Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #234 - Lessons Learned: Innistrad

Episode Date: June 12, 2015

Mark looks back as the lead of Innistrad and shares what he learned from it.

I'm pulling out of the parking space, so we all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today I had to deliver my son's Rube Goldberg project to school. So I am leaving from school, but as we all know, school's right near my house, so we get a full day of drive to work. Full episode. Okay, so today I'm going to talk about, I'm going to continue a series that I call Lessons Learned, where I started this long ago, where I talk about sets that I've led and what lessons I learned from leading those sets. Just, it turns out, by the mere circumstance of how things work, that I'm up to Innistrad at the same time that I'm talking about Innistrad block. They converge! So, what I'm going to do is

I'm going to talk about Innistrad and I'm going to talk about Dark Ascension. My plan is that this podcast will probably be Innistrad, but if I get to Dark Ascension, we get there. I might intertwine, actually, maybe what I'll do is I'll intertwine a little bit since some of the lessons between the

two of them, they were shared. I did both Innistrad and Dark Ascension. It's the only large, small, back-to-back set. Well, I did Shadowmourne Eventide, so I guess it's the second one I've done. But anyway, so let's talk about what did I learn. So let me start off by saying the following. If you had to ask me of every set that I've done that's been released, what set is my best design, probably i have to say innistrad i mean

i have some soft spots for like tempest and unglued and some of my early stuff that just emotionally means a lot to me but probably if i had to be honest like what is the best design i've done i think innistrad is the answer innistrad is i'm very very happy with how it turned out um so the interesting thing is you, a lot of my lessons learned are like, you know, I talked a lot during the Odyssey one about all the mistakes I made and what I learned from it. Today is about how you can do something and be very successful. You know, Innistrad might be one of the most successful sets I've ever done, at least. And yet, there are a lot of lessons to learn from it.

Even though it was successful and I'm very happy with it, that doesn't mean there weren't lessons learned. And I talked about during my mistakes podcast about how when something goes wrong, you have more motivation to learn because things didn't go right. You know, things went bad. I don't want that to happen again. What do I need to change? But one of the important lessons so lesson number one is that you have to make sure you understand not just what went wrong in your failures but what went wrong in your successes and what went right you know i'm saying but um i i think successes tend to breed repetition so it's very common when you have a success for you to go okay i'm gonna repeat that success i'll keep doing

what we did before and that into in and of itself can be dangerous because a lot of times, what makes something successful? Like, Industrials is a good example where Magic, early on in the very first expansion was a set called Arabian Nights, made by Richard Garfield, and that was the first time

Magic did what I would call top-down design. Where Richard took the Arabian Nights and very much designed cards from call top-down design, where Richard took the Arabian Knights and very much designed cards from a top-down perspective of Arabian Knights. What does Aladdin do? What does Ali Baba do? He was taking all the different components of Arabian Knights. Now, the one thing

he did that we don't do anymore is he was doing what I call a straight transliteration. He was making characters as they existed in the story. Since then, when we do top-down, when we do Top Down what we do now is we do stuff inspired by a source but it's our own version of it

so the first set that we really did Top Down on in any sort of modern sense of us taking our own take on it I think would be Champions of Kamigawa and the idea of Champions of Kamigawa was what if we started from a place of creative what if the creative did its work first the way it used to work was

design would do its work and when design was done creative would then figure out what they could layer on top of it okay well we know the design is this what is that and then create a creative to match the design so Champions of Kamigawa was the first time

where we said okay what if we start with the creative and then layer the mechanics on top of the creative? Now, the big lesson from that set, lesson learned from a set I didn't do, was that mechanics aren't as flexible as flavor. And so, when you start with flavor, you have to really ham-fist mechanics to work. And so, Champions of Kamigawa did a lot of things incorrectly that didn't quite work out. And it kind of scared us away from top-down sets. It's one of those things where I talk about how your successes can have things that you, you know, there are failures within your successes, and there are successes within your failures. The idea

of doing a top-down design was actually a pretty neat idea. It wasn't executed well the first time we did it, but that doesn't mean the idea was a poor idea. It just meant the execution needed to be changed. But the interesting thing about Innistrad is when I wanted to do Innistrad, so remember a little, for those that don't remember this because my Innistrad podcast, the original one was a long time ago. The way Innistrad came about was we were making

