Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #93 - Top Down Design

Episode Date: January 31, 2014

Mark looks at how we design when we start from the flavor. ...

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Okay, I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today's topic is something that I've talked a lot about in my column, what we call top-down design. Okay, so let me start by answering the question I get a lot, which is, why is top-down design called top-down design? lot, which is, why is top-down design called top-down design? Oh, real quickly, let me define what it means. So top-down design is when we start with the flavor, and it's the jumping-off point for the set. It starts from a flavor bent. Theros and Innistrad are examples of recent top-down designs. Like, oh, we're going to do a gothic horror world. Oh, we're going to do a world inspired by Greek mythology. A bottom-up design is when you start from a mechanical place. So, for example, Zendikar started as the land set. Ravnica started as a set where we're going to represent the two
Starting point is 00:00:54 colors, make people play two-color gold. Now, no matter which direction we go, we intermingle flavor and mechanics. So, if our job is done well, Zendikar feels very flavorful. Ravnica feels very flavorful. But what I'm talking about is technically when you're building the design, which direction did you come from? So anyway, people always ask me, where in the world did the term top-down design come from? Now at Now, at first, whoa, sorry. Sorry, traffic, car coming right at me. Okay, so where does top-down come from? Now, I kind of assumed that it was, like, you know how you use an expression long enough that you're just like, oh, this is just an expression people use.
Starting point is 00:01:39 And then I realized, no, actually, I think I came up with it. So I did a little research. Here's where I believe it came from. So if you look at a magic card, the top of the card is the title. Then there's the art box. Then there is the card type line that has the subtype, has creature types. Then you get to the rules text. Then you get to the power, toughness, and the legal text and collector number.
Starting point is 00:02:04 Well, the top half of the power toughness and the legal text and collector number. Well, the top half of the card has the vast majority of the flavor because the title and the name and the creature type are all on the top half of the card. So top down came from, oh, we start from the top of the card and go downward. So a top down design is, well, I know what the name of the card is and kind of what it looks like, and, oh, I'm trying to match the flavor of the card making the rules text. Where bottom-up is, I have the rules text, now I figure out what the flavor is going to be. Now, we have an awesome flavor text, sorry, an awesome creative team. Oftentimes, we make a mechanic, and they come up with a perfect match, and so it feels very connected.
Starting point is 00:02:42 But I'm just talking about where we start. In the end, we want everything to feel meshed and interconnected. But anyway, top-down design is when you start from a place where flavor is the jumping-off point. And I've talked about this a lot in this podcast especially, in that one of the keys to creative endeavors is you want to make your brain attack things from a different angle. I've talked about this a lot. If you go at something in the same direction, your brain will hit the same neurons and you tend to get the same answers because the brain will follow a familiar path.
Starting point is 00:03:18 But if you come at it from a slightly different vantage point, then you're thinking of it differently and you find different answers. So, for example, when I do top-down design you just use Theros as a recent example. Oh, well, everything I was doing was saying, oh, does this match Greek mythology? And so my lens that I was looking at things through was a lens I'd never
Starting point is 00:03:37 used before. I'd never designed a Greek mythology before. And so I was making all sorts of interesting decisions because I was using a new thing to judge by. That's one of the reasons top-down is nice. And bottom-up also does that where when I was making all sorts of interesting decisions because I was using a new thing to judge by. That's one of the reasons Top Down is nice. And Bottom Up also does that where when I was doing Ravnica, I had never done a gold set before that focused on two-color play. And so when I did that for the first time ever in Ravnica, you know, it guided how I wanted to put things together. Okay.
Starting point is 00:04:01 So today's podcast is going to be about how we do Top-down design, sort of the lessons of top-down design. Okay, so thinking about it, I realized that communication theory does a very good job of explaining the key lessons. So for those that didn't listen to my podcast on communication theory, my podcast, plural, in communication theory, there's three things that you have to strive for. One is comfort, one is surprise and one is completion so I'm going to walk through top down design through those three lenses because I believe it gives a good example of what you need to do
Starting point is 00:04:35 to do good top down design okay so number one, comfort okay so let's say I'm doing a top down design I'm going to use Innistrad and Theros as those are the two recent sets I've done that were top-down design. Okay, so what happens is the first thing you want to do, and this is when I have both my first meeting of Innistrad and my first design meeting of Theros, I said the following to my team. Okay, guys, we're going to brainstorm.
Starting point is 00:05:01 What is everything you would expect that this, you know, for Gothic horror or for Greek mythology, what would you expect? So, for example, in Shroud, we started writing up the board. We're like, well, we expect vampires and werewolves and zombies and ghosts and we'd expect, you know, nighttime and candles and bump in the night
Starting point is 00:05:22 and we're just writing everything down that you can think of, you know, victims, and everything that you can think of that gothic horror would be to you. And the same for Greek mythology. It's like centaurs, and medusa, and pegasus, and minotaurs, and gods. We wrote everything down that we expected. And the reason this is important is,
Starting point is 00:05:43 part of doing top-down design, the reason to do top-down design is that it plays into the concept we call resonance. And what resonance says is, okay, if you are trying to make somebody, I, as any kind of creative person, but especially the game designer, I'm trying to connect with my audience. I want them to be invested in the game so that they are excited. Remember, game design is about creating entertainment and experiences, right? That you want people to experience something,
Starting point is 00:06:12 and you want them to feel something, experience an emotion. And one of the tricks to doing that is to take things that your game player already understands. Because they have lived a whole lifetime. They have all these experiences. If you tap into pre-known experiences, and that could be real life experiences, it could be pop culture experiences, but something that they know and understand, what happens is that you are piggybacking, if you will, on emotional things they already have. Emotional feelings they already have.
Starting point is 00:06:51 And so, for example, if we're doing gothic horror and you, you know, there's expectations that come from gothic horror because they've watched movies and they've seen TV shows and they've read books and they have expectations.
Starting point is 00:07:04 So part of doing top-down design is you want to meet that expectation. and they've seen TV shows and they've read books and they have expectations. So part of doing top-down design is you want to meet that expectation, that there's a level of comfort that, for example, Champions of Kamigawa. So historically speaking, there are three blocks that have done top-down design, Champions of Kamigawa, Innistrad, and Theros. Also, we did one set, Arabian Nights, that was top-down design. Now, the difference between Arabian Nights and the other three blocks is Arabian Nights was top-down,
Starting point is 00:07:31 but Richard was trying to, as best he could, match Arabian Nights. He wasn't trying to create an inspired world by Arabian Nights. He was trying to actually make, you know, capture Arabian Nights, where what we do now is, you know, Kamigawa and Theros and Innistrad, we were trying
Starting point is 00:07:46 to create our own magic world inspired by those top-down flavors. We weren't trying to do, for example, in Theros, there's no Zeus. There is Heliod, which has elements of Zeus, but it's not Zeus. It's different. We were doing our versions of things.
Starting point is 00:08:03 I bring up Kamigawa because Kamigawa is a good example of some mistakes that we made. I think Innistrad and Theros are top-down done well, and that Kamigawa is top-down with some major mistakes made. And we learned a lot. One of the reasons I think Innistrad and Theros are as good as they are is we learned some important lessons from Kamigawa. This is one of them. So Kamigawa went into, looked at Japanese mythology as inspiration, and so one of the things that they got into was Shinto, I do not
Starting point is 00:08:32 buy tons of Greek mythology, so I'm not Greek, tons about Japanese mythology, so I'm going to talk the best I can, but if I'm a little off, that's because I did not, this was not my set, I did not lead that set, And so I'm not quite as off. I spent a lot of time and energy on both Greek mythology and Gothic
Starting point is 00:08:49 horror. But, so we did some stuff with Shinto. We did a lot with the kami. There's a belief in Japanese, I think in Shinto, that like every object has a spirit associated with it, I believe. Anyway, what we did, though, is we captured something that, while being somewhat true to Japanese mythology, was not very known by a lot of the Western audience. So we created a lot of stuff that wasn't as resonant as it could be. I mean, I think there are a lot of resonant tropes for Japanese mythology. But instead of sort of hitting the more obvious ones,
Starting point is 00:09:26 we would try to stay true to it, but the problem was we weren't as resonant as we needed to be. And in fact, Kamigawa also taught us that it's very, very important that when people first experience your top-down, that the thing they expect is there at common, you know, you want them to run to the stuff they expect first, you know. So if you're doing gothic horror, well, you want the monsters to show up pretty quickly. You know, you don't want like all these unknown things sitting in common.
Starting point is 00:09:56 You want your vampires and werewolves and zombies and ghosts and stuff sitting right there. And same with Greek mythology. You want your minotaurs and your centaurs and your cyclops and the things that you would expect. You just want people to see them quickly. Okay? Now, the idea is that doesn't mean you can't ever do more obscure things. Hundred handed ones would be an excellent example, which is we have a hundred handed ones. If you know Greek mythology, it's a big part of Greek mythology. We didn't want to not
Starting point is 00:10:24 do it. We wanted to include it. And we wanted to have a reward handed ones. If you know Greek mythology, it's a big part of Greek mythology. We didn't want to not do it. We wanted to include it. And we wanted to have a reward for people that really knew the source material. But, unlike Chems and Kamigawa, where we put some of that stuff
Starting point is 00:10:33 at low rarities that people just didn't know, a hundred handed one is rare. It's like, you're most likely not, it's not going to be the first card most likely that you're going to open up and see.
Starting point is 00:10:43 You know? And the idea is, one of the lessons of Top Down is, makedown is, make sure that your as-fan, your low rarities are things that are comfortable that represent the thing you want. Because one of the things that's important is that when you are trying, the point of top-down is to connect with your audience on an emotional level, right? You want them to go, oh yeah, you know, oh, you're doing so-and-so? Oh, is there this? Yes, there is.
Starting point is 00:11:08 Oh, is there that? Yes, there is. You know, you want the audience to be hoping for things and deliver on most of that. You know, for example, if I went out on the street and pulled Magic Players and said, okay, when you think of Thing X, what do you think of? When you think of Greek mythology, what do you think of? I want us to hit most of those top ten answers. Now, I'm not saying all those answers have to be the major thrust of what's going on, but if you ask people and they really, really think there's going to be a Gorgon,
Starting point is 00:11:35 well, I kind of want to make sure we have a Gorgon. Like, Greek mythology, you know, Medusa is pretty central to Greek mythology. I'm not saying we need a lot of them. Obviously, we didn't have a common one, but we did have an uncommon and a rare that were high profile. Like, hey, you want to see a Gorgon? We got a Gorgon for you. And a lot of what we also did in top-down design is you look at what magic has done before
Starting point is 00:12:00 to see if the things that, like, for Greek mythology, one of the things that Ethan did, Ethan Fleischer, I had him do some research ahead of time for Theros, and he wrote down a booklet. And the booklet mostly broke into two categories. First category is, what are things we would expect to do that magic has done, and what are the things we would expect to do that magic hasn't done? And we wanted to make sure that things magic had done, that we had enough of those there, because there was a base already built up. One of the examples was, I knew
Starting point is 00:12:30 I wanted a little bit of tribal, not tons, because the way that that played out, as I explained during my Theros, my lengthy, lengthy Theros podcast, that we found that people knew Greek mythology, they didn't think of races together in the same sense like they would in Innistrad, where monsters, you do kind of click together. But I knew I wanted some tribal, so I went and I said, what is the tribal players would most expect and want?
Starting point is 00:12:59 And I decided it was Minotaurs. Minotaurs have done a little bit of tribal stuff in the past. Homelands, obviously, they did some tribal. I know Didgeridoo was very popular. I knew that there's this desire for Minotaurs and Minotaur tribal. Okay, Minotaurs are super resonant, even though, ironically, the actual group of Tauji has one Minotaur. In our world, there's many Minotaurs, not one Minotaur.
Starting point is 00:13:18 And it's become a race that magic is used quite a bit. So that seemed like a very good place. Okay, so first off, number one, comfort. Figure out what your audience is going to expect, deliver on expectations, make sure that expectations are a low enough rarity that that is what your audience is seeing. Okay, time to move into the second part, surprise.
Starting point is 00:13:40 Okay, so now that you're doing something, it's important that you do everything you can to capture the stuff that people expect. But then you want to make sure that you add some unknown element to it. So, for example, I will use Theros because there's a clean example here. So, we wrote on the board what you expect. And as we wrote things on the board, it became crystal clear that there's an expectation of gods. Gods are about as central to Greek mythology as you get. But while we want to deliver Greek gods, we wanted to surprise the people a little bit. And the reason is, we didn't. When we
Starting point is 00:14:15 do a top-down set, our goal is not, like Richard was doing in Arabian Nights, our goal is not to just capture 100% in which it's just that thing. We want to do our spin on it. We want to make it a magic thing. And so with the gods, as I explained in my Theros podcast, we wanted to take the essence of Greek mythology, which was the gods, and the essence of magic, which is the color wheel, and put them together. So what that meant was we ended up making 15 gods, 5 major that are monochloric, 10 minor that are two-chloric.
Starting point is 00:14:44 And each one of them had to embody either the color or the color combination that they were god of. And then what we did is we chopped up all the existing Greek gods and took elements of them to make our new gods. Now, why did we do this? Because there's a level of comfort. You expect gods. We have gods. You, in fact, expect attributes of gods. We have attributes of gods.
Starting point is 00:15:08 But we've mixed and matched them in a way to make something new and different. And that is important for top-down, I feel, that you have some newness to it. Now, even Richard doing Arabian Nights, which was what he was trying to capture, didn't make up stuff. While Arabian Nights might have had djinns and
Starting point is 00:15:25 efreetz, Richard made up specific djinns and specific efreetz. He definitely gave us some spin of his own to it. And in magics, now, you know, Theros and Innistrad, even more so. You know, we definitely took our take on things. Yeah, they're gods. They're our gods. They're color wheel gods. They're magic
Starting point is 00:15:42 gods. And the reason that is important is that essentially what you want with a top-down set is you want to create comfort, meaning you want to draw the audience in. Oh, and here's something important. I use Innistrad to make this out, which is one of the fights you'll have sometimes is trying to be realistic to your source versus fighting expectations. For example, in Innistrad, we were doing gothic horror. In gothic horror, the zombies in gothic horror, there's not a lot of them, and probably the most famous is Frankenstein's monster from Frankenstein. Now, if you know the actual story of Frankenstein,
Starting point is 00:16:21 Frankenstein, it's a story, he actually is an intellectual, the monster, that he is intelligent, that he has conversations. The idea of Frankenstein being like, ah, Frankenstein, that's modern. That is not an old school version of Frankenstein. That's not what the book does. But that is what people expect. but that is what people expect. And likewise, when you say zombies, people expect what I call dawn of the dead zombies,
Starting point is 00:16:53 which is the zombies that kind of slumber and are dead and aren't really bright and say, brains, brains, you know. That's the kind of thing you expect. So when we say we're doing zombies, well, people are going to expect Frankenstein's monster, but like, you know, universal style Frankenstein's monster, not Mary Shelley. And they're expecting Dawn of the Dead zombies. Well, guess what? That's what we're delivering.
Starting point is 00:17:13 Did that actually match our source material? No, no, it didn't. But that was the expectation. And you cannot fight expectation. If your audience expects something and you're trying to deliver to it, you have to match what the audience expects. In Theros, the other example is the kraken. Kraken's from the Scandinavian mythologies,
Starting point is 00:17:33 not from... I mean, now, there were sea serpents in Greek mythology, so it's not a crazy stretch, but we knew, thanks to... What's it called? Clash of the Titans, both version movies, that, you know, release the Kraken, that people expected a Kraken, and they'd be upset. So we made sure to deliver that, you know, that even though it's there.
