Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #298 - Star Wars Trading Card Game

Episode Date: January 22, 2016

Mark talks about working with Richard Garfield ont he Star Wars TCG.

I'm pulling up my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today I'm going to talk about the design of something other than magic. I actually worked at Wizards for a long time, and while in the recent past I mostly just worked on magic, ever since I became the head designer in 2003, the vast, vast majority of my time has been on Magic. But before that, I actually worked on a bunch of different games. And so people have been asking me to talk about a design other than Magic that I did. So we're going to try that today and see how it goes. Okay, so the game I decided to talk about was the Star Wars trading card game.

I'm going to talk about sort of my role on it and about the game and talk about sort of designing it and just working on a card game. I'm going to talk about sort of my role on it, and about the game, and talk about sort of designing it, and just working on a different game. A lot of people have expressed interest in sort of hearing about some design stories that are a little different. So, here's a whole new game that a lot of you probably never played. Okay, let me set the scene. So, I think it was back in...

It was before the second movie came out. So Attack of the Clones came out in 2002. And so that was our first set, was tied into that. So probably we started working, my guess is, 2000s probably, knowing our timetables. So what happened was, so Hasbro had gotten the rights to Star Wars, and they were making all the Star Wars toys and everything, and so they came to us and said, you know what, we would like to make a trading card game. You guys are the trading card game people, make us a trading card game. And we were very excited, because surprise, surprise, R&D is filled

with people who like Star Wars. So Richard Garfield was to lead the design, and then I was to lead... Well, Richard was to lead the design of the overall game system. He was going to design the game, and then I was in charge of the first set, which ended up being Attack of the Clones. It was tied in with the second movie.

And so, I've done some research to try to remember who was on the design team with Richard and I, and I cannot locate it. So I don't remember who. It was Richard and me and some other people. But the thing I do remember was Richard was doing the key

design of the game, and then I was supposed to lead the very first set. So we were working closely together so that we could do that. So what happened was we started by doing some time of just overall game system design and then we started working on the actual first set. Richard was more involved in the game design part and less design in working on the first set. My memory was he was around for that, but I took charge of that part of it. But anyway, so there had already been a trading card game for Star Wars. In fact, I think there had been multiple. But we wanted to do our take on it,

and Richard had a very interesting idea. So Richard's idea was that he wanted to make a miniatures game, but using cards. And so he really wanted to take a lot of the components that make miniatures really fun and bring it to a card game. So the key was, there were some challenges in making a Star Wars game. Number one was that clearly we had to match, like, in Magic, we get to make up whatever story we want

because it's our game and it's our story and if we need to change the story to match the gameplay, we can. We often do. But Star Wars was Star Wars, right? There was an existing thing.

So there were a bunch of challenges. First off, we had to match the IP. We had no ability or freedom to do something other than what was the story. So that meant we had to figure out how best to make a game that felt like a Star Wars game. And then that unto itself is quite a little challenge. and that unto itself is quite a little challenge and also one of the problems with doing an IP game is you have characters

one of the things that Richard always realized is a lot of times when you would play games that had characters what would happen is because people wanted Luke Skywalker or Darth Vader or whatever, I mean, we were doing Attack of the Clones, but go with me for a second. The cards you would want tend to be things that you kind of want

to make the rare cards, the rare mythic cards of your set. That's what people are most excited for, but if you do that, that means that the everyday play, the limited play, is people are just playing with like Stormtrooper or Rebel Fighter, you know, and that the fun of the game is like, if I'm playing Star Wars, I want to have Luke Skywalker or, you know, Anakin Skywalker or,

you know, Padme or whatever. I want to have characters I know. I don't want to fight with like random second extras, right? So we had to figure out how to sort of, how do we make a game in which we could make rarer versions of cards that people wanted, but also make the functional everyday game be something that met expectations. And so, okay, so,

Richard wanted to sort of embrace a miniatures feel. We wanted to make sure that we could do something that captured the Star Wars IP and we wanted to make sure that we got the characters in your hands. Those were a lot of the challenges we had. So, one of the things

we did is we started by watching a lot of Star Wars movies. So at that time, there were four Star Wars movies out. There was the original trilogy, and Phantom Menace had already been out. Now, another really cool thing about this

is the set that we were starting with was a set that wasn't out yet. So that meant we got to read the script. Dun-dun-dun! And so one of the interesting things about it was, it was super, super secret. Right? And so, of the interesting things about it was it was super, super secret, right? And so we had special permission to read it, but there were rules about where and when you could read it.

