Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #286 - Designing Limited

Episode Date: December 11, 2015

Mark talks about the many things design has to care about while designing a set for limited.

I'm pulling my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work. Okay. Today, I'm going to do another topic suggested to me by my audience. So someone asked about me talking about designing for limited. So I thought today I would hit that topic. So one of the challenges of making a magic set is there's a lot of different ways to use it, obviously. There's a lot of formats you can play. But while there are a lot of construction formats, you know, there's standard and moderate and legacy and commander and pauper. And there's tons and tons and tons of different formats, construction formats.

But limited is a format that – so when the game first started, when Magic first started, the idea of playing with product in a limited sense was limited, you know, that it really, players did not, other than playing sealed a little bit, like the only reason you would play Sealed is kind of like you just opened up some stuff and you wanted to play. But there's a lot less, in the early, early days, there's a lot less built into that. There were some formats. Most popular format early on was just what we call Sealed, which is just open up some product and play it.

When we, a lot of the play chapters, I credit Bill with this, is the playtesters messed around with drafting. And so R&D was really aware of the fact that you could draft with Magic. But it wasn't something that was really pushed early on. In fact, it wasn't until the Pro Tour started that really Wizards and R&D in general kind of started saying, hey, guys, this is fun. You should try it. So the original draft formats were Rochester Draft and Booster Draft.

So Rochester Draft, for those that have never done Rochester Draft, Rochester Draft is a format where you open up the booster, you lay out all the cards, and then the first person picks a card. You do that until the eighth person picks. Then the eighth person picks a second card. They take the ninth pick, and then it snakes back. So everybody who opens up the pack gets a card except for the very first person. And I guess the very second person gets the land, which is usually irrelevant.

But anyway, that is Rochester. Named after the fact that it was, I believe, invented in Rochester. That's when it got its name. Booster Draft was – by the way, I think Rochester Draft was inspired by, like, fantasy pro tour, fantasy sports things where you were drafting a team. or fantasy sports things where you were drafting a team. Booster draft got invented more out of just trying to come up with an easier, simpler way to do the draft.

Now, I mentioned this. When we started, we thought that Rochester draft was, like, going to be the popular one and that booster draft was going to be, like, you know, we want to have some variety. And it turned out that booster draft ended up being way more popular for a couple reasons. One is it's just faster, just easier and faster to do. And the second thing is, you don't feel so dumb. In Rochester, everybody's watching every move you make, so if you make a wrong pick,

it's just there for everybody to see. Plus, there's so much information that the really, really good players enjoyed it, but the average player is like, there's too much. I feel obligated to know these things, but I'm not capable of doing it, and so I feel bad. So we ended up pushing more Booster than Rochester. It's also interesting to note that when we started Draft, it took a while to pick up steam. Like when we did Draft for the first, I think, not the very first Pro Tour, that was the Constructed Pro Tour in New York, but the second Pro Tour in Los Angeles, we had a draft

format, and most of the European players, most of the players that weren't from the U.S. were very hesitant to actually do the draft. We had pushed it a bit in America, and so they were more receptive of it, but it's funny, the cut to day two of PTLA-1, the very first Pro Tour to have limited in it, I believe was we cut to 64 and 63 Americans and one Japanese. I don't think there were any Europeans in the cut because it's something they hadn't prioritized, and they thought it was very unskill-testing at the time.

Now, obviously, it's going to improve to be maybe one of the most skill-testing formats. Okay, so the question is, how do we design for limited? When I say limited, mostly we design for booster draft. We do keep sealed in mind. Here's the issue with sealed is 10% of something like that, a large percent of limited play happens at the pre-release. And so most limited play, most sanctioned limited play, sealed play, sorry, not limited, most sanctioned sealed play takes place at the pre-release.

