Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #96 - New World Order

Episode Date: February 14, 2014

Mark talks about how the New World Order came to be and what it means to design.

Okay, I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, today I'm going to talk about something that revolutionized how we did design. Something called New World Order. So let me explain how it came to be, and what ramifications it has, and how we do design. Because since I've been working for Wizards now over 18 years, there's been a few different things that have radically changed how we do things. This is one of them. And so today I'm going to talk about it.

So to understand New World Order, let's first talk about where we were around the time of, I guess it was like Lorwyn block. Lorwyn into Shadamore, that era. Because we were on the cusp right before we were getting to Shards of Alara. Anyway, what had happened was, actually, we'll go back a second.

Future Sight had come out. The Time Spiral block had come out. And for the first time, we had this weird statistic. Up until Time Spiral block had come out. And for the first time, we had this weird statistic. Up until Time Spiral came out, we would look at sales and we'd look at tournament organization, like how many people were playing in tournaments, and they tend to be lockstep, meaning if tournaments were doing well, sales were doing well, and it showed this tight-knit bond between the two.

But Time Spiral did this weird thing that we'd never seen before, in which sales were down, but turn-in attendance was doing fine. I mean, it wasn't, I don't know if up's the correct term, but it was not, they were not trending in the same line. And that was very different, we'd never seen that before. And that's when we realized, at the time we called them the invisibles, but the idea was, there are people who play, who aren't organized, who don't participate in organized play that are hard for us to

see because they're not somewhere that we can easily monitor. But the first time, because there wasn't a lockstep between tournament play and sales, we knew that there was this group that wasn't being reflected in tournament organization, but was obviously being reflected in sales. And so we took a look at what was going on in FutureSight, or, I keep calling it FutureSight, Time Spiral, Time Spiral Block, Time Spiral, Planar Chaos, FutureSight. And what we realized was

that the complication the game had raised. So let me talk a little bit about that, because complexity is a huge part of New World Order. So let me explain. So what happens in any game is you make a game. People like it. Now, we're a trading card game. That means we need to come out with more cards. It's what we do. You know, the game's constantly changing and evolving. That's the essence of magic. So we have to keep coming up with new cards. Well, guess what? That means we do new things. Partly we need new things because

to sell it, you need new things. Partly because we've done the old things. If we're trying to make cards we haven't made before, you have to do things you haven't done. And so with time, you start making up new mechanics. You're forced to. And so what that means is, the game just has more in it. As time goes on, there's more and more in it. Now, we've

created the standard format to sort of keep a balance of how much complexity is in standard, you know, the main way to play it constructed, we found a way to keep the power level relatively flat by having things rotate out. So when new things come in, old things go out. So there's only so many cards you can play with. That helps keep the power level a certain level. But we had a different problem, which was that we were, acquisition is what we call acquiring new players. So we talk about, there's three things we talk about.

We talk about retention, acquisition, and reacquisition. So retention is the players we have, can we keep them? Are we making them happy? Do they want to keep playing? Acquisition is, can we get new players? Can we get new people to play? And reacquisition is, can we get back old players that used to play to stop playing um and so those are three things we're constantly thinking of and each one of them is very important you know if we don't keep our

players if we're constantly changing then there's no continuity and that the game you know doesn't evolve we're all about having a community and part of having a community is having players that play for a long time now magic right Magic right now, the average player of Magic is like nine, nine and a half years, I think. That's a long time for a game. That's a really... For those that don't know the gaming world, that's a really, really long time to have people play your game. In fact, it's

insanely long. The only games that have that kind of measurement are stuff like Chess and Go, which have thousands of years behind them. But anyway, so, we want retention. That's important. We want to make sure that we are doing things that people like.