Odyssey. And Odyssey had a strong graveyard component. And Brady Donovan, who would later run the creative team, although the time wasn't even on the creative team, made the comment to me that the creative was a very poor fit. That the creative for Odyssey was a story about Kamal,

but it had nothing to do with the graveyard. And Brady brought up how we could do something cool, a gothic horror sort of thing. And that when Brady brought up the idea of gothic horror, something that I really liked the idea was to take a genre, which is horror, and build around a genre. That I thought that was a really neat idea. And so when Brady brought that up, it triggered an idea that I had, which is the idea of a design in which you take something that has a pulp culture relevance to it, a genre that means something to people because they've seen this kind of story again and again. And I married the idea of the gothic horror sense that Brady talked about we could do with the idea of a set that I wanted to do that was genre-specific, that was built around a genre.

genre-specific, that was built around a genre. And horror specifically. Horror fits very well because horror and fantasy have a lot of overlap. A lot of classic fantasy very much overlaps in some of the fantasy tropes. Traditional fantasy tends to be a little more medieval, where a lot

of the gothic horror tends to be more Victorian. But magically new could shift up a little bit. So anyway, I had this idea. So this is Odyssey. So I'd taken sort of my idea, Brady's idea, and pushed him into a neat idea. And it was not for 10 years before Innistrad got made.

And even then, for those who remember, Innistrad wasn't even originally going to be the fall set. Originally it was going to be the small, what was in the Avacyn restored slot, was going to be Innistrad in its own world, by itself, a little one-of large set. You can kind of tell, by the way, early on in the way we were messing around with

when we were starting to do large sets in the spring, we were torn with the idea of it having to be their own thing, which was really a precursor to where we ended up with a two-set paradigm. So anyway, or the two-block paradigm, sorry. Okay, so what happened was, in Ashrod, it just took me a while to convince people to do it.

Partly because, I mean, champions did not help. When champions happened, me trying to pitch this idea of a more top-down design, people were a little intimidated by it. And there was not a lot of confidence outside. I mean, I think Brady believed in this. The creative team, I think, believed in it. But the idea of there being enough substance

to do a whole set around. Could you make a whole world build around horror? And the answer, obviously, was yes, but people were nervous at the time. One of the things to remember is, and this is an important lesson unto itself, which is the role of design is to see what isn't there. My job is to design things that don't yet exist. Sometimes I bring things back. I mean, I'm not reinventing the wheel

every time, but a lot of design's job is to find the thing that could be that is not yet. And people can rely on the known. When you say, we're going to do this known thing, it's like these people go, okay. You know, when I say we're going to return to Ravnica, I can get people on boards like,

Ravnica was successful. You want to go back? Okay. You know, or even when I was picking themes that were just established themes, I want to do a multicolor set. Oh,

we've had successful multicolor sets. Okay. But when I want to say, I want to do something in a way we've never really doneolor sets. Okay. But when I want to say, I want to do something in a way we've never really done, and the one best example to compare it to was one of our least successful products ever, it is, it's a

hard sell. And the funny thing is, the thing that I think finally, ironically, got me, got the foot in the door was that thanks to things like Twilight, horror was taking off, becoming very popular. It had a kind of resurgence.

And so when I was going to the powers that be and said, hey, I was able to pitch. You know this idea I've had, that even in horror, horror is hot right now. And I think that helped get the ball rolling a little bit. Like, well, okay, I guess we're going to take a risk. At least, you know, there's some proof that the theme is popular. And that's one of the things that helped get me the foot in the door. But anyway, so the first lesson, the first lesson in Innistrad is one of persistence, is one of believing in good ideas.

