Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #126 - Lenticular Design, Part 2

Episode Date: May 30, 2014

Mark concludes his podcast on Lenticular Design.

I'm pulling out of the parking lot. We all know what that means. Actually, we probably don't all know what that means. It means I dropped my daughter off at school today. But, it still is time for drive to work. So today, well yesterday, last podcast, I started talking about lenticular design, which is a concept that we've been working on a couple different years, based out of our work on New World Order. And last time I talked about sort of what lenticular design was,

but I hadn't finished, and so today I'm going to talk about sort of the rules for using lenticular design. What does it mean to actually, how do you use it? And there are six rules. This is based on an article that I had written very shortly ago, published to me, but since this is many weeks later, over a month ago for you. Okay, so let's start with the very first

rule. Rule number one is some complexities are invisible to inexperienced players. So the thing I explained last time was that there are three types of complexity. There's comprehension complexity. Can you read the card and understand what it does? There is board complexity. Can you understand how the card on the battlefield interacts with other cards on the battlefield? And there is strategic complexity. Do you understand how best to optimize this card to win?

So what we find is that comprehension complexity is more important to the beginning player than board complexity, which is more important to the beginning player than board complexity, which is more important than strategic complexity. So the way I like to describe this is, imagine a new player has a sphere of awareness, and that when they first start playing, it's really, really focused. In fact, when a beginner plays, most of their attention goes on their hand, because the question they're asking is,

can I play a card? When you first start learning magic, that's the first thing you can tend to be focused on. You know, it's like, okay, it's my turn. Okay, do I have a land? I play a land. Okay, can I play a card? And in fact, we do what we call focus testing, which is we take players and we put them in a room, and we watch them behind a two-way mirror, or sometimes we're interacting with them. Sometimes they have never played Magic and they're learning for the first time. Sometimes they've played, but they're beginners. And anyway, we learn from them by watching them and see what they do. It's very educational. So one of the things very beginning players do is they're just very focused on, what can I do? What can I play out of my hand?

Eventually, they start thinking about, oh, what do I have in play? Can I attack with the things I have in play? Should I be blocking? They start becoming aware of the battlefield. But then, it's mostly their side of the battlefield. Eventually, they start thinking of all the battlefield. And then, after that, they start thinking about the opponent.

The opponent really has a second thought until they get comfortable with their own hand and their own play and what's going on in the battlefield. So what happens is, the first thing they care about is comprehension. Can I understand what cards are doing? When I'm focused on cards in my hand, I read them and go, what does that do?

Now, note, they're not really saying, why would I do this? It's just, what does it do? So, for example, one of the things you'll see with beginners is, let's say you give a beginner a shock, which is our deal two damage to target creature or player. What'll happen is on turn one, let's say they have a mountain,

they play a mountain, they look at their hand, they see they have a card that only costs one red, they will read it. Now, odds are, if they're a beginner, the word target will throw them a little bit. But at some point, they figure out that, oh, this can do two damage to a creature or player. They look. There's no creatures. So they go, okay. They do two damage to their opponent, and they're very happy

because their opponent goes from 20 down to 18. So one of the things, by the way, that we've learned about beginning players is they overvalue life, and the reason is the goal of the game is to get your opponent from 20 to 0. So, at first blush, it seems like every time I'm lowering my opponent's life total, I'm advancing the game and getting

to the point where I'll be winning, and every time my life total goes down, oh, well, that's a problem, because if I get to 0, I lose. And so, the key we found for beginners is they just overvalue life. We take advantage of that sometimes. Sometimes when we're making cards for beginners,

we play into the fact they really enjoy or really value getting life, both gaining life and taking life away from the opponent. But the point, though, is that the players early on will do whatever it is, like, can I play this card? Yes, I can play it and do it. Even if what they're doing is not beneficial or not,

