Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #54 - Flavor Text

Episode Date: September 20, 2013

Mark discusses flavor text.

Okay, I'm pulling out of my driveway. We know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. So today, I have a guest. Say hello, Matt. Hello. So Matt is driving with me to work. Now, regulars of the show might say,

wait a minute, but you normally pick Matt up, which I do. So why is Matt in the car? Which you did. So we were part way to work doing version one of our podcast when my wife called Matt's phone, not my phone because my phone turned off to do my podcast, to say that her car was dead and we had to go home and jump her. So anyway, take two. It was the best podcast in the world.

Lost to all time. Lost to all time. So today's topic is flavor text writing, because it just so happens that both Matt and I, at different times, have been in charge of flavor text. I less so than Matt, because I was in charge of Odyssey, because at the time the creative team, we were in between creative teams, and Bill Rose came to me and said, Hey Mark, we don't have a creative team.

Could you please run names in flavor text? Being the wordsmith, I said sure. And I also ran the flavor text for unglued and said, hey, Mark, we don't have a creative team. Could you please run names and flavor text? And being the wordsmith, I said, sure. And I also ran the flavor text for unglued and unhinged because it required a lot of comedy writing, and I had a comedy writing background. So, Matt, what flavor text are you in charge of? Ravnica and Time Spiral Blocks and also Cold Snap. Right.

So for people that are unaware, when Matt first, Matt's had two jobs at Wizards. His first stint, he was in charge of names and flavor text on the creative team. And now he's in charge of the look and feel of magic outside the paper. So packaging and ads and such. Okay. But that's for another podcast. Today, we're talking flavor text. So your current job, useless right now.

Useless. Your old job's what we need. So let's talk a little bit about why we do flavor text. Why is there flavor text, Matt? Because there's room on the card. No, wait a minute. There's more to it than that. I believe that there is flavor text

because where card name and mechanic and art either leave off or where they don't intuitively make sense together, flavor text helps either fill that gap or provide that extra little bit of oomph that the card needs to be both a game piece and an entertainment vehicle. A famous man once called it the mortar that holds the bricks together. A famous man. I wonder when that happened. In our first version of this, that was Matt's analogy, which I thought was very good. That each card lives in its own world, and that something has to sort of bring them all together. Right. If you think about how an entire block might tell a tale from the moment you first

set foot on a new plane to the point at the end when it gets destroyed or what have you, foot on a new plane to the point at the end when it gets destroyed or what have you, flavor text is largely the best place to find out what's really going on if you're not picking up a comic book or a novel or whatever. Another thing that most people might not realize, that Matt and I realize having done this process, is flavor text and names come last. That, you know, the mechanics come first and then the art happens

and the names and flavor checks are the last thing to happen. So if there's ever any shifting during the course of the process, and there is, what happens, for example, is, you know, we'll make a card.

Design makes a card. Development goes, okay. It gets concepted. They get art for it. And then after art is done, after art is already locked in, development goes, oh, wait, that's not going to work. Yeah, yeah, we have to change that card. There might be a soldier that has first strike, and the art is commissioned to have a guy with a really long pike or something that would explain that and then first strike is taken away and

vigilance is added and all of a sudden that pike is no longer flavor relevant it's just it's a pikeman and the the flavor text and the name have to pick up the pieces right vigilant pikeman ever watchful pikeman so yeah one of the things that happens a lot is, like one of the things I joke about in Unhinged, we had a series of cards that you had to play a little mini game, and you got a reward. So one of the mini games was arm wrestling. And so the mechanic is like arm wrestle, and we had to give you a reward.