And so there's not a lot of sealed play outside of the pre-release. Hopefully I haven't been missing out the word limited and sealed the whole time. Limited means it's a limited format. It means you don't bring cards, you open them up there. Sealed means you just get a pack and you open them up. Another format, by the way, that I loved, for those that know the history of the Pro Tour, not that, history of the Invitational,

was a format called Duplicate Sealed, where it's a sealed format, but everybody gets the exact same card pool and it's pre-built ahead of time to give the people a challenge. And the cool thing about that format is not only are you building a sealed pool, but because you know that everybody has the same sealed pool, there's a lot of challenge of figuring out the metagame call.

What's the best build within this environment knowing that other people are going to have the same pool as you? Anyway, so most of the time when I talk about designing for a limited, mostly I mean draft. It's not completely draft. We do think about SEALs a little bit. Okay, so first and foremost, once again, a lot of what goes on for SEALs happens in development. In fact, the vast majority of it goes on development. I'll talk about that a little bit today, but the goal today is designing for a limited. So I'm more talking about the design part.

I'll talk a little bit about the development part just because it matters, but it's not really my area. So I'll talk more about the design part. Okay. The first thing you have to worry about for design, I talk about it a lot, but it's so important in today's talk, I'm going to re-explain it. It's what we call as-fan. So as-fan is short for as-fanned. What that means is if you open up a random booster pack, fan out your cards, what percentage of the cards you fanned out in an average pack would have the theme in

question? The reason as-fan is so important is, and this is one of the challenges about designing a trading card game, is we don't control what you see. We don't, you know, every pack is random. So we don't know when you open your very first pack what exactly it is you're going to get. We don't know the cards you're going to get. We make a lot of cards, and you can get them in any order. And in one particular card, you might not open for many packs, especially if it's higher rarity, but even the lower rarity,

even a common, you could open up 10 packs and maybe not hit a particular common as possible. So the idea, actually very possible. So the idea is, what ASCEND means means is we think in terms of how often you will see a theme by counting up every card that has that theme. So the idea is let's say, for example, I'll pick a theme. We want to make artifacts matter. Okay. Well, the first thing I have to figure out is what percentage of packs of artifacts. Now, actually, artifacts is an interesting case.

When you figure out your ad spend, there's two things you have to figure out. One is straight up ad stand. How many of these cards will I get? And the second is sort of a by color ad stand. What I mean is if I talk about artifacts, artifacts okay let's say we put so many artifacts in and the aspen is three and a half if the aspen is three and a half and that means is if you open up an average pack you can expect three and a half um artifact cards now that fraction throws people because obviously you can't have half an artifact card what that means is on average that's what

you will see um let me just use three for a second. If I say it adds down to three, that means the average pack, you open up, there's three artifacts. Adds down to three and a half means if you open up all the packs, they average over the course of it three and a half cards. And we often talk about adds down to how many cards, and it can be fractions. In fact, we get to decimal points. Sometimes, like, oh, the ascent of this thing is 2.475 or 2.391. You know, we'll get down to fractions to understand exactly.

Usually we have goals. So one of the things is to figure out what your theme is and how important it is to you. Like, what exactly are you trying to do with it? And then that gives you some sense of how much Aspen you need. Now, here's the other point that comes into it, is when I say Aspen by color. So artifacts happen to be colorless, or mostly, and the default artifacts are colorless. We occasionally make colored artifacts, but that is not the norm. The norm is normally the set of about artifacts, usually they'll mostly be colorless,

just some exceptions. So anybody can put that into their deck. So when I say an As-fan of three and a half for artifacts, if they're normal colorless artifacts, that's really good. That means everybody will have access to three and a half. That's a lot. Now, if I talk about As-fan by color, what I mean is, let's say we have a graveyard theme, and I want to know how many cards interact with the graveyard.

Okay. Well, I then have to care about by color, because if the average overall is 2.2, but black is 3.0, what that means is, oh, well, if you're playing black, you can get a lot of access to the graveyard, but other colors have less than that. And so when you're not in a colors thing, you have to think about sort of by color, because it's important sort of what volume you get and how often can you play it. Now, there can be what we call flat-ass band, which means all the colors have the same-ass band.