Starting point is 00:17:55 And my other example of this is, Richard Garfield made a game that was called What Were You Thinking? Its design name was called Hive Mind. And the premise of the game is that you get a topic, What Were You Thinking? Its design name was called Hive Mind. And the premise of the game is that you get a topic, and then you're trying to write down the answers that everybody else is trying to write down. Okay? So, one of the categories one day was insects. And it turns out that one of the top answers was spider.
Starting point is 00:18:23 Now, now, you might say, What? Spiders aren't insects. Well, now, you might say, what? Spiders aren't insects. Well, you see, it didn't matter. The goal of the game is to write down what other people wrote down, not be correct. It wasn't actually write down five insects.
Starting point is 00:18:35 It's write down the five things that people think they will think of when you tell them they're insects. And not only that, what do you think they think other people will write? So the funny thing is, everybody in that room might have thought or might have known that spiders weren't insects,
Starting point is 00:18:49 but enough of them thought that other people might not know that, that they wrote down spider, and the correct answer was to write down spider. So when doing top-down, you do have to match expectation. Now, that said, once you match expectation, once you give something, players then want to be shaken up a little bit. Players do want us to say, okay, we've given you Greek mythology, but here's some stuff that's a little magic-oriented. You know, here's our versions of the gods. Here's our versions of some of the stories.
Starting point is 00:19:18 You know, we definitely captured a lot of things from Greek mythology, but we put our own twist on them. And the fun of that is, once you have the comfort level, once you, you know, oh, you're doing Greek mythology, you're doing top-down Gothic horror, oh, yay, vampires, yay, Greek gods, whatever, at some point you're like,
Starting point is 00:19:39 ooh, but what's new and different? What are you giving me that I haven't seen before? And that's where we get to sort of put our own spin and it's fun for the audience because magic's still a game of discovery.
Starting point is 00:19:53 You still want people to want to look and see. Now part of it is seeing things they already know and if we did them and part of it is finding new things
Starting point is 00:20:00 and you want to balance there. The top down isn't about being slavish to your source material but, and this is important, you do have to balance there. The top-down isn't about being slavish to your source material, but, and this is important, you do have to follow the feel, meaning everything you add has to have the right feel to it. We can't just do Greek mythology and go, hey, look, it's something out of Norse mythology that has no connection to Greek mythology. You can't just go, here's Thor with his mighty hammer.
Starting point is 00:20:25 You're like, what? That's not Greek mythology. So you have to sort of make the thing fit. Okay. So now that gets us to the third part, which is completion, which is that it's not just about making individual pieces. One of the things that I talk about a lot, and this is, I mean, the completion aspect of design talks about this quite a bit,
Starting point is 00:20:47 which is you can't just think about your designs in isolation. Meaning, if you just make every card and don't think about anything else in the set to make each card, the end of each card in a vacuum makes total sense. For example, let's say I say, okay, I'm going to do a Greek mythology set. And I make a card, and I forget about everything else I'm doing and just make a Greek mythology set. Those individual cards in a vacuum might be awesome cards. But the thing is, you are working together.
Starting point is 00:21:15 Your game does not live in isolation. Your cards do not live in isolation. And so you have to be very conscious of how things interconnect. Especially in Magic, a game in which people will take cards and put them in their deck. Meaning, and this is important to remember, we, as trading card game makers, are making a game in which we're giving you components. Now, remember, when I talk about trading card game, that is a really, really important distinction.
Starting point is 00:21:39 That most other games, when you take the game and open the box, when you open your box monopoly, it's an experience that's a unique experience. I'm sorry, it's not unique. Every person opening a Monopoly set, or a basic Monopoly set, is getting the same things. And if I go to my friend's house and he has the same Monopoly set I do, we're going to play the same game.