And actually, there's two examples from Innistrad. One is just the whole set itself. It's funny because trying to get the set made took forever there was a lot of resistance once the set was finally happening once the set was in design the actual idea of doing gothic horror nobody blinked an eye like once like getting to get the right to do it took forever but once they got the right and was like okay sounds good and people were happy um and in general, I think as we were designing, people could see what we were doing, and they were happy. But, it's funny, so once we got into design, I had told my team that werewolves were very important. Magic had not really

ever been successful doing werewolves. I think we had three werewolf cards, but none of which were successes. And so what I said is, look, we're going to do stuff like vampires and zombies. Magic's done good vampires and zombies before. But we've never really nailed werewolves. If we can nail werewolves, then, you know, we could have something to hang our hat on. And it's out of my desire to sort of figure out werewolves that got us to Dark Transformation,

that got us to double-faced cards. And for those that remember the story, it didn't start like, that was just one of a bunch of ideas it was weird but so one of the lessons was I mean something I knew but I got reinforced during the set is when Tom Lapilli

first suggested double-faced cards as a solution to the werewolf issue on that I was a little skeptical you know magic had always had a back to it that felt like a pretty radical thing I'm, I, magic had always had a back to it that felt like a pretty radical thing. I'm not, I don't believe in

breaking out of the box for the sake of doing it. I don't want to do something that we've never done just to say we've done it. I only want to do something because it fits the needs at hand. But Tom's idea

did fit the needs at hand. And so even though I was a little skeptical, I'm like, you know what? We have a lot of ideas. Let's try them. An important part and a big lesson of this, which got reinforced is, you know, even things that seem impractical in design, try them.

Do not. There's so much. If things work, if things are showing sign of progress, you will figure out ways to solve your problems. And so design, early design is not the place to be naysaying. If something is fitting what you need, try it. You know, that there's plenty of things that will fall out along the way. If the idea functionally won't work, trying is not going to make it happen.

You know, if Devil's Face Cards was not doing what we needed to do, you know, but it did. It's like, oh, we need werewolves. Werewolves need two states. That is definitely a way to show two states of werewolves. It had baggage with it. There's a lot of complication. It wasn't something that was an automatic, of course, we're doing it. But I did say, okay, let's try it. I did not write it off. Even though, I'll be honest, like I said, I was a bit skeptical. But I've learned, and like I said, this is a big lesson,

was, you know, you've got to try things. Even things that might sound crazy, you have to try them. Because sometimes, A, they're not as crazy as you think, double-faced cards, or they lead you down the path of something that is not as crazy, but you wouldn't have got there without the stepping stone of the crazier idea. Now, second thing was, so we made these cards it became pretty clear to me about midway through we were doing it there's a point where I realized like I said the set handed over in

July or August and like February I went to Aaron and said I'm pretty sure we're going to do this and we needed to talk to other parts of the company there's a lot of things we do that only R&D like as long as the rules and the template and people can figure it out, if R&D can handle it,

it can be done. This was a printing thing. I know Duel Masters had done it, so I knew it was something that was doable. But I knew we needed to adopt earlier because there were a lot of factors that went into it. It turned out to be tons of factors. In fact, in February, I started the ball rolling, and had I started a month later, we might

not have been able to get them in the set. I thought I was starting insanely early, and I wasn't. later, we might not be able to get them in the set. That's how, like, I thought I was starting insanely early and I wasn't. Although, I mean, that's when we figured out we were using them. But one of the big lessons is you have to have passion to support your ideas.

A lot of people came along and said, you cannot do this. This is breaking a fundamental rule of magic that cannot, should not be broken and I had to fight very hard I had to say no no no this is okay, magic is a game that breaks its own rules and we do things

and that it's scary to do something you've never done before but I've worked on magic for a long long time I've watched us do things that we've never done before and every single time I mean, interesting by the way, there always was, outward,

the players would be skeptical but they're not the most skeptical because to the players, we've made it. You know, most players are like, well, it's here, they can complain about it, maybe we shouldn't have done it, but we did it. By the time the players see it, it's a done thing. We have done it. And so players will gripe done it, but we did it. By the time the players see it, it's a done thing. We have done it. And so players

will gripe about it, usually before they've seen it, but at some point they'll get used to it because it exists. When you're inside the building, if you believe it shouldn't be done, you are fighting to stop it. You are fighting to say, this should never happen. So the people that disagree with things

are very passionate. Now that's great. I love passion. People make magic. Now, that's great. I love passion. People make magic. I think that's good. But the thing here was I had people who were trying to stop it from happening because they fundamentally believed we were making a critical error, that we were taking magic someplace it should not be going. So I had a lot of fight in my hand.