It ended up being in green, so the reward was you got a token. Turns out to be an ape token. And so the thing was, well, what does arm wrestling have to do with you getting an ape token? And so the Flavor Text came to the rescue, you know, about how something about... It's like, he didn't know why he did the arm wrestling, but he just couldn't stop,

because, you know, hey, free monkeys. Yes. And then the Flavor Text is kind of there a lot of times, and the name too, or the Flavor Text has a little more more flexibility than name to sort of help explain what is going on so another thing that I my background

being sort of a writer is that there is an art to writing flavor text the flavor text is a very difficult thing because you have a lot you want to say but very little space to say it. And I sometimes compare it to poetry. Yes, absolutely.

And that poetry is a lot of times about getting a lot of emotion, saying a lot, but with as few words as you can. Right. I had a writing professor who dispelled the youthful myth with all of us freshmen that poetry was how flowery you can be when saying something simple. And he said it's the exact opposite. It's how simply can you say something that is deep and complex. Yes. And that's really important with flavor text. So one of my favorite pieces of flavor text that I did that I was very happy with,

from a craft sort of standpoint, and I don't even remember the card it was on. It's on a white card in Odyssey, I believe. And the flavor text was, there is no victory without virtue. And the thing I loved about it was, look, at the core of white's being, at the core of white philosophy, is this idea that there is an objective moral right, and that in order to live your life,

you have to live it correctly, and that you can't just win. You have to win in the right way. The ends does not justify the means. Yes. And so I love the idea that that conveyed a pretty complex idea in five words that was alliterative. Right. Alliterative means, you know, the key

words start with the same consonant, with V in this case. And so, like, as a wordsmith, the idea that you can get a complex idea into a small number of words and make it alliterative, like, all that, that's the stuff that the flavor text people are trying to do every day, is how do I take this neat idea but boil it down into something that is, unto itself, is its own little mini work of art.

Right. When I was managing the flavor text process, and even more so afterward when I was just doing the writing, I would keep my eye out for the cards that had six lines of rules text. And that's like the threshold of the longest amount of rules text where you can still sneak in one line of flavor text. Yeah. A card has room for seven lines of goodness.

And those were always the biggest challenge because a six-line rules text probably indicates that something's going on there. Yes. It's not just a dude. indicates that something's going on there. Yes. It's not just a dude. But you only have one line to either bring it all together or add a little

panache. Those were extremely challenging. Quite often I would skip the ones that had five lines and let somebody else write the epic tale and I would find a way to to come up with something really pithy in that one line um and hopefully not create a groaner that's also

you and i you and i have different philosophies completely um i mean two things first is one of the things about that, you're right, the one-liners. Not only are you worrying about the one line, but you literally have to worry about not even the number of characters, but which characters. Like, one of the things you learn is L's don't take a lot of space, but W's take a lot of space, you know? And so when you're making words, it's like, sometimes it's like, oh, like I've written those where like I have to replace a word and go, I better use skinny letters. Yeah. Yes. The other thing, let's talk a little bit about humor since you brought up groaners.

So one of my philosophies as a card designer is I'm a big believer that I would rather create cards that really excite some players while maybe upsetting other players than merely make cards that everybody's okay with. Meaning, I want the highs and lows rather than everything just being kind of okay. And I feel, to me, Flavor Text is the same way, which is every once in a while, I have a piece of Flavor Text that both was in the top five and the bottom five.

That's a winner. You know, and I'm like, that's awesome, you know. It really evokes something. And to me, that's way more exciting than a piece of flavor text no one remembers. Yes. Now, where do you stand on comedy in flavor text? Oh, well, I've actually had to think about the comedy factor, even in my current job. in my current job. When we're thinking about marketing the game as a whole, or flavor text in a way is presenting a card as a product to somebody. And for me, what works for comedy

and magic is when the humor comes from a place of knowledge. If you feel like it's funny because you knew something going in, whether that's wordplay that makes it funny or the context of knowing something about another card or another character that makes it funny, that's the kind of thing that I really appreciate. When it's funny because it's about someone farting or something, that's, I don't know, I feel like that's for another game. Basically, if it's humor above the neck, I'm in. If it's below the belt, I'm in, but not for magic.

