Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #1256 - Right For This Set
Episode Date: July 4, 2025In this podcast, I talk about how it's not enough for a mechanic to be good in a vacuum. ...
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I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time to let their drive to work.
Okay, so today's episode is called write for this set.
So I'm going to talk about one of the biggest challenges of making
mechanics.
And I think that one of the thought processes,
like what we do is we just go in our meetings and do our
exploratory design and vision design.
And we just find the absolute best mechanics and put them in
the set, and then we're done.
And that actually is not what we do.
So a lot of trying to find new mechanics.
I mean, clearly during the exploratory portion of design,
we're just testing ground and finding new areas.
And normally, there is something, there is some
mechanic that you are centering the set in.
And that mechanic usually can do whatever it wants,
because it's the most important.
It's the grounded center mechanic.
It's the heart of the set.
And whatever you put into the set first, you know, gets to be, um,
gets to sort of have the space it needs.
So there is one mechanic that goes in every set that we just wanted to be the best that can be in a vacuum,
because it is trying to capture the set.
But even then, that first mechanic we pick is chosen not because it's a great mechanic in a vacuum but
because it fits what we're trying to do. The key to design and this is sort of
the essence of today's show. Our job is not to design the best set sort of in a
vacuum. It's to design the best set given the parameters that we're doing and that
what like magic for example this is the 30 year we're doing. And that what, like magic, for example, this is the 30,
30 year, 32nd year, 32nd year of magic, right?
And we make a lot of sets.
And the answer is each set wants of its own identity.
That it's not like we're trying to make any one set better than the other.
We're just trying to make each set the best of its own thing, what it can be.
And our job as designers is to say, okay, what is this that trying to make each set the best of its own thing what it can be and our job as designers is to say
Okay, what is this that trying to do and we want to make sure we come up with a cool idea
You know, um arc planning spends a lot of time trying to come up with
You know world concepts and just general ideas that are just exciting and then in design
We need to capture that we need to figure out what it is
what the essence of it is,
and that a lot of the job of the design team
is then capturing that essence.
So let me talk about another big misconception.
When you talk to people about creative work,
there is this misconception among the average person
that the most important thing is the idea. That the idea is this amazing thing
and if you have the amazing idea then everything comes forth and really the
the genius, the genius is the idea. And the reality is it's not that a good idea
isn't valuable, it is, but an idea is just as good as the execution it takes to make it.
Uh, the idea that an idea is so like, this idea is so great that it just
explains how to make it is just not the way it works that a lot of what we do
in design is we have good ideas, but it's the execution.
Uh, and so I, I call today's episode right for the set because the job is not to make a to make mechanics
that just are universally good it's to make mechanics that fit and do what the
set is doing. That ideas are great but ideas inherently by themselves are kind
of worthless.
It's the execution of the idea that matters.
That is great to come up with, oh, here's a really cool idea for a set.
Great.
But you have to make the set.
And that a lot of what, to me, the genius of magic design is not coming up with a cool
idea, it is figuring out how to execute the cool idea. A good example, I remember Doug when he was working on the story for the Bolas arc,
had this giant finale that he loved.
And it was Nicole Bolas and his army of eternal zombies are fighting almost every planeswalker
known in a giant battle in Ravnica for the
fate of the multibirds. And that idea was a cool idea, right? That's not that
it wasn't a cool story concept. But that idea unto itself did not make War of the
Spark. It gave us a purpose, a drive, something to try to achieve, but how, you
know, figuring out how to do that, figuring out how to make a war of
planeswalkers and make that into something that was a magic set took a lot
in time and energy. And my point there is I think the true excitement to see
War of the Spark was not the idea of a planeswalker war,
was the execution of a planeswalker war.
The idea was cool, but figuring out how to make it happen
was actually the real hard work.
And that's a lot of magic design.
A lot of magic design is, look,
we have a lot of talented people
and we come up with a lot of cool general ideas.
I mean, I'm on the art planning team.