And in fact, the way it worked was I, at work, somebody had gone to Skywalker Studios. The only place you could read the script was to Skywalker Studios. The only place you could read the script was at Skywalker Studios. It's the only place you could read it near San Francisco. At Skywalker Ranch. You had to go there to read it.

And so it's the only place you could read it. And so somebody had gone down, a guy named Bill Slavisek, who worked on Dungeons and Dragons. Star Wars, Dungeons and Dragons, or not Dungeons and Dragons, but role-playing

was also doing some Star Wars stuff. They were doing some role-playing things with Star Wars. So Bill had gone down and read the script and he came,

he took thorough notes and then he came back and he did a synopsis which is what we read. So we didn't read the actual script. We just read a synopsis of the script which was super top secret.

Even that was super top secret. Like, you know, it wasn't like emailed or anything. Like you had to go to a room and there were special printed copies. And, you know, it was super, super secret. So that in and of itself, by the way, was very cool. It gets cooler. We'll get there in a second. It gets cooler. We'll get there in a second.

But anyway, so we looked it over and we watched all the films. We watched the first four films. And we watched them a bunch of times. I know the sacrifices we make for our art. We watched the Star Wars films a bunch of different times. And the real question was, Richard was really intrigued by the idea of having things, I think they were called units, having dice associated with them, and that what he wanted was,

he knew it was a combat game, but he wanted something in which there were things that had the advantage, but you never quite knew what could win. And so he was really enamored with the idea that there was an amount of damage that got done, and that he wanted, I think he wanted persistent damage. So magic doesn't have persistent damage.

Magic is like, you damage something, if it doesn't die by the end of the turn, the end of the turn it's going to heal and go back up. For Richard, he wanted something that had persistent damage. He wanted battles in which you didn't always know the outcome of the battle. One of the things that he liked about miniatures in general is that miniatures is like, you know a superior force should win, most of the time will win, but there's some suspense you don't always know that's going to win.

And so Richard became really connected to the idea of having Titan dice to the game. And the idea was the units ended up having three stats to them. They ended up having a speed stat, a power stat, and a health stat, I believe is what it was called. And so the idea was your speed stat was how quick you were.

That became important for fighting, so you know what order things got to fight in. Power was how much damage you did, but that was related to how many dice you got to roll, six-sided dice. And then health was your hit points, to use a D&D term, how many points you had until you were destroyed.

And so the idea was we wanted to have, Richard was really keen on having some kind of damage in which you're rolling dice and that there's persistent damage, things that get's persistent damage. Things that get damaged stay damaged. Okay. Something that I really pushed and that Richard embraced

quite strongly, actually, is I pointed out that one of the things that's interesting about Star Wars was that there really were different fields of battle. There were different arenas of the fight. And that if you look at most films,

you know, whenever... Usually in the last part of the fight. And that, if you look at most films, you know, usually in the last part of the film there's a big battle sequence. And it's never just one battle. You know, there's a battle on the ground. There's a battle in space. There's a personal battle with, you know, lightsaber dueling. Usually there's multiple different arenas. And so Richard really embraced it and said,

okay, let's have a game in which there's three different arenas to fight. That there is, there was space, ground, and character. And the idea was that in each arena, in order to win the game, you had to control three arenas. And how do you control an arena? Well, I have the only one standing there. So if you have units in an area and your opponent has no units, then you control that arena. If your opponent puts stuff in it,

then you have to fight until only one thing remains, and then you control it. Now, the thing about it was, once you control an arena, your opponent could then get more units into that space to fight you again. So the idea was, you had to end the turn in which you were in two arenas that nobody else was in, and then you won.