Yeah, I mean, I agree with you that to me, the best flavor stuff in which, like I, as a color pie purist, I love finding flavor text that gets the essence of the colors. And I truly believe that all five colors have a sense of humor. But

what they find funny is very different. You know, now everybody gets red sense of humor because, for example, I kind of feel like if you're going to do below the head kind of humor, if we're going to do it, red's where you do it. Red is definitely, if any color appreciates lowbrow humor, it is red. is red. But I think something like green to me, the thing I love about green sense of humor is that green just looks at the world and sees the world and goes, hey, that's kind of funny.

I love when we can find flavor and humor outside of the obvious place. I mean, obviously goblins are funny, we'll do that. But it's neat to find flavor text that can sort of show you something pithy from other places. And I agree with you. One of the neat things about writing flavor text

is it is an exercise in wordplay and that you are trying very hard to use your words very conservatively to sort of convey something. And that I love when you, like, one of my favorite things as a flavor text writer is when somebody I love when you, like, one of my favorite things as a flavor text writer is, when somebody references my flavor text, like, just they quote it, or they, that's awesome, where, like, the flavor text manages to sort of stand out, because it is, it is low man on the totem pole, like, when you talk about a card, well, first off, the number one thing people, I mean, you can argue between mechanics and art, but those are the two things that clearly grab people's attention.

Right. You know, I mean, it's a game, so the mechanics are super important, and the art is. It's immediate. It's immediate and splashing and colorful and takes up half the card, and, you know, it's hard to miss the art. That's my wife almost hitting us. Oh, my God.

What are the odds? So, yeah, see, the accident show, or, anyway, my wife obviously is rushing to get

where she's going because she was late because her car died. That's the real stuff you get on this podcast. Actually driving on the road with near accidents and,

Oh, that was good. Anyway, what I was saying was when you're doing flavor text and you're looking for the right word choices and trying to capture that essence,

when you get people to sort of speak it, it's amazing because it is the low man on the totem pole. I'm talking about how mechanics are sexy. People want to know the mechanics. Art is sexy. Even the name, people have to refer to it, so the name gets

used. But there are people, for example, there are people who will play the cards, and they will not read the flavor text for like months into having the card. A lot of people read it the second they see it. But there's other people who are like, eh, whatever, they just kind of ignore it. And then usually what happens is they're in the middle of playing the game

and they're bored or something, so they go, okay. You're playing a guy who's playing blue, sitting there. Eh, I think I'll read some flavor text. And I love when the flavor text just can kind of make you laugh or smile. I like the ones especially that encourage a player to invoke them while playing. If the flavor text is a rallying cry or something, then while they're attacking or while they are casting a creature, they reference the flavor text because it offers something that is fun for the game.

One of my favorites is writing flavor text for counter spells because one of our running joke on counter spells is they're always trash talking. Yeah. Like, somehow if I counter spell you, I must trash talk you as I counter spell you. It's not bad enough that all of your plans are being foiled. You have to have your nose rubbed in it. Yeah, somehow blue mages are just kind of, you know. I know what you want to call them.

I won't say it. It's a family show, but they're sometimes not the nicest people. Meanwhile, for example, another one that I love, one of my favorites is right for Jaya Bowerd, or Chandra in my mind. They actually have a very similar style, which is the red mage kind of just in your face, like take it. style, which is the Red Mage kind of just in your face, like, take it sort of, you know.

Some of my favorite flavor texts I've done has just been because Jaya is so much fun to write, and Chandra is so much fun to write, that just kind of, I don't know, something about the Red Mage of just like, you know, they're snappy and in your face, but in a fun way.