Eric Lauer, who was the head developer, a lot of people came to him, because by the time people didn't really understand what we were doing until it got to development. And so there was a lot of me having to convince Eric that this was the right thing to do, and Aaron and all the people. There was definitely

a lot of voices on the other side saying it was a huge mistake, and I had to sort of be the voice saying no it's not we need to do things like this and it's going to be okay and players are going to love it so that was a big

stick to your guns understand what you're caring for take chances and then when your chances work out you got to defend your puppies you got to believe in them and you have to fight for them and that

had I not been so passionate about double-faced cards, had I just been willing to be a little more accommodating of, well, maybe there's another way we can do it. I don't think they would have happened. You know, that I, and I realized early on that in order to make them happen, I needed to be full committal. You know, I, I had to sell it. So that's another big lesson here is that one of the big jobs of a designer, a lead designer, a head designer, is you are a salesman. You have to convince people that some of the stuff you're doing is the right thing to do. Now, when it's small things, it's not that hard to convince them. Here's a new mechanic.

Usually it isn't too hard to convince people. But when you want to do something radical, when you want to, right, go someplace the game's never gone before, that requires some salesmanship. And one of the things I think I'm proudest of, looking back at Innistrad, was I had some salesmanship. I had some salesmanship to get the set off the ground. I had some salesmanship to make the double-faced cards happen. There were a lot of things that had to be done. Another thing that I had to sell people on, that people were a little skeptical was,

the set had three keywords in it. We had transform, which was a double-faced mechanic. We had flashback, which was coming back. And we had morbid. Now, there were other things going in the set. There was a tribal component. There were curses. It wasn't like that was the only thing going on but there are only three keywords now early in magic we used to do two keywords and over time we it started keywording more things so the time three keywords was actually pretty low for us at the time and what i said was there's a lot going on it's okay that the three keywords is there's plenty happening. One thing that's very interesting is,

and this is true with players as well as internal, is that people tend to use the keywords as a marker of what's happening in the set. And that if there's few keywords, a lot of people will read that as meaning there's less going on in the set. That other thing had five keywords. There's more going on there than this,

so there's three keywords. And part of the answer is, there was a lot else going on, but not everything needs to be keyworded. And the way that Innistrad was designed, a lot of the tribal components, a lot of the, some of the flavor, like the curses and things, they just, they worked better not as a named mechanic. Didn't mean they weren't there.

It didn't mean it wasn't something people couldn't build around or draft around or have fun or, you know. Like, they were themes to play with. But they weren't things that needed the keyword. And so there was some debate at the time about, you know, was there enough in the set? And so I also had, like, one of the things that's important, Innistrad really taught me this is don't put things in your set like understand the volume of what you have you have to believe in

you need to gauge how much you need and then don't put more in your set than you need in fact one of the big lessons and Innistrad was a really good I mean Innistrad was a good example where I did this and the response proved I was correct in my assumption, which was, you want to put as little in your set as you need

to accomplish what you need to accomplish. The forces of being will make you put more in. And there's a lot of moving pieces to a magic set. I'm not saying magic sets shouldn't have a decent amount in them. By the nature of what they need to exist, they need a bunch of stuff. But, avoid the pressure of putting things in because you feel you need to put things in. Put things in because you need them. Put things in because there's space missing.

Put things in because, you know, there's something that the set isn't doing that it needs to do. But do not put things in because they are... Do not put things in your set because they are... Because you feel that, well, I don't have enough. It doesn't seem like I have enough that I should put more in. I mean, if there's a gap, if something's missing,

that's okay. But there were a bunch of conversations about, oh, should I be adding a keyword? And I was very... I'm like, no, no, no, the set's doing what it needs to do. The set has enough in it. There's enough going on. And Innistrad, the thing that's interesting about Innistrad is

on the surface, because of three keywords, it looks like there's a little less going on. But when you start playing with it and you start seeing some of the tribal connections and some of the different themes that were woven in the role of the graveyard, there was a lot going on, it was by no means

a simple set it definitely had a lot going on but on the surface, one of the things that I learned being a top down set was I let the top down carry a lot of the content. What I mean by that was, I knew when you played the set, there's things you're going to want to do because the top-down

leaves you there. I want to build a zombie deck, and I want zombie deck to act like zombies. Okay, we got that. You know, I wanted to do the same with werewolves, with vampires, with spirits, with humans. Each one of them had a story and had a role. And that story and role, because I was building top down from pop culture, meaning I knew you had seen zombies in movies and TV and read them in books and you had a sense of what zombies were like. So when I made a zombie deck and figured out how the zombie deck worked, I knew the audience would have an expectation and I could meet that expectation. And a lot of the interesting things about Innistrad was trying to figure out what people would expect and designing to match the expectations.

That was, so one of the biggest lessons, I guess, of Innistrad was I did not do Champs Kamigawa. I mean, I was on the development team, so I was familiar with how it was designed, although I did not design it. So this was the first time that I had done top-down. And I learned a lot. I learned a lot about top-down. And one of the big things is the need to allow your top-down to sort of guide expectations and try to design to expectations. The other thing, which is a big thing, which started with Scars of Marriage but got reinforced in Innistrad, was trying to understand the emotional content. The one nice thing about using pop culture was when you're messing with a genre, genres come pretty emotion loaded, if you will.

Like, it's clear horror was about fear. That when you watch a horror film, it's crystal clear. The emotion that it plays around with is fear. It is playing into fears you have. That's what horror is about, is taking human fears and exploring them and digging into them. So if I'm doing a set around that

and I want an emotional response, well, fear is what I'm going for. I'm trying to provoke fear out of the other player. I want to scare them. I want to make them feel uneasy. I want some sense of tension. And a lot of the design was built to match that feel. And the big thing I learned walking out of Innistrad was that there are a lot of tools available to a top-down design that are unique to a top-down design. And not that that was the only way to design, but it was a way to design.

And I think a lot of what Innistrad did was sell the rest of R&D that this was a viable format to design. In fact, if anything, it oversold it. I believe that our player base so loved Innistrad that the response is, stop doing how you do design. Let's make all the designs it oversold it. I believe that our player base so loved Innistrad that the response is, stop doing high-end design. Let's make all the designs top-down designs.

And the answer is, we can't. Partly because there's not the amount of top-down material as we need. Partly because Magic is better if every set is not designed the same way. Magic is better if different sets come from a different place. I really was happy how Cons came out,

but Cons was not at all from the top down. Not that it wasn't the top-down component that was later woven in, but that's not where it started. That's not how it got designed. And I guess even, I mean, the big takeaway from Innistrad was the idea of there are tools available from us that we should be more conscious of. And we had definitely tapped into some resonance things that were going on

during Magic 2010 and Zendikar. I mean, there were places we were looking at resonance. But it made me sort of approach it in a whole new way. I think we looked at resonance as a thing. What things can you replicate? And Innistrad taught me that there was resonance in emotion

and feeling and sort of how things were played out and that we could take advantage of that. It's clear to me, by the way, I'm not quite to work yet, but I'm not getting into Dark Ascension today. So today will be an Innistrad day and the next time I do Lessons Learned, I will do Dark Ascension. Dark Ascension, actually, a lot more

went wrong, so Innistrad's more of things went right, Dark Ascension's things went wrong. We'll get to that next time. But anyway, so what went wrong in Innistrad? I'm talking a lot about things I did right and how it taught me. So let's flip the coin. What went wrong? So the number one thing that went wrong in Innistrad

was I had a lot more going on than I think I explained to my lead developer, Eric Lauer. I mean, the classic story, I've talked about curses, how I had this big plan for curses, and one of the things I was trying to do was I was trying to show the role of the humans

versus the monsters in the first set so that I could play it off in the second set. And the problem was, although I had set this stuff up in the design, I didn't elaborate with my lead developer what I was doing. There's a lot of stuff I was doing that was trying to pay off. And some of it happened. Some of the payoff happened. But not all of it.