And you can fight. The way you clear an arena is you fight. And the cool thing about that was one of the things we wanted to do was we wanted to make sure that we represented all the cool things that were Star Wars, right? You wanted the spaceships. You wanted the ground units, you wanted the characters, but having them all fight in the same place, A, it didn't even make flavor sense. Like my, you know, why would my AT-AT fight your X-Wing? Like they're not, they don't even make sense. So having

three different areas really sort of matched that thing and allowed us to make all the different things. And it also meant that in space, we just had to make each thing match the things in its arena. We didn't have to match an AT-AT versus an X-Wing. We had to match an X-Wing versus other space vehicles. We had to match an AT-AT versus other ground vehicles. We had to match the character versus other character vehicles.

So that meant we had three different scales for what things could be. We didn't have to say, oh, well, sorry, Anakin has to be pretty weak because compared to an AT-AT or compared to a, you know, X-Wing or whatever. I'm mixing my Star Wars moves here,

but you get the gist. So we got the three different arenas and like I said, Richard was really interested in the idea of using dice as a means. So the game came with a bunch of dice and, oh, the other thing that was really interested in the idea of using dice as a means. So the game came with a bunch of dice, and oh, the other thing that was really important was the idea that you didn't

just outright play things. In Magic, it's like, if I can play something, I play it, immediately it goes onto the battlefield if I can play it. The idea in Star Wars was that you build things. That if you wanted something, you needed to build toward it, and you didn't necessarily get it all at once.

So the way it worked was, there was a build cost. And the way the build cost worked was, every turn you got a certain amount of force, and then you rolled a dice for additional force, plus some of the units and things you had might grant you additional force. And then you spent your force building things. And the idea spent your force building things. And the idea was, let's say something cost 11 force to build. What that meant is,

let's say one turn you had five force to spend. Okay, well you put five toward it, you use dice, you use it to mark it, and that says, okay, I have five of the 11 paid for. As soon as you finish paying for it, as soon as you finish building it, then you get, as soon as you finish building it,

then you get to bring it into the battlefield. And so what happens is, one of the things is, you're sort of, every turn, there are sort of two different phases. There's the command phase

where you would build things, and there's the battle phase where you would fight. And once again, the goal was, you had these cards, you had to get them out. Oh, let me explain.

So another issue we ran into is the character problem. Okay, well, we really, like, we're doing battle for clones. Anakin's the main character. So, okay, you want Anakin. Anakin's the main character. Someone who opens up the battle for the clones, they want to get Anakin. But if Anakin was only a rare, a mythic rare card, I think we did a mythic rare, I think we to get Anakin. But if Anakin was only a rare, a mythic rare card,

I think we did a mythic rare, I think we just said rare, but if Anakin was only a rare, very few people would see Anakin. And like in Limited, we definitely built this so you could play Limited, you'd never see Anakin. And we didn't want it to be,

like I said, we didn't want it to be my rebel soldier fights your stormtrooper, whatever. We wanted to have more meaning than that. And so what we ended up with

is we made different versions of the characters. And the way it works is when you play another version of the same character, they stack. And what happens is you're strengthening your character. So instead of... Characters are unique, and so there are some rules for fighting over them. Although, one of the things that Richard did in order to match the flavor of the story is there's two sides. And so you either play the light side or you play the dark side.

And then the light side has characters and the dark side has units. And the dark side has units. Now, the light units can only be played by the light side, and the dark units can only be played by the dark side. But then you add neutral units, because a lot of mercenaries and things, there's things in the Star Wars universe that, you know what, whoever pays them the most or whatever, whoever influences them can get them to fight for them.