You know, blue's kind of snotty, but red's a little more like, ha ha, you know. You know, blue's kind of snotty, but red's a little more like, ha-ha, you know. I really, really enjoyed writing for the gruel. The gruel, yes. It's not hard to understand why. I consider myself one of them. But there was something about the, if you combine that red, fiery sensibility

with someone who is downtrodden, doubted, marginalized, it colors that with a little bit of acid that I really, really enjoyed sort of internalizing and then throwing out there in some gruff and hard-edged words. It was a lot of fun. So here's an experience I had. So I don't do a lot of flavor text writing anymore. I just don't have the time. But once upon a time, I did a lot of flavor text writing.

So during the Weatherlight Saga, which was, for those that don't know, way back in the day, we told the story, it ran over four blocks, there were key characters that showed up in the art, and so what we did is we divvied up the characters,

and so each flavor text writer got two characters to write about, or two or more characters. So I got Ertai and Karn. Does that mean you wrote about them, or you wrote as them?

No, we wrote as them. Yes. So Ertai was this young whippersnapper wizard that, and he, I talked earlier about writing the counter spells. He was definitely, his whole shtick was he was, went to this

fancy wizard school and he thought he was the best thing, you know, ever. And so he was just really full of himself. And he was fun to write because he was just the most arrogant, you know, I mean he was good but he was just really full of himself. And he was fun to write because he was just the most arrogant, you know. I mean, he was good, but he was arrogant. And then the other one was Karn, who is the archetype called the gentle giant. And Karn's shtick was he was there to protect Gerard, but he, even though he was this powerful golem,

he had vowed, because he had accidentally killed somebody, and he had vowed not to get in a fight. He was a pacifist. because he had accidentally killed somebody, and he had vowed not to get in a fight. He was a pacifist. And so for Karn, I decided that I liked him telling little parables, and so Karn's flavor texts were me telling little tiny stories, but in two or three lines, which was a challenge,

but I was very proud of it. A lot of my favorite flavor texts have come from some of Karn's stuff of just telling the simple little story, but in real little amount of space. Yeah. It's like the Native American chief telling a small tale in between puffs on the peace pipe. Yeah. And that was interesting because that was one of the times where we really went out from a character angle. We wanted the characters to be consistent, so different writers would write different characters. And one of the things I like a lot, I mean, this is way back when, but the Wedlight Saga,

I really liked how we used the flavor text to really, really convey character. Because one of the things about magic in general is we have stories and we have characters and we have places and we have civilizations and there's a lot going on and it is hard to convey a lot of it anywhere but flavor text right you know like one of the things that the creative team does is they will figure out entire cosmology of a world and you know the the a particular race of people have beliefs and do certain things and function in a certain way and that we try to hint at that in the art and the names and the mechanics where we can.

But in the end, sometimes flavor text is the only one that just can actually tell you. Right. Right. So let me bring up another, I don't know if controversial is the right word, but another topic. Where do you stand on real world flavor text? I think that it is

I think that it's cool to put on a promo card or maybe a core set card, although the core set has been filling a different function as of late. Cards from particular worlds have been concepted that way in the core set,

whereas in the past the core set was kind of an agnostic hodgepodge. So I don't know that, I think that the venues for real world flavor text are shrinking. Yes. I mean, I like finding spots when we can, don't know that i think that the venues for real world flavor text are shrinking yes i mean i like finding spots when we can although i do understand the idea that look we need our flavor text has so much important storytelling to do that especially in expansions we just don't have the room like we need every you know every scrap we can get to try to explain the world and even then the flavor text shows a little tiny tiny portion the world, because there's so much to convey. But I do, when we find the places to do it, it is nice to take, I mean, to be fair, as good as our flavor text

writers are, there's been some better writers out there. Yeah, maybe not as good as Robert Frost. You know, I mean, I always wondered what would happen if, like, you know, Shakespeare was live now and, you know, he was one of our flavor text writers. But, like, too lengthy a will. A little shorter. You know where we've never gone, though, is music lyrics. Have we ever done that?