The idea is we want to come up with something that just inherently
sounds like a fun world and a fun idea, but that is that is just the starting
point. And a lot of what I'm talking about today is that the majority of our job in
designing mechanics is making the right mechanic for the right set. So let's
talk a little bit about exploratory design. So in exploratory
design we go wide not deep. The idea is we really want to sort of farm out and figure
out what are all the possibilities? What could we do with this theme? And like I said, we
have our three buckets, what I call the good, the bad, and the ugly. Good means this is
a good mechanic. Vision design could look at this.
Bad means we think it's a bad mechanic, vision design, save your time, we've saved you some energy,
you don't need to look at this, we've looked at it, it's not good.
And then the ugly means there's something here, there's something that has potential, but it's not there yet.
This isn't the version. So that's the thing
sometimes we go back to an exploratory design or sometimes vision design will
take a crack at it. But essentially the idea is usually when I leave exploratory
design, not always, but normally when I leave exploratory design what I want is after all
this exploration of what the space is, is me to figure out what is the essence of
what we're doing.
For example, I'll give a good example. So when we were doing Dominaria, so early
Magic, Dominaria was the home of, for the first ten years of Magic, with a few
exceptions, most of the vast majority of the sets were set on Dominaria. And we
would move around continents rather, like it took us a while to realize that kind
of we wanted each plane to have its own identity
So Dominaria sort of had this continent has this feel that continent has that feel
and so there was just a lot of huge variety that that
Early magic where we later on would just go to a new plane. We just went to a new part of Dominaria
So, okay
We really spent a lot of time and energy later
like figuring out how best to do planes. That planes shine when they have a strong identity.
Oh, this is the Gothic horror plane. This is the Greek mythology plane. You know, where
planes really had something that made them stand apart and have their own identity. But
we wanted to go back to Dominaria. Dominaria was the home of magic. It is where it all started.
And the challenge is we wanted to turn Dominaria into sort of a modern plane, meaning a plane
that had a unified feel.
But the problem was, oh, it was the home of Ice Age.
It was the home of Mirage.
It was the home of Onslaught.
It was like, there's just infinite worlds, the home of Odyssey.
There's all these worlds that
All took place in the one place
How do we how do we figure out what that is and we spend a lot of time in exploratory trying to figure out?
How do you do that?
And it wasn't till like the tail end of exploratory that we came up with the the flavor of history
the idea that this is a world whose future is defined by its
past. And the cool thing about it was not only did this world live through a lot of
things, the player base had lived through them too. There was the Brothers War. Well,
you played the set, you know, where that had happened. And you saw the revocations of that.
You were there for the Frexian invasion. Like, there's big earth-shattering, plane-shattering events.
But you, the player, were there. You were there when it happened. You got a chance to see it.
And so when we talk about these global events, it's not just us making up some random thing that happened.
It's a thing that we had, that itself had history. It had history in the game as well as history in the world.
That itself had history. It had history in the game as well as history in the world
And the idea that a lot of early magic took place there history was a really fun thing
And a lot of trying to figure out was figuring out. Okay, how do we make how do we make history come alive?
Right. That is a lot of the challenge history was a great theme
But okay, how do you?
mechanically bring forth history?
And a lot of that, you know, and the other thing to keep in mind is not only are we designing a magic set, we're designing a magic set in conjunction with sets around it. Like Dom and I
was a good example where one of the low-hanging fruit for history would be the graveyard.
There were sets right around it that really were messing in the graveyard and so we
didn't want to be messing in the graveyard. So sometimes for example the
answer that's the obvious answer isn't available to you because you are working
in conjunction with other sets. There's an ebb and flow to magic and so what comes
before it what comes after it can affect it. So the idea is you need to come up with
some unifying vision. For Dominaria, we really latched onto the concept of historic. The
idea of what are things that represent history? There are objects that represent history.