And so there were definitely neutral things. And the idea was anybody could put neutral things in their deck. The other thing about the build cost was, I believe in deck construction, I think, that the build costs were part of what you were allowed in building your deck. There were certain rules of how much build, I think, you the build costs were part of what you were allowed in building your deck. There are certain rules of how much build I think you could have, if I remember correctly.

Once again, this is 2002, or 2000 is when I worked on it, so this is 15 years ago. So I'm remembering the best I can. So if I'm a little shaky on a few things, what's the expression I want here? Bear with me. Okay, so the idea was that

if you play a Anakin and then later get another Anakin, you've got to stack the Anakin and then essentially what you did is it became a boost for the existing Anakin. And so rather than it being a bad thing, rather than like, oh no, I drew an Anakin, it's like, oh good,

I can make my Anakin in play even stronger. Okay, so the way it worked is you first had the build phase. You would get your force. The rule of the game was whenever there's a tie, the dark side wins. So I think the dark side tended to go first on stuff.

But each turn, you got so much force and then there was a dice rolled by the light side and then everybody got the force equal to the die roll of the light side. So there was some variable. The reason that Richard did that was we wanted... One of the things that's fun is you don't want things to be too predictable. One of the things that matches this really well is that you have some sense of what's going to happen,

but you don't always know if you're going to draw a land. You don't always know what you're going to draw. That there's some tension of what exactly is going to happen, but you don't always know if you're going to draw a land. You don't always know what you're going to draw, that there's some tension of what exactly is going to happen. And Richard wanted to make sure that there was some tension also in the Star Wars game that, you know, you could plan ahead, but you didn't quite know exactly what was going to happen. You know, maybe you could finish building something, maybe you couldn't.

The other thing, by the way, about building is just because you started building one thing didn't mean you couldn't start building something else. You could build multiple things at a time. Just because you started building one thing didn't mean you couldn't start building something else. You could build multiple things at a time. And sometimes what would happen is in order to maximize your builds, you would start multiple things at once so that you had some options when you could finish things. Because remember, whenever your opponent beat you in an area,

if you didn't quickly get something in that area, they controlled the area if they won. And if they did that in two different arenas, they would win the game. So sometimes you would build a couple different things just to say, okay, who needs me most? I would start building something and go, oh, wait a minute, I really need to be in this arena. And I'd stop, switch plans, start building for that arena. Anyway, the game was actually,

if you've never played the game, I mean, it hasn't been sold in quite a while, but it's a fun game. One of the things about it is the game ended up not doing super well for a very ironic reason, which I'll explain right now, which is the game had a lot of dice in it.

And some of the larger units, you could roll, you know, tens of dice, and you could roll a lot of dice. And the problem was people perceived the dice rolling as being too dice. And the problem was, people perceived the dice rolling as being too random. And the fact that you rolled so many dice meant, you know,

you have to roll 20 dice. How random is that? But the thing they missed, which is funny, is the more dice you roll, the less random the game becomes. Because what happens is, when you roll one die, there's a swing, right right it can be between a one and a six but you have an expected value for a roll and as you roll more dice you

more lean toward the average roll meaning um one die has a wider swing than two dice that yes two dies you know one die could be one to six two dies okay it could be two to 6. Two dice, okay, it could be 2 to 12, but you're more likely to roll in the middle because you're more likely on any one die to have a score that adds up toward the middle.

So if you roll more dice, you do have a wider spread of the possibilities, but you have a more certainty you're going to roll toward the middle. So ironically, what people perceived

as being more random was actually Richard putting enough stuff in to make it less random. And the fact that there was so much dice rolling, like I said, Richard was trying to get a feel of miniatures, and so

he definitely was trying to have a lot of suspense and surprise, and the dice did this cool thing where you kind of knew in a matchup who was supposed to win, and you knew who was going to win the majority of the time, but you didn't always know. There was suspense. The other thing

that I've talked a little bit about is speed. Let me add speed. So the way it worked is, in the battle phase, you looked at the speed of your thing, and then whoever had the fastest speed, in a tie, the dark side won ties. They went first. So in a battle, it wasn't

just that one player went and another player would go. It would go in order of the speed. And once something was destroyed, it was gone. So if you could destroy something before it was its turn to go, you could prevent its damage from happening. So that was a big part of the strategy sometimes, was to use your fast ships. And usually, one of the cool things about speed was that speed tended to go on smaller things. And so the idea was that the big things that were powerful,

that had a lot of dice, tended to be slower. And so one of the advantages, the reason you want to have smaller things is the smaller things were faster and tended to be more useful. And, you know, there were some neat fights between small and big things. Like, a lot of small things, you know, big things would easily destroy them, but they would get in hits quicker than the fast things.

Oh, one of my favorite things, by the way, is... So once I did... Richard led the design for the game system. I led the design for the first set. And then afterwards, the game got turned over, and Henry Stern ended up being the person in charge of the project. So the vast majority of sets, in fact,

real quickly, here are all the sets we put out. So the first set was Attack of the Clones. I did that. And that came out in April of 2002.

Sith Rising came out in July of 2002. Then A New Hope, we went back and started doing the old films, October 2002. Notice there was a gap in between the second film and the third film.

The first set we did was the first film, the second film, sorry, Attack of the Clones. The last set we did was Revenge of the Sith, which was the third film. So all of Star Wars' trading card games fell in between the second and the third films. So after A New Hope, which was October 2002, we did Battle of Yavin, which was February of 2003. Then we did Jedi Guardians, which was June of 2003. Then we did Empire Strikes Back, which was October of 2003. Then we did Rogues and Scoundrels, which was March of 2004. Then Phantom Menace, which was May of 2004.

Then Return of the Jedi, which was October of 2004. And then Revenge of the Sith, which was March of 2005. So it was from 2002 through 2005, so the game came out over four years. I think we just had the license for four years and so we got in, we sort of did a bunch of stuff. I think near the end you can notice as we were running out of time

for the license, we just started doing movies. We sort of were pacing ourselves and realized that in order to get all the movie stuff out because I guess we didn't know when the license was going to end or maybe if I was going to extend it and it ended up not getting extended. But anyway,

Henry was the one that mostly worked on that. So I'm familiar with the very first set. But anyway, we haven't got to the cool part of the story yet. Let me finish talking about the game. Oh, so the speed story. So when we were making A New Hope, the first time we had a Han Solo. In fact, we had the very

first Han Solo. And so, one of the things that we did is we made sure that Han Solo in A New Hope had a speed faster than Greedo had. And so, I'll leave a little tribute to in our game, Han shoots first because he's faster.

Anyway, so the speed is pretty cool. So the idea is you could build, things come out, then you fought in different things. And the neat thing about arenas was every once in a while, you'd have things in one arena that can affect another arena. Like you'd have a ground thing that could shoot at ships in the air. And so it would sit in your ground arena, but it could affect things in the space arena. So there's definitely some crossings between them. There were three different types of effects that matched magic.

There were activated abilities, there were static abilities, and there were triggered abilities. They worked just like magic did. There were a couple different types of cards. So there were units. So there were space units which were blue, ground units which were green, character units which were purple. Those units were green. Character units were purple. Those units could only go in the arena

that there was their arena. There were battle cards. They were red. They were kind of like instants, but you only used them during battle. There were mission cards. They were yellow. They were things that you had to build that were kind of like battle cards, but you had to build them first.

And there was equipment which was silver, which were the weapons and the vehicles and things that you would attach to your units. Later on, not in the first,

not when I did, but we later would make locations that would act a lot like enchant worlds, like world enchantments, which is you would play them, they'd go into a certain arena, and then they would affect

that arena as long as they were there. Early on, some of our units were places, and later locations would take the role of places in the game. Okay, so now that I've explained the game, let me talk a little bit about my favorite part about this whole experience, which was, so I was in charge of the Revenge of the Sith set, and a lot of that was, I wanted to make sure that I was properly charge of the Revenge of the Sith set and a lot of that was

I wanted to make sure that I was properly reflecting the movie so Bill had gone and took very lengthy notes and we had this outline to read that had a lot of stuff in it but I went to talk to the powers that be and I said you know

we're Revenge of the Sith we're going to be matching the movie and I said, you know, look, we're trying, like, we're Revenge of the Sith. We're going to be matching the movie, and look, I got to milk every, you know, now that we know the system, and we need ground, and unit, and personal, and like, I'm like, you know, the personal we weren't too afraid of. The character,

we knew all the characters. Star Wars was really exacting and showing us all the characters. We knew all the characters. We mostly knew what all the ships were. But I'm like, you know what? I have to do battle cards. I've got to do action cards. I have to make sure we have enough ground and enough thing.

I go, look, I really need to see the script. And they're like, look, Mark, the only way to see the script is to go to Skywalker Ranch. I'm like, uh-huh, that is true. And so I convinced them that I should go to Skywalker Ranch to read the script. Which, to be fair, I actually did believe it was better. If I was going to do Revenge of the Sith and I was trying to actually reflect the movie, that it made a lot of sense that I read the movie. And so I convinced him to send me to Skywalker Ranch. Let's talk a little bit about my trip to Skywalker Ranch.

So one of the things that happened is I took a flight. So it's some suburb of San Francisco. I had to fly to San Francisco, and then I had to get a rental car, and I had to drive there. I think I drove, and I spent the night in a hotel, and in the morning I drove up to Skywalker Ranch. And one of the things about Skywalker Ranch is, I think it's a, okay, my memory of it was that they took a winery and sort of adapted

it into a place. So like, one of the things that George Lucas was real big on is he wanted the Skywalker Ranch to feel real natural. And so they took a lot of energy. It's not just a place with giant buildings. The buildings were all ingrained to the, like, they're part of kind of the nature. And it was really sort of elegantly built. And, you know, so from the outside, like, the buildings were all ingrained to nature. Like, it wasn't like, it wasn't like a corporate campus or anything. It was very, there was just a lot of natural stuff. So you go to the gate and you get buzzed in.

And then I think I got a badge or something. And then I met my representative. So whenever I had a deal with Star Wars, I had a liaison that I would talk with. So if I had a question about something, if I didn't know, let's say we were building a card or something. And like, oh, there's a, you know, which is supposed to be faster, this thing or that thing, that I could call this person up and he could do some research for me and help me. And so this is my contact at Lucas. So what we had done was we set it up so that I was coming during a time, there's licensing

days where licensors come. And so I was there during that. So the first thing we did is I came in and there's a licensing conference. And so I came in and it was just all sorts of information about the movie. And like, I was there and I'm making up these names. So don't, don't, but you know, it's like next to me was the Frito-Lay guy. And then there was the Sprint guy. And then you're like, like Star Wars was a big deal. And there was a lot of licensing going on, you know, and we were making a game for them,

but there were people that were just, you know, partners with them and they're going to advertise them. And, and so I came in and there were, uh,

remember we all got these little goodie boxes and then we watched a whole bunch of different stuff and they were showing scenes from the movie and, you know, showing, just letting the partners in on stuff

that was going on and then giving them a lot of tactical information. Now, the interesting thing about that part was I didn't need to know a lot of it. It was helpful and it was fun. I mean, don't get me wrong. I was super glad I got to see it. But it was, but anyway, it was, we had lunch, I think. I mean, it was a pretty big thing.

I know, like I said, I forget what I got. Like, I had my little box. I forget what I got in my box. But there were little cool little Star Wars things. And it was very cool. And then after the presentation, after lunch, I got to meet with my liaison. I forget his name. And then it was time for me to read the script.