No, because we have to use public domain. Oh. For those that are unaware, when we do real world flavor text, we have to do flavor text that's to use public domain. Oh. For those that are unaware, when we do real-world flavor text, we have to do flavor text that's in the public domain. And so things that are owned by somebody, we don't have the right to do. And so that's why we're not quoting song lyrics.

We could do, like, John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt. We could. If we can concept a... Hey, design, can you create John... Oh, here's something. This is like for a clone. Something that's interesting that happens sometimes, this happens more for names than flavor text, but sometimes it happens for flavor text, where

somebody will come and say, we want to convey a certain thing. Can you make a card to give us the opportunity to convey that? That happens from time to time. The creative team will come to us and say, this world really needs to show something, and we know we want to talk about it, but unless you guys give us something

we can talk about it on, we can't make it. And so, from time to time, creative will ask for something, and then we will make a card so the creative has the opportunity to do that. Like, a good example is, I know in Zendikar, that they came to us and said, please, could you make the Eye of Ugin? We want to talk about the Eye of Ugin.

It's really, really important to the story. And so we went out of our way to make an Eye of Ugin. Did they happen to ask you not to make it too complicated so there was actual room to write? Yes, yes, yes. Here's one thing that has always bothered me. There is nothing in the magic cosmology that is more enduring and important to our storytelling than planeswalkers at least at this point

and they have no room for flavor text it's a beating we talked about that when we were laying out the planeswalker frames that it would be nice if there was room for flavor text but what we felt was there was so much else going on that we didn't want every Planeswalker to have a micro font that you couldn't read because we were trying to convey something. So, like, well, the rest of the set's going to have to pick up

the flavor text of other Planeswalkers. Well, we have done a pretty good job of earmarking non-Planeswalker cards to be places for their quotations or places for their backstory. Yeah, another thing that happens, and Matt was alluding to, was sometimes that the, I mean, obviously the game mechanics tend to take priority, and, you know, Flavotex will suffer sometimes because, look, the card just has to play correctly. But I do know there's times when the person with Flavotex will come to development

and say, I have this awesome thing I want to say here. Could we make this card a little simpler just to free up space so I can say what I need to say? That doesn't happen a lot, but it happens every once in a while. And usually it's on a card that's not a major role card.

It's just we're trying to explain something. I know, for example, sometimes, and this happens a lot nowadays, where there's one key event that happens and they're like, okay, we want to make sure that people see this one key event. Okay, design, development,

can you make us a card so we can show off this one key event? And what that means is the art will show the event, we have room for flavor text so we can talk off this one key event? And what that means is the art will show the event. We have room for flavor text so we can talk about the event. And we definitely make those. We definitely are very conscious to have, you know, a card or two that are just meant to be windows into something really important and what's going on. So I'll bring up something, a little trivia.

Do you know what Flavorical is? Flavorical? Yeah. So it's an idea that I came up with when the website first started. And the idea was it was Oracle for flavor text. And the idea was some cards don't have flavor text because they

didn't fit. So what if we and the idea was we'd use the audience and we'd have crowds submitting and stuff. We could come up with flavor text for the cards that didn't have room for flavor text. then i would go in flavorical uh that one that one they never took off like we did a lot of other things that were successes but flavorical never really uh never really took off we talked this is this is years ago about um having rare reprints, sans the rules text,

sort of the way a full art card, it's just known. We know what Lightning Bolt is. We did some of those. We did some ones that had, they're just the name and it's all art. There's no text. But in this case,

it would be the regular card frame, no text, but an opportunity for a full seven line blast of flavor text on something that otherwise wouldn't happen. Yeah. That didn't happen. I'm sure there's a number of reasons why. Yep.

Yeah, I guess they, I guess if there's no text, you feel like, oh, I must, the text doesn't exist, but with. Oh, here's the thing. Yeah. You probably did this when you were, when you were managing the flavor text process, but there were a number of times, especially when it was just one line and nobody hit a solid one-liner.