There are people that represent history. There are stories that represent history. There is, you know, there are stories that represent history. And so artifacts, legendary cards, and sagas, it tied it all together. It made history
into something that made it historical. And that is the key is you want to figure out what is the
essence of what you're doing and then you want to build around it. Now the other
thing that's important is we come up with a
lot of mechanics. We make lots and lots of mechanics. It is not the reason the
majority mechanics don't end up in the set we make them for is not that they're
not good mechanics. A. we only have so much space. But B. and then this is once
again today's theme, a lot of mechanics end up being not the best fit for the set
they're in. I'll give another classic example. So when I made
original Mirrodin, I love the design of original Mirrodin, I when we turned in
the set for design it was jam-packed. So much so that Bill Rose who was the head
designer at the time said Mark there's just too much in here you got to pull
something out. And so I looked at the set and I figured out,
the stuff in the set, what was the least
kind of interconnected to the other things?
And the answer was energy.
Energy was the theme, there was an artifact theme,
obviously in Ridge from Meriden,
and the idea that the different artifacts,
especially non-contracted artifacts
are using energy was cool.
It was a smaller theme, and one of the reasons I pulled it out was not only wasn't it as synergistic as other elements of the set, but I'm like it really deserved to have more space.
Like it kind of was crowded and didn't get enough space. So I go, you know what, let's pull it out. Let's wait. Let's wait to find the right set for it. And I believe it took 13 years. Now, that's not that we didn't look. It was actually in a couple of different designs at different points,
because we knew fundamentally it was a fun mechanic.
You know, just having a different resource that multiple parts can share was a very cool idea.
And it wasn't until we asked Kaladesh.
So Kaladesh originally started as the idea of a steampunk set that had a more optimistic vibe
that we sort of called Inventor World,
was sort of our shorthand for it. And the idea of can I tie all these things together,
like it ended up being the perfect place for energy. And energy was such a good fit that the
creative ended up building a lot of the story around it. That one of the reasons that it is a
planet of invention is because of the aether that's natural on the planet.
And so, you know, we did eventually find a home.
And so the idea here is,
you wanna figure out what your set's about,
and then you wanna figure out your primary mechanic.
That in any one set, there's one mechanic
that is going to, I call it the mechanical heart.
What it means is, it's kind
of the center of what goes on. And the other thing to remember that's really important is,
when you first get a set, you have an empty set when you first start. You have, and I've
talked to like, you have to design skeleton, like there's, we have a file, every cart in the file
is a whole, and we got to fill it. And then the whole idea is in vision design,
we are making a set as proof of concept
for the structure we are building.
When they actually build the set,
some of the cards will stay,
but they will redo a lot of the set
to get exactly what they need.
We're more building a set because it's a lot easier
to play a set and see a set and understand it
to give the concept.
And normally the structure we give them tends to stay,
some of the cards will stay,
but a lot of the cards will change usually.
But that first thing you put in the set,
it doesn't have,
it has the freedom of being whatever it wants to be.
There is no,
whatever space it needs to take, it can take.
And so, usually the thing that tends to be
the mechanical heart does two things. One,
is it something that sort of addresses the core essence of whatever we're trying to do. And second,
usually it's the bolder, it's the thing that we're trying that's a little more, you know,
every magic set we want to be bold. And normally main mechanic that the heart is the bold thing of the set
Not always there's exceptions
But like energy is a fine example is energy is a really cool concept, but it's a bold idea
It really requires a lot of work
There's a lot of infrastructure that has to go into doing that and so whatever the set may be
We find the thing that we really think is the heart.
You know, it mutates in Icoria, or spells matter in Strixhaven.
You know, you figure out the thing that really matters, and then you really want to build around it.
And what that is and how you build around it, usually there's some emotional center. Original Indistrad really wanted to play up the idea of leaning into the genre of Gothic
Horror and making you feel afraid as you play.
Ferris was leaning into Greek mythology and really like the sense of gods, heroes, and
monsters and wanted this sense of adventure that you build things over time, that you
accomplish something.
So each set has its own goals, its own feel that we want.
