Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #279 - Bad Cards

Episode Date: November 13, 2015

Mark bases this podcast on his article about why so-called bad cards exist.

I'm pulling up my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today I want to talk about an article. So back in 2002, I was put in charge of trying to create the website. It's a sort of, Magic didn't really have a, we had a website, but we didn't really have like daily content. And so I was given the assignment of putting it together. I talked about this. I did a podcast, I believe, on the website. But anyway, I decided that I was going to write a column on making magic. The column I still write.

And so I was still trying to find my feet. I was trying to figure out what kind of stuff I wanted to write about. And I think the seventh column I ever wrote was a column called When Cards Go Bad. And somebody had written into me about a question about why we make bad cards. And so I wrote a whole article about why we make bad cards, which went on to really be one of the defining articles I originally wrote that really helped me figure out my voice and the kind of stuff I wanted to write about. So today I'm revisiting When Cards Go Bad and I'm going to talk about why we make bad cards.

It is a source of much debate. People are, it is something that people always ask, you know, like clearly, clearly. So today I'm going to walk through, there's seven reasons, this goes back to the original article, so I'm going to walk through sort of the reasons of the article and explain them probably in a little more depth than I did in the article, the advantage of a podcast. Okay, so number one is why do you make bad cards? So, number one is all the cards can't be good. So, let me walk through what that means. Okay, so we make 600 plus cards a year. Standard is 18 months. So that is about 1,000 cards or so in standard. And here's the reality is you can't make 1,000 cards all playable at the same time in the same format.

It's just you can't do it. It's not possible. Essentially, the idea is for any one function, there is one, maybe two cards that are the best at that function. There are synergies. Maybe certain cards work with certain other cards. But when push comes to shove, if you want to do a thing, there's just some way to do that thing that's better than the other ways to do that thing. That something's going to rise to the top. It's a little cheaper. It's a little more

efficient. It has a rider that's more beneficial. Something. Something's going to make a certain card better than another card. And the idea is if we you can't let's say for example you take

so vintage vintage is every card is available you can use any card in magic there's over 15,000 cards that doesn't mean all the cards don't get played when you go to

standard with 1,000 cards all the cards don't get played there isn't just basically I don't know the exact number but maybe 100 to 200 cards really can matter. Maybe there's another 100 cards that fringy could matter.

But there's just a limit. No matter how big your card pool is, there's a limit to how many cards can matter. Because as soon as one card is made better, it just absorbs another card. One of the things people talk about all the time is, you know, your cards would all be stronger if you just knocked a mana off each one. That is true. They would, well, actually, it's not even true.

If every card had its mana lopped off by one, you're not really changing the power level of much of anything. You know, the idea is people look at cards and say, I know how I can make that card in isolation more powerful. I could just make it cheaper.

Then it would be more powerful. I can make the effect bigger. You know, it's not that we don't understand how to make a card in isolation more powerful. The issue is we can't make everything powerful. That the environment of cards for any sort of constructed environment, there's only so many cards that matter. And our constructed environments are bigger than that number.

You know, the most diverse standard environment we can come up with, 100 cards, 150 cards, maybe 200 cards are going to matter. You know, and maybe if you're counting every card showing up in sideboards or anywhere, like, maybe there's another 50, 100 cards, maybe, maybe that can show up.

But the reality is you're going to be hard pressed to get much more than 2 to 300 cards in an environment this is hard to do because once again once you improve one card to make it better it's just pushing out another card so the first thing about why the bad cards exist is

we make more cards than exist that could be powerful at any one moment in time. That there's no way to make the volume of cards we do. So why do we make the volume of cards we do? Well, number one, we're a trading card game. You know, part of what we want to do is constantly put out new cards. Number two is there's lots of formats. We'll get to that in a second.

Cards have value in different places. So we'll get to that. That's a whole different reason. cards have value in different places so we'll get to that, that's a whole different reason and number three is that you know the part of

magic is a discovery so that's another thing, so I'll be getting to these other ones but anyway, so number one is we literally cannot make a thousand cards we can't make a format where all a thousand cards are played in it. It just can't be done. There's only so many different things you can do, you know.

