Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #367 - Flux

Episode Date: September 16, 2016

Mark talks about the impact of flux on design.

I'm pulling my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, today I'm going to talk about the topic of flux, of change, of evolution. So one of the things that magic does is we are a living, breathing game, and that the game is constantly changing. a living, breathing game, and that the game is constantly changing. So for those that have never heard, real quickly, let me explain what I believe is one of magic's greatest strengths. And what that is, is, I've explained this before, but for those that haven't heard it, I will do it quickly again, what I call the crispy hash brown theory. So the crispy hash brown theory, sorry to say, the crispy hashbrown theory is that the best part about a hashbrown

is the crispy outer shell. That's just the best part. Once you eat the crispy outer shell, you eat the inside. The inside's okay. It's not bad, but not as good as the crispy outside part. And I think in games, one of the things that the crispy outer shell of games is the discovery part of the game, is learning about the game games is the discovery part of the game, is learning about the game, is trying to figure it out. And the key is, once you've figured it out, then you move on to a section that's more about memorization and stuff. For example, if you get really good at chess, at some point you start memorizing opening moves.

Or if you get good at Scrabble, you have to memorize at some point two-letter words and three-letter words. There's a point where you move past the discovery part, where it's more of learning what is known from other people and other things. And that's okay, and some people enjoy that, but that's not kind of the most

fun part of a game. The discovery part is really exciting, and I think to me, the outer crispy hash brown. You know, the outer crispy part of the hash brown. So one of the things Magic does that I think really makes Magic a game that has lasted as long as it has, and people play it for as long as it has. Right now, the average Magic player plays between like nine and a half years. That is longer than the average game lasts.

That's a long time. And the reason is that Magic keeps reinventing itself. It keeps changing. It's always in flux. That's the goal of today's topic. So one of the things I want to talk about is what exactly... So, I mean, when Richard first made the game way, way back in the beginning, his intent was that there would be more cards

and that the environment would change. Now, the funny thing is when Richard first created the game game there was no idea of rotation yet. That didn't happen till later. But what happened early on is once it became clear that magic was like... I think when Richard first made the game his scope was a lot smaller because he assumed it would be a normal game. It's very hard to assume your game is going to be a blockbuster phenomenon. You just don't plan for that. And so under his idea there's a lot of cards out there and it would just take it's very hard to assume your game is going to be a blockbuster phenomenon you just don't plan for that and so under his idea there's a lot of cards out there

and it would just take time to learn the cards and the flux would come as you hit different metagames and change your deck around but once it became clear that Magic was as big as it was and that there was many people playing it R&D came up with the idea of Standard called Type 2 at the time. But the idea of rotation.

Because one of the things that's key is that flux is a big part of magic. And that if you don't change the system, if the same cards are always there, then the only way to affect the system is by making things that supersede things that are there. And what that means is, so let's say there is no standard, there is no ever changing of formats. The only way for things to change is for you to put out cards that replace cards that are currently existing in decks.

And there's two ways to do that. The easier way is a power level thing, just it's more powerful. Why did I place this blue spell for that blue spell? Well, that blue spell is more powerful. The other way could be a synergistic thing, where it's not that it's more powerful in a vacuum, it just has higher synergies with the things.

But those synergies itself creates a power level, and what happens is, if nothing ever leaves the system, the power level just is going to creep upward. The only way to make things viable and relevant is to up the power level, either through direct cards or through synergy, and that both of those cause problems long term. I mean,

one of the things that I think is very important to magic is that we can keep... The metaphor I always use is what I call pushing the pendulum. So when I mean a pendulum, I mean a rock on a rope hanging over a pit of sand. Not really a rock, but, I mean a rock on a rope hanging over like a pit of sand, you know, not really a rock, but usually there's a little pointer or something. So the idea is a

pendulum, that kind of pendulum, where it can swing in any direction. But the idea is there's a default, there's a center, that magic has a default and a center to it. That one of the things about having flux is not, it's not random in the sense that it's not like who knows where we're going. We have a center to the game. We have, and to me, the core of magic, the core center of magic is the color pie. And the key to the color pie is that colors do something and that there's a core identity to each of the colors. That black is black and red is red and blue is blue and white is white and green is green. The colors have core identities. And the idea is, in any moment in time, we can shift a little bit away.