But, another important part is acquisition, which is you need fresh blood. Why? A, because some people will leave your game. And I've talked about this before. The reason people leave Magic, sometimes people are unhappy with Magic. That can be one of the reasons they leave. But more often than not, people tend to leave, we've found,

because of circumstances that actually are nothing to do with the game. Usually, your social circumstances change, meaning the people I play with aren't available to play anymore. And the second thing is, something, I move, or my job changes, or I don't have the time, or I don't have the money, or something changes or I don't have the time or I don't have the money or something changes where I don't have the access to the things I need. So what has happened is a lot of organized play is to try to solve the first problem,

which is, well, if you don't have someone to play, we can help you get someone to play. We can provide other people to play with. But the other thing is if you don't have the time or the money, there's other factors we can't control that. And so people are going to come and leave the game. Now part of that crowd is what we call reacquisition. The website probably is our biggest reacquisition tool, which is we have this tool. If you leave Magic, we have this thing you can sort of monitor and keep your pulse on the game even if you're not playing. And a lot of people have told me how they'll read my column even though they don't play anymore, and that something

I'm talking about gets them excited and they come back. Most players who leave Magic come back to Magic. That's very, very common. In fact, most players will take a hiatus from the game and come back to it. If you talk to Magic players, that is a very, very common thing. And the reason is, like I said, most

people don't leave because they're unhappy with the game. They leave for other factors. And when those factors change, something can draw them back into the game. That's why reacquisition is very important. The website does a really, really good job of reacquisition. There's other things we do. Duels of the Planeswalkers and Magic Online can be good at reacquisition. Anyway, so we were looking at statistics and we were realizing that acquisition was going down.

That we were acquiring less players than we used to. Now that is a canary in the coal mine, if you will. That's dangerous. What that's saying is that if you don't have fresh blood coming in, that is the death knell. I mean, your game is going to die if you don't have fresh blood coming in. Partly, one reason is because some people are going to leave and you need new players to play them. But also, it's important to just have fresh blood coming in. Partly, one reason is because some people are going to leave and you need new players

to play them. But also, it's important to just have fresh blood into any system because it just adds an important mix. Just like on R&D, we like having fresh blood.

In your gaming system, you want new people coming in. You want people constantly discovering and excited. The established experience players are very, very valuable to us, insanely valuable to us. In fact, you know, most of our work is on retention.

The vast majority, whenever I talk about acquisition, people always feel like, we don't care about the existing players, we only care about the new players. Like, no, no, no. 90% of my time is reacquisition. Most of my time is making a magic game that's awesome for people that play magic, you know. But I do need to spend some time on acquisition. Acquisition is very important. And a lot of times when we talk about the importance of acquisition,

I think people think we're trying to say the sake of retention. No, no, no, no. Retention is super important. Like I said, most of my time, 90% of my time is spent on retention, not on acquisition. But acquisition is important. So we figured out that our acquisition was going down. And acquisition is important. So we figured out that our acquisition was going down.

And that is a danger. If you don't fix that problem, it's a sign that Magic is going to be in trouble. So we looked and said, okay, well, what's going on? Why are we having acquisition problems? Well, I've talked about this many times, which is I believe that Magic's greatest flaw

is its barrier to entry. And what barrier to entry means, it's a gaming term, which means, how easy is it for me to get your game? Part of it might be, you know, what do I need to do to start? Part of it might be, how hard is it to learn? So magic has a big barrier to start because it's a complex game. Now, the funny thing is, at its core, the base game is not that complex, but when people see the game, you know, you tend to experience through other players, and like, it's a game

with thousands of pieces that any one person doesn't know all of them. That sounds pretty complex, and to be fair, it is complex. And so, magic is intimidating, and there's a lot to learn. So, we've done a whole bunch of things to try to help with barrier entry like Duels of the Planeswalkers was a big one

but anyway New World Order would be another huge one so what happened was we were looking at our numbers like look we're not acquiring players and so if you looked at your game it's just obvious like I said before as you age as an ongoing game that keeps putting out new content, you are forced to make new material.

And the thing to remember is the new player, let's put them at zero on the scale. Okay? They know nothing. Now maybe, maybe, maybe if your game gets big enough and is around enough, over time, like Monopoly in my mind isn't a zero because when you walk in to learn Monopoly, you, like zeitgeist of the culture behind it, that you know something about Monopoly. You know, I mean, you might only be starting at a one or a two,

but at least you walk in knowing it's a property game or knowing there's a boardwalk or something. You know something about it. Magic hasn't reached that point yet. Hopefully one day it will. So it starts at zero. People don't know anything. Now, when Magic first started, when Richard first made the game,

let's say it was a 15 to learn. Well, over the years, it got up to what? A 20, a 25, a 30? It just got harder and harder to learn because the beginner's still at zero. So the jump to get into the game, as time went on, we realized we were making the gap farther and farther. So we looked at time, so we said, okay, there's just a million and one things to memorize and all this stuff. We've got to simplify.

We've got to make things easier. So in LoRaWin, we were very vigilant about how many words were on cards and, you know, what each card did. Can you read the card and understand what it did? how many words were on cards and, you know, what each card did. Can you read the card and understand what it did? And so we made a big jump in trying to simplify the cards. And what we found was when you played with Lorwyn, or especially Lorwyn Morning Tide,

in fact, we had a pre-release at work, which was a Morning Tide ploy pre-release. And one of the things that's interesting about the pre-release is a lot of people who work at Wizards, you know, they're not R&D members. There are other people in the company and a lot of them know Magic. A good chunk of them, you know, know enough to play because they work on Magic. So they learned how to play, but they're not, they're not gamers. They didn't come to Wizards sort of being a Magic fan necessarily. And so it's an interesting thing to look at. These are people that play Magic that are not die hard Magic players.

They don't know every intricacy of the game. And we were watching them at the Lorwyn Morning Tide pre-release. Now remember, Lorwyn was a tribal set, had eight races. And then in Morning Tide, we introduced five classes. So now every card had a race you cared about and a class you cared about. And anyway, there was a lot going on. There was a lot on the board. And we were noticing that the people just were having trouble playing.

We actually noticed a few people quit. They're like, I just can't handle it. And they stopped. We're like, what's going on? And we said, okay, let's look at what's going on. And we realized, holy moly, there's a lot going on. Every card cares about other cards, and you've got to look around. And people couldn't even, like, just looking at the board. Forget hands existed. They wouldn't be able

to track what was going on on the board. Okay, and we realized we had a problem. So that's when we started talking about how there's three different types of complexity. Let me talk about that. First, there is comprehension complexity. This is the thing we try to fix after Time Spiral Block, which is, can I understand what the cards do? Can I read the card and tell what it does? That's comprehension complexity. The second is board complexity, which is, okay, I have these cards and they're sitting in play on the battlefield. Can I understand what it means, what they do? Can I comprehend the board state? And the third thing is what we call strategic complexity. I have a card.

Do I understand the ramifications of how best to use the card? So what we found was comprehension complexity and board complexity were causing problems for new players. Strategic complexity, interestingly, was not because they didn't know what they needed to know to even be aware it existed.

For example, what we found was, for example, let's say death triggers. So death triggers are triggers that go on a creature, or actually, even simpler than that, enter the battlefield triggers, what we call ETB triggers. It says a creature, when it enters the battlefield, it does something. Now, an experienced magic player looks at that and they say, okay, well, there's an ability. This is a spell. I want to think about when I want to cast this spell. Likewise with death triggers.

That's an also good example where when the creature dies, something happens. Well, I want to think about what I'm going to do because when it dies, this is going to happen. Now, an experienced player might not play a creature right away that has an ETP ability they want or might make blocks or do something interesting or attack with the creature that's ETB ability they want. Or might make blocks or do something interesting or attack with the creature that's a Death Trigger they want. They think about their actions, take into account what the card does. Now, a beginning player, you know what? They play a card. When it comes to play, oh, ETB effect, what happens? When their creature dies, oh, Death Trigger, what happens? They don't plan ahead, because that's beyond them. They're not thinking about that. When you're first starting to play, it creature dies, oh, just figure what happens. They don't plan ahead because that's beyond them.

You know, they're not thinking about that. When you're first starting to play, it's like, oh, things happen when they happen. You don't plan ahead. And that's okay. It's not bad for them. It's not like they're not having a good time when their creature dies and something happens. They might not be maximizing it, but they don't know they're maximizing it, so no harm, no foul. But the problem with comprehension complexity and board complexity is it causes them, they recognize they don't

understand what's going on. If they can't read the card and read it, they're just baffled. If the board has too much going on, they get frozen. They can't understand what's going on. And so we realized we needed a way to lower our complexity, especially in comprehension and board complexity. Now, enter Matt Place. So Matt Place was a developer. He no longer works at Wizards, but he worked there for quite a while. Matt used to be a Pro Tour player.

He won PT Mights way back in the day. And he was a very good player. He and I were very good friends. And Matt and I were talking about this issue. And the big problem we had to solve was how do we make the game simpler for newer players without necessarily taking away the strategic complexity

and the depth that the players the experienced players want. And then that's when we made an important realization. Matt and I made the following realization which is a beginner buys less cards. Why? They're less invested in the game. You know, when you first start playing the game, you know, it's one thing to be invested. Like once you've been playing magic for nine years or whatever, and you're like, you know, you're

buying the latest box. You might buy two boxes, you know, you might buy three by, I mean, you know, you understand the investment. It's your hobby. You spent time. You spent energy. It's something you said, I'm dedicating a chunk of my time and money to. But a new player, they don't know that yet, necessarily. So they're going to sample it first. And so new players just buy less cards than experienced players.

That's just the way it is. A known fact. Okay, now, if you take that into account, comments became very important. Because what we realize is, in every booster pack, there are 15 cards. On average, there are 10 common cards. 10 common, 3 uncommon, 1 rare, which 1 out of 8 is a mythic rare, on average, and then 1 basic lamp card.

Okay, so if you are a beginning player, and you just buy 5 packs, let's say, pretty much of the cards you own, two-thirds of the cards are common. And another one-fifteenth is basic land, which is simple, too. Okay, so two-thirds of the common are common. So if you're a beginning player, most of what you have in your hands are common. Now, if you're an experienced player, you're buying a box or two boxes or three boxes. You know, the commons don't mean as much because you have four of every common.

You are focused on the uncommons and the rares and the mythic rares. And what we realized is, oh, well, the commons mean more to the beginning player than they mean to the experienced player. Now, they have a big impact on limited for the experienced player. But we're like, okay, what if we took common and we set a bar for complexity to the experienced player. Now, they have a big impact on limited for the experienced player.

But we're like, okay, what if we took common and we set a bar for complexity and just lowered the bar? And what would happen was if we made common simpler for the beginning player, we would make the game simpler because they have not yet graduated.

To them, very few of their cards are uncommons and rares and mythics. Two-thirds of their cards are commons. Two-thirds. That's a commons. Two-thirds. That's a lot. So if we could toe a line at common and say, okay, here's the complexity we want for the beginning player. And so

what we did is, here's the policy we came up with. We said, okay. Matt and I wrote a whole document up. We said, okay, here's what we want. We have a line. 80% of your cards must, must be under the line no matter what. 20% can be above the line in what we call these red flag. So what red flag means is if you break one of the following rules, you get red flagged. What red flag means is the design team and then the development team has to acknowledge that you are meant to be there.

It's not that you can't stay, but if you get red flagged, the powers that be have to sign off that you're there. And the idea is we want to make the designers and developers responsible for understanding the complexity that goes on in a comment. Now, New World Order has a bunch of different things. There's different ways you red flag things. So I'm going to walk through them.

But first, a sip of water. It is important to drink when you're talking nonstop for half an hour. That's why I'm always drinking. That and my love of cold water. Okay, so, first red flag, I talked about this not too long ago, complexity, comprehension complexity, which is just, is the card wordy? We don't have a lock thing, but pretty much

if you are four lines or more of text, you're red flagged. You have four lines or more of text, of rules text. If you have four lines or more, you're red flagged. That means, hey, what's going on? Now, that doesn't mean you can't stay. And there's exceptions. For example, reminder text. One of the things that New World Order does, it says that we expect players to have to learn new things and new sets can have new things, but a common, concentrate your new things. You want to have a new mechanic, fine, but that could be your new thing. One of the things to make it very complicated is to have, let's say for example, 20% of your set is redlined, it's over a line. If all those cards are pushing in the same direction,'s a lot simpler if you have one new mechanic

and 15% of your 20% is just the new mechanic well it's one mechanic, learn the mechanic then ok the other 50% aren't too hard the first time you see landfall or the first time you see in fact or

the first time you see a mechanic ok I've got to learn what a mechanic does and in fact it's extra counters know, I mean, the first thing you see in Mechanic, okay, I've got to learn what Mechanic does. And in fact, it's extra counters, and landfall is a trigger, and, you know, there's different things you've got to learn. And that those things aren't things you necessarily normally care about. But we say, okay, you can, you know, if you have to care about something you don't normally care about,

that's red flagged. But, we say, you get one thing brand new to care about, and concentrate that new thing. Every game can have one new thing to care about that you don't normally care about and you can concentrate. Now, every once in a while we'll have a second thing. If that second thing's simple or the two things together are simple. But you always get one new thing at least.

One new thing you never think about. Landfall says you have to, every time a land plays, you have to be aware a land is being played. Okay, that's the one thing. And we did a lot with it. So New World Order says, whatever you do, you introduce something new, and you should be introducing something new, consolidate that new thing. Okay, so we look at wordiness. We look at, are you doing a new thing that something players have to track

they don't normally have to track? Next, are you affecting another card in play? And the answer is yes, you are red flagged. Now, some of that is okay. Now, for example, Samite Healer, when we talked about Samite Healer not being New World Order compliant, a lot of people are like, what?

What? I've played that since the beginning, since Alpha. That card is so easy. But think about this. I have a card in play that says, any combat that can happen, you have to adjust for the fact that maybe it won't. Maybe there's one more point of damage you have to account for. So if I attack with a 1-1, 2-2-2s, and a 3-3, and you block with 2-2-2s and a 4-4,

4-4, it's like, oh, okay. Well, I now have to take into account that maybe maybe that, you know, maybe that some things I think are going to die aren't going to die. Because you can save one point of damage. And all of a sudden, this one card influences a lot of other cards. So what we say for New World Order

is, if you affect other cards, well, sorry, if you have an impact and you affect other cards, you're a red flag. Now, if you're affecting other cards decreases decision making, we normally tend to allow you to stay. For example, tappers in white. When do tappers get used? In one of two cases.

Either you're about to attack where I say, you say, I'm going to attack. I go, wait. I tap that creature. Now there's no decision. When you attack this one creature, you have to think about whether you're going to attack with or not. So that reduces decisions. The other is, I'm going to attack. And before I attack, I tap your creature.

Now you have one less creature to block with. Once again, less decisions. So tappers are good. They require less decisions. You know, before the player has to make any decision, semi-healer is like, okay, you've got to make block decisions, but you don't know yet what I'm going to do. So cards that affect other cards are red flagged.

And cards, another thing that got red flagged was we red flagged all cards that caused two-for-one-ing. And we red flagged any card that could kill more than one creature. These are kind of combined. So two for one meant it gets card advantage or it could repeatedly kill things or repeatedly get rid of things. Those were pushed up. And those also create complex board situations. If I have a card you can't deal with, it's not that magic shouldn't have those. Once again, the whole point of New World Order is not that the game can't have complexity. It's that we want to concentrate the complexity. That we want the complexity on a few cards that matter. And one of the underlying ideas

behind New World Order is this. Is when you play a game, there's a certain amount of energy you have to take just to be aware of what is going on, just to be conscious of the board state. And what we said is, that is not where the fun of the game lies. The ability to track everything that's going on and watch it and know that it might be relevant. For example, when we took Matterburn out of the game, one of the issues on Matterburn was,

here's a rule you have to learn, you have to learn very early in the game, and it just doesn't matter most of the time. Yet you have to know it because every once in a while it matters. You know, and like I said, we play tested it. It didn't come up for months.

And it's like, why am I learning something right out of the gate when the game is chock full of things to learn that I have to pay attention to? And so one of the things we've been doing over the years is trying to pull out things that it's like, you just have to pay attention to. And so one of the things we've been doing over the years is trying to pull out things that, like, you just have to pay attention to this even though it doesn't matter most of the time. And that just eases up your mental energy.

I mean, your brain can only absorb so much. There's only so much you can do. And we're like, you know what? There's lots of strategic decisions we want you to make. Use your brain on those strategic decisions. Not on remembering what's going on. Not on remembering obscure rules or remembering things that happen every once in a blue moon

or just keeping track of what could happen you know there's plenty going on there's plenty of decisions in a game of magic in fact a game of magic is insane really on how many decisions you have to make during the course of a game, there's a lot of decisions and in no way

when people talk about simplifying the game, dumbing down the game, you know, it's like, look, there are already more decisions in the game of Magic than most players can comfortably make them all correctly. I talk about the perfect game, which is, imagine you were playing and there was a team of ten pros watching you from behind a two-way mirror.

And at the end of the game, every time you made a decision, they checked whether you made the right decision or the wrong decision. At the end of the game, you know, how often do you have a perfect game? Every decision you made, you made the right decision. And the answer is, most players never have a perfect game. Maybe John Finkel a couple times in his life had a perfect game. There's just too many decisions in Magic. There's too much going on.

It is almost impossible to make every decision correctly. You know? going on, it is almost impossible to make every decision correctly. You know? And that... Look, if we can lessen the amount of mental strain of just, here are things to keep track of, even though most games it doesn't

matter. Let's lessen that. Let's make the mental energy about, okay, what does he have in play that can block? What do I have? What do I have in my hand? What might he... You know? There's so many things to think about. Focus on that. Focus on the core part of the game. Another part said, look, let's have cards that matter,

especially in limited. Let's have cards that matter, but we don't need to have 12 cards that matter. That's one of the problems with the Lorwyn Mourningtide was every card in play affected every other card in play. It's like, okay, how many, okay, you have this many soldiers and this many elves and this many, like, you know what I'm saying

just keeping track of it all was too much for most people to bear you know and so New World Order says let's pull it down let's limit the number

of things you have to track and let's spend this mental energy optimizing the things you do have to care about because those are hard you know one of the stories I tell

is I was teaching people portal which is like simple magic. It's like sorceries, land, and creatures, and that was it. No artifacts, no enchantments, no instants. And like just simple, simple creatures. You know, the creatures, a few of them had basic abilities, but no real complex things on them.

And just playing that. In fact, the demo game, I think, didn't even have effects on the creatures, just like they were mostly vanilla creatures. And I realized just watching people play with vanilla creatures, how complex blocking and attacking is with vanilla creatures. And so, anyway,

New World Order was saying, let's dial that back. I'm at work. I've not named every single red flag, I guess. It's not really worthy of a whole other podcast just to name other red flags. But be aware that the gist of the way it works is there are things that make the game complicated

and what we want is, look, let's have those things. Magic is a complicated game. We want it to be a complicated game, but we don't want every moment or every possible, you know, the game is not a better game for every moment being complex. And, here's a very fascinating thing. When we changed

New World Order, and we were playing in the pit, now notice, the pit, R&D guys, these are hardcore, long-time Magic players. Most of them were Pro Tour players, many of them, like, Pro Tour winning players. A few of them are in the Hall of Fame. And what we found was we liked New World Order.

We liked what it did to the game. It made the game more fun for us. Because you know what? Yes, maybe we're capable of tracking things, but does it make the game more fun? No, it didn't. And boiling it down and allowing you to sort of put your mental energy in what really was the most cool things made the game a better game.

And that is, to me, the biggest thing of New World Order. But anyway, I'm at work. Hopefully, one of the things I'm hoping today makes you understand is, a lot of what improving magic is, is finding and figuring out what is the core of what makes it awesome. What makes

magic such a great game. And what we were trying to do is extract the things you don't need and leave the things you do. And that New World Order was a big, big lesson of going oh, here's some stuff the game has always had that it doesn't actually need. And that lessens the

game for the vast majority of players. There are people that love complexity for complexity's sake and I always get, whenever I say New World Order, they're like, oh, the game was so much better when I ate a thousand things to keep track of. I love when, because my opponent forgot this, I won. Okay, yeah, oh, the game was so much better when I ate a thousand things to keep track of. And I love when, because my opponent forgot this, I won. Okay, yeah,

there's players like that. But I think most players, and most of the pros I've talked to have agreed that, like, you know, not having strange things to care about that don't matter

most of the time does not make the game more fun. Anyway, that's what New World Order has done. I think it's helped everybody. I think it's very, very good for new players.

I actually think it's good for experienced players. And hopefully, you enjoyed me hearing about it today. So, as much as I love talking about improving Magic, I also like making Magic. Time for me to go. Talk to you guys next week.