And that's if we do a theme and we cycle it, you know, where we're trying... Usually multicolor has a flat-ass band, because one of the things we do with multicolor is we balance it, meaning if we do a cycle of ally colors or a cycle of enemy colors or wedge or arc or shard, that we'll do them in a pattern because we want to have color balance. And so if your scene is tied to color, usually multicolored being the most obvious, you tend to have a flat half stand, meaning that every color has the same amount of accents. Gold is also interesting because gold messes up even more. Because we talk about how many red cards are there. Well, a red-green card is considered half

a red card. Oh, here's a little caveat, by the way. When I was in high school, I remember our teacher telling us, I see a little speech one day, and the little speech was like, you guys, you've got to pay attention. This matters because one day you're going to have a job, and it's going to require math. And you might not think it matters, but you're going to need this. And I remember at the time, I was pretty sure I was going to be a TV writer at the time, and I'm like, look, as long as I can count my salary and count my pages, I'm good to go. I'm not going to need this.

So flash forward many years, and I'm now a game designer, and, oh, boy, there's a lot of math. It's all this ad-sense stuff, for example, I'm talking about. It's just understanding what representational things are. And there's all sorts of other things. There's lots and lots of math. Maybe one day I'll do the math of magic. But anyway, there's a lot of math, and I'm glad I paid attention in class because I need the math.

So all of you out there that are like, I don't need math, screw math, math surprises you in where it comes up. And game design, it's not a mistake that the game was designed by a mathematician. There is a lot of math in the game. Trident cards in particular, because of the fact that you are working in different rarities and different skews of how often things come up and different amounts. Anyway, it is definitely something that you have to be very careful of. Anyway, back to the talk. Okay, so the first thing you have to figure out, like I said, is you're asked to end of your themes. This is, it's not the same as the quote that I said, if your theme's not a common, it's not your theme. It came out of Champions of Kamigawa. We tried this thing

where we had a legendary theme where all the creatures that were rare were legendary. There was no mythic at the time. And we made some uncommon legends. But mostly they were just the rare cards. And the problem was you can open up a lot of packs before you figure out the theme because, you know, if I open up a pack and I don't have a creature in my rare slot, and I might not get one of the legendary uncommons, I might not get a legendary card. So I didn't even get the theme in my pack.

And even when I finally do open one, hey, I opened up a rare and it's a legend. Okay, there's a rare legend. Like, it starts to take a pattern before you recognize that's odd that the rare is legendary. We make legendary rares. And we have some sets that are more than others. In fact, if all of them are legendary, all the rares are legendary, it's really hard to tell. You have to open up three, four, five creatures before you even get an inkling of, oh, hey, it's weird all my rare creatures are legendary, it's really hard to tell. You have to open up three, four, five creatures before you even get an inkling of, oh, hey, it's weird.

All my rare creatures are legendary. So anyway, one of the things when I say your scene's not a comment, really what I'm talking about is your as-stand, but it's not as catchy to go, your as-stand must be high enough, or not your scene.

Once again, it depends upon how your theme is used and where it goes. If it's flat, then we can mark it. Usually, the other question is how many of the cards you need in your deck. Certain themes require you to be more heavily invested than others.

If we have a blink matters theme, artifacts matter, enchantments matter, some tribal thing where a creature type matters, things in which we want you to go wide in which, okay, the goal is to fill your deck with as many of these as you can. It needs a much higher outstand than something where what we call threshold one. So threshold one is a term which means cards that say,

I turn on as long as you have one other thing you need. I get better as long as you have one vampire, one artifact, one enchantment. And the way we do threshold ones is, sometimes they're blunt. They just say, I do my thing if as long as you control one whatever.

Sometimes it might be an aura that has to enchant that thing. There's some trickier ways to make threshold ones that are little as obvious as what's going on. And also, then there's a range. There's cards that can function with one to get better with more. There's cards that scale based on how many you have. So you have to figure out what your themes are and how often they have to do. So you can figure out.

And then, once again, there's an issue by color. Because let's say I have a graveyard theme, and it's really high in black and green, but it's low in the other colors. Like, okay, well, if I'm playing a black-green deck, I'm good to go. I have tons of cards. If I'm playing a black or green deck, okay, it's viable, let's say. But that means, okay, so remember there's ten two-color pairs. So when we do limited now, we always keep opening the option up.