You know, that the pendulum can swing a little farther away, but it always swings back. That the colors at their core have to be what the colors are. They have to do what the colors do. And one of the neat things about as we move from world to world and, you know, metagame to metagame, one of the things that R&D can do is we can keep a shifting focus. That one of the neat ways to keep the game fresh is, so here's the way to think of it is, imagine Magic, I'm making a number up here, but imagine it has 100 facets to it. It probably has more than that,

but let's say it has 100 facets to it. At any one time, we can focus on certain facets. And even if facet one is in the metagame at two different points in time, if one time it's with facet 10, and other times it's with facet 24, that can mean very different things. So one of the things that we really want is,

we want the ability to sort of focus on different things over time. So development has something that I refer to as the Escher Stairway. So what the Escher Stairway is, you want every set to be exciting. You want every set to feel like, ooh, this has cool and neat things. And the way to do that, so essentially Escher is a painter or illustrator, I'm not sure, for those who don't know. And he was famous for drawing optical illusions in his art. So one of his most famous pieces was a stairway that always went up. And it's like, wait a minute, how could a stairway always go up?

It went in a square I guess but the idea is each step you would go up but as you went up by the end when you go to the final step it went up to the first step now it's an optical illusion obviously that can't really in normal physics happen but it's a similar illusion that that development wants create, which is the goal is not to raise the power level. That is not a long-term answer to the game. I mean, if we make set one and then set two is more powerful than set one, okay, people will play set two. And then set three is more powerful than set two, we have people play set three. But you're just going to spiral out of control.

There comes a point where the power level just breaks. So one of the jobs of R&D, development especially, is to figure out how to balance the power level in a way that keeps it fun and interesting, but creates flux and keeps change. So one of the ways they do that is by changing different facets of the game and raising or lowering the power level of them. The idea being that if you lower the power level of them. The idea being that if you lower the power level of some things

but are always raising the power level of other things, you create a sensation upward motion. Oh, look, these new spells that are powerful are more powerful than spells from the previous set. Which is true. And if you... People tend to focus on the good cards. It's harder to notice,

other people do notice this, that certain strategies, oh, we haven't made cards as good as the old cards. The strategy has gone down a little bit. And it's key in order to sort of keep the flux in the environment to do that, that you want things to go up and down. In power level, it's a matter of figuring where your focus is and changing your focus. So like, okay, right now, it's really about this thing. Okay, some of the best spells in the game are this thing in standard.

And other things that might be problematic with that, maybe they're a little lessened. And so you give different parts of the game time to shine. Now, one of the things that I always talk about is development is a very, very hard job. Because the goal of development is to make an environment that is interesting and is not a solved environment meaning if development could figure out the environment if they knew the answers well the audience which is millions of people would figure the answers overnight you know we don't have the play testing resource to outstrip what the public is there's millions of people playing Magic.

What they can do is make an interesting environment where they push in a certain direction without definitively knowing what's going to happen. Like I said, if you want to make a metagame that's fun and challenging for the player base, it has to be complex enough that our developers can't just crack it. And so it's a very, it's a hard, hard job. I mean, my job is hard in its own way.

I'm, you know, making nothing out of something or something out of nothing is tricky. But their job is also very difficult because they have to create a balance in that something that's not completely solved, but something in which they have a general sense of where they're going. And a big way that they do that is controlling the aspects of what part of the game are weak or strong at any one moment in time. And one of the things they tend to do is they look at where the game is strong and go, okay, this has been dominant for a while. Let's ramp that down a little bit and ramp up something else. But that's just development.