Starting point is 00:21:57 Not true for Magic. Magic is different. When I go to my friend's house, if I'm playing with my friend's Magic cards, they might speak different cards, or I'm playing against his cards, they're different cards. And that is one of the things that makes magic a very different game. But, remember, people are going to experience their game by taking the components and putting them together. And so our job as trading card game designers is to make sure there's cohesion. Now, in top-down design, what that means is I have to be very
Starting point is 00:22:25 conscious of how things fit together. For example, let's take Innistrad as a clean example in Innistrad. I was trying to tell a story of the monsters impeding on the humans. Really what it was was a story of the humans in peril where things were bad. I mean, remember, in story, you want to start your story from the farthest end away from where you want to end up. Well, the ending of our story was the freeing of Avacyn and, you know, the good guys come and save the day. Well, then I needed to put my heroes in a pretty bad place to make that story interesting. Well, if the humans were in good shape, well, Anderson coming back, what does that mean? No, things have to be bad. In order for things to have to
Starting point is 00:23:09 be bad, I wanted a relationship where the monsters were impeding on the humans. Now, the monsters weren't working together. It's not like the werewolves drew up a plan. No, the werewolves were doing werewolf things, the vampires were doing vampire things. But in order to create the sense that they're you know, they're in trouble, I decided that I needed to isolate the humans. Well, how do I do that? Well, one of the ways to do that was to create structures that I left the humans out of. So, for example, I did a bunch of cycles in which the monsters all got stuff, but the humans didn't get things. And the idea being to get the sense that the humans were distinct and separate from the monsters
Starting point is 00:23:50 and make them feel isolated. I tried to isolate them in my design. Now, there's no way for me to do that. I mean, that is a design that only works in conjunction. Now, the good thing I'm going for, because I was doing top-down, that top-down was humans were the victims. The reasons we had humans, and the reasons we did human tribal for the first time, was it was very important to me that the victims got represented. Why?
Starting point is 00:24:21 Because in horror stories, the victims are a key part of the horror story. You don't tell horror stories without victims. And the victims are human. Why are they human? Because the whole point of a horror story is to get your audience to identify with the hero so that the horrible things that happen to them, you go, oh, that could happen to me. I am scared. That would be scary if it happened to me, you know. Because a big part of any sort of creative endeavor is you want to give your audience what we call a POV, a point of view, that you want them, if you're trying to get emotional responses, usually what you do is you connect them to the hero or the game, the center of the game, such that they're experiencing things they need to experience. So in Magic, you're the planeswalker. You're having a duel against the other planeswalker. And so I'm trying to make sure that when we build our sets,
Starting point is 00:25:04 you know, I want the humans to feel like victims. It's very hard to do that on one card. I mean, I could do, you know, human comma victim, but, I mean, it's a little heavy-handed. What I want to do is demonstrate that the humans are in trouble. Now, part of that is by making the humans smaller, you know. A monster versus a human, the monster's going to win. Now, luckily, white, it its nature is humans teaming up and has smaller creatures, so it works well there.
Starting point is 00:25:28 I mean, that's why humans weren't white in the first place. But the key is, you want to make sure that when you're doing top-down that not only are you creating the elements you need, but you understand how they structure, because the audience is going
Starting point is 00:25:44 to want a sense of structure to what's going on and it'll help them give that sense of completion. In fact, one of my pet peeves is I did not do a good job explaining to Eric that the curses were a cycle that left out the humans and so the green curse got left off and then, well, not really. It's hard to recognize a pattern when the pattern's not complete.