And, like, for example, one of the things about magic is there are certain staple abilities that we do all the time. That's what makes magic magic. You want to have a giant growth. You want to have direct damage. You want to have a counterspell. You know, there's a lot of just basic effects that we do. Well, one of those is going to be the better version you know i mean there's certain effects where maybe like you're doing a drug damage deck you want a lot of direct

damage but in general you want something to do the functionality we we recreate that functionality a lot and like for example take a giant growth effect every set we make is going to have a giant growth effect every every set every large set small set, just an effect you're always going to get. So in standard, for example, at bare minimum, there's six of them. Now often there's more than one in a set, so there might be six to ten. One of those six to ten giant growth effects, A, maybe none of them are good enough in the current environment, but even if one is good enough, they're all not going to be good enough. One of them is going to be the good giant growth effect.

They can't all be the best giant growth effect. And so, like I said, the first big thing to understand is one of the reasons bad cards exist is because they can't all be good cards. You physically can't fit it all in and make them all good cards. So that's number one.

Just the sheer math of it. Just that, you know, people are always, and people seem dubious when I say this. They're like, oh, but you could change the cards. And I'm like, no, no, no, no. We can change individual cards. We can always make any one individual card in a vacuum more powerful.

Yes, we can. But we have to be wary. And the other thing to be aware of is we don't want to create what we call power creep. One of the ways to make every card matter is have the new cards just be stronger than the old cards. And the new cards will always matter. You know, hey, the new set comes out and knocks everything in the old set out. Now, that is bad for several reasons.

One is the game will spiral out of control. You can't play a game where every set's more powerful than the one before it before things get horribly bad eventually. The second thing is you don't want players to go, oh, I have my cards and all of a sudden the new sets go, forget the old cards. The old cards are useless. You want to have balance and that every set have things that offer something.

You want the pendulum to swing. You want different things to be more powerful in different places. Okay, so let's get to number two. Number two is different cards appeal to different players. So I talk about this all the time. Magic is not one game. Magic is many games with a shared rule set.

You know, somebody who's playing Commander is playing a different game than someone who's booster drafting, which is a different game from someone playing Standard, which is a different game from someone playing Vintage or Modern pauper or, you know, free-for-all. There's lots of ways to play Magic. And one of the goals is every Magic set is trying to give cards to every Magic format, to every Magic experience. And so what that means is we have to put cards in that are good for somebody, but that doesn't mean they're good for you. For example, if I make a common card that has some effect that common hasn't particularly done before or done well, that is a golden card in pauper. All of a sudden, like, oh,

thank you so much. You know, that card that might be useless to you is something that somebody, or there might be somebody who has a cube they're building, and there's just a niche thing they need. This card might fit that niche, and all of a sudden it's perfect for their cube. Or we make something that just really fits a particular commander. Or, which is a big one, Limited. We make a lot of cards for Limited, because Limited is a very popular format. We want cards that when you draft, you can build archetypes around,

and cards that do clever and cool things. So there are a lot of different types of people who play, and they want a lot of different types of cards. So one of the big reasons a card is bad, I almost want to put bad in air quotes. The reason it's bad is because it's not for you. I mean, that's a big lesson you have to learn when you play Magic is not everything's for you. I mean, that's a big lesson you have to learn when you play Magic is, not everything's for you. Not everything was designed for you. Not everybody plays like you. Not everybody uses the format you use.

And we have made cards for everybody. So sometimes when you say a card, and you go, like, for example, you might see an over-cost legendary creature and go, I'm never going to play this. This doesn't have any constructed viability. But that might be an amazing commander that, like, people will have tons and tons of fun with. Another reason bad cards exist is bad is relative.