And the reason was I didn't do a good enough job explaining to my lead developer what I was up to. And part of that was that one of the things is I am very intuitive in how I do design. That there's things that I believe

I was setting myself. Like I knew I was doing Dark Ascension. I knew design that there's things that I believe I was setting myself, like I knew I was doing Dark Ascension. I knew when I was doing Intro that I was doing the next set. So I acted a little differently than I normally do.

But I didn't change my process even though I acted differently because I was leading into myself, something I don't often do. And even with Shadowmore,

I didn't know when I was doing Shadowmore that I was going to be leading Eventide. For those who remember that story, the lead designer dropped out of the last second, and I let it just so I had nobody else I could put on it. So I didn't design Shadowmoor knowing I was designing Eventide. I designed Innistrad knowing I was designing Dark Ascension.

And so I did a lot of things. I now realize a lot of them I did on a gut level, but I didn't do on a level where I understood what I was doing until I got to Dark Ascension. And then I saw what happened in Innistrad. I'm like, oh, why didn't I explain this? Because why didn't I explain it? Partly because I didn't know.

And that's an interesting thing about, about design that I learned from Innistrad was how much of the way I design is by feel. People ask me a lot sort of how I design, what do I do? One of the things you learn as you design is every time you design something

you are learning more about who you are as a designer. And that's a never ending process. It's not like I go, I mean I'm 20 years in. I've been designing a lot of magic sets. I've designed like 20 magic sets. I'm still learning about what makes me tick as a designer. Now, partly that's because I'm growing as a designer, and so I'm changing. But part of that's also like, oh, I now see something I didn't understand before.

And so Innistrad was a very important design for me to understand a little bit more about who I was and how I designed. And one of the things that, like, it's funny because I write a design column. I talk about my designs all the time. I do my podcast. I mean, it's not like I'm not constantly talking about my designs. But it's interesting that as I talk about my designs, like, when I do a podcast like this, you know, it is, a lot of times I'm saying aloud things that I had never said until I bothered, I mean, I might have internalized them, but, like, the big lesson I learned

in the industry that's funny is understanding how important, um, I think I knew I was trying to evoke emotion out of people, but what I didn't understand, like I talked about this before, which is you want to understand your, I talked about in writing, I had a writing teacher that said that everybody has a theme. Every writer has a theme, you know, and we would read famous writers and figure out their theme.

And then one day she's like, now let's figure out your theme. What's the theme you write? So if you guys remember, my theme as a writer that I always come back to is how people like to function intellectually but in reality

they make most of the decisions by emotion. That people want to think that they process intellectually when they process more emotionally than intellectually. And I made a whole play about it. The theme pops again and again. Mood swings is about emotions.

Emotions are a very strong theme in my work. One of the things I didn't realize is that I think that I spent a lot of time thinking about what my audience would think about what I was doing and not what they would feel about what I was doing.

I did a whole podcast about emotional connection. And I think that a lot of the lessons of that podcast came from Innistrad design, of working on something that had this really emotional core and starting to understand that what I was trying to do was match expectations and that expectation wasn't as much emotional as anything else. And a lot of what I was doing, interestingly, was as a designer, was I was trying to, and this was done subconsciously, that I was trying to say, oh, they're going to respond not intellectually but emotionally. Let's make sure I'm emotionally hitting the beats I need.

You know, that I was, as a game designer, having the same theme I was as a writer, and just unaware that I was doing it, you know, and that was a very illuminating thing, that one of the neat things about doing design is understanding how you are functioning as a designer, so one of the things that's a great thing to do, what we call post-mortem, and I mean post-mortem in R&D is when the whole group sits around and talks about what went right, what didn't go right. But one of the things that I still call sort of a personal post-mortem,

which is, I find it very interesting, I mean, obviously I write things, I have a very public place to do this, but even if it's privately, write down, after you're finished designing something, about the design process. Walk through your design process, talk about it. And that, what I find the design process. Walk through your design process. Talk about it.