Starting point is 00:26:04 Having cycles of four, you really need all four, and that was me dropping the ball in that one tiny area. But I'm just saying, it's that notion of completion that's important. Okay, now I've gotten off the freeway,
Starting point is 00:26:16 which means I'm not too far from work, so let me do some recap here. Okay, so when you're doing a top-down design, you start and make sure that what you're doing is resonant, that there's comfort, that you are capturing the things people expect you to be capturing. Then we get to surprise, which says, okay, make sure that not only do you capture what people expect, but you put some twists on it that are your own. That when people come to see
Starting point is 00:26:43 something, yes, they want familiarity, but they also want some sense of identity, but you put some twists on it that are your own. That when people come to see something, yes, they want familiarity, but they also want some sense of identity, that you are doing something that's giving it your own spin. For example, in movies, I didn't bring that up, but let's say you're going to take a classic story. Highwood's getting ready to do
Starting point is 00:26:59 fairy tales right now. You're going to do Hansel and Gretel. Well, hey, you want Hansel and Gretel, there better be a house made of candy, and you want a, hey, you want Hansel and Gretel, there better be, you know, a house made of candy and you want a witch, but you want some spin on it. And I believe the spin
Starting point is 00:27:10 like in the last one was like, there are witch hunters, right? That they lived through this experience and now they're hunting down, I didn't even see the movie, but from the poster
Starting point is 00:27:18 I got this much. But you want to have some comfort, but then you want some spin on it. You want some take on it. You know, there's been a bunch
Starting point is 00:27:24 of Snow Whites. Well, how is your Snow White different than other Snow Whites? I didn't see these either, but Mirror Mirror, I think, was a more modern take on it, where Snow White had a little more active role. And Snow White the Huntsman, I mean, both of them. She becomes more of an active fighter. She's more involved. She's not as passive. And that's a big part, I think, of how,
Starting point is 00:27:47 I mean, it just was a modern take on the story, but it had its own take on it, it wasn't just a story you knew, but, I mean, once again, I didn't see the movie, but I'm, it was called Mirror, Mirror, so I'm sure there's a magic mirror, I'm sure there's an evil queen, I'm sure there's dwarves, there's probably seven dwarves, you know, you definitely want to deliver that there. Okay, so you have the comfort, then you have the surprise finally, completion says not only am I making the components but what does my audience expect of the components
Starting point is 00:28:14 that I can't just make individual components that once I start making certain components there's an expectation that other components are going to be met that I have to make sure that I am not just building pieces, but building a whole. And I have to figure out in my design what my overall feel is, right? That my part of creating the resonance that I want is creating resonance in the micro and resonance in the macro. And once again, one of my ongoing themes, I have a bunch of themes,
Starting point is 00:28:46 is in the macro, in the micro, that says if you want something to happen, if you want an audience to feel something, it has to appear both in the big picture and in the small picture. In magic, that means the set has to show it, the cards have to show it. You know, that you,
Starting point is 00:29:06 that I want to show it through my set design, I want to show it down to my individual cards. That whatever theme I'm doing, I want to keep hitting that theme. In Theros, for example, I was trying to build up a sense of adventure. Well, I wanted cards that built. I wanted mechanics that built. I wanted a style play that built.
Starting point is 00:29:21 That my theme was hit at every level from the micro all the way up to the macro. And remember, when you are building something, that your big device is made of a lot of small devices, and so you want that to carry through. Okay, so top-down, comfort, surprise, completion. How, by the way, you told me when I was studying this in communication in school
Starting point is 00:29:45 that this thing I learned about, and by the way, this completely applies to like TV and film and all sorts of stuff, and like, oh, this would be very good for game design. I'd be, wow, I was pretty, kind of cool. You know. But anyway, I'm driving in, I see the wizard's building, and I'm pulling my space.
Starting point is 00:30:02 Or not my space. A space. I would say my space, too. I feel like I have my own person's space, which sadly I'm pulling my space. Or not my space. A space. I always say my space because people feel like I have my own person's space, which sadly I do not. Okay. So, I hope you guys enjoyed
Starting point is 00:30:12 hearing about top-down design. It's something that I think we're getting better at. It's something that has gone over really well. Both Indusrider and Theros went over gangbusters. So,
Starting point is 00:30:21 we will be doing more top-down design. I know the future of seven-year plans. There's more top-down design coming. It's not every year. A, because I think we want to mix it up, and B, because there's not an infinite number of things we can do top-down design. It's a lot smaller than you think. But
Starting point is 00:30:34 anyway, thanks for joining me today. Oh, it's pretty much a good average 30-minute ride. So not a lot of traffic today. Which is good for me. I don't know if it's good for you. But anyway, thanks for joining me. And while I always love talking about doing top down design
Starting point is 00:30:47 I also like making magic talk to you guys next week bye

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