What is bad for you, what bad means is I can't make use of this card. Usually people talk about bad in context of power, but really what they mean is, really when someone says, why do you make make bad cards what they're really saying is I opened up my booster pack and there are cards I will never play why would you make cards I will never play

and put in booster packs and the answer is at least for this question for this answer is hey they're not all for you there are people who are going to open

some of those cards that you're dismissing and be really excited by they're going to be are going to open some of those cards that you're dismissing and be really excited by. They're going to be really happy to open it. And our job is to make everybody happy. Not everybody has to be happy with the same card. That's an important little game design lesson.

Is that when you design something, it's not important that everybody love everything. It's important that everybody loves something. And that when I make cards, I want to make sure that each card has somebody it speaks to. And so part of the reason they're bad is it's just not for you. And that's... I mean, I think one of the...

I think when I first wrote this article, that point was a very important point. I think it's disseminated to the magic audience a lot more. The idea of diversity of magic play and that different people play different things is a little more prevalent than it was in 2002. At least people are a little more obvious about it. Okay.

Number three. Diversity of card power is key to discovery. Okay. So the idea there is magic is a game of exploration. That the idea is we want you to have to explore the game.

So let me talk about my crispy hash brown theory for those that haven't heard it. I've done it before, but for those that haven't heard it, it's important. What makes magic such a fun game? So my crispy hash brown theory. The idea is when you have a hash brown,

the best part is the crispy outside, the outer shell. It's awesome for those who've never had hash brown. And eventually you eat the outside, and then you go on the inside and eat the inside. The inside's okay. It's not bad. It's not as good as the outside. And in my mind, a lot of games, that the crispy shell is the discovery process,

is that you learn about the game, and that learning about the game, discovering the game is really fun. What's good? What's the strategies? What do I want to do? But the problem is, at some point, you figure out the basic strategies, and then the game shifts to a different area. Usually what happens is you have to start learning something. It's less about discovering, more about memorization. For example, in chess, when you get good enough,

you start just memorizing opening moves and learning opening moves. When you play Scrabble, you have to start memorizing two and three letter words. Then it comes to the point where it's like, okay, I have to sort of study what went before me, and I'm not going to learn new things as much as I now have to study other people that have learned it,

and that I'm not discovering as much from myself as I'm learning from others. And that is fun. That is not as fun, I think, as the discovery process of learning about the game. And that, you know, tic-tac-toe when you're a kid is fun until you realize, oh, I could never lose. I could stall every game. There's a way to always stall the game. Then it's not so fun, you know. And there's a lot of games,

like Othello's a fun game until you kind of learn how important the corners are. And then little by little, it's not quite as fun just because you sort of cracked it. Well, what magic does is because we keep putting out new cards

and we keep rotating the cards, is we keep regrowing the outer shell. We keep regrowing the crispy part back. That magic you're constantly rediscovering. You're constantly trying to figure out what's good and what's bad. And because we keep changing things on you, what might be good before is no longer good. And so one of the fun things about magic is we want that discovery. And a big part of having that discovery is we need to have diversity of cards.

Cards have to be of different power levels and do different things. Some cards will be obvious. Some cards are like, clearly this is a strong card. I need to play this card. But sometimes there are cards that are situationally good. Or maybe they're not good in a certain environment, but as the environment shifts, they become good. An important part of people having the joy of discovering magic is having things that aren't obviously good. You know, that one of the things I say is, one of the things that's super fun in magic is you discovering a card that other people haven't figured out is good yet. Well, that doesn't happen without bad cards. Because once again, bad is in quotes.

What that means is I open a pack and I don't get it. I don't get why this, I wouldn't play this card. And that some of the cards you should play. And it's important like, if every card was good, once again, we can't do that. But let's say somehow rule number one just went away. Mathematically, we could

do it. If every card was good, you know, you wouldn't have as much discovery. You wouldn't go, oh, oh, this card that people perceived as bad is good, you know, you wouldn't have as much discovery. You wouldn't go, oh, oh, this card that people perceived as bad is good. You know, actually, I'm stepping on the toes of a different one. But anyway, the point of this lesson is that you want to have different levels of diversity because it enables discovery. It enables people trying to search through things and find things. And that having things sort of be unequal and having the environment constantly shift so you have to keep reevaluating whether something is good or not just makes the game more fun.

Okay, number four, power levels are relative. And what that means is, let's say a card comes out that's bad. But the reason it's bad is there's a card that came out three sets before that is better than it. So this card is bad, and I'm going to always use that other card. Let's say card B came out, the card A preexisted. Well, card B is bad. I'm going to use card A. But we rotate things. Card A might go away.

When card A goes away, card rotate things. Card A might go away. When card A goes away, card B might be really good. Because what made card B bad was card A. That power level is relative. Whether something is powerful or not has to do with what is around it. You know, like I said

in the article, Ancestral Recall, which is draw three cards for single blue mana, is good. Well, until you print draw four cards for one mana, is good. Well, until you print draw four cards for one mana, then it's not, once again, parallel, it's relative, and because there's lots of other cards we put out, a lot of times whether a card is good or strong has to do

with the environment, with other cards. But there's a lot of examples of cards that, oh, like Necropones is a classic example, where Necropones was a card that came out of Legends, I'm sorry, it came out of Nice Age, and it went on to define standard and broke all sorts of things, but it took a while before people started playing it. And a lot of people said, oh, well, wow, it just might have appeared to be a bad card

and really was a good card, but the answer was Black Vise was in the environment for a while. And while Black Vise, before Black Vise got banned, it wasn't as good as it would later become. Probably people should have been playing it even with Black Vise a little bit. But the reality is Black Vise really made it not as good a metagame choice. And once Black Vise went away,

all of a sudden it became a much, much better choice. And that's another thing. Why are cards bad? A lot of times it has to do with environment, with other cards. It's relative. For a game that's constantly shifting, that doesn't mean the card... When you open a card and stamp it bad,

that doesn't mean before it leaves the format you're going to play it in, it's going to be bad. It might be something where a card rotates and now it's playable in standard. Or another card comes out and the combination of those two cards has lots of synergy and all of a sudden now it's played in modern. Or it might be a new set comes out and now that I'm drafting, all of a sudden this card has value because I'm drafting differently than I did before. Okay, number five.

Diversity of power rewards the more skilled player. Okay, number five. Diversity of power rewards the more skilled player. Okay, so imagine we could set the card power level equal. It's impossible, but let's imagine we can do it, hypothetically. And the reason it's impossible is just fine-tuning, you know. It is not like there's granularity in every card. Like, the knobs that we get to play with to sort of fine-tune how powerful a card is. A card has to cost one mana or one mana more.

You know, if we could do, it costs 3.7 red mana, you know, then we could do granularity. But anyway, let's assume the power level could all be the same, just for the sake of this argument. Let's say you were drafting and card power was all the same. What that means is that any player just taking any cards of the same color is going to wind up with a decent deck.

You know, yeah, yeah, maybe there's some synergies. Maybe the better player can edge out a little bit of advantage from understanding that certain cards are better with other cards. But the reality is

if all cards were the same, the same power level, what that means is the difference between how good a deck of a bad drafter was and how good a deck of a good drafter would be really close. There'd be a little bit like I said,

synergy would matter, archetype stuff would matter, reading your opponents in the draft. I mean, there are skills that would matter. I'm not saying that it'd be irrelevant, but the gap between the worst player's deck and the best player's deck would be a lot narrower, a lot less.

Because right now, when you have bad cards, bad players might misjudge it and take the bad cards. One of the things that adds skill to an environment is being able to figure out what is the good and bad cards for the environment you're playing. What's good and bad in the deck you're playing? So having diversity of card power makes it so it's a more skill-testing game.

Especially in Limited. I mean, it's also true in Constructed, but Constructed, people will copy other people's decks more in Constructed, where in Limited, you're building your own deck. So it's even more skill-testing in Limited. I would argue that, in some level, limited is more skill testing than constructed. They're both skill testing. And constructed

tests different skills, so I guess I'm being a little fair. But the ability to sort of on-the-cuff make game decisions, obviously limited is much more strong about that. Of sort of having a natural, intuitive sense of what's going on. Limited requires you to be much more aware of all the cards and all the

card powers. Where Constructed is like, I need to learn about one small thing, and I need to understand how that thing interacts with everything. And not that that's not skill testing, it's very skill testing, but it requires a little less overall breadth of knowledge that Limited does. Okay.

Number six. People like finding human, not human, people like finding hidden gems. So what that means is that one of the things that makes magic a lot of fun is, I've talked about this before, in that there is what we call ego investment, which is you aren't just playing a game. You're not just sitting down and playing Monopoly. You have made a deck. It's not just sitting down and playing Monopoly. You have made a deck. It's not a deck.

It's your deck. You have spent time and energy making it, maybe playtesting it, crafting it, fine-tuning it, that there's a lot of investment of yourself inside your deck. That there's a lot of... When you play a game of magic, you are bringing a lot of your own, I'm not sure what to call it, but yeah, your ego, your own, bringing you to the game. And that when your deck wins, not only does the deck win, but you, you win. You, someone who's crafted and created this.

So a big part of the joy of deck building, and that, like I said, not everybody's a deck builder. Some people enjoy other people building decks and just playing the decks that other people make. But a lot of magic is, especially constructed magic, is fine-tuning.

And even limited, this actually applies to limited as well. So one of the great joys is figuring something out that you have figured out that others have not figured out. That one of the things that really is satisfying, and like I said, this is true in draft, this is true in constructed, it's true in almost any format.

When you find a secret, something that you get, that you understand that other people do not seem to understand or haven't found yet. When you discover something they haven't, it is a wondrous thing. It is, there are certain moments in magic that I believe, just endorphin rush moments, moments that just really go, this is awesome. I'm enjoying myself. I really like this game.

And one of those is this moment of finding something that others have not found, of finding something that is uniquely your own to find. And bad cards allow this. That one of the things is there is no end of satisfaction I've seen with players when they play a card and other people are like, you're playing that card? You know, and then a smile comes to your face. You're like, wait, wait and see. That's true in draft.

I know, like, when people talk about how they draft a card and they get so many of it because no one else seems to want the card and it's an awesome card and, you know, there is just there is a great love of being able to sort of personalize what you're doing and have a connection where you have found something that is your own discovery. Bad cards allow that. You know, if all the cards were good, you wouldn't quite have the moment, oh, you're playing bad card?

And that's a fun moment. Hidden gems is a fun moment. Discovery of things that other people haven't found is a lot of fun. Okay, so the final, number seven. The seventh reason why bad cards exist. R&D is human. We make mistakes. One of the things about creating magic, especially developing magic, let me talk about developing magic for a second, is

we can't make an environment, if the environment we make is so easy that we are confident in what we are doing the millions of players will crack it in a in an hour you know the we r&d can't make an environment so simple that we can understand it because that means you guys will figure it out right away so So we're not making it a solved environment. We're making an open-ended environment where we think we're pushing in the right direction. We definitely push certain cards and certain strategies and we do what we can to sort of help certain things along,

but we don't know for sure. And that when we make a card and we think the power level of the card is a 7, maybe it's an 8. Maybe it's a 6. Maybe it's a 5 or a 9. I mean, there's some variance. I mean, hopefully it's not a 1 if we think it's a 7, but maybe it's a 5 or a 4. And maybe we don't think it's a 10, but maybe it's a 9.

You know what I'm saying? And maybe we don't think it's a 10, but maybe it's a 9. You know what I'm saying? That there's so much in magic and so much complexity and synergies. And there's so much that goes on. And that we want you, the audience, to have the fun of discovering stuff. That we make an environment that's not solved. We make an environment where things are possible.

And we get surprised all the time. All the time. Like, people ask me this question all the time, which is, did you expect them to do this with your card and I'm like no you know like magic players are smart people you guys do all sorts of cool things sometimes you use cards in ways we didn't imagine

sometimes you combine cards in ways sometimes you run archetypes we didn't imagine you know like I remember Mike Long made a deck called Prosperous Bloom he won a Pro Tour with it. And he couldn't believe we didn't make that deck. It was such a combo deck. And it had all these pieces. It was just in Mirage and Vision.

So in two sets, this combo deck and all the pieces, they worked perfectly together. And Mike was so sure that we had made the deck and then broke it up and put the pieces in the two sets so people would discover it. And I'm like, Mike, I made this one piece, and Bill made this other piece, and Mike made this third piece.

And no, we did not make that deck. And he just couldn't believe it because it worked so well together. He's like, how was this not purposely constructed? And the answer is, we are a very modular game in that we make lots of pieces that click together with lots of other pieces. And so, look, we are already trying a lot of different things, and we're experimenting, and a card might be bad because we thought maybe people would do something and they don't do it. Maybe we were testing something

and it turned out a little worse than we thought. Maybe we anticipated a certain environment and it swerved and it wasn't that environment. You know, a lot of the reasons a card is bad is, it's not even R&D necessarily meant to make it bad. Sometimes we do. Not every card can be good, but sometimes bad cards are cards we were trying actually to make decent cards and we missed.

Or we were trying to make a limited card and missed. Sometimes we make cards and we think, oh, this will be good enough and no, it's not. So one of the reasons we make bad cards is we're human. We are making one of, maybe not the most complex game out there. You know, it's a very complex game. There's a lot of moving pieces.

It is a very hard thing to make magic. And especially, you know, set the power level and environments and standard. I mean, I tip my hat to eric whose job that is you know there's a lot of moving pieces and there's a lot of smart people taking all the different components and trying to do different things and we have to do it ahead of time like when magic comes out there are millions and millions of people playing the game and r&d we have tens of people you know i'm saying even counting people helpingD, we have tens of people, you know what I'm saying? Even counting people helping us. We have, like, tens of people, you know, we're not going to find what millions and millions are going

to find. I mean, they push things in certain directions, they definitely have a general sense of where things are going, but it's tough. So another big reason bad cards exist is we're going to mess up. Some bad cards are us trying to make something that's good, whether for limited or constructed or whatever. For commander, I mean, we try to make cards for all sorts of different formats. Sometimes we miss. Okay, so I'm almost to work, so let me recap. So why do bad cards exist? Bad cards exist, let me recap, the seven reasons. So the seven reasons are, all the cards can't be good. Different cards

appeal to different players. Diversity of card power is key to discovery. Power levels are relative. Diversity of power rewards a more skilled player. People like finding hidden gems. And R&D is only human. So next time someone asks you,

hey, why does R&D make bad cards? Now you know the answer so a little follow up is I wrote this article it had a huge response like I said it really really when I first started writing the article I didn't know exactly what I was writing

and once I sort of wrote this article sort of defending here's the philosophy here's what we do we do and explained and sort of said people always ask this question I'm going to definitively tell you why does design said, here's the philosophy, here's what we do, we do, and explained and sort of said, you know, people always ask this question, I'm going to definitively tell you. Why does design do this?

Here's why design does it. People ate it up, they loved it. And A, it made less people ask the question. One of the things I like to do is arm the audience with answers. And so when questions come up, sometimes not the audience can answer the question, they'd have to come to me. And the article was a huge hit

and it really sort of helped define the kind of articles I wanted to write. Not that every article is like, when cards go bad, but it really defined a style of article that really resonated with the audience, and so a lot, a lot of my articles. So,

anyway, I'm now at work, but I hope today's given you for those that, I mean, a bunch of you have probably read the article, and have heard me say this before, so this was kind of a refresher for you guys, but for those that have never read the article, never heard me explain this before, look,

this, making magic is hard, and bad cards exist for a reason, it's not, I mean, number seven is a mistake, but most of the time it's not a mistake, most of the time there's method to our madness, and I just, I think when you mistake. But most of the time, it's not a mistake. Most of the time, there's method to our madness. And I think when you get a chance to understand why we do things, it makes it a little clearer and a little better to understand how we make the game. So anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed it. Enjoyed the talk on bad cards.

But I'm now in my parking space. So we all know that means it's the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. See you soon.