We want to have a certain number of archetypes for you to be able to draft. And what that means is we want a bunch of options, and usually we think about them in terms of color. Now, not all sets does invert with color. It depends on what you're doing, what your theme is. But as a default, color is a good them in terms of color. It's easy, but now, not all sets does invert with color. It depends on what you're doing, what your theme is. But as a default, color is a good way to think of it. And usually what we tend to do in the default environment is look at the two-color pairs. There are ten two-color pairs, white, blue, blue, black, black, red, red, green, green,

white, white, black, blue, red, black, green, red, white, green, blue. Those are the ten two-color pairs. And so one of the things you have to look at is you have to figure out what you're capable of doing, what things can be. So when you're looking at AvSan, let's say, go back to my example now, black and green have a lot of cards, and it just dribbles in the other three colors or maybe not exists in the other three colors. So what it means is black, green can easily, easily do the theme. And black and three other combinations, so black, white,

black, blue, and black, red, they can do it because black has enough that it can support it. Meanwhile, green and its other three, green, white, green, blue, and green, red, also can do it. But that's only seven colors. You are missing the three interactions that don't overlap. So blue, white, and red don't have it. Well, there's three combinations of blue, white, and red. There's blue, white, white, red, and blue, red. Well, those ones have to have a different theme because they have no support to do that.

So one of the things when you're planning is you're figuring out what your themes are. Now, back in the day, if you go back to, like, the time of Invasion and Odyssey, there was a period in which we were all about one really loud theme. And so in those sets, we made sure that that theme is loud enough that the different colors can play. And usually when you have one loud theme, you have to spread it to all the colors. You have to make sure all colors have access. you have to spread to all the colors. You have to get to all colors of accents.

The thing we've moved from since then is the idea that themes are paints to go on a canvas. It's not that, you know, once upon a time it's like it's the artifacts set. It's all about artifacts, artifacts, artifacts, artifacts. And everything had a strong artifact component woven into it. Since then it's like, okay, we're doing these worlds in which maybe there's a component of artifact, maybe artifacts play into it, but it's not, the whole set's not this, this, this, you know, thing, thing, thing, thing, thing. For example, Odyssey was a graveyard set, all about the graveyard, everything spoke about the graveyard, you know, it was definitely graveyard, graveyard, graveyard. You get something like Invasion, Inv, into Innistrad. Innistrad has a graveyard component.

You could care about the graveyard. There were colors that did care about the graveyard, but it wasn't, for example, Innistrad did this thing where it said, okay, I'm going to have a graveyard component. I'm going to have a tribal component. I'm going to have some top-down stuff. I'm going to do a bunch of different things. And, okay, if you were drafting certain colors, you know, for example, blue had a lot of self-milling. And that combined with blue-black was a zombie deck that really got creatures

out of your graveyard because zombies like to come back out of the graveyard, where if you put blue with green, green had a bunch of caring about the graveyard. So you would know yourself, and green would reward you for having things, you know, having little boy-type things or spiders spawning or things that cared about what was in the graveyard. And so the idea was blue had tools that would match with black, made one archetype, and match with green, made another. So, okay, that's the next thing you need to do. Once you understand your themes and how your themes play out, you want to know where your themes lie and what colors to make sure that you're able to build your archetypes. And the reason the archetypes are important is in drafting,

what we want to do is we want to make sure that each person has a plan and something they can do, and we want the set. So normally what you want to do for limited is you want to build in some blunt themes and you want to build in some subtle themes. And the idea is our goal when we make a set is we want the set to be draftable as many times as possible within the confines of how long the set will be out. There are people who in a four-month period will draft 40 times. We want to make sure that there's enough depth that they can draft 40 times.