And that what I find is when you walk through your design process and you're forced to kind of label things and think about how you did things, that you will, you know, whoa! Light will open up.

You're like, oh my goodness. All these things you did not understand why you did them. And like I said, it was very interesting in Innistrad. In some ways, next time I talk about Lessons Learned, we'll do Dark Ascension. I didn't realize some said, it was very interesting in Innistrad. In some ways, next time I talk about Lessons Learned, we'll do Dark Ascension. I didn't realize

some of the stuff I was doing in Innistrad until I got to Dark Ascension. I did a whole bunch of things to set up stuff in Dark Ascension that I did not understand when I was doing Innistrad, even though I did it. I mean, I knew I was doing Dark Ascension, and I did it, but I didn't understand what I was doing necessarily. And so there's a lot of

design work that is done subconsciously. Like one of the things about writing that I know from my writing teachers is that when you write things, there's a lot of themes and things you put in your work that you put in, you did it, but you weren't aware that you were doing it. And Innistrad taught me that I do that

a lot in design, more so than I was aware of. So my first big mistake was not getting a better understanding of what I was doing so I could communicate it. Second big mistake, I mean, I didn't make major big mistakes, obviously, that's the set I'm most proud of. I also, like I said, I think I made a mistake on the spirits. I solved them in Dark Ascension, I believe,

but I wish I'd solved, like, I wish I'd given spirits more of a definition in Innistrad I feel like Dark Ascension kind of picked up the ball there now part of it was, early on I didn't realize we were doing four monsters and I kind of added it a little later and I didn't give them the same treatment as the first three I also think that I wish

I mean it taught me that I needed to be clear earlier about some of the things I want Innistrad did a good job the fact that I came out early trying to explain double-faced cards and wanting to do double-faced cards made me realize that that was something that we should be doing all the time and a lot of how design has changed is we are getting involved much earlier with other people outside of design to say, hey, is this working?

Hey, development, is this developable? Hey, rules teams, can we write text for this? Hey, templating people, can we template this? You know, talking to different people, talking to digital, talking to creative, talking to, there's lots and lots of people that have repercussions of what you are doing and that design is better if it's

serving those other functions and Innistrad made me realize that we need to be doing that more often that part of being good at you know part of being a good designer is making sure that you are setting up all the people down the road that are going to be working on what you're doing and you are maximizing your design for those people a good good design is a design that is developable. A good design is a design that creatives can do the work they need to do on it. A good design is a design that digital can work with. A good design is a design that organized play can work with. A good design is a design that can be templated, that rules can be written for it. A good design is a design that everybody else doing their job making magic can do their job.

And your job is the first ones down the road, the first ones in line, is to make sure that you are making something that fulfills what everybody else working on the product will need. That you are making a product, you're not making a product in a vacuum, you're making a product that a whole bunch of other people will work on.

Your job as first one in the line is to make sure that everybody else is served by what you are doing. Your job as a designer is to service everybody down the line, to make your design not just the best design it can be, but the best design it can be to fulfill the roles of everybody else. And that was a big takeaway. So anyway, I think that Innistrad, I learned a lot from Innistrad.

It's funny, as I talk about it today, there were major things I learned from it, major things I understood. It was successful, but it really made me rethink a lot of how I did things, how I structured things, how I thought, how I thought about myself as a designer, how I functioned with the rest of R&D and the rest of Wizards.

So anyway, it was pretty illuminating. Like I said, while it was a very successful set, I think behind the scenes it was very successful too, that I walked away with a lot of lessons. Interestingly, the very next day at Dark Ascension, I made a whole bunch of mistakes. But that will be the next lesson we talk about. But anyway, I'm now parked in my car,

which we all know what that means. It means it's time to end my drive to work. So instead of making magic, it's time for me... No, I said it backwards. Instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. See you guys next time.