Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #142 - Inspiration

Episode Date: July 25, 2014

Mark answers the question: Where do you get your inspiration?

Okay, I'm pulling out of the parking lot. You know what that means? It means there's another drive to work. So my kids had market day today where they have to sell things, so I had to help bring in all the stuff for them to sell. But anyway, I still got a drive to work and school is right by home, so you'll have pretty much the same length podcast today. So for today, I'm going to answer a question that I get all the time. And that

question is, where do your ideas come from? And the answer is, there's no one single answer. Thank you very much. It's actually a very complex answer, which is why I feel I can spend an entire podcast talking about where ideas come from. So, okay, so, I think I can divide into a couple categories. So the two major categories, what I would call the Vorsothian categories and the Melvinian categories. So, Vorthos and Melvin are two different aesthetic attributes.

Vorthos is all about flavor and Melvin is all about mechanics. And so, there really is some flavor approaches and there's some mechanical approaches. And then, there's a few other types we'll get to. Okay, so let's start with the flavor stuff. Because we've recently done a bunch of top-down sets. So, sometimes we start from a place that is just, we're trying to capture something. Innishrod was gothic horror. Pharos was Greek mythology.

You know, that sometimes you're just trying to capture a thing that's a pre-existing thing. So those ideas are like, okay, I want to capture this real thing. So for example, Double Face Cards started in Innishrod because we were like, okay, I want to capture this real thing. So, for example, Double Face Cards started in Innistrad because we were like, how do we capture a werewolf? What would a werewolf have to do? And it became clear pretty fast that, well, werewolves have two states. They have a human state and they have a werewolf state. And in their human state, not particularly scary,

but in their werewolf state, they're pretty scary. And one of the things that made werewolves interesting is sometimes they're a human in which they're kind of weak. And sometimes they're a werewolf in which they're very strong. And so we literally started our design saying, we want to do top-down werewolves. We know this to be true about werewolves. How would we do that?

And we tried a bunch of different things. It wasn't like double-faced cards were our only attempt. We had day-night mechanic we tried. We tried a bunch of different things. But in the end, the reason we got to double-faced cards was it ended up being the cleanest, best execution

that captured what we wanted. So sometimes when you're making cards, flavor is a very interesting place to start. And when I say flavor, there's a couple different ways. The flavor is not one giant bucket. It actually has a lot of little elements to it. So sometimes you're trying to capture a specific thing. For example, werewolves.

Okay, there was a quality to werewolves. We wanted to capture that quality. It had a mechanical ramification. Like, for example, humans were smaller, werewolves were bigger. Okay, well, this card is going to have dual states. One state, the power and toughness is lower. One state, the power and toughness is higher. So that is a very mechanical resonance. Like, clearly, something about it has to be portrayed, and there's a mechanical way you would portray it. But we were coming from a flavor perspective of how to do that.

So another way, sometimes with flavor, has to do with mood and tone. So for example, the morbid mechanic in Innistrad came about because I was really trying a way to make things dying scary. One of the things we wanted in the Innistrad set was we were trying to set a certain mood to the set. And the mood, one of the things we wanted in the Innistrad set was we were trying to set a certain mood to the set. And the mood

was one of suspense. And so what I wanted to do is say, here are things that naturally happen in the game that I normally don't worry about,

but all of a sudden I have to worry about. So for example, let's say I attack with a creature that I know you can block. Now in normal magic,

maybe you're hinting you have a giant growth or pretending you have a giant growth, but, you know, there's one or two spells I might have to enhance the creature. But, in Andesrod, if I attack with a 2-2 and you have a 2-2 that can block it, there's a whole other layer. It's like, oh, well, maybe he wants it to die,

because he is morbid. And if I kill this creature, you know, we can trade, but then he'll get a giant creature that normally wouldn't be that big, but because I chose to kill his creature, now he's getting a bigger creature. And so all of a sudden, morbid started saying,

oh, am I willing to make trades? Do I want to kill things? And made you have to think about it in a different way, which added some suspense, because normally, whether to block or not to block is not quite as suspenseful as that.

So sometimes you get cards because you're trying to match tone or mood. That's another way that you can capture flavor. Sometimes, like the unsets definitely do this, where sometimes I'm inspired by, I'm just trying to do something that's fun and silly, and I'm like, for example, carnivorous death parrot. It's a card from Unhinged. So what the card does is it makes you say something every turn. Now, it just so happens the things that make you say

one word is a sentence you have to say. I think it's save one kill spell to deal with this guy. I think it's what it says. And it turns out there's five gotcha cards that if you say a particular word,

you get the card back. Well, this sentence says one word from each of the five cards in the cycle. So we knew it was this fun card that said, okay, we're going to make you have to say something. And so it was like, okay, well, what? That card came from the flavor of saying, well, why do you have to say something? And then we figured out that, oh, what if some kind of parrot, you know,

and that's where we got to the idea that it mimics things that you say, that it keeps saying the same thing. In general, when you are trying to design something, like I said, the inspiration for cards usually comes from having some nugget of something

that you want. And, you know, on the flavor side, usually there's some flavor that you're going for. I'm trying to match perceptions of a werewolf. I'm trying to create suspense. I'm trying to be silly. Each of these examples is, oh, well, I started out knowing something about what I wanted. So let's dig into this a little bit,

which is, I talked about this in my creativity one, but it's an important point, which is having a truly blank canvas is daunting. It's very daunting. When I say to you, you may do absolutely anything, your brain just kind of freezes up. It's like, ah, I'm not sure what I want to do. But the second you say to your brain, okay, here is a parameter. So, for example, we have what we call hole filling, which is we go out to people, there's an email we send out to people who have volunteered within the company,

and say, oh, here's some holes we've made. We need your help. And what we discovered is, if I just say blue rare, I don't get as good a card as if I say blue rare enchantment. Maybe a Johnny. If I say I want a blue rare Johnny enchantment, I will get much better results than if I just say blue rare. And the reason is, if I just say blue rare, people don't know what to do. They're not sure where to go from. But if I sort of just pinpoint something, I give you something to start with, it makes it much easier.

And that when you're doing card creation, that is very, very important. That you need to have, you need to kind of lay the groundwork to give something for people to get some tread off of. You know, my metaphor of the day is, you know, you get stuck and you're trying to get your wheel out of mud or snow or whatever it's stuck in.

The thing you always do is you put down something to get traction so that you can get out of it. In a lot of ways, you're spinning your wheels. For a lot of people with blank, the blank page, you're spinning your wheels. And that just putting a little down there, something to focus on, will help immensely. And so when I'm making something, one of the things that's very important and one of my jobs as both head designer and as lead designer of a set is to make a bullseye for my team so that they know what we're aiming for, what are we going for. For example, day one, when I have a design team, I will sit down and I will say to the team, this is my grand vision for

what I want. Now, I might not know all the details on day one, but I have some general sense of what direction I want to go in. For example, day one of Zendikar, I sat down and I said, guys, this is a land block. We are going to explore all, you know, I believe that there's a lot of space in land mechanics that we haven't messed with. That's where we're going to start. Now, over time, we found Landfall and we found some other land things and we eventually realized that we needed a world and we came to Adventure World

and we started building to Adventure World. And so what I said on day one was not necessarily, you know, we evolved during the course of the design, but I gave my team a direction. And that, to be honest, being the lead of a design, that your number one job as the lead designer is giving your team a direction of telling them what to aim for. It's not to say that people don't occasionally come up with fun blue sky things. It's just, here's a neat idea out of the blue.

But when you're trying to get results and you're trying to make cards, and magic is daunting. I always talk about magic as being a hungry monster. It's very, very funny because one of the things there was, back when I used to work in Hollywood many, many years ago, there was a comic. I don't remember the name of the comic. But one comic was, it was called New in Town. But there was one comic was, it was called New in Town. And the comic showed this person that goes, oh no, what if Paramount and Warner Brothers and Columbia all want to hire me, you know?