But in the same sense, there are people that are just going to draft a couple times, and we don't want you to have to draft 10 times before you figure out what's going on because the diehard drafters will do that, but the more casual drafters will not. So one of the things we want to make important is we want to make sure that there are themes that tell you what to do. Also, by the way, sealed is the pre-release. We don't spend tons of time on sealed, but we spend some. And we want to make sure that whatever our themes are,

that there's enough loudness of the theme that in limited you can at least have a handhold of something you can do. Now, one of the problems that keeps popping up is the difference between sealed and draft is you need to push a lot harder in sealed to make sure people have the numbers of things you want. So one of the things we tend to do for sealed is we tend to make sure the themes are there, make sure the synergy between the themes, but we don't expect somebody to be playing a dedicated deck to one theme in SEAL. It would require not enough people

play SEAL for us to gear the entire design around SEAL. So one of the things we want to make sure is, we want to make sure when you play SEAL, you sample all the cool things there are to sample, and we want to make sure... Oh, okay.

Hold on one second here. There's a truck that needs to cut in front of me. We'll have to get the truck cut in front of me because this would be a bad podcast if I got hit by a truck. But one of the things we've learned is the way you design for SEAL is very different than draft, and a lot more people are going to draft. So our strategy for SEAL now is to let people sample what's going on, not to sort of make sure that everything exists in numbers but we should play them in Sealed. If we did that, it would make us cut down the number of themes we had,

and when you were drafting, it would be super, super loud. So anyway, we do keep Sealed in mind, and we do a few things to make sure that Sealed can work. It's not that we ignore Sealed, but we do do a lot more of our design work and development work to make sure that we can do what we need for draft, which is the more played format by quite a bit. Okay, so then you figure out your themes and you look at the color combinations. Like I said, the default is

you do two color combinations. There are sets in which you care about minor color combinations. There are sets you care about three color combinations. There are sets in which you care about monocolor combinations. There are sets you care about three-color combinations. There are even some sets you care about four- and five-color combinations. A lot of that, by the way, so one of the things, this is a development thing, one of the things that development is in charge of, and we design works with development so that we can put things in early on so our design play test will work correctly. But we work with development to get the mana correct.

So one of the big things about how many colors you can play is very contingent on how much access you have to the right mana to fix your colors. And so the idea is if you want to play anything more than two colors, we need to support that. An average Magic default set will not have the resources for you to play more than two colors. Maybe you can splash a third in certain ways, certain colors, especially in green, because one in green strength can access other colors. But anyway, the default is you play two colors.

Usually the default draft is we make deck our sets for all ten color pairs, and then usually we have some strategy that if you want to go mono-color that you can do just as mono-color, barring like a gold set or something. Usually, mono-color is something you can do if you want to do. So we're conscious of that. If the mana allows you to sort of splash a little bit, sometimes, instead of bringing the one color, we put a little more emphasis on the three color. The idea is I'm playing two color

and splash. Once again, it also depends. Sometimes, like Dragon's Terror had an ally theme, so primarily we gave you an ally, but then instead of the secondary being the enemy color pairs, we made the shards, the three colors, in which

having an ally, you can go two different directions with it. But anyway, it goes on a case-by-case basis where we do it, and it has a lot to do with where the colors lie. But when designing, a big factor of designing a set with keeping draft in mind is making sure that you're enabling your feats. Now, there's a second problem that design has to worry about. And by the way, anything design has to worry about,

development has to worry about, plus many other things that I'll get to in a second. The other big thing when you're doing design is you have to make sure that if I make every card for one specific archetype, the following problem happens, which is someone

opens a pack. They go, and they pick their feed. They pick out what they're doing. And then they open up later packs. They go, oh, not for me, not for me, not for me, for me. I'll take it. And they keep taking the cards for them. And what happens is drafting becomes boring because nobody wants the card for the black-blue archetype except black-blue, and then black-blue keeps getting the same deck.