Right. Where the right decision is to just use none. Oh, yeah, definitely, definitely. There are cards like Lightning Bolt or like Wrath of God. Right, that don't have flavor tags. The choice is to have nothing but that one iconic blast of rules tag. We still do that in the course set. Yes.

I think normally what we do nowadays is we pick one cycle, the most iconic card in each color. I use a spell, not a creature. And we, it's like, it's clean, it's simple, you know. And there's some elegance to that. And I, I mean, sometimes the correct answer for flavor text is not to use flavor text. And I think that people don't always realize how the absence of something sometimes has a lot of power. The other thing that is interesting about flavor text is,

I think that there's a lot of neat moments that happen in Flavortex where I think, like, one of the things I find very interesting is that, like I said, there are people that, like, until they stumble across it because they're bored or whatever, they don't read it. And then all of a sudden, like,

oh my goodness, I didn't know that, you know. I think Flav flavor text has the ability to really fill things in I mean to the mortar to the brick sort of analogy that it really does fill things in and that I'm as a flavor text writer or as a flavor text manager I was always happy when

I somehow just found that perfect thing that just made everything click and fit together There's another element of flavor text that I have always appreciated, and that is that it allowed a single card to challenge or tickle the fancy of an intelligent person. Magic fans, by and large, are pretty sharp folks. Yeah. And they get to apply that sharpness in combinations of cards

and how they build their decks and the order in which they play cards. But if you're just looking at a single card, flavor text is the place where you can challenge their ability to parse a pun or to consider a deep thought or whatever. And I have always felt a responsibility to have a certain number of intelligence-challenging pieces in every set. Oh, well, here's a good story. Let's talk about the flavor text for Niv-Mizzet. Because that was under your watch, right? Yes, yes.

At the time, the Izzet were a new thing to us, and we were really having a lot of fun playing with them as mad geniuses. And I wanted, on the signature card of the guild, to create something that showed some of that madness and that allowed magic players, who I consider to be closer to Izzet than any other guild just naturally as magic players, to test their metal. And for those that have never seen the FlavorTrek's for Niv-Mizzet, when you first look at it, it just looks like a bunch of random symbols. Yeah, it looks like an impossible math equation.

Right, yeah, it looks kind of like a math equation. And there's a secret to it, right? I don't want to give it away for people that haven't cracked it yet, but there's a message there. There is a message to it. I will give you a hint. It's not a mathematical equation. And there's a secret to it, right? I don't want to give it away for people that haven't cracked it yet, but there's a message there. There is a message to it. I will give you a hint. It's not a mathematical equation, even though I was at

a pre-release once and some guys who fancied themselves as mathematicians told me that they had solved the equation and that it worked. The way the flavor text works is it's got a bunch of random characters and then it did that it worked the way the flavor text

works is it's got a bunch of random characters and then it says equals one and they solved it and claimed that it equals one and I was like oh really that's really interesting I'm glad my math worked out so anyway we are now here at work after our longer deal

but to wrap up I think that flavor text is something that might get less attention than other aspects of the card, but that doesn't mean that any less work on our end is put into it. In fact, a huge amount of work is put into it. I'm always happy when people appreciate the flavor text because it is a chance for us to flex our muscles in a different area than we normally get to, you know. It also shows that those people are digging deeper. Yeah.

And like I said, I'm happy. I mean, obviously there are people that love flavor text and I know we have an audience that really gets into it and that it's not everybody's thing. Some people could take it or leave it, but I just want to show today that like, even this aspect that a lot of people might think is this whatever throwaway is not.

I mean, we use it very, it is a very valuable resource, and that we spend a lot of time and energy on it. Two people who have been in charge of it at different times, like, it's a very, very important tool, and so I guess I'll leave today by saying hey, take a look at this

flavor text. Read some flavor text. So anyway, thanks for take a look at this. Take a look at this flavor text. Read some flavor text. So anyway, thanks for joining me today, Matt. All right. For both trips. And anyway, guys, it's time to go make the magic.