And it's this idea of like, you come with this world of possibilities and assume like the problems you're going to have is that like, you know, embarrassment of riches that everybody will want to work with you. And then the reality of Hollywood or any career sort of thing is,

hey, you've got to earn your spot, and it's hard. And it's very hard to get your opening break. Magic cards have the same sort of quality that when people start designing magic cards, the worries they have are really funny worries of, like, what if I can't get all my ideas onto cards? And I'm like, magic is, trust me, you will have the ability to spill out all your ideas onto cards. And I'm like, magic is, trust me, you will have the ability to spill out all your ideas

and magic will soak them up and then go, give me some more ideas. It is not, you know, one of the things about designing magic cards is,

I mean, I don't know the right ratio. I always talk about being like 99 to 100. I mean, you make a lot of cards versus cards that see print. A lot of cards.

Because you make a whole bunch of cards and other cards you make, only a tiny portion even get into the file. And then cards that are in the file are constantly being changed and being kicked out or upgraded or tweaked. And so the idea that you make a card, and then the finished product has that card, that's a tiny, tiny portion of what you make. tiny, tiny portion of what you make. And so, it is definitely interesting that when people start doing design, they're really, really worried that they'll come up

with a great idea and they're like, we've got to do it now. And one of the things you learn is you have to put the cards where they belong. That you might have an awesome, awesome card, but if it doesn't make sense in the set, well, you've got to save it. You've got to save it for another set. Save it for the place where it makes sense.

Which segues into the Melvinian side. I'm making words today. The Melvinian side. So one of the things that happens is when you are making cards is that you have to hit a bullseye. The set wants to do specific things.

And so what tends to happen is when you make cards that don't fit the set, but do something interesting, sometimes they fit, but usually, if it's not gelling with what the set is doing, the correct answer is, remember it, put it aside, and then wait until you find a place to use it. And a lot of magic designs have come about because it's like, oh, well this is not the right place for it, but let's find the right place for it. For example, Suspend, the Suspend mechanic in Time Spiral

was originally designed for I think Saviors of Kamigawa, but it was just like, oh, it didn't make sense in the third set, it needed more space to breathe, it felt more like a major mechanic than a minor mechanic, and so we saved it. And that when we were starting Time Spiral, it's like,

okay, well, here's a mechanic that we like that maybe would make sense here. And we were talking about maybe doing time-based mechanics and, you know, suspend was part of it. Oh, that fits really well in a set about time-based mechanics. And so one of the things that you learn, and this is an important lesson, it takes time, is that you need to save things

for where they make the most sense. And it's really, really hard to make something that you think is awesome and then hold on to it and not do it right away. Because there's this fear that, like, I'm working on the set right now. And so right now I want to get this card because I want people to see this card as soon as possible. I've made an awesome card. I want the public to see this card as soon as they humanly can see this card because this card is so awesome I want them to see it.

And the answer is, look, you are doing a disservice to the set if you are putting a set in because the card is awesome in a vacuum and not because the card is awesome in this set. And that is a really, really hard lesson. It's something that takes people a while to get to. To realize that, look, magic is going to

constantly require stuff of you. If you have good cards, good cards will see the light of day. Good ideas will see the light of day. And the reason is because magic is so hungry for new content. But you have to sort of save things for where they go. So another big place

where we get cards sometimes is we go, oh, I have a neat idea. Like I talked about Zendikar earlier. We had a neat idea for a bunch of different land mechanics. Now the funny thing is a lot of the places I thought we were going to go, I knew that we had a lot of neat land mechanics. Now, the funny thing is, a lot of the places I thought we were going to go,

I knew that we had a lot of neat land ideas. So I'm like, oh, maybe we'll do this, maybe we'll do that. And it turns out, landfall was not where I started. But as we explored and figured out where land shined, landfall came up. And so it's not always that you end up where you start. But one way to come up with your ideas is just saying, here is a neat space. So one of my jobs as head designer is, we, the way to think of this is, I use my mining metaphor. Imagine we are the seven dwarfs, mining for jewels from the mine. Well, if you always go to the same part of the mine, well at some point

you're going to find all the things that are there. And so part of designing is finding other rich design space, other veins of design, we call it. And so what happens is, part of head designer is, when I see something that's interesting, I might go, oh, that's cool.

Okay, we're going to save that and use it somewhere. And sometimes, like Zendikar is a perfect example, it's the jumping off point for where we start. Other times, it's like, oh, well, we want to do Thing X. So, like, for example, one of the things that happened in Scars of Mirrodin, or New Phyrexian, to be technical, is that I knew I wanted the Phyrexians,

as they slowly changed over the Mirrodins to have an artifact-ness to them. That at some point, you see that the, I wanted to convey that the Phyrexians are starting to turn the Myridans into artifacts. And so when we started New Phyrexia, I thought we were going to use, we were going to use what I call two-braid, which are hybrid things. It's call two-grid, which are hybrid

things. It's a two-colorless mana or one-color mana. We did Cyclism and Shadowmoor. And I thought, okay, this might convey some artifact-ness in that here's something that could be color, but oh, it could be colorless. And in the end,

that didn't work out, but we ended up with Phyrexian mana. And one of the things I like about Phyrexian mana is Phyrexian mana has that quality of artifactness in that you can play it in a deck that's not that color, which is a very strong artifact quality. And then we took the permanents that had Phyrexian mana and made them colored artifacts, so that we were able to convey that.

But the place we started from was trying to figure out how to get across. You know, like, I'd wanted to use Tuber and Manna somewhere. I'd wanted to use it. I liked it from Shadowmoor. And I thought that was the spot. And so it's funny, we didn't end up there, but that's where we started. And that's another sort of

theme of today's podcast, which is where we end up and where we start are not the same thing. The important thing when you make a card is to give you something to go on. The fact that it changes is fine. The reason you want the idea, the germ of something, is to get your mind spinning.

And once again, remember that the way that the human brain works is that your neural pathways, you will go down the most common pathway, meaning your brain has figured out how to make things happen. And it's not that it's lazy,

it's just it's efficient. And so when you approach something, you tend to come to the same solutions because you just use the same neural pathways. And what you'll notice a lot of times is when you're trying to solve a problem, you just keep coming up with the same answer. You're like, I keep getting the same neural pathways. And what you'll notice a lot of times is when you're trying to solve a problem, you just keep coming up with the same answer. You're like, I keep getting the same answer. So one of the

tricks to do that is, if you want to get a different answer, you've got to put different input into your brain. One of the important things is that you need to, if you want a different output, you need a different input. And so sometimes when I'm stuck on a problem, what I will do is I will throw some artificial thing in just to make me think

differently. You know, like I will say, okay, okay, I need to do this. I need to do this. I want to do a creature. I'm stuck. I want to do a black creature. What's a black character? You know, I mean, black as in color pie black. What's a black character or what's a red character or whatever, you know. What's a character that embodies that? So maybe I'm, let's say for example I'm doing black-blue. And I go, what's a black-blue creature? I might go, Lex Luthor. Arch nemesis to Superman.

And I'll go, okay, I'm going to make a black-blue creature inspired by Lex Luthor. Even though Lex Luthor's got nothing to do with anything, I just want to give me a pathway to go down, of something to just jumpstart me. And by the way, sometimes it's less direct than that. Sometimes it's like, I need

to make a green comment. I'm going to be inspired by a leaf. Think about a leaf. Or think about a koala bear. Or just something. I will just pick almost at random. I talked about this in my creativity podcast, which is there is a great power to randomness

in helping you be creative in that sometimes by forcing you to make connections you've never made, you just find new space. I talked about this, that a lot of what I believe creativity is is finding a way to take A and B and find connections between them that normally aren't there, or normally you don't think about.

And one of the new exercises is when you do that, you just say, I'm going to take two disparate things, you know, Twizzlers and the Joker. What do they have in common? You know, oh, they're both twisted. They both have some red in them. You know, they both make people smile for a different reason. So the thing that is fun is just trying to, when you're creating cards, sometimes you're jump-starting yourself by giving you something to jump-start off of.

And that's another place that I'll get ideas from, is I'll just say, okay... Now, another thing I get ideas from is the design skeleton. I talk about this in my Nuts and Bolts podcast in my column. A design skeleton is something where I have a list of... I need a CG15, common green 15. I need a naturalized, either green 15, I need a naturalized, either naturalized or a naturalized variant.

So sometimes it's like, okay, I know I need a naturalized variant, and that's my jumping off point. I'm like, okay, I don't want a reprint, I did enough reprints, I want a variant. Okay, well, maybe I'll look up and see what other naturalizes we've done. And then I'll think of,

oh, what are ways we could do naturalized? Have you ever done a cantrip naturalized? Oh, yeah, we've done a cantrip naturalized. Have you ever done a naturalized naturalize? Oh yeah, we've done a cantrip naturalize. Have you ever done a naturalize? That's a sorcery. Yes, we've done it. And I can start running through things and I can look and then at some point

I'll stumble across something that I haven't done. I'm like, have you ever done a naturalize? Where? I don't know. It probably sounds, everything that will come up on top of my head we probably have done because we've done

a lot of naturalizes. But that's another good vantage point of starting with is sometimes saying, here's the hole I'm trying to fill. Literally,

a little hole from the design skeleton. So another place sometimes I get ideas is, this one's a little less structured, is sometimes, I mean, I have dreamed up cards. I mean, the story I've told, I think I told ideas is, this one's a little less structured, is sometimes, I mean, I have dreamed up cards. I mean, the story I've told,

I think I told the story, but the Entwined Mechanic literally came to me in a dream. Came to me in a dream. I woke, I've been thinking about it nonstop. You know, Bill felt like we needed one more mechanic. I was racking my brain to kind of come up with it. I literally was asleep.

I dreamed it up. I remember in the dream I'm like, I think I'm dreaming and this is a good mechanic. And I woke myself up and then wrote it down. Because I knew I might forget it. And so where do cards come from? All sorts of places.

Sometimes I've actually made cards based on art. So one of the things that happens with the art is normally we make cards before art happens. But sometimes, uh, cards get scrapped after art comes in. And what that means is, well, we're committed to this piece of art because it's already been done. So, hey, we've got to make a new card, but we have to make it to this piece of art. Um, for example, there's a couple pieces in Unglued, I'm sorry, in Unhinged. Unhinged? No, Unglued. In Unglued.

Uh, Gus and, um, sorry, in Unhinged. Unhinged? No, Unglued. In Unglued. Gus and Temp of the Damned were both what we call slush art. Where we, art, they were made for a card. The card never got made, but we owned the art, so we put it in a file saying, okay, someday if somebody finds a reason to use this,

we can use it. And so when I was doing Unglued, I said, okay, let me look at the slush pile. And there were two cards. And I was like, okay, I can use it. And so when I was doing Unglue, I said, okay, let me look at this flesh pile. And there are two cards. I'm like, okay, I can make cards for these two cards. And I have no idea what Gus was originally,

but I'm like, I made it Gus. So sometimes you can come from art. I've actually, on a few occasions, done design based on flavor text. Unsets also mess around with that a little bit more. Unsets also mess around with that a little bit more. Unsets also are a very good example where sometimes I have a concept for the art or a concept for the name. Or, you know, oh, and designing to names.

For example, one of the things we did in Innistrad, and I started doing it on all my design teams now, is I had the creative team person, it was Jenna, Helen, for Innistrad, come up with just awesome names. We're doing Greek, not Greek, we're doing Gothic Horror, give me awesome names. And she would say, okay, Evil Twin. And in the meeting, we came up with Evil Twin. Jar of Eyeballs. In the meeting, we come up with Jar of Eyeballs. That was Dark Ascension. But Jenna came up with names for both

Innistrad and Dark Ascension, and we just were designed to the name. You know, top down from the name. That's what the concept is. Sometimes, you just have a weird mechanic you want to build around. Sometimes it's just like, I have a neat idea. I don't know what to do with this, but it's a neat idea.

For example, we knew at one point we wanted to do a zero-toughness creature. And it's like, okay, is it vanilla? Is there something more to it? Sometimes you'll start with a germ of something and then you figure out where to put it. But the common bond to today's podcast is it always comes from somewhere,

meaning that if you want to make something, you need to jumpstart from somewhere. And so there's many, many ways to do that. Like I said, you can look at flavor, you can look at part of cards, you can look at mood and tone. I mean, it's just what do you want? And like I said, I literally, literally designed a card

just because I'm making a card based on a donut. Just to jump into white space. Just to like, okay, I want to try to make something. And when you do something from a place you've never done before, it is a great thing because you will just, you will get new neural pathways. You'll go to new places you never thought of

you know and that one of the things that's real fun for me like when I was doing Theros is I never made a set based on Greek mythology that was never my inspiration

so all of a sudden I just was I was inspired to do all sorts of things because I had this neat inspiration and it's like okay how do I capture Icarus

how do I capture Hercules how do I capture okay, how do I capture Icarus? How do I capture Hercules? How do I capture, you know, how do I capture each of these different things that were just neat that I wanted to do? And, for example, my favorite card from Theros is Rescue from the Underworld. Now, that card, there's not, there's no way

in a million years I would ever make that card cold. The only reason that card exists is I was trying to do, you know, the tale of Orpheus, right? I was trying to you go, you send someone down to rescue a person who has died, and like, oh, well that's really Greek, and it's pretty neat,

and I stretched it a little bit, black doesn't, you know, it kind of let black flicker a little bit, although black can sacrifice things, black can animate things, I mean, all the pieces of it were black, although it kind of came together to do something that black doesn't normally do. But it was just super, super flavorful.

But like I said, I only got there because I just took a different vantage point for inspiration. So anyway, that is kind of, for people listening today, I know people listen to my podcast for reasons beyond just to hear me talk, that my goal today as I'm talking about

inspiration is that you have to start from somewhere, but you can start from anywhere. So the question is, what inspires you? The answer is everything, but not nothing. You know, or maybe everything's the wrong word. Anything inspires me. Not everything. or maybe everything's the wrong word. Anything inspires me. Not everything, I guess that's technically incorrect. Anything inspires me, but nothing can't. And that when I sit down to make a card,

or make a set, or make a mechanic, or whatever, the biggest trick that I have is, I just define a space for me, and I try to define a space that is something I haven't defined before, so that I'm just looking at it with a fresh set of eyes, with a fresh set of neural pathways, if you will. So anyway, that, my friends, is what I have to say about inspiration

and where inspiration comes from. So I hope you enjoyed it. Like I said, today, funny thing is like, where did today's podcast come from? Today's podcast, I literally, here's how it happened. I actually got in the car and I said, okay, I want to do a podcast today. I'm not sure what to do. And I said, okay, what's a question that I get all the time? You know, and I said, oh, what do you do

at work? And they're like, oh, I already did that podcast. Where did your ideas come from? Oh, I've never done that. And so today's inspiration for today's podcast literally was just, okay, I'm going to take a question I get all the time and make a podcast about it, and that's where it came from. So, anyway, I'm now in the parking lot, in my parking space, so it's time for me

to be making magic. Talk to you guys next time.