we could discuss about them.

So maybe some future carpool. Maybe after Gatecrash comes out, you can come back, and we'll talk about Gatecrash. But anyway, we are here. I've just parked. So it was fun having you Carpool yeah it was a good time so it's funny I feel like we rushed the story

because there was so much to say so we will have to say more stuff in future podcasts but it was fun having you and it looks like it's time to go

make the magic cards