And so the way it worked was in me to read the script. And so the way it worked was, in order to read the script, I had to go in this special room, and there were all these rules. I don't even remember all the rules, but I was allowed to have a pad of paper and a pencil. I was allowed to take notes, because, I mean, it was a way that I was trying to make sure

I could figure out things for my game. So I was allowed to take notes, but I wasn't allowed any cameras or anything, and this is really before the age of camera phones, I was aware that I was trying to make sure I could figure out things for my game. So I was allowed to take notes. But I wasn't allowed any cameras or anything. And this is really before the age of camera phones. So that wasn't an issue. But anyway, I was allowed to sit there as long as I wanted. And I could read the script. And if I had any questions, I could go talk to my liaison guy.

And he could answer questions. So I just sat in this nondescript room. And I read the script for Attack of the Clones and it was it was awesome now be aware like most old timers Phantom Menace came out and I was all excited

because Star Wars was up again and then the movie came out and it didn't quite live up to what I was hoping for but I was optimistic and okay Attack of the Clones I was super optimistic when I was reading for, but I was optimistic, and okay, Attack of the Clones, I was super optimistic. When I was reading the script, it's very hard to tell from a script versus the finished product, and so I was just super excited. The script that I read versus what got made was a little bit different. There was a bunch of sequences

that got added different from the script I read, but I was very pumped. As someone who grew up with Star Wars, who truly, truly loves Star Wars, to just sit at Skywalker Ranch in a room getting to read the advanced copy of the movie that was coming out in two years was just super, super cool. And then the last cool part was

that they have a store. They have the official Lucasfilm store. And so I was able to go to the store. And I remember all this stuff. I bought some t-shirts, obviously. It's funny. Of the two t-shirts, for some reason I bought... Normally I wear t-shirts, but one of the shirts I bought was this polo shirt

that had the Lucasfilm logo on it. And I don't really wear polo shirts a lot anymore. So I have that shirt. I don't wear it a lot. But the other shirt I got was I got a THX shirt. So back when I lived in Los Angeles, I had a roommate named Greg who went to USC, the University of Southern California. And USC has a film school. So the two big film schools are UCLA and USC, for those who don't know. And USC is where George Lucas went. And so it's probably

the most prestigious of the film schools. And my roommate got in to USC. It was a really big, giant deal. And so he took a course with a guy I think his name is Tom Holman. I apologize. I got that wrong.

But anyway, what we, he took a sound class and what we learned is that Tom Holman is the T and the H in THX. Um, and that he was a sound guy. And I think, I think he might have been a teacher for for Lucas and that Lucas then pulled him in and that he helped Lucas make THX that's why he's named after him on the sound system

that's something that that is something that Lucasfilm does for those that don't know Lucasfilm really not only did they do the Star Wars movies

they got really into special effects and doing sound stuff but anyway I got a THX shirt to remind me of my roommate and his THX class. And ironically, of all the shirts I bought there,

the one shirt I still have is my THX shirt. So I have my little polo look shirt. I just don't wear polos that often because they don't work with the flannel. So I think I was trying to get extra fancy, but I've since learned that just go with a simple T-shirt. But anyway, that was an awesome experience and one of the things that's really cool is Magic has done all sorts of fun and neat things for me

and I've traveled around the world and I meet all sorts of people and I've been all sorts of cool places but the one thing Magic did not do for me is get me to Skywalker Ranch and get to read an advanced copy of a Star Wars film that was being made.

And the neat thing about it was, because we were working on the script, we were constantly involved with them and learning about what was coming up and what the movie was doing. It's the one time that I was really, really involved in the making of a movie. Well, sorry, the first time. There's a magic movie, but we can't talk about that yet.

But anyway, it was a glorious experience. And I really, really, I think the Star Wars trading card game is a really fun game. It's a little different. It is, I think, one of the reasons

that it didn't quite do as well as we were hoping is that Richard kind of made a different kind of game with it. I think people were expecting a more traditional trading card game. And really, Richard made, what he made was this miniatures game on paper, on cards.