So what we want to do is make sure that the cards, the monocolored cards, which usually the majority of the deck, barring a gold deck, you want to make sure the monocolored cards service multiple archetypes. And one thing we actually will do is we will go through and look at colors and say, okay, here's our deck archetypes. What deck can this card go into? And we want to be careful. You don't want

very many model card cards that can only, only go in one deck archetype. Because once again, no one will take it but that deck archetype. And then it starts warping, you know, okay, it's always about getting this card. What you want to do is find synergies that overlap between your themes. So that's another important thing when you're creating your themes. You'll notice sometimes we'll build themes, I guess Return to Ravnica, Gatecrash is a good example, where Return to Ravnica had an Azorius theme and it's playing the enchantments. But the problem was nobody around Azorius, the colors that connected to it,

cared about enchantments, and it made it really hard to play, to make cards for Azorius that other colors wanted to play in other guilds. And that's really crucial. That you really have to think about, okay, mono blue card, how do different archetypes want this mono blue card? Why do different archetypes want this mono black card, mono red card, mono white card, mono green card? You have to think about that.

So one of the things that means is you also have to make sure you understand the synergy between your mechanics. The reason that's important is if I make a mechanic it in certain colors, so let's say I have mechanic A and it goes in red and green, and mechanic B that goes in white, black, and blue. Okay, so most deck archetypes, so for example, white-blue only has mechanic B, blue-black has mechanic B, black-red has mechanic A and B, red-green has only mechanic B, sorry, mechanic A, green-white has a combination of A and B, blue-black has just B, blue, um, uh, blue-red has a combination of A and B, um, black-green is A and B, red-white has A and B, and green-blue is A and B. So if you notice there, six of the combinations, um, have, have both A and B, uh, three of them have just B and one has just A. So the

idea is that, um, when you combine something, so like for example, my example there is I have two mechanics. Now six of my ten mechanics overlap. Now I'm going to have both mechanics exist in two different, in six different archetypes. Well if A and B don't work together, that's going to be a problem because A and B are going to play together a lot. Even though they don't show up in the same colors, even though A and B do not overlap in colors, six out of the ten two-color archetypes have them overlapping. And that's not even going splashing or three-color or whatever.

That's just in a two-color archetype. So what that means is another thing you have to do to limit it is you have to think of your mechanics and understand how they interact with each other. The other thing we will do is we will put certain mechanics and center them in certain colors so in draft archetypes it pushes in certain directions. That's why, for example, you'll notice, like, I'll have a mechanic and it shows up all the colors, but it just shows up more in common in certain colors. It shows up in higher rarities in other colors.

What we're trying to do there is we're adjusting for common and we're trying to push you in certain ways. You know, let's say, for example, the mechanic A is in red and green. Okay, the red-green archetype is probably going to really much revolve around A because B's not in it at all, so it's revolving around A. Likewise, when you look at the white-blue, the blue-black, and the black-white decks, okay, those decks only have mechanic B. Now, you might have a theme that is not about mechanic B

that makes use of mechanic B, or mechanic B doesn't contradict the thing. But probably what will happen is one or two of your archetypes will be built around the mechanic, and one or two of them will be about something else which the mechanic can work in, but it's not about that mechanic. Then, you have a lot lot of things with overlap, and you have to make sure whatever your strategy is, that can take that overlap into account. And a lot of this, like the funny thing about a lot of designing for limited is in structure,

is in numbers, is in figuring out sort of where to put things. In fact, the biggest thing I would say is when you're designing for limited, your tools are number one, structure, the biggest thing I would say is when you're designing for limited, your tools are, number one, structure, the volume and numbers of things, and number two is synergies, is creating different combinations so they go

together to help enable how things will mix. And that's a big, big part of building for limited mind is understanding how the components of your deck will mix and making sure you have enough support. So the next big thing is once you figure out what your themes are, you then have to make sure you give enough support

so that deck has enough pieces to it so you can draft it. And you have to be very careful. If I make a card that is super, super, super good for the white-black archetype and usable for the black-green archetype, black-green's not going to get it all that much because white-black's going to snap it up all the time. So we also have to be careful that even part of making cards useful is making sure that they're equally useful to different things.