You see flux in many places. Let me get back to the color pie. This is a little more my area. Color pie has a similar sense of flux. But the difference is in development, it's more power level. In color pie, it has to do with bends. So I've talked about this quite a bit, that in the color pie, there is what I call the core of the mantle and the crust. The core, what I call the core ability. So imagine like the earth. The core is the center of the earth. You know, the magma at the center.

And the core is the identity of the color. That is what the color does. Set in, set out, that is what the color does. That if I said to you, what do you expect green to do, and you listed the things that green does, because green always does them, that's the core identity of green.

And each color has a core identity. So next you have the mantle. So the mantle is the area that I call, is sort of a light bend. Is, you know, the colors don't always do this, but they can when they need to. A good example might be, there's areas like, for example, we do graveyard sets from time to time. And when we do a graveyard set, that means that I need all the cards to interact with the graveyard. But here's the thing. Normally, at its core, not all the cards interact with the graveyard. Really, you know, if you go to a normal set, black will have a raise dead and probably have an animate dead. So something that gets creatures out of the graveyard to your hand, and something that gets creatures out of the graveyard to your hand, and something that gets creatures out of the graveyard into the battlefield.

Onto the battlefield. Green will usually have some kind of regrowth, which is a card that gets any card from your graveyard into your hand. And white will often have some kind of reanimation, usually with small creatures, or it might get back artifacts or enchantments, sometimes small creatures, from the graveyard to your hand. But normally, as a default, those are the colors that you might see have it.

Normally, red and blue don't. I mean, I'm not saying they never hit the graveyard, but as a default, they don't. And one of the things we did is we carved out space to say, well, in a graveyard set, I need to make sure all the colors have access to graveyard stuff. So we found things for red and blue, you know, for example, red can get back sorceries or red can regrow direct damage spells that regrow themselves back. And blue will get back instants and sorceries, more instants and sorceries, sometimes instants and sorceries. And so we find things to do.

We find ways to take the colors and push them a little bit so that in that environment, when that's the theme, that we have things they can do. That's kind of the mantle. The mantle is things in which sometimes the color does them. When I say a light bend, what I mean is it's not the core. It's not even really, it's a light bend in that, look, the color does it quite a bit. It's something the color does. Usually what a light bend means is the color either doesn't normally do this because it's only in theme we do it, or it's something in which it does something similar, but in the right theme we could shift it a little bit. A good example is one of the ways we divide red and black is black tends to have can't block and red tends to

have must attack. But we have certain environments where we need can't block more or certain environments where we need must attack more. Well, black and red, those are really close to each other. If red has a can't block or black has a must attack, those are a light bend. That's really close to what they normally do. We separate them for delineation between the colors, but it's not as though, you know, black and red aren't, you know, there's a very thin, a thin film dividing them. And so if we're to make an environment work, we have to sort of push a little bit. You're not breaking a lot. That's a lot more for color identity. So we can do light bend stuff like that. That's the mantle. The mantle is like, okay, you know, this color doesn't always do it, but it can. It can do it. It does it from time to time.

And then you get to the crust. And what the crust is, is heavy bends, where it's like the color just doesn't normally do this. But it's sort of like, it's playing in a space that the color tangentially does, or

you know, it's playing in space that philosophically the color tangentially does or it's playing in space that philosophically the color can handle. Now, the one thing I've never mentioned before is let's say we have the earth, we have the core of the mantle of the crust and there's space. Space is the break. Space is the not allowed part of the color pie. That's the part that says,

no, you've gone too far. That the core of the mantle of the crust is what's allowed with the colors. And that colors have weaknesses built into them. There's things colors are not supposed to do. And when you get to those things,

like I don't care what the environment is, the color's not supposed to do that. It has to find a different way to answer that problem. And just because we're in an enchantment block

doesn't mean red all of a sudden gets to destroy enchantments. That's one of red's weaknesses. It can't do that. And so one of the things that's important in trying to figure out how to do Flux with the color pie is figuring out where we want to push things. Where are the light bends? Where are the heavy bends? We want to make sure to avoid the breaks because we don't want...

People understand the color pie is that it's a safety net in some ways. We want people to want to play different colors. And the key to doing that is saying, you know what, not every color is good at everything. And so sometimes you want to do something, you know, the color is not going to be good at it. You've got to go to a second color to do that. And that's important.

So one of the things in the flux we do with the color pie is we want to shake things up. We want to let people experience different things. We want to sort of let colors have some flux. Now, there is a bigger meta-flux going on. Let me talk about that. So that flux I'm talking about is from set to set, the color pie exists. You know, we swing the pendulum a little bit. Maybe green is doing something it doesn't normally do but makes sense in the set, stuff like that.

There's a larger flux that goes on, though, which is the color pie itself, the whole entity itself is in flux to a certain extent, which means that at the core identity of the colors is the philosophy of what they do. That never changes. Richard introduced

it back in the beginning of the game, and while we've tweaked and refined it a little bit, the essence of the colors are the colors. But how they're executed, so for those of you that remember Planar Chaos, one of the things I messed around with in Planar Chaos was the idea of what if the color pie redistributed its mechanics slightly differently. But the thing I didn't do was I didn't violate the essence of the color. I didn't make red not feel red or blue

not feel blue. I just said, you know, if you're going to divvy up the mechanics in a different way, there's a different combination of ways we could do mechanics that would make sense. For example, blue is the main color of card drawing and we've tied it to knowledge. Makes a lot of sense. But if instead we wanted green to be number one card drawing and say it's all about wisdom about growth and wisdom we could do that that could have been something we did that there's other choices that could have been made

and so one of the things that happens over time is we try to figure out whether or not we are there's areas for us to shift that the color pie itself as an entity not individual choices within the color pie but the color pie itself as an entity, not individual choices within the color pie, but the color pie itself, the philosophies do not shift, but the execution can shift. There's a flux of execution. For example, in just the last couple years, we said, you know what? Red's a

little low. What are some things red can do? We added in looting to red, although it has rummaging, I guess, where it discards before it draws. But we added that in. We added in what I call the impulsive drawing, what Chandra introduced. You exile a certain number of cards, and you can play them until the end of turn. So it's like card drawing, but I've got to play them right away or I don't get them. And in general, this is a good example where we saw that red was kind of light in something, and we worked to sort of add some stuff that philosophically matched. But once again, there's this ongoing flux.

And so one of the things that you'll notice is anytime you peek in and look at magic, the color pie is always sort of slightly changing. And I think that's important. I believe you want some constancy, and I believe that in general the color pie has not shifted too much. But there's elements that we shift and we continue to shift because we're always trying to fine-tune what we're doing but there's an inherent shift to that that there's flux in the system okay so let me talk about another big flux which has to do with overall thematic flux I talked about this a little bit in why we change the color

pie or why we change elements, why we do bends and stuff. But one of the jobs I have is I'm trying to put out a brand new expansion. So how do I do that? Well, I'm not trying to put out what you saw last week. I'm trying to put out something new. So what I want is, every time I

start a set, I have to figure out what about the set is different. And then most of the set is going to be the same. The secret of magic is that, I've made this quote before, you don't have to change much to change a lot, to change everything. You know, that little changes can really have huge impacts. And so one of the things I'm doing when I'm looking for a new expansion is I just want to change some small piece of it. I don't want to change everything because that's just

too disorienting. I want to change something and say, okay, here's the one change. The way I think of it is when you write stories, when you write fantastical stories, one of the rules is you're allowed to change one thing. And then beyond that one thing, the audience starts getting skeptical. So what that means is I can introduce you to the idea of Superman. Superman exists. He's from Krypton. He has mighty strength and can fly. He's a superhero. And the audience will go, okay, Superman's from Krypton. He can fly. Okay, I got it. Then he changes in a phone booth, and people are like,

how can you change in a phone booth? How can that happen? And like, see, they're willing to accept Superman from Krypton, super strong, can fly, but like, then it has to make sense. And when he does something that doesn't quite make sense, they question that. And that's one of the rules of writing is that you get one gimme that the audience will accept. You get one premise, the audience gets to accept. Then everything beyond that premise has to fall within that premise or has to make sense. So you can't sort of say, well, I'm going to introduce this new technology and then pretend that people act a different way. No, no, no. If your premise is

the new technology, then people have to act like people. If your premise is society has inherently changed and people function differently, okay. But then you don't get a new technology. You know what I'm saying? Like, you have one what-if that you've got to work with. You get one sort of fundamental change. And that people will accept that change. Whatever the change is, I mean, I guess there's limits. But pretty much people go, okay.

You know, I mean, Superman doesn't make much sense from a realistic standpoint. You know? But it's like, okay, okay, there's a man from Krypton, he's super strong, okay, I'll buy that. So one of the things is I feel sets have a similar quality to them, which is I always want to make one big change, but then everything beyond that one big change has to come out of that change or be consistent with magic. My goal is not to change everything about magic. Magic has to be magic. I'm allowed to change one basic thing. Now, that one thing could have ripples and can have, you know, there could be elements that come out of it. I'm not saying that one change doesn't have other effects from it. But, for example, I'll, let me take Innistrad. Innistrad was, I'm going to do a top-down gothic horror set.

Everything came out of that. What my choices of mechanics were, my choices of cards, everything I did came out of that choice. And Magic doesn't normally do that. That's not Magic's normal default. So I've got to make decisions and do things I don't normally get to do, but it fell within that range of what I was doing. And that one of the things that's really important to remember,

that one of the things when we talk about flux in design, is what that flux wants to be, is it's not everything changes all the time. One of the mistakes I see, I don't get to look at a lot of custom sets, but in the past, you know, every once in a while, usually for reasons of looking at someone we're going to hire, I get permission from legal to be able to look at things.

So I've seen a few sets. And one of the biggest mistakes I see is people want to change too many things. That they go, ooh, wouldn't it be cool if A was different and B was different and C was different and D... And what happens at some point, you lose the game is not...

It stops being magic. The goal is... I talk about magic a lot in different games. But really, at its core, there's a core experience that is magic. And I need to make sure that every game we make still, at its core, is magic. We get to change game we make still at its core is magic. We get to change things up. We get to do something different. We get to dress it differently. We get to

have different synergies and make you care about different things. But it's because we are shifting and making one fundamental shift. Now, I work very hard with the creative team because we want the creative shift and the mechanical shift to feel cohesively one. That's another important reason we work so close together. We only get to change one thing. Well, since we only get to change one thing,

we have to work with them to make sure that what we're doing feels like one thing. You know, if I'm going to make a more combat-centric play style, well, I need to have

an environment where that makes sense. That was Khans of Tarkir, for example. That Khans was all about this battle world with these warlords and like okay I can make a more combat oriented

gameplay because that fits the theme of what we were going with. And that one of the things in general of flux is key to the game. Flux is important. But I want to stress, and this is, I guess, one of my themes today is that change, change for the sake of change is not good. It is not like the more change magic has, the better. That one of the reasons that our flux

works is because it's so grounded in familiarity. I mean, I talk a lot about comfort, surprise, and completion. Comfort is key. Comfort always comes first. That people, magic has to be the game they love. And that I want the surprise, I want to throw things they don't expect. But in a lot of ways, what I want to do is first create a comfortable environment, figure out what the thing is different, you know,

and then I want to make sure I deliver on what people know. Like, one of the reasons it's so important to have vanilla creatures and French vanilla creatures, I mean, A, it keeps the complexity in check, which is important.

But also, it's just, you want people to be able to see something and go, okay, I just know what this is. You know, you want people to have some, like, what? But you don't want want people to be able to see something go okay i just know what this is you know you want people to have some like what but you don't want every card to be what you know you want some cards a few cards key cards um something like meld from um shadows of industry or side from eldritch moon melds awesome but if every single card had meld it would not be awesome if you were playing a game in which everything melded together, that would be way too much. It'd be A, too complex, but B, it just would be too much.