And the idea is we start by picking the thing
that is the most central to what we're doing.
In Indistrad, one of the things that's really key to us
was this idea of dark transformation.
So the double-faced cards were the thing we started with.
They're big, they're splashy, they're thematic.
In Theroseros for example we really want this idea of enchantments, it was
the touch of the god. And so very early on we had to figure out how to make
enchantments work, which led to stuff like Visto because you have to fit the
space. So anyway, the first set, the first mechanic you put in has free range
It can do whatever it wants
Now and even the first mechanic will sometimes influence the very nature of the set structure
For example, I'll just use Theros we wanted the idea that the gods that the feel of the gods is represented through enchantments
That the gods themselves were enchantments. That the gods themselves were enchantments,
the creations of the gods were enchantments.
A lot of that stemmed from the idea that
how do we make enchantments matter in a big way?
And one of the lessons is,
I'm gonna use limited to explain this,
but it applies to constructors as well.
In limited, you tend to have a 40-card deck,
about 16-in-a-cards are creatures,
about seven-in-a-cards are non-creatures.
That's not a lot. That if you're making-a-cards are creatures, about 7-in-a-cards are non-creatures.
That's not a lot.
That if you're making something that doesn't live in creatures, it only lives in those
7 cards, it is hard to make that matter in a vacuum.
And so what you need to do is you need to figure out how to spread that footprint.
In Theros, the idea was, okay, we want enchantments to matter.
Well, for starters, some of our creatures could be enchantments
In Shrix haven where there was an incident sorcery matters who said, okay Is there a way to have creatures?
generate
Instance and sorceries that's where lesson learned came from the idea that well, I'm a creature
I go and I fetch us in center of sorcery. So you I think the most of our sources
But the creature that card sort of came with the sorcery. So you, I think the most of the sorcerers, but the creature, that card
sort of came with the sorcery. And there's a bunch of different ways to do that. But
the first mechanic really is kind of finding its space. And like I said, it might redefine
things. You can restructure like the set structure, I talk about the set skeleton is, it's just
a default beginning point. You change it as the set of balls
So okay, so the very first thing comes in it defines what the set is it gives us a flavor
Sometimes it's flash, but it is it really
It takes over what it needs to take over and the idea the reason you start with that is you always want to start with
the thing
That is the most complicated and the most greedy of its structure.
Like I said, energy for example, there's a lot energy asks of you.
Whatever it is, pick whatever the core theme we're doing.
You want the thing that's greediest to be the thing that's most endemic of what the
set is.
But okay, you stick it in. So non-mechanic one is in the set. You've figured out places to put it,
you've made the cards for it, it's in the set. Next thing you do is you look at the other stuff
that you've done in exploratory or in early vision. And it might not even be new things,
maybe it's a repeat mechanic you want and you say okay
do I have something else that's really in damage to what I want to do that fits and
Maybe it cleanly fits in that's nice when that happens sometimes like well
It's not a need fit
But if we if we think of it this way or you know, like you can adjust things a little bit
But normally you you after after you do your main mechanic,
you have maybe one other thing that you probably
can find something that naturally fits,
or close to naturally fits.
But the key is, once again,
every time you stick something in the set
and you make cards for it,
you are filling up parts of the set,
which means that there are places
you can't stick new things or
it's full but you also leave holes so this set does these things but doesn't
do those things and that whenever you make a set there's just things that
every magic set needs you need card flow you need mana spouts you know you need
combat or something that cares about combat.
Like there's things that you need that just card flow means that you need a
means by which to get through cards.
Um, you want a man, an engine, meaning you want something that you can spend extra
man on, especially in the late game.
Uh, combat means look, comments, very, very core to part.
You want things to interact with combat in some way to make combat interesting.
You know, you want this component pieces that every magic set has to have.
And so what happens is you put the first thing in, it fills whatever needs to fill.
Then normally you put the second thing in and what you choose to put in, A, have to
fit the nature of the set, but B, has to also fit in the parameters.