Now, having different values is good. Having a card that's a little bit more valuable to white-black means the more skilled player learns they want to take it to the white-black deck. And there's levels of how obvious it is. Like there's really obvious where it just tells you gold cards obviously are super loud. Like a white-black gold card only goes in a white-black deck or in a three-color plus deck. It doesn't go in anything but the white-black deck. So we just count that as a white-black card.

And usually those teams will be very strong. We've started doing a very common thing for us to do is an uncommon gold cycle of two-color cards that are really loudly telling you the theme is unlimited to help people who need the help. And the cards clearly can only go on that deck. And that's why that's a great way to make a loud card that does that. Okay, so let's get development a little bit. Design does a lot to set up the tools that are necessary so development can do the fine work it needs.

I would say 80% of what goes on in limited is the work of development. Design is trying to craft things. I mean, design is in charge of synergies and making sure that we pick things that can exist in numbers and trying to roughly hit the numbers correctly. We'll work with a development member on the team, sometimes the development team in general, to get a general sense of where we want the ad span to be. Like a lot of times I'll sit down with Eric.

Once we know what our theme is and say to Eric, okay, this particular theme and this card, what ad span do you think we should be aiming for? Especially like in gold sets, he and I will talk about where to aim the asset. For my conscious arc here, we were very peculiar in, what was the asset of morph? What was the asset of multicolor?

Things like that really matter because they have a lot to do with how you build your deck. The reason morph matters, by the way, is you care about colors, where you have different colors, and you care about color lifts because color lifts have a big impact. How many artifacts you have to color lift, how many, something like morph when you use colorless sniff, those things can have a big impact on how people fix their decks so you're very aware of the as-van.

The other big thing that development usually figures out that's the development thing but we put it in design is the lands like I said and there's a lot of the as-van of the lands and the mix of lands and how the lands play with color have a big part of sort of helping you understand how to build your deck. Okay, so once development gets their hands on the file, they have to figure out a bunch of things. First off, they do what's called quick pointing, which is figuring out how good the cards are.

There's like A, B, and C cards. I'm not going to get into the nature. I don't know well enough to give you guys the down and dirty of it. I can give you the real brief overview. And the idea is an A is a really good card you're always going to want. A B is a card that sometimes you'll want. And I think a C is something where, eh, maybe it's the 23rd card in your deck or something. But it's something where you use it out of necessity, not because you want it.

When you put a C in your deck, it's because, well, I didn't get enough A and Bs. I guess I've got to put a C in my deck. And the idea is they want to make sure this is the right combination because one of the things they have to do is they have to color balance the power level. Design does not do power level. Development does power level. So they have to equally balance the power level of all the colors so that there's grading that goes on to do that.

And they also want to figure out the right mix. One of the things that's important is what we call collation, which is the order in which cards come together, because they're on the sheets and they're next to each other. That's important. Having the right weight balance to understand what the proper, like you want, if red is stronger than green, it'll warp the environment. So they try really hard to try to make the colors balance. It's a very, very hard task to do.

In any one set, they're going to aim to have them be even, and certain colors might be better based on certain synergies. Now the other thing they have to do is they have to make sure they figure out what the archetypes are. Design takes the first pass of the archetypes. Development will usually fine-tune them. Often in development, multiple archetypes will change just because they change power levels. Sometimes they have to shift colors for color balancing or to make certain things work. So development has to worry about the archetyping.

They have to worry about making sure that there's a lot of things. I was talking about design doing. It has to be stress-sensitive by development. You know, I want to make sure that the cards can be played by multiple things. Development has to reinforce that and go through and make sure. And not only that, they have to set the power level. So they have to make sure that cards are the right power level. Because one of the things you want is you want each deck architect to have its

share of A's and its share of B's and its share of C's. So because one of the things you want in a draft is you want players to have different options each draft. If the draft is repetitive, if I open up and I'm doing a thing, and I always know exactly what to take, and there's no ever mixing what's happening. Now, one of the reasons that rares and mythic rares are so important for limited is they do show up, like, you can have a draft, and certain rares and mythic rares will never

show up in that draft, and they might show up in another draft. And so they are the high variance cards, like, they tend to be a little stronger in the nature of how we do things, and they often push you in directions which, well, if I didn't get that rare, I might not be pushed in that direction. So, oh, one of the things we do in design that's reinforcing development is what we call uncommon build-arounds. So the idea is you want to make sure your ASVAN is strong at common. Actually, your ASVAN is strong overall.