I often use the cake metaphor of icing is important, but icing is not cake. Icing works because there's cake. That nothing but icing would be too much for most people. The cake kind of grounds it. That most of what makes a cake is the cake. And the funny thing is, when you decorate a cake, you put frosting on it and change colors and you decorate the top. It makes the cake look different. That a lot of making cakes, like one of the things my wife and I do is we throw a lot of parties.

And part of throwing our parties is we have a lot of cakes. In fact, the woman at the place that makes our cakes knows us first name, knows who we are, and we come all the time making cakes. And one of the things we want to do is we always come up with fun, inventive cakes. We have fun with her. She's really cool and makes a lot of neat cakes. But one of the things in the end is the cake is the cake. We order the same flavor of cake.

We normally have half vanilla and half chocolate. She makes really good cake. It's yummy. But we don't change up the cake. It's not like one time it's raspberry, this, and the next time it's... No, we make nice, simple, clean cake. And the reason the cake is cool is we change sort of aspects of it, and it looks different. You know, the Super Bowl cake looks like a football field

where my birthday cake might look like a Green Lantern's lantern. But in the end, the cake's the cake. It's the same cake. It's yummy cake. That's what I want. I'm not looking for a radically different cake. I like the cake. But I like the fact that one is a football field and one is a Green Lantern lantern

are very different things. They feel different. Even though, in the end, the cake is the cake, they feel different. And that's a lot of what the flux in how we different things. They feel different. Even though in the end the cake is the cake, they feel different. And that's a lot of what the flux in how we do things. I want to change things up. I want to add new mechanics. But it's not, I'm not trying to change everything so much

that you don't know or love the thing that it is. People love magic because it is magic. My goal is not to see how far I can take the magic mechanics. Like one of the things, and I've seen people do this, I've had people inside Wizards try to do this, where it's like let's do this thought experiment about how different I can make the game using the rules of the game. And the answer is I can make it really different. I can make a game that technically is magic that is not remotely magic.

But that is not my job. My job is not to say, hey, I made a wacky cake. And guess what? When you bite into the cake, you'll have never tasted that before. And you might even say, is this cake? Not my job. Not what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to make sure that the cake's the cake.

I want you to love the cake. I want to jazz it up a little bit. I want to sort of do cool things so it feels different. And I want you to love the cake. I want to jazz it up a little bit. I want to sort of do cool things so it feels different. And I want it to play somewhat differently, but I want it to play differently in that I'm pushing the pendulum. Once again, the core of the game, same default. The reason I use a pendulum is a very specific analogy. It always pulls back to the center. The game always pulls back to the center. The color wheel always pulls back to the center. The game always pulls back to the center. The color wheel always pulls back to the center. The power level always pulls back to the center.

That there is a default for what things are, for how things work. And the idea of flux and magic is not that it's chaotic. It's not that it's not going anywhere. It is that it's very carefully trying to go differently than where it was. In fact, a lot of the reason in the pendulum

metaphor is the idea that it swings one direction. What does the pendulum do when it swings one direction? Well, it swings back in a slightly different direction. And that's the key to what we do with flux. A lot of it is figure out what aspects we have, where we can push in a way we haven't pushed before, and make sure to push in a different direction, conscious of where we can push in a way we haven't pushed before and make sure to push in a different direction, conscious of where we have, where we've been. And a lot of what we try to do, and this isn't even just mechanics. Creative tries to do this.

That if we go to a very dark world, maybe the next world's not so dark. If we go to a place that is... We try to mix up the temperament of our world, the temperament of our environment. I try to mix up the temperament of our world, the temperament of our environment. I want to mix up the gameplay. That if, you know, I'm trying to make you feel like, Innistrad, for example,

had a very sort of, it was trying to make you afraid. It definitely, you know, the set after it, which was Return to Ravnica, I was much more playful. I wasn't, you know, the goal isn't, the goal is to keep sort of moving around where things are. But once again, the key of Less of today is the idea of flux is not randomness. The idea of flux is carefully thinking about where things have been and then purposely picking places that create a fresh feel to it.

That it's not like we just throw darts in a dartboard and do it, well, whatever. We carefully look at what we've done and figure out from where we've done where we can push again. I know in mechanics, I say, oh, well, we've played a lot in this space. I'm going to go far away from that space. You know, we've just played a lot in this thing. Okay, I'm going to push over here. In the color pie, for example, we're like, oh, you know, we've done a lot in this space. We've bent in this direction. Let's bend. Next time we bend, let's bend a little different. Let's play in a little different space. Now, those two things work well.

As I go to different mechanical space, the color file wants to bend in different places. So there's a synergy there. Same with development. They're like, what was powerful before? What were the good decks? Well, let's push in a different direction. You know, if a certain archetype was really strong,

well, let's make a different archetype stronger. Maybe make elements of that archetype weaker, you know. And that, if you sort of look at what we do, and like I say, it has to do with card power, it has to do with development, it has to do with design, it has to do with the color pie. Flux is about all the aspects of the game

that we want to keep you guessing, we want to keep it fresh, we want to keep you having fun, but, never forget, never forget, that the core of why you're. We want to keep it fresh. We want to keep you having fun. But never forget, never forget that the core of why you're playing this game is because you love the game of magic. And we can't deviate so far from magic that it's not magic. And so the trick is,

the illusion that we're trying to create is we want it to feel constantly different without it really being all that different. We keep making cakes and we keep decorating and making weird shapes out of them and doing cool decorating things with them. And this time it's a football field and that time it's Green Lantern's lantern. And the next time it's a child's toy or whatever. You know, we keep shaking up. But the cake's the cake. When you taste the cake, you go, oh yeah, I love this cake. And that's one of the things I do whenever we have the cake at our party,

is people are always like, ooh, this is really good cake. We know the good cake. We got the good cake. We found the good cake. The goal is not to get rid of the good cake. The goal is to jazz it up and make each time you use the cake feel a little bit different and feel appropriate to the circumstance that you're in. Match the circumstance that you're in.

You know, if our party's about one thing, the cake thematically is going to match that. If my set's about something, my mechanics, my bends of the color pie, all the things are going to match that thing. And that is what Flux is about. Flux is not about just being different for the sake of being different. It's not about randomness. It is carefully selected to maximize trying to create variety over time using as little change as possible to do that. That is our goal. Our goal is not to change as many things as possible. Our goal is to change as few things as possible. And once again, the caveat, as I said before, you don't have to change much to change everything. That part of what makes Magic cool is you can change one little facet

of the game, and all of a sudden just focus on that one aspect. Like, one of the neat things about Zendikar was that I got to say, okay, you don't normally care about when you play land. This is not something you normally spend energy on. And we said, you know what? In this environment, all of a sudden, we're going to make a

mechanic where it says, you have to now care. You have to think about, do I want to play this land? Or think about, oh, you know, the order you play the land or when you do things. And it just, it made you care about that. That's not something you normally care about. But it was fun. It was fun for that environment to care about that thing. And that if magic always did that, you know, probably it wouldn't be as fun. But that's the neat thing about it is that we get to change our focus in the game. That we get to sort of shift where you're caring. You know?

And that's the idea that everyone's in magic. You care about thing X and sometimes you care about thing Y. That's kind of the pendulum we're swinging. That's what the flux is about. So today's podcast really was to say how we use change.

How we make things different. And what the purpose of that is. Because it's not, we're not throwing darts at a dartboard, and we're not recklessly or carelessly or randomly doing things. Our change is very, very carefully done to have a certain effect at every level, from the design, from the mechanics, to the color pie, to the color bend, to the development. All of it works together, and in conjunction with each other, to constantly sort of make

a brand new environment that is fun and different but you know magic as you know it okay guys I'm now at my parking space so that wraps up today so you know that means means at the end of my drive to work so instead of talking magic it's time for me to be making magic thanks for joining me guys today hope you hope you enjoyed it bye bye