It is a really fun game if you've never played. It has a lot of drama. Rolling a lot of dice is a blast. And like I said, there's a lot of strategy. The game is full and full of strategy. Just because there's a lot of dice rolling game is full and full of strategy just because there's a lot of dice rolling does not mean

by any stretch of imagination like the better player will win the majority of the time you know you want all your games when you make a game to make sure that

the less experienced player has a chance you know you need a dream you need an ability to win I think games in which the lesser players

like I can never win it's very frustrating for the player to play. And this game definitely had dramatic moments and exciting things and that sometimes when it was really close, I mean the reason the dice mattered is, look, if I had a giant, giant ship and you had a little tiny

ship, look, I'm going to beat you. You know, I'm rolling 20 dice and you're rolling 2. You know. Now there was, we did have something called critical hits. One of the things that small ships could do is, certain ships have critical hits where if you hit a critical hit, if you rolled, I think, 6s, then you've got to roll

extra dice, and so there's an ability for a little ship to have these explosive things happen where they could take out a big ship, but it was very rare. But in the movies that happened, so we wanted to make sure that happened. But anyway, it is a fun game. If you've never played it, I know you have to go on eBay or something to get it

but it is actually a very fun game. I actually played quite a bit of it when it was out and it was just... And the other thing that was fun is we worked really hard to match it to Star Wars and so it has all the characters and all the vehicles and all the ships and the locations

and the weapons. Everything you can imagine. Every Star Wars thing you can imagine, it's there. It's in the game. You are playing with it. You are just having awesome Star Wars battles and you're fighting in multiple arenas. It is really a fun game. One of the things that was great for me is

I consider Richard Garfield to be my mentor. He is where I feel like I learned the vast majority of my game design skills. I mean, I learned a lot from doing, and there's a lot of other people I've worked with that have been awesome. But Richard really was the person who I've learned the most from. And Star Wars was a chance where he and I he and I have worked on Magic but that was the only game that I can remember in which he and I worked really closely on making a brand new game

and so I always have warm moments there I feel very proud that the three arenas was definitely something that I helped bring to the game and that it was just exciting it was exciting working, you know,

it was exciting working closely with Richard on a not-magic product, and, and being able to make a, a game from scratch with him, and, and watch him work, and work with him,

that was just amazing, so, so anyway, uh, that was the Star Wars trading card game, a very, very different animal, um,

now, I will say, by the way, um, there are definitely things from that that have influenced magic, although not many of them... It's funny. There was a mechanic called Absorb that I put into Future Sight, which reduces damage.

And Absorb was exactly the mechanic from... There's a shield mechanic in Star Wars, and shields allow you to reduce damage. And so what they do is from every die roll it reduces damage. So if you have a shield one, okay, well if I roll any ones, it negates the ones. And so the idea is the bigger shields you have, the harder it is to hurt something. The higher rolls you have to roll.

And usually things with shields have a lower health, but they have shields. And so depending on your rolls, you really can have bad rolls in which you don't harm the ship at all. And I tried to bring that as Absorb. Absorb ended up being a little too powerful for magic, so I'm not sure we're going to see that in a future set. Also, there was a Meteor card that Henry had made that we directly made.

There's a creature in magic that, every time it takes damage, it splits in two. But it shrinks each time. That was based off the Meteor card. There was a whole mechanic that we made that never got made that was based on the build costs. I think we called it layaway. There was a magic mechanic where you could cast things

like you could build them in Star Wars. We tried that. That never actually never quite made it into the game. I think there's probably a lot of little things that influence magic. But anyway, one of the things in general is anytime as a game designer

you work on a game, you pick things up through osmosis that affect you. And that, I do know that just working on Star Wars has made me a better game designer and thus a better magic game designer. And there definitely were influenced of working there.

But anyway, I'm now in my parking space. So we all know what that means. That it's time to end my drive to work. So instead of talking Star Wars,

it's time for me to be making magic. So thanks for joining me, guys. And I hope you enjoyed a peek at a slightly different kind of game design.