I guess not beneficial is the wrong word, but even if what they're doing might not be strategically the best move, they're not thinking about that. What they're thinking about is, do I understand, can I play this game? Do I understand what the cards do? Now, at some point, they advance beyond that

and they start thinking about the board, about the battlefield. And at that point, they start going, oh, well, what do I have in play? What does that mean? Now, early on, what we also find is beginners tend to be very hesitant to attack. In fact, they're very scared of taking any kind of damage, and they are very afraid of losing creatures by attacking. So what we tend to find is, if your opponent has blockers,

a lot of beginners will not attack. And if your opponent attacks you, they tend to get in the way because they don't want to take damage. Pretty much what they've learned is that going down is bad, and so they do what they can to avoid it. So what happens is, eventually they start realizing the importance of board, of what's going on on the board,

and the interactions between the things on the board. That takes a little bit of a while. And understanding whether you can attack or not. I think I've told this story once before, but it's worth repeating. And yes, I like repeating stories, if you haven't figured that out. Is when you play,

what I used to teach people Portal, it gave me a chance to play with really, really simple creatures. You know, the Portal was an intro version of Magic we made a long time ago. The creatures pretty much were vanilla. A few of them had enter the battlefield effects and there were a few basic, basic keywords like flying.

But pretty much it's like, oh, I just have vanilla creatures. And in between teaching sessions, like we go to music festivals and different places where we can teach people, the teachers would play each other and we just had portal decks to play with. And it was very intriguing how much decisions there were to make

on the most basic of basic cards. You know, I have a couple vanilla creatures to play and you have a couple vanilla creatures. What's the right thing to do? And it was interesting watching how just making those kind of decisions forget any complications there's no instance no enchantments no artifacts you know no activated abilities just really nuts and bolts how much stuff's going on there and that sometimes one of the things that's very easy to forget when you are an advanced player is how you've incorporated all the lessons you have and

things that at one point were a struggle, you've just learned how to do. I talked about this last podcast. So anyway, the reason this first lesson is important is the comprehension complexity is much more important as a beginning player than board complexity, which is much more important than strategic complexity. So the beautiful part of this is,

pretty much for a long time, in fact, I will say almost as long as they are beginners, in fact, one of the signs that you start to see strategic complexity is you're no longer a beginner. So if we're trying to make sure that we don't want to make the game complex for beginners, strategic

complexity is awesome because strategic complexity is mostly hidden. It's invisible to a beginning player. That they're not even thinking of those terms. And so that is very, very valuable when we talk about lenticular design is, well, if I want to stick stuff that is for the advanced player but unseen by the beginning player,

oh, well, there's an entire realm, strategic complexity, that is pretty much invisible. Okay, rule number two. Cards have to have a surface value. Okay, so the way to think about this is imagine if i if you will um in the far-flung future uh we eventually technology exists such that you can have an item that looks like a magic card and feels like a magic card but in fact the face of it is you can think of it like a computer screen, but something in which it has the ability, like a computer screen, to change.

So you can imagine in the far-flung future that there are magic cards that look and feel like magic cards, but you have the ability to program so any physical card can become any magic card. Now imagine, because it's the far-flung future and we can, that there is something in the card that is able to sense who's holding it. And it knows, for whatever reason, how experienced you are as a Magic player. So imagine if a beginner picks up a card

and it shows the beginner a card that makes sense to them, that is something the beginner wants. And then, when an intermediate player picks up the card, it shows something that makes sense for them that's a little more testing than the beginner card, but not so advanced. And when the advanced player picks it up, it's a very advanced card. Lenticular design,

the basic premise is you're doing that, except you don't have the luxury of the far-flung future and cards that just can change. And what that means is each person, when they look at a card, looks through their own lens, how they see it. And one of the things that I'm trying to explain

about lenticular design is that different players will look and see cards differently. They don't see it as the same thing. My example, this is from later in the article, but I'll grab it because it makes a good point here. It was the card of Rescue from the Underworld.

Okay, so to the beginner, they look at that, and that looks like a flavorful way to reanimate a dead creature. Oh, I see. I'm going to play the spell, and then I get a creature that's in the graveyard, out of the graveyard, and now I... And everything else is just flavors. Like, oh, I get it. He went down to rescue his friend, and he brought him back.

But as far as the player sees, it's just a way to get a dead creature out of the graveyard. Now, the intermediate player looks at it, and the intermediate player says, oh, well, not only does it get a creature from the graveyard, but it also takes the creature in play, it sacrifices them and brings them back. And so they go, oh, well, it's kind of like a black flicker.

Okay, I can do some neat things with that. By choosing which creature I sacrifice, I could not only get back a creature that's valuable, but I also can do something with a creature that I'm removing for a short period of time. Now the advanced player gets the card and they notice it's an instant. They notice that there's a lot of combat shenanigans, things they can do. They realize that not only can they take advantage of what card is going away

and what card is coming back, but they can tie those together so that the two of them create some effect larger than the sum of any one card. And they can even build their deck taking advantage of the fact that this would let those combos exist. And the beauty of it is every player, when they look at it, is seeing something that makes sense to them. So the lesson of lesson number two is, if a beginning player doesn't understand what the card is doing, and like I said last time, it's not just a matter of strategically understand.

Sometimes it's just like, I don't know why you would use this. Like one with nothing, my example from the last podcast, which is, yes, they can read the words and understand the words, but they don't understand what it means. Whenever the player doesn't get why the card,

what function the card has, that what you have to do when you're designing a card is you got to make sure there's a sheen on that card that the beginning player goes, ah, I get it, it's such and such. You know, they look at Rescue from the Underworld,

they go, oh, oh, I get it, I'm getting a creature back from the graveyard. Everything else just seems like flavor to them and they don't realize, oh, well, hidden in that,

that mechanics is a lot of interesting space. But they don't realize that yet and that's fine. Because the thing is, as long as a beginner can look at a card and come up with some reason why you play that card, they're happy. So here's a parallel that I'm going to give. Imagine you were a spy. See, you're going to the far-flung future today, you're going to be a spy. There's so

much role-playing you're going to do in this podcast. Okay, so imagine you're a spy, and you need to have a little hidden camera that you want to carry with you. Now, if you just make a small miniature object and carry it around with you, people are going to go, ooh, what's that object? And maybe they might go, hmm, is that a camera? But if you make that little miniature object look like something, let's say you make it look like a book, no one's going to question whether the book is a camera because they see a book. Oh, it's a book. They're happy.

You know, and that this is the same way, which is if you want to have your little, you know, if you want to have your card be something greater, it still has to have some appearance for the low end player. So they go, oh, I get it, it's this. And if not, then they start looking to figure out what it is, and that's when problems happen. Now, I'm not saying, by the way, that we don't make cards just for advanced players. We do.

We don't do it at Common. That we make cards, for example, there are rare cards with lots of, lines and lines and lines of text that the beginning player picks up, looks at it, goes, not for me, and puts it on. But at Common,

and this is where the particular design shines, is as much as we can, we want to make sure that cards that have value for the advanced player are also useful and not shunned by the beginning player. Because I don't want beginning players to pick up a card and go, oh, not for me, when it's a Common.

The Commons need to be for them. And so the lesson here is you have to make sure when you are designing complexity and trying to hide it, that the thing that the card is doing that's not the complex part has a function and the person playing it gets it and sees it and understands what it is. Because beginning players are not seeking out the complexity. It is not what they want complexity. In fact, the last thing

they want is complexity. When they get simple answers, they will latch on to the simple answers. They desperately crave simple answers. One of the hardest things about learning to play Magic is there's this feeling early on of, do I understand what's going on? Do I get it? And one of the things that about learning to play Magic is there's this feeling early on of, do I understand what's going on? Do I get it? You know?

And then one of the things that we want to make sure is, as much as possible, that the player goes, oh, yeah, okay, I got it. Okay, I got it. Oh, yeah, yeah, I get it. I get it. And that makes them continue. Every time they hit something and they don't understand it, that's another exit where they can go, eh, this game's not for me.

This game is too hard. Okay, let's get to rule number three. So rule number three is experience is connected to how far ahead a player thinks. Okay, so I talked about the sphere of awareness, which is when you play,

how much you're aware. So before I talked about sort of the distance, like my hand, my battlefield, your battlefield, my opponent's hand. And then even farther than that,

by the way, is my opponent. One of the things you'll find about really good players is that the best players, it's not even about what the cards are or what the play is. It's about who the opponent is. You know, Mike Turian, a Hall of Famer who I work with, used to be at R&D, now is an organized play, or is on digital media. One of the things that he talks about is that it's not just enough to know what the cards are. You have to look at your opponent and think about what did

he think about? Oh, he paused before he did something. Well, why would he pause? What cards would make him have to think at that point? And that helps you pinpoint what he has and what he's thinking about. Now, that's very, very high in play. Now, the other way that the sphere of awareness expands is time. So, for example, a beginning player is thinking about now. Now. Not later in the turn. Not at the end of the turn. Not next turn.

Now. Here's my hand. What can I do right now? And, for example, what we find with beginners is they really like to have the turn sequence, which they put right next to them and go, okay, I'm doing this. And they do that. And they consult again. Okay, now I'm doing this. And they do that. You know, they're very in the now. Now, really good players. So I'm going to tell a story about Mark Justice. So for those who might not know who Mark Justice is, early on, if you would ask players, right around the time when the Pro Tour began,

if you asked players, in fact, I did this. So I did an interview at the very first Pro Tour where I said to people, if you could end up in the finals, who would you want to play in the finals? And what I found was people wanted to play the person they thought of as being the best Magic player. The most awesome finals would be them

versus the best magic player. The most awesome finals would be them versus the best magic player. And the interview, I believe 80 to 90% of the people all named the same one person. Because at that time, at that moment, that person was considered by the vast majority of magic players to be the best magic player on the planet. A man named Mark Justice. Now previously, Mark had won the Southwest Regionals, had gone and won the U.S. Nationals, and then had come in third at Worlds that year. He would later go on to top eight the very first Pro Tour. He would

that year come in second at Worlds. Oh, sorry. He had done top three at Worlds two times in a row. So before the Pro Tour started, he had won a Regionals, won a U.S. Nationals, and then top third Worlds twice in a row. And then he came to the very first Pro Tour and top eighted. And then the very next Worlds he came in second, almost

won. In fact, it's funny, if you had asked people if you told them in time, one day there was going to be a Hall of Fame, but Mark Justice wouldn't be in the Hall of Fame, people would say, well, why are you having a Hall of Fame? Anyway, so Mark Justice, one of the best people to ever play the game. One of the things that I was fascinated by is Mark had a natural flair for the game, that he had an intuition. Now, what we find is that he takes the players, the really good players, and divides them up.

Some of them just have a natural intuition for what's the right play to do, and John Finkel's a good example of that. And some are good because they just work so hard that they learn every possible thing and they playtest every possible thing. Randy Buehler was his way, that Randy would test like nobody's business.

And the reason he was so good is he didn't get into a situation he wasn't familiar with because he did so much prep work that he knew everything. So anyway, Mark Justice was one of the intuitive ones. And so one of the things that I love about Mark and watching him play was, and this is something in general about really good

players, is he would make a move on turn four that would win him the game on turn 14. He would do something that you have no idea what he's doing. Here's what I remember. He came down, there's some big event down, you know, in California. I used to live in LA.

And so he's playing and he's in the finals. And I'm looking at his hand, and he has a few things in play, a wall, but not much. Not much land in play at all. And in his hand is a bunch of land and a bunch of spells. And he's discarding spells.

Drawing, getting up to eight, discarding a spell. And he's very frustrated, and I have no idea what's going on. Because he could use the land, he has land in his hand, there's spells he could cast. I don't understand what's going on. He could use the land. He has land in his hand. There's spells he can cast. I don't understand what's going on.

And as the game progresses, little by little, he's discarding the spells. And finally, in turn 14, he draws a land, drops the last spell he has in his hand, which I think was Land's Edge, which is a red enchant world from Legends that allows players to discard their hand, discard the land from their hand

to do damage to the opponent. So he plays Land's Edge, has a land of seven cards, throws him 14 damage, defeats the opponent. And, like, I was talking to him after, and, like, basically what happened was his opponent had answers to all his threats. And the only route to victory he had in his deck was the thing where he hit him all at once

with the Land's Edge for 14. So he nibbled him down to 14 exactly and then played this game where he hit him all at once with the land's edge for 14. So he nibbled him down to 14 exactly and then played this game where he looked like he was stalled on land so that his opponent didn't understand what he was doing and got to the point where he could at one burst just kill his opponent. You know, and

anyway, beginner players are very focused on the now. Advanced players are very focused on the future. Advanced players are very focused on the future. And so one of the things when making lenticular cards is that the function that is the now function is something that the beginning player has to care about. But the fact that the card has potential for long-term function

means you can hide that kind of complexity in the card. And so a lot of the way it works is the newer player will take the immediate effect and the ramification. So one of the big things, for example, we learned is enter the battlefield effects are really, really lenticular. And the reason is, really what an enter the battlefield effect is, I mean, on a creature, is it's a spell stapled to a creature. And the thing that's interesting about it is sometimes what's important about the card is the spell,

and sometimes what's important about the card is the creature. And so if I have a card, for example, that later in the article I showed Venerable Monk, which, by the way, is not the most exciting example of a lenticular card, but I'll give an example here of where it can be. So the card is, it's a 2-2 for, I think, 2-W. You gain two life. Most of the time, you just want the body.

It's a, you know, it's a 2-2, right? And so, look, if you can get it out early enough, it helps you attack, and the life gain's a nice little bonus, but really it's just a body. But what happens is, sometimes in a game, what can happen is the ground gets gummed up, that the board is all about your evasive creatures,

and when you play, there's this concept called the clock, which says that I have to be aware of how many turns before I defeat my opponent, and how many turns before my opponent defeats me. Well, if my clock is faster than my opponent's clock, well, then I'm going to win. So what happens is, as people are watching the clock, as they get close to winning, they start making moves they would never make early on, because they know that the win is in sight. So what will happen is, late in the game, if the ground's gummed up, the gain two life is much more important than the two two. And so an experienced player will hold on to that.

They won't play it, because what they want to do is wait for the opponent to make a decision based on life totals, not knowing that you have the ability to go up two life, and then at the last possible moment, you change the clock on them, so that they have made a mistake, because they were accounting for something that wasn't true.

And in general, that is true of almost all ETP creatures, inter-thealth creatures, is that you have to understand what's more important at the time, the spell or the creature. And that makes a very good lenticular card because the beginning player, they don't think about the separation.

They just play the creature when they're capable of playing the creature. So I have two and a white. Okay, I'm playing Venable Monk. Ooh, what happened? Surprise! I get a little life. They're not thinking about the ramifications of that.

They're just thinking like, ooh, they get a little surprise. Which leads us into rule four. Nobs tend not to think of causality. So I talked about this example last podcast, which is if you have a Fechter and Goblin, which is a B, 1, 1, 1, 1 for black, that when it dies,

target creature gets minus 1, minus 1. The gaming player will never think to block a 2-2 with that because you can block it, it's a 1-1 creature, it'll do 1 damage when it dies, you can do minus 1, minus 1, to the creature that's already taking damage, it'll kill the creature. I've watched time and time again where they'll chump block a 2-2 with a 1-1 and then use the Feftrin Goblin to kill another 1-1 creature rather than the 2-2. And the reason is that much as a sphere of awareness,

they're not aware of time, they're not aware of space, they're not also aware of causality early on. That they don't think of, oh, well, this death trigger, and death triggers are another good example of lenticular design, that a beginning player is just like, I have a death trigger, it's like a little surprise. When it dies, I don't know when that happens,

but when it dies, I'll get something. Where an experienced player says, no, no, no. The fact that it's death does something and I can manipulate that information.

I might manipulate it because I make it die when I want it to. I might manipulate information because I know my opponent doesn't want it to happen. So maybe I attack the creature knowing

that there's a disincentive from blocking it. But anyway, novices don't think of that causality. And so when you are building stuff in Lenticular Design, you can take advantage of that. That's why we, for example,

are doing a lot more enter the battlefield and death triggers in common because for the most type, they're nice, simple, vanilla creatures to the beginning player. And that to the advanced player, they have a lot more depth than that.

Okay. Number five. Players will try to use the cards to match the perceived function. Okay, so let me talk about the Venomal Monk and Aven Cloudchaser. Is that the card I talked about? Yeah, Aven Cloudchaser. So Venomal Monk, as I said before, 2w2-2, enters the battlefield,

gain two life. Aven Cloudchaser is a 3w2-2 flyer when you enter the battlefield, destroy a target enchantment. Now the Venomal Monk, they look enters the battlefield, gain two life. Aven Cloudchaser is a 3w22 flyer when he enters the battlefield, destroy target enchantment. Now the Venom Monk, they look at the card, they see the two life, they go, okay, whatever, I like life, and they play the card. The problem with Aven Cloudchaser is they look at it and they go, oh, it destroys enchantments.

Ooh, destruction, that's important. Oh, I better wait for an enchantment. Now the good player says, oh, well, sometimes I care about the enchantment removal, but sometimes, you know what, the 2-2 flyer is way more important than the enchantment removal. And you'd go, oh, isn't that good? It's decisions that the advanced player would see, the beginning player wouldn't.

The reason this card isn't good is that the beginning player understands the value of destroying things, and so they see that as so important, they won't play it until they're able to destroy something. So they might sit with this 2-2 fly in their hand when it could be helping winning the game, because the thing they feel they need to do to play it isn't there. And so you have to be careful.

Once again, I'm going to talk about surface value. What does the player think this card does? Destruction's so important, they look at a 2-2 flyer with Destroy Enchantment, and they think, like, oh, it's a Destroy Enchantment card with a little bonus, so I get a 2-2 flyer. Rather than, oh, the 2-2 flyer a lot of the time is the most important part, and the Destroy Enchantment card is a little bonus like a 2-2 flyer, rather than, oh, the 2-2 flyer a lot of the time is the most important part, and the Destroy Enchantment is secondary. So that's an example where the

Fenrir Monk makes a good card, where the Aiden Cloudchaser is not quite as good a card, because the beginning player is using it incorrectly. What they think it does does not lead them in the right direction. And once again, that's very important. What the beginning player thinks it does is important, because they need to have a plan that every

card has to have a function for every player. You know, when players look through their own lens, the card has to have meaning for them. Okay, so rule number six is let the players play the game they want to play. This is a fine general design lesson in general, game design.

The key here is that each player has in their mind what they think the game is about. And how a beginner sees a game of Magic is much, much different than how an advanced player sees it. To the beginner, Magic has much fewer things going on. And the reason, it has to be that way. That they could not handle the number of decisions

that an advanced player makes, a beginner couldn't handle. And once again, remember, this is important to understand. It's not that the beginning player is incapable of decisions, more so than the advanced player. It's that the advanced player has incorporated a lot of decision making. Both the beginning player and the advanced player are only capable of thinking so much. The human brain can do so much. The difference is, when you do something multiple times, you learn how to do it, and you shortcut it in your brain mentally

so that you don't have to think about it as much. And here's a good example of keywords. A lot of people, when you're an advanced player, you look at keywords and go, why don't you keyword everything? Keywords just makes it easier. Because you're like, I understand the idea that putting a car from the top of your library into your graveyard

is a concept known as milling. So if you just say mill one, I get it. Much easier. I don't have to read all those words. But the problem is, for a beginning player, their vocabulary isn't a known thing yet. So when they come and encounter it, if they say mill one, they're like,

that's not English, what does that mean? And now they have to learn what that means. Now yes, eventually they can learn what that means, but the point is, there's only so much they're capable of learning. When you're introducing a game to an audience, they are invested in some learning, but there's a barrier. If you make them learn too much, they opt out, they check out, they go, ooh, too hard for me. And Magic already has a rep of being a hard game, because it is, and that we're trying to do as much as we can to...

One of the things I try to explain to beginners is the basic game of magic, the basic game is actually not that complex. Now, we layer lots of things on top of that basic game, but the basic game itself is not that complex. And I'm like, just learn the basic game. And with time, you can learn the other stuff. Not important right now. As long as you have the basic game, that's what you need. And when you're teaching someone to play, by the way, you want to strip out every possible thing you can learn the other stuff not important right now as long as you have the basic game that's what you need

and when you're teaching someone to play by the way you want to strip out every possible thing you can that's why you know Portal was just mostly vanilla creatures

and sorceries like cut out as much as you can and the key to the lenticular design is the idea I talked about before which was

that each player has to look at the card and to them they have to see the cards that they want it to be they have to see and it has to look at the card and to them, they have to see the cards that they want it to be. They have to see, and it has to make them smile. So using my far-flung computer cards, each player, when they look at it,

if the card is something they want it to be, they're happy. And the Anticular Design is trying to take this far-flung technology and bring it to today, which is, can we make cards that different players look different, you know, that's why it's called Lenticular. That each player looks at it and they see something

different. And the reason I used Rescue from the Underworld in my podcast, not in the podcast, in my article, was it's a really, really good example of something that and this is one of the advantages of flavor, by the way. A lot of what's going on

in Rescue from the Underworld to the beginning players is flavor. As long as there's a reason for the text to be on the cards, they're happy. Flavor is a reason. So that's another very good way that we can hide stuff. I didn't mention this before, which is, if the player looks at it and they justify why it's there,

like, for example, a lot of times we'll put what we call trinket text, which is flavorful text. Well, sometimes that trinket text can hide interesting gameplay. But as long as to the beginning player it just seems like, oh, it's flavorful, they're happy. And that's a big, big part of lenticular design, is you want each layer of player that you're trying to make happy see what they want to see,

have it be something they want it to be, and then they go happy, walk away. And what's great about magic is, and this is why the particular designs are really good, is there is a moment that happens in magic, and it happens multiple times in magic, but the first time it happens is the one you can't remember the most,

where you see a card that you've played before, but one day you notice some functionality you hadn't noticed before. And you go, oh my goodness, normally I do thing A. Ooh, but I could do thing B. Thing B will help me win. And then you feel really clever, and just, it's one of the things that grabs people about magic,

is that magic has this quality where cards can do multiple functions. That you can learn about something and you can feel real clever and you can do neat things and have neat interactions. And there's a lot of opportunity for cleverness in magic. And that's really important. Players like feeling good about themselves.

Players like feeling like they've found something. Even if the thing they've found has been found by thousands and thousands of people before them, it doesn't matter. They found it, and it feels great. One of the reasons people play games is they want the mental stimulation, and when you find something where you get a

positive thing, it's just endorphins get released, and you're happy, and you're excited, and it's a great moment because you've found something, and you're happy, and you're excited, and it's a great moment because you found something, and you discovered something, and you managed to twist the game to your mean to do what you wanted to. It's one of the things magic does really, really well.

So anyway, that, my friends, is all I have to say, or more of what I have to say on lenticular design. The thing that's really exciting to me about lenticular design, and I talked about this in the first podcast, is one of the things that I love doing and one of the things I love about design

is that I feel like the reason I've been at this close to 20 years is that I keep finding new things. Just like the players get excited when they discover new things, I get excited when I discover new things. And that New World Order was a very interesting thing, and out of New World Order came lenticular design.

And like I said, I'm fascinated because lenticular design isn't just for complexity. It started as a tool for complexity, but imagine the same idea of I have a card that's seen different ways by different players, maybe psychographically, maybe Vorda and Melthor aesthetics. Maybe, you know, there's

different ways for me to make different cards for different players in which the same card meets the needs of different players. And that one of the things that magic, one of the big problems magic has always had is space. That we are trying to make mini games for many different players, but we only have one card set. And so a lot of times, I'm

really tight on space. And the idea that I can make a singular card and make it be multiple cards for multiple players is very exciting. And here's a big way to think about this, which is the example I've tried to say how what Lenticular Design does is a little bit different than how we've done things before. In the past, we would make cards that were a Timmy and Johnny card or a Spike and Timmy card, that they

were and. And lenticular design says that we could try to do or, that we can make a card for Timmy or for Johnny. And my parallel for this is kind of like a Manicoth. Think of the difference between traditional multicolored cards and hybrid cards. You know, a red-green card is red and green, but a red-green hybrid card is red or green. And the difference between those, it's subtle, but it's very important. And so lenticular design is this awesome thing, and I'm very excited,

because it allows me to look at magic and how we make magic in a completely different light. And I've been thinking about magic for almost 19 years, okay? The fact that I can think about cards in a different way I've ever thought about them for almost 19 years, okay? The fact that I can think about cards in a different way than I've ever thought about them is mind-blowing and awesome. And so the reason I wanted to share lenticular design with you is it's the cutting edge of where we're going

and how we're thinking of magic. And the next awesome thing is New World Order was a great thing. From New World Order came lenticular design. I don't know where lenticular design will lead. I mean, clearly there's a lot more things to do with lenticular design, but it's going to lead to other awesome places, and that this discovery,

much like you guys love finding neat things to do with the cards, I love finding neat things, well, to do with the cards on the other side. And so, anyway, if you can't tell, I'm excited and passionate about lenticular design and just making magic because, guys,

I love talking about making magic. I love talking about making magic. But even more, I like making magic. So this has been awesome talking with you guys. Hopefully you can see my passion in lenticular design. I really, really think it's something interesting and a very exciting portal in where we're going. I mean, it's had a lot of impact

in the last three years of design. But I'll have even more on the next three and the three after that. So anyway, thanks for joining me today, guys. As always, it's awesome to talk with you. I'll see you next time. Bye.