And that's how we're getting into the core today is
really a lot of design work is not just making something, it is making something to fit the needs that you have.
So you have to find the first mechanic which is endemic of your theme,
then your second mechanic usually is something that
naturally fits in the file and
reinforces what you're doing. Usually after that, after you have your first two
mechanics, and maybe after your first mechanic, what comes next usually is, okay,
now we have to make things that fit in the space we have. Sometimes, sometimes
you can find a third thing that fits, but usually what happens, and there's a point in vision where you figure out your main thing,
maybe get your secondary thing, and then it's like, okay.
And the key to that point of the design is you start to say, what am I missing?
Do I need ways to spend mana? Do I need card flow? Do I need combat?
You know, are my mechanics living on permanents and I need spell mechanics?
Are my mechanics living on spell and I need permanent mechanics?
What is the set doing and what is the set not doing?
What the set is not doing will very much guide where you go.
And that a good chunk of design is
trying to fill the gaps, is understanding what it is your set needs and then finding it.
And that can, there's many different ways that can happen.
One of my favorite stories, which is I will say the easiest way, so we were on Kaladesh and we had a meeting where, uh, what's a very normal meeting is where you get in
a meeting, you get, get at your whiteboard and you say, okay, here's what we're missing.
Here are the gaps in the files.
We need another mechanic and here is what we need structurally.
So for example, uh, we got energy very early on.
We got, um, vehicles were very early on. We got vehicles pretty early on.
And really, we were looking for one smaller mechanic.
And we wanted to be something that I think we were open
where it could go.
Because energy fit well on spells, I think we were
looking for something that went on permanence.
So anyway, I'm on the board, and I'm writing. I go, OK, we want something that goes on spells. I think we were looking for something that went on permanents. So anyway, I'm on the board and I'm writing. Okay, we want something
that goes on creatures. The set has the theme of caring about plus and plus
encounters. It also has a theme of caring about token creatures. So if we
get a mechanic that goes on creatures and either could care about plus and plus
encounters or care about tokens, that would be really valuable and
Then while I'm writing this on the board. I literally have a moment where I said
or if it could care about plus and plus encounters and
Tokens that'd be great and then I had this epiphany where I literally made fabricate
I was walking through what we needed so fabricate for those who don't know is a mechanic goes on creatures
And it says okay fabricate and it's a number you can choose to either put that many plus one plus one counters on the creature
Or make that in a one one artifact servo
artifact creature tokens
And it literally was just me defining what we needed and realizing as they laid it all out
But that itself spoke to me and was a mechanic.
Now it doesn't always cut. It's not every set where as I'm describing the problem
I solve it while describing it that happened once.
And so that is a lot of what design is.
Is you have to find the thing that fits the role that you need.
Not that it's a good mechanic.
We make a lot of good mechanics.
Oh, and as the essence of energy, the story of energy was, is if we make a good mechanic,
and I like to say, magic is a hungry monster.
We have a lot of magic sets to make.
If you make a good mechanic, I guarantee you we will find space for it.
No, not always, you know, and some mechanics,
so for example, here's a mechanic story.
So many years ago, we made a Star Wars trading card game.
The main structure of the set was designed
by Richard Garfield, I was on the team with him,
and then I led the first set.
And so Richard's inspiration for the Star Wars trading card
game was he wanted to make a trading card game that kind of functioned like a mini-shirt
game. And so there was a lot of die rolling and the real short, I won't go too deep in
this, but there were three areas of battle. There was the ground, there was space, and
there was personal. Because if you watch Star Wars movies, there tend to be three battles that go on at one time.
Those are the three battles.
Anyway, some of the things were really large, because Star Wars, as a science fiction thing,
had some very large items.
And so we came up with a way... you had so many sort of game units,
you could use each turn to do things and some of the ships were
so big that you couldn't build them in one turn. So we had a mechanic that let you, you
could sort of exile it and you could put counters on it and then when you put enough things
on it, it paid it off and then you got it. So we actually made a mechanic inspired by
that called layaway. And the way layaway works was you put a card from your hand face down,
outside, and then for every one mana you paid for it, you could put a plus one plus one
counter on it. And then at any time, you could cast that card from exile, assuming you paid
for all the mana that wasn't accounted for, meaning every counter on it made it one generic mana cheaper.
So you always had to pay for the colored mana.
And it might be nothing but the colored mana, or maybe there's still more to pay off, but
the idea is you could pay it off over time.
So we were working on Call Time, and there was a theme in Norse mythology about omens,
about sort of the future, reading the future. And so we were
talking about that and so I then brought up the layaway. So like one of my big
jobs as a head designer is we come up with a lot of mechanics and there's
really no great system to record the mechanics. Not that they're not written
down but you know let's say we had a master book we wrote down every
mechanic we thought was good that maybe one day we'd use.
It just released this giant volume and it wouldn't be something that would be easy to
process.
So a lot of my job as the guy who's just been around forever is when we hit an area that's
close to something we've done.
Much like when we were working on early Lord of the Ring, we needed something.
I'm like, hey, here's a mechanic that we were going to put in the second Dominaria that never happened because of Hidden Core Set
called Leader. And Leader sort of evolved into what ended up becoming The Ring Corrupts You,
much like Layaway kind of evolved into Fortel. Sometimes the mechanics and energy come back
whole cloth. Sometimes they inspire and get changed.
But the idea essentially is their ideas don't get lost, ideas get saved.
And so a lot of mid to late design, or at least as far as the structural part of the
design, is figuring out what you're missing, figuring out what the gameplay needs.
Because the other thing I've talked a lot about is magic from game to game, there's
a lot of overlap.
That you don't have to change much in magic to make it feel very differently.
Even just caring about one thing, like I always use landfall.
Landfall just says I care about when I play my land. Hey, I play land every game
It's land's pretty useful
But you know if you have set with landfall all of a sudden when and how I play my land just takes on a slightly different
A different thing or morbid of the kind of the made in original Innistrad where you care about when things die
So all of a sudden maybe I'm attacked with features that I would never normally attack with
But my opponent doesn't know my bluffing or do I want it to die because I have more of it? Like it becomes, it
is adds an extra layer. But the reality is you don't need to add much to add that extra layer to make it interesting.
So I would say 80-85% of magic from set to set is identical.
That there's a core aspect of what we do. So a lot of what we're doing in normal magic design is just making a magic set that plays like a magic set that does
Magic set things. Yes, there's always some difference and that difference matters and we lean into that difference
That's what dictates kind of what the first mechanic is
But we
Really are trying to make sure that we deliver on the magic experience.
So a lot of magic design is saying, I need to do the things I always do, but I need to
be synergistic with my set, and I need to be in the holes of the set.
I need to make my next mechanic that fits where the set needs it.
And that's kind of the big point of today is that I think more magic, more magic design
is about meeting criteria than it is about blue sky design.
So blue sky design is what we prefer to make something.
Maybe you have an impetus, maybe like here's the theme, but you really don't have a lot
of restrictions. And that is fun and exploratory gets to do blue sky
design and I do enjoy blue sky design. But most of magic is not blue sky design. Most
of magic is we know what we're doing. In fact, we have some of it done already and we got
to figure out what else fits. What works here? What is right for this set.
And that there's a lot of skills required for that.
One is just having a good understanding of magic mechanic basics, right?
Of understanding what makes for good magic play.
There's a reason we want card flow,
there's a reason we want, you know, outputs for your mana,
there's a reason we want combat oriented things.
The reason we want to space out spells between permanent and non-permanent.
Like all these things I'm talking about,
like we've made enough magic sets that we understand the nature of what we're trying to do.
And the fun part about it, like I'm saying, this is my 30th year making magic and I'm not bored yet.
And the reason I'm not is every magic set is its own puzzle.
It is not as if, like magic sets are not take the best mechanic we have and put it in the set and call it an A.
It is, and this is kind of why I was interested in talking about this topic, that one of the true skills of becoming a great magic designer is learning how to make a great magic set.
And the key to making a great magic set is not the three best mechanics you can think of in a
vacuum. That will not lead to a great set. That what makes magic sets shine is the synergy, is the
connectiveness, is the idea that mechanic A and mechanic B both are doing something but they work together or they care about each other or the decisions you make with one would influence decisions you make with the other.
That a lot of the dynamics of what makes a really cool magic set is that the component pieces speak to each other. For example, another big thing we have to worry about is we want to make draft environments. In order to make draft environments, you
need to make sure that colors speak to multiple themes. That if I make one card
and only one archetype wants that one card, that archetype will get that card
every game, and that means that their play experience will be very repetitive.
If every time I play theme X, I always
play card Y, well then it's just going to play out a lot the same. And so what we
need to do is all our themes have to appeal to different archetypes in what
we're doing. Okay, here's a red card. Well at least two archetypes need to want
this card. It's great if three do. It awesome if four do and so a lot of what you're trying to do
when making a set is
blend things together is make those synergies is make things such that the the set talks to itself and
The other thing that's really interesting is you know
You guys get to see the finished magic sets
So one of the things that's really informative,
it's something that the average Magic player
doesn't get to experience is,
I have played a lot of Magic Sets
that aren't, that don't have synergy.
I've played a lot of Magic Sets
that were trying things that didn't work.
And one of the things that really makes Magic Magic,
one of the special sauce of Magic is that there is a feel that magic sets have
like one of the things that's really interesting is
that
You can kind of tell when a magic heart is a magic heart right that there is a certain
Je ne sais quoi there's there's a certain essence to how magic cards work
There's a certain rhythm to them. There's a certain just a how magic cards work. There's a certain rhythm to them.
There's a certain, just a general function.
And that comes from us learning over time how to make magic cards and what kind of magic
cards really shine.
And that, I guess, is, I've gotten to work here, so I'm going to wrap up today.
That is kind of the point of today.
And that, you know, the number one thing, and that the number one thing about design,
the number one lesson about design,
that takes time to learn, by the way.
When you first get to Wizards and you are on a team
and you make something, and it is amazing, it is awesome,
it just plays great and it's great,
you wanna get that into a magic set
as soon as humanly possible.
I made a great thing.
Let's put this great thing into a set.
And one of the hard parts is,
look, maybe you did make a great thing,
but that great thing might not be a great fit for now.
And the idea that this great thing has to wait
until we can find a place for it.
Now be aware, like I said,
it took 13 years to find energy, right?
It sometimes takes time
to find the right place for something and
When you're new you want it now, right? You came up with let's put it in the set and the idea that well
That's cool, but it doesn't quite fit what we need right now
That that takes a little while getting used to and that
You know, I've talked about this a lot in my writing
You know the there's the same basic premise in writing, which is every single thing you do has to
serve the story you're in.
Every scene has to serve the story, every line of dialogue has to serve the story.
It's not just about making something cool that doesn't necessarily have an organic feel.
And that I think is true in any creative endeavor.
This is not unique to magic.
It's not magic is the one thing that needs to do that.
Everything needs to do that.
That's the essence of a creative vision is understanding the larger scope of what you're
doing and then needing that larger vision.
That's what we're doing.
That's sort of the essence of what we need to do in magic.
And that is why we don't just design the best card, we design the right card.
We design the right mechanic.
We design the mechanic that is right for this set.
So anyway guys, I hope you enjoyed my sort of peek into magic design today.
Sometimes I get a little more esoteric.
Today was a little more esoteric.
But hopefully it gives you a little insight into the way we think and what
we have to care about. But anyway guys I'm now at work so we
all know what that means. It means the end of my drive to work.
So instead of talking magic it's time for me to be making magic.
I'll see you all next time. Bye bye.