Common is a lot of where you support ASVAN. And then what you want to do is you want to make sure that in uncommon, you have some cards that push people in different directions. I talked about the gold cards already. That's one way we do it. Another might just be Spider Spun, if you can describe a good example, where it was a deck archetype. You could do this deck.

And in uncommon, if you could pick up one, two, maybe three of these that are uncommon, you know, you really could build around it. But it required somebody early on. Like what we want with building around Uncommon is you open it up, you take it first pick, first pack, and you're like, okay, I got it. I'm going to do this thing. So we want both straightforward draft strategies, so the people that need the hand-holding, they feel like I don't know what to do.

The cards can clearly tell you what you want to do. And they want to settle stuff. The players have drafted, right, for the 20th, 30th, 40th time to find pockets

and nuances and find other things to explore. One of the things we want to make sure is, we want to make sure there's lots of different possibilities

for what you can draft. So we build in the archetypes and then we build in the Builder Army draft that continues on other paths. We often make some rare cards that, like, we know if they'll show up that they can do some weird things, and we know they'll show up in low enough rarity that, like, it'll

be a surprise thing. The reason Uncommons is what Builder Army is is they show up with enough regularity. Like, if I do a draft, not every draft will have every Uncommon, but most the Uncommons will show up, you know, between the 24 packs in a booster draft, you're most likely to see a particular uncommon. Now, someone might take it before you, but it's most likely to show up in the draft. Where rare, you know, there are 24 rares and mythic rares there. That is just a fraction of how many we have in the set. And so, you know, any one particular rare or mythic word

is not guaranteed. I mean, nothing's guaranteed, but we'll take multiple drafts to show up in. So I'm almost to work here. The last big point I want to make is that a lot of the detail to drafting comes during development because they use lots of metrics. Like I said, a lot of math.

They use a lot of metrics to look at all the different components of how often something's being drafted, where it's being drafted. They'll chart numbers and colors. And one of the things you do when you draft, especially in development, design doesn't always do this, is you write down what cards you have. And not only what colors you played and what number you played, but maybe what rare mythics you took, or of a particular theme, how often you had that theme. You know, like if we're doing a concert, we might say, how many morph cards did you take?

How many off-color morph versus on-color morph? And what happens is each environment has its own things that draft will care about. Now, there's other things that design cares about that are draft-related. There's some card flow things. I mean, there's some basic things that you always care about, but one of the reasons you really care about is help enable making draft work. But the thing I hope you'll get today, and like I said, I kind of just scratched the surface. This is one of the topics where I have 30 minutes. I'm doing the best I can of just scratched the surface. This one was top of the story.

I've got 30 minutes. I'm doing the best I can to explain stuff in 30 minutes. There's a lot going on. There's a lot of moving pieces. And one of the things to remember is that when we're designing magic, we're designing magic for many, many, like draft and limited. It's just one facet we're drafting for. I said we're building for.

We're designing for. But there's so many things you have to care about that it's very complex. I mean, I hope walking out of today you can see all the different moving pieces that you have to care about. And I didn't name everything. I just named the highlights. I named the larger things you have to care about. There's tons of detail. There's card-by-card things.

There's mechanic things. There's all sorts of other things you have to care about. I just started today on the broad picture of what you have to do. And that is pretty complex. And so I'm hoping for all you draft fans out there, you'll realize that we spend a lot of time and energy to make sure that your draft experience is the best it can be. And that is just one way to play Magic.

A part of it away, but still just one way to play. So anyway, I hope you enjoyed my talk. I had a lot to track in today. So anyway, I hope you enjoyed my talk. I had a lot to talk in today. But anyway, I'm in my parking spot. So we all know what that means. It means the end of my drive to work. Instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic.