4/12/13 Episode 29: Creatures

All podcast content by Mark Rosewater

Okay I’m pulling out of my driveway, so we all know what that means. It’s time for another Drive to Work!

Okay, a while ago I decided to start a meta-series about card types. And I started with artifacts. Then numerous people informed that “No, no,” I didn’t start with artifact, I’d actually started with planeswalker many weeks before that. Matt Cavotta, I gave him a ride to work and we talked about planeswalkers and planeswalker design. So, I had not realized I’d done two of them, time for the third. Today, I thought I’d talk about creatures. There’s no real order. For those that are thinking there’s some order, other than alphabetical if you ignore planeswalker, no, there’s not really any order to this. I just, I don’t know, I’m just picking the one I want to talk about of the day.

 So creatures, I think if you said to me the following: you said, “I… we’re going to do the game over. Okay. There’s going to be lands because we need the mana system. But other than that, you know, there can only be one card type. One card type. Which card type do you choose? And hands down, not even… I don’t even have to think about it. Creatures is what I’d choose.  Why would I choose creatures? For a couple things. One is, I believe creatures are the core of the game.

I know, I get a lot of email, people who like, you know… not a lot, actually maybe a little (???) but I get email from people who are like “I love creatureless decks. I love that the game of Magic doesn’t have to play with creatures, and hey! I think that’s cool as an occasional thing, but I believe that creatures are pretty core to what makes Magic, Magic. Why do I believe that?

A couple reasons… One is that there’s some permanence to creatures, and that they have an interesting give and take built into them. So, pretty much if you look at what you want in game design, a couple things. I mean, jump into this real quick… one is, you want interactivity, meaning you want the two players to have some relationship to one another that causes them to have to deal with each other. Because if there’s too much isolation, then it’s just a game of… a duel game of solitaire.

And creatures are nice because creatures, by their nature, force interaction. I’m going to attack you with a creature. Well, you need to do something about that. And you having a creature allows you to interact with my creatures. And if I have creatures in the game, and my creatures are attacking you, and the metagame says “Look, there’s creatures attacking,” well now there’s impetus for you to have some creatures so there’s some give and take.

Now, that said, I believe creatures have a lot of roles. I mean, one of the reasons for example that I could replace everything with creatures is, I can pretty much mock most other abilities with creatures. You know, if you put ETB creatures, enters-the-battlefield effects on creatures, you know, you’re making things that feel a lot like sorceries. If you put them on flash creatures they’re like instants. You know, you put global effects, you can make them feel like artifacts or enchantments. Okay, making them feel like planeswalkers is a little hard, but the game could survive without planeswalkers. I think they’re fun, but it’s the least essential probably. Although it serves an important role.

So, creatures—A, get interaction. They make you interact with the opponent. B, I also talked about how games need inertia, right? That you want the game to end. And creatures do a good job of that. That they make a threat. That if I have creatures, you know, if you don’t do something about it, you know… well, one of the things in general about Magic is, you want to make sure that somebody always is winning. That’s another important thing in that you want to make sure there’s means to break your stalemates in your game. That your game gets in a situation where there’s means by which you can make sure it ends. And that’s for example why evasion is so important. That’s why having little Tims or creatures that tap to deal damage, or… anything that sort of says “Hey, if left unchecked, I will make sure the game ends.” Those cards are important because otherwise you can get a game in a state where it doesn’t end. And that’s pretty bad. You know, you want to make sure that your game’s always moving toward a conclusion.

In general, by the way, I’ve been trying to give little game design tips where I can. One of the things that I think is something for game designers to always keep in mind is that the players will do what they’re incentivized to do. That doesn’t mean they’ll do what is fun. Players, I mean players do like having fun, and they will push toward fun.

But if the game incentivizes them to do something that isn’t fun? They will do that, and then they will hate the game for it. You know what I’m saying? That, if the game says “in order to win you have to do this,” they’ll go “Okay, that’s what the game is saying.” And they’ll follow the lead of the game, but then what happens is they don’t have fun, and then they blame the game. You know. They don’t blame themselves, like “Oh, there was a path for fun and a path for not fun, I chose the not fun, I guess it’s my fault,” no no no, that’s not how it works. The game has to give the right path to the player. And part of that, I think, is why in general we are very aggressive with our creatures. I mean, more so.

So one of the things that comes up all the time, I mean this is a little Development-y, but I’ll jump in here—is people have this idea that “Wow! Creatures are just out of control, and when are spells going to be as powerful as creatures?” And we’re like “No no no no no, this is a perception issue.” When the game started, the spells were bonkers. Bonkers, okay? You could draw three cards for a mana. Bonkers. The creatures were not bonkers.

In fact, if you go to Alpha, you look at all the creatures in Alpha, barring, you know, complexity issues, barring it just was too complicated, there’s nothing we can’t reprint today from a… card power, you know what I’m saying? Like you look at the powerhouses of early Alpha, you know, Birds or Hypnotic Specter… they’re all things we can do. And they’re all, you know… like, I remember we brought Hypnotