Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #171 - Lessons Learned, Part 5

Episode Date: October 31, 2014

Mark Rosewater shares part 5 of his lessons about Magic design.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay. Today, I'm going to do a series I've not done in like a year and a half. So one of the things about this podcast is I've learned I need to create content. So one of the ways to do that is to come up with series where I do something where I know I'll talk about some subject over multiple episodes. come up with series where I do something where I knew I'll talk about some subject over multiple episodes. And I try to continue with the series, but every once in a while, you know, I forget about something. I go, you know, I haven't done that series in a while. So today is a lessons learned. So this is a series that I've done where I look back at sets that I led and I talk about, okay, well, what did I learn? Having done that, what did I learn from the experience?

And so I've done four so far. In fact, Lessons 4 was my special bread truck overturned episode. At the time, it was my longest ever episode. I've since beaten that record. So my first, I talked about three things every time, except I talked about four things in the bread truck episode. So, we're now up to Scars of Mirrodin. The last time I talked about Zendikar. So the next set

I did after that was Scars of Mirrodin. So Scars of Mirrodin is a very, very interesting lesson on several levels. So first, Scars of Mirrodin is the start of what I call the fifth age of design. So let's talk a little bit about that, because a lot of the lessons of Scars of Mirrodin is the start of what I call the fifth age of design. So let's talk a little bit about that, because a lot of the lessons of Scars of Mirrodin is how I advanced from the fourth age of design to the fifth age of design.

And let me explain. So one of the things, one of the interesting things for me is, I consider my job one of constant learning. It's not like at some point I figure out how to make magic sets and I'm done. It's always like I'm constantly trying to improve the technology. How can we better design sets? And I have an entire team of designers that are all looking at new and different ways to do things. But one of the things I've been very, very focused on personally is the larger meta structure.

It's something I'm responsible for. It's not something any of my team really spends, you know, they're very focused on, let's do this set, let's make this mechanic, where I'm, I have the luxury of sort of thinking big picture, because I have such an awesome team below me to make stuff that I have some extra time to sort of think about, where's magic design going? What are we doing? And the age of design really are representing a different way to think about how we do design. So let's talk about fifth age of design, because I think some people don't quite understand what I mean.

So I'm going to talk a little bit in detail because the big lessons of Scars of Mirrors was this lesson, which is I think when you learn to do any art form, the first thing you do is you learn the basics. So let's say I want to draw pictures. Well, I'm going to first learn scale and perspective and color and I'm going to learn all these things that have to do with how do I draw a picture. Let's say I want to be a writer.

Well, I have to learn about story structure, three-act structure and characters and character arcs and all the things of motivation and all the things that go into making a story. Now, at some point, once you get past the basics, then you start saying, okay, I'm going to start doing that. And you start just making things, making pictures,

making stories, making games, making sets. So early on, if you watch me, when I first started, I was just fascinated with you know, I just want to make magic sets. There are cool things we can do and how we put those together? And, you know,

my early magic designs were very fascinated by, like, what cool things can we do? And then at some point, you get very fascinated by the very essence of the structure itself. Something that's a very common thing to do

is once you learn the basics, you then want to start breaking the basics. That's a very common thing. If you look at Odyssey for me, it's like once I understand cards, like, now let's take card advantage and turn it on its ear. There's this desire where you really want to, once you understand the structure, you want to rebel against the structure.

You want to prove how you can do something that finds a new venue within the structure. And then, at some point, after you get through your rebellious phase, you then start saying, okay, well, what, I want to master this. You know, what are the skills that are needed to really make this thing? What are the strong things?

And so then, at some point, you spend a lot of time sort of re-evaluating the structure and sort of embracing the structure. Rather than rebelling against the structure, you embrace it and go, here's the things that work. Let's really evaluate the things. And you get very into history and studying and understanding what has come before.

Then, so I mean, I'm kind of talking stages here. Then you get to the point where you want to take the structure that you understand, that you studied, and then figure out how to advance it. It's not that you want to rebel against it. It's not like you want to take the structure that you understand, that you've studied, and then figure out how to advance it. It's not that you want to rebel against it. It's not like you want to break the rules. It's more of how can I build upon it in a way that takes what was done before and advances it. And I think a lot of the fourth stage design for me was the idea of a block structure. It's just taking a lot of the structure we had in cards and mechanics

in sets and saying, okay, let's broaden that out. Let's, let's, just as I would plot out a set or plot out a mechanic, I want to plot out a whole block. Okay. So the next step after that, which is where fifth age came from, is at some point you're spending all this time looking at the, the art of what you're doing, the brushstrokes, the characterization, you know, you're spending all this time looking at the art of what you're doing, the brush strokes, the characterization. You're looking at the thing you do, and you start looking outward. You're like, okay, instead of thinking of this by how I do it, I want to start thinking about how the audience receives it.

How does somebody look at a painting? How do they hear a story? How do they hear a story? How do they play a game? And so the big part of the fifth age is saying, okay, I make games. I make sets. I make magic. It's what I do.

How is it received? What does the audience do when I make a magic set? So the big realization I made,, I've talked about this in one of my other podcasts on emotion, was one of the big leaps I made is this idea that it's very, very easy to be intellectual when you try to create something. For example, just take making magic. I and the rest of R&D, we spend so much time, and you have no idea, talking about magic. And every little tiny nook and cranny, you have no idea. I mean, we will spend hours debating things

that the average player probably never thinks about, you know, because we really care and we're trying to advance every little thing. You know, part of improving any system is finding the little details and that a lot of improvements later on. Remember, Magic's 21 years old at the time of this podcast, that, you know, a lot's going on in 21 years, you know. And so the advances we make are going to be things that are very much in the details. It's not like there's some wide sweeping thing we haven't done. There are a few, but those are hard to come by. So a big thing that I sort of, the step I took as an artist, as I said, okay, how are people perceiving what I'm doing? And that's when I made the big realization that I tended to approach

it very intellectually when my audience was approaching it emotionally. And what I mean by that is my job as a game designer is to entertain my audience, is to make something that is fun for them, that challenges them, that really... Like, you know the psychographics, you know, Timmy Johnny Spike. I keep talking about how it allows them to do something that psychologically they need to do. You know, Timmy needs to experience something,

and Johnny wants to express something, and Spike wants to prove something. In order to sort of, like, I'm making something that I've understood for a long time was emotionally received, yet on my end, I was still intellectually kind of building things and saying, you know what? I'm not thinking of this emotionally.

I'm thinking of this intellectually. And so the fifth age design said, okay, what we're going to do is think about how to use our mechanics as a tool to increase the emotional impact of what we do. And Scars of Mirrodin had a perfect opportunity to do this, because we were reintroducing one of, in my opinion, the classic bad guy of magic. Bad guys, I guess, in plural. In some level, you know, to me, the Phyrexians have always been the big bad. I mean, I'm not saying there aren't other big bads. You've got Nicol Bolas and Eldrazi, and you've got other bad guys.

But the Phyrexians, in some way, have always been the perfect bad guy. They match to the game well, the environmental bad guys that warp each environment they come to. I mean, they're almost perfectly crafted to be a villain for a magic set because they attack not, it's not one person, it's a whole creature and they attack the whole place

and they change the whole place that they environmentally attack, which is very visual, that you can really, the whole set can communicate that. And so the big thing that I was trying to do is say, okay, we have the Phyrexians. The Phyrexians, I've talked about this, they match an archetype. That's what I call the plague archetype, which is,

and examples of this would be zombies, invasion of of the Body Snatchers, the Borg. It's like, we are coming and we are going to overtake you, but then we're going to make you into us. It's a very scary trope, you know, because it's like, if I lose, not only do I lose, I'm not just dead. I become the very thing I'm fighting against. That they turn me against my loved ones. You know, that like, to lose, it's more than just being killed. You know, they're an enemy that like, it's the extra. It's not just that you will continue on, but under the service of the bad guys, that you will turn into a source of evil on some level.

So what that meant was, the reason I approached making Scars of Mirrodin was I wanted to bring the Phyrexians to life. And I wanted to bring the Phyrexians to life. If you look at a lot of earlier sets I had designed, it was very mechanical. For example, I looked at something like Mirrodin, the original. I was really exploring with what can you do with artifacts. That was really what drove me. What, how do artifacts, what can you do?

Now, that was a very interesting way to approach things. But, once again, that was very old school. I was very much thinking about how do I do it on the, I was crafting the medium rather than saying, well, what am I trying to do? What I'm trying to do is create an experience for the audience. I'm trying to make them feel something. I'm trying to get this emotional connection, you know, and that I want to convey who the Phyrexians are and I want to convey it through gameplay. I want the Phyrexians to feel like something through gameplay.

I want the Mirrens to feel like something through gameplay. I want the conflict between the Phyrexians and the Mirrens to feel something through gameplay. So a lot of what I was trying to do is setting out to evoke strong feeling through mechanics. Now, the interesting one of the lessons is, I think I achieved it, and I might have overshot a little bit. One of the reasons, for example,

that I did infect was, and one of the things I've liked about infect is it really, it just puts the game on a different vector, which says, and the reason, by the way, that I'm not a big fan of removing poison is, I feel like there is already a dynamic in magic where I do damage to you, I do enough damage, you lose, but you have the ability to undo some of that damage. You can gain life. And that there is a give and take where you're going up and down. And the thing I like about poison is

I want a sense of certainty, which is every time I give you a poison, I've marched you that much closer to death, and it is not undoable. You are that much closer to death. Now, you're not dead to your death. Until you have 10 poison, you're not dead. Just like until you have taken,

you know, until you have zero life, you're not dead. But the thing about life is I always have this security blanket that I can gain some life, you know, and that I wanted poison to feel, have a little more certainty to it, a little more like I'm, you know, that if you have five poison counters, you're half the way to death from poison. There's no changing that. And the thing that I really liked about that, it's interesting. I've been trying to get poison back in the game for many, many years. But what had

happened was I needed the right place for it. The reason it took so long wasn't, I just didn't stick it everywhere. I mean, early on I did. I stuck it in Tempest, I stuck it on Bluetooth. But eventually I'm like, okay, my problem is it has to make sense. It has to be really fit for the thing we want.

And so when we realized we were going to do Phyrexia, I'm like, this is it. I mean, I want poison to feel invasive. I need the Phyrexians to feel invasive. That is perfect. You know, that you want the Phyrexians to feel like they're slowly, you know, the thing I talked about is I like the idea of the phyrexian as a disease, which fits the plague archetype. That it's kind of inevitable.

Like, how do you stop a disease? It's all these little microorganisms. It's like, if there's a bad guy in the bad... Well, I just got to stop that one bad guy. But this race, it's not even like they're creatures as much as they're like a disease. In fact, you have the black oil. It's like, man, when the Phyrexians invade your world, how do you stop them?

That's pretty scary. Much like disease is pretty scary. We hear an outbreak of disease, that's a pretty scary thing. How do you stop an outbreak of disease? And so I really liked tying poison to it. And we spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to do it. We ended up with Infect, which was pretty cool. I liked that Infect

took a quality that we hadn't withered, and really sort of said, look, whenever I touch, I am doing my thing. And if it's a creature, I'm going to wither it. If it's a player, I'm going to poison it. I'm just doing my thing. And it had this very neat sense of, it made the fractions feel inevitable and scary,

which is what I wanted. Now, the problem is that I made them feel inevitable and scary. And it's funny because I've made a lot of mechanics. I've made mechanics people have loved. I've made mechanics people have hated. I've made mechanics people have hated. Infect has more split people than anything I've ever made. Like people, there are people who love, love, love, love, love Infect. And there are people who hate, hate, hate, hate Infect. You know, it really is polarizing. There's not a lot of people out there, when I say, what do you think of Infect?

They go, eh, it's okay. Usually it's like, oh, I like Infect, or oh, I do not like Infect. And what I realized was, the thing that I liked so much about it was the impact that it had, you know, that it, I was, one of the things about the fifth age design is I want you to feel something. When you play the game that I've made, I want to literally generate a feel. And with the Phyrexians, I was trying to scare you. I was trying to make them... I wanted you to kind of be in the role of the Mirrens where you go, oh my God, how do you deal with this?

And the answer is, you can. I mean, the funny thing is, people are like, how do you deal with the effect And the answer is, you can. I mean, the funny thing is, people are like, how do you deal with Infect? I'm like, well, you kill the creatures. The Infect has some weaknesses to it. Mostly you have to deal damage through creatures. You have to only use things that do Infect because normal damage doesn't matter.

We limit your tools to be able to use it. But once you commit to that it's scary and that in fact is one of those things that has popped its head in a lot of formats it's never been dominant in any format but it's definitely poked its head in a lot of formats and so the lesson that I had from there

was, I mean it's an interesting one the success of Scars of Mirrodin told me that I was on the right track with the fifth age of design that Scars of Mirrodin told me that I was on the right track with the Fifth Age design. That Scars of Mirrodin led to Innistrad. It led to Theros. I mean, I didn't... Return to Ravnica, I did not actually do the first set.

So, I've tried this before. The Return to Ravnica, in a lot of ways, felt to me like a little more Fourth Age design than Fifth Age. But, anyways, I've talked about that in another podcast. So, Scars of Mirrodin taught me the importance of how to use mechanics to convey things, and taught me an important lesson that when you make people feel things, they will respond to those feelings. So, this brings up an interesting point, something that comes up in storytelling, which is negative emotions in general. I'll talk about an interesting experience I had.

I did a play in college called Lego My Ego. The idea of the play was that the main character is in a relationship of two and a half years. character is in a relationship of like two and a half years um and the relationship is going through a strain right now you know that that he loves her but but you know it definitely is there he's having some issues the relationships have some issues and he gets a proposition from a girl who he's had the hot seat with forever and she's like you know what let's have a one night stand i won't tell anybody what do say? Let's you and me do this. And the main character's like, okay, what am I going to do? I have this proposition.

I'm tempted, but I'm in a relationship. And so the play is about his emotions having a meeting, kind of discussing what they're supposed to be doing. And the way the play works is I have the meetings being run by the ego, and the id and the superego are arguing different sides about what they should do. Obviously, the superego is saying they need to honor a relationship. You know, they have to turn this down. And the id is like, this sounds like fun. Let's do it.

And then what it is, all the different characters are different emotions. So in the play, okay, see if I can remember the emotions off the top of my head. So, there are 11 characters. So, there is super ego and ego, there is lust, there is love, there is curiosity, there is depression, there

is bitterness, there is paranoia, there is um, I is paranoia, there is guilt, and there is rationalization, which is not an emotion. Rationalization is a defense mechanism that crashes the meeting. Anyway, so the idea was I tried to get the different emotions to argue the point of do we want to do this or not want to do this. And the thing that was interesting

was it's a comedy. The play's a comedy. That the characters that ended up being the populars from the audience were, well,

no, or better yet to say it is, what I found was the more I had the emotion being the emotion, meaning the more depressing depression was,

the more bitter bitterness was, the more the audience liked them. Which was interesting. I'm like, depression, like depression, if you took depression's lines in context, depression, nothing they're saying is remotely funny. They're just finding a way to make everything depressing. But that was funny, and that was what really made the audience connect is, you know, depression,

hey, I can relate to depression. And you know what? It's funny how depression finds everything depression. How depression finds everything depressing. That's what depression does. It's interesting how bitterness is bitter about everything. It's what depression does. It's interesting how bitterness is bitter about everything. It's what bitterness does.

You know, love, love is loving, you know. And that it was neat to take these characters and watch how, that even the negative emotions could respond very positively. And the way to do that was

the more I had them be true to what they were, the more the players, the audience related to it. And so one of the things as a writer that I definitely believe, and I believe this as a game designer, is I don't shy away from negative emotions,

that I feel that you want to be careful. I mean, a good example here is it was always the intent of this story that the Phyrexians were going to win. In fact, like I said, if you don't even think about the history of Scarlet's Myrden, like, it started from a place where you knew,

I mean, we knew the Phyrexians were going to win. In fact, the point of this block was to reintroduce the Phyrexians as a really valid threat. I mean, obviously, they'd been in Magic's path, they'd been a big threat in the past, but we wanted to reintroduce them. The Phyrexians had really not been in the picture for about ten years,

and we were like, we wanted to reintroduce them in Scars of Mirrodin and say, not ten years, like seven years, but anyway, they're back, I guess ten years, but anyway, they're back and they're bad, and you should be afraid of them. So I went all out to create a negative emotion, because I was like, I wanted to scare you.

I wanted the fractions to be scary. And like I said, the takeaway I got is I really, really succeeded. But it did generate some negative emotions in that it really made people feel uncomfortable. The fractions are invasive. Poison is invasive. And that some people really reveled in that and had fun and really enjoyed it. But other people were like,

I don't like the feeling of this. It was funny that the big complaint that I got about poison was, the two biggest complaints, one was there's no way to deal with it. Everything else has an answer. Why can't poison have an answer? And then, the interesting thing there is, there are answers to stop you

from getting the poison. There aren't answers to remove it once you have it. The second complaint is that the poison was too much like life. So it's funny that the biggest complaints kind of contradict each other. Like, this is too much like life, and why can't you make it more like life? I mean, it doesn't mean it's the same people making the complaints, but it's interesting. So anyway, I think the big lesson I learned was

that we need to be careful. I mean, I think having some negative emotions is fine. You need a balance. Like, one of the things is Magic for a couple sets

had a lot of downer endings where the good guys weren't winning. And we realized, like, okay, it's fine to have the bad guys win some of the time, but you know, you need the good guys weren't winning. And we realized, like, okay, it's fine to have the bad guys win

some of the time, but, you know, you need the good guys to win. And we made sure in Innistrad, for example, that the good guys, in the end, the good guys won.

I mean, obviously, it had to start bad, but that only makes a good guys winning even more exciting when it looks bad up front. But anyway, that, to me,

is the biggest lesson of Scars of Mirrodin was sort of connecting and getting us into the fifth age design and kind of learning of the danger of being careful. Like, you know, you can push emotions a little strong and that when you're pushing negative things, be careful how you do it, you know. I mean, the good news is the Phyrexians are a villain that we've reestablished and that when you see the next, hopefully you'll go, oh, the Phyrexians are a villain that we've reestablished, and that when you see the next, hopefully you'll go, oh, the Phyrexians, uh-oh, that's not good.

The other lessons of Scars of Mirrodin on a smaller scale was it was the first time we had really revisited a world. I mean, I understand we've gone back to Dominaria, but in some way we had never really revisited stuff in Dominaria. The way we tended to do Dominaria was we just would pick a new back to dominaria but in some way we never really revisited stuff in dominaria the way we tend to do dominaria was we just would pick a new spot on dominaria and tell a new story in some ways early magic um we would go to a new world but a lot of times we stayed on the same plane you know it's like yes ice age and mirage and you know and Onslaught. All that stuff takes place in Dominaria, but

on some level, we went to an Ice World, which was Ice Age. We went to a Jungle World, which was Mirage. Nowadays, it'd just be a brand new world and it wouldn't be all the same place. In some ways, Dominaria was just us not quite getting, like, we're planeswalking.

The neat thing is our characters can go from world to world. So let's actually go to new worlds. And so this was really revisiting a set for the first time. So one of the things that I was trying to understand was the balance between how much do you repeat? How much, what do you need to feel like we're back? This is something that we know. And how much do you need new things to feel like to feel like we're back? This is something that we know. And how much do you need new things to feel like, okay, well, I've seen that.

I want to do something new. And that's really interesting. It's funny because first time out of the gate, I think we did a pretty good job. We brought back imprint. We brought back the mirror. We brought back dark steel. We brought back imprint. We brought back the mirror. We brought back dark steel.

We brought back equipment, obviously. We brought back some stuff that were very key to what Mirrodin had been. But in the same sense, we brought a whole new quality. They were being invaded. That was something that, even though the background was there the last time, it was set to one, and we ramped it up now to ten. And so it was interesting trying to find that mix. I was pretty happy.

I felt like we definitely feel like we were in Mirrodin, but by the end of the block, we definitely felt like, and now Phyrexia's taken over Mirrodin. You know? I mean, that's one of the things that we were trying really hard to do, was that we wanted you to rediscover and remember Mirrodin, and then watch it fall to the Phyrexians because we wanted the Phyrexian threat to feel real.

And part of that, part of the emotional connection of that is we have to have you connect to Mirrodin. You had to care about Mirrodin. You know, if we went back and had the Phyrexians just destroy a world that you'd never met before, it's a lot harder, right? You know, you don't have the emotional investment in the world. But we went to Mirrodin, the world people really liked.

And so when the Phyrexians took over Mirrodin, you felt bad for the Mirrins. You're like, oh. And the Mirrins, by the way, the other important thing about the Mirrins was we'd established them

as badasses. They were like, this was like a broken world. They were strong. You know, they beat other worlds around them. So when someone came and beat them,

you're like, this is something to worry about. So I was very happy with that. So here's something really interesting. Previous lessons learned, at the end of the time, I've gone through multiple sets. And now, not only I'm ending,

and I even more to say about Scars of the Mirrodin. I don't know if, here's my theory, is I did this series long ago. When I first started doing my podcast, I was just burning through things, and I would, like, go as fast as I can. And eventually I realized, like, I have a lot to say. Why rush through that? Why not just talk about that topic? So, as I get back to lessons learned, you get me doing the slower lessons learned. And so, that is Lessons Learned, you get me doing the slower Lessons Learned. And so, that is

Lessons Learned of Scars of Mirrodin. But I'm not even done yet. So this is Scars of Mirrodin Part 1. Lessons Learned Part 5, Scars of Mirrodin Part 1. I don't even know how to, I'm not sure, I'll figure out how to list that in my thing. So this is all Lessons Learned

Part 5. I started doing Scars of Mirrodin. I think my plan is next time I do this podcast, well, my plan is I will continue Scars of Mirrodin, so I'm not going to make you wait forever to hear Part 2 of Scars of Mirrodin. I will do the rest of Scars of Mirrodin in my next podcast, and maybe then I will get into it. I'm not sure. We'll see. In a lot of ways, today was as much about

Fifth Age as it was about Scarlet Mirren, but they all came together, so. That, my friends, that's my show for today. Obviously, I've just parked my car, so that means this is the end of my drive to work. So thank you guys for joining me. I did so good, I just messed up again.

Thank you so much for joining me today. I'll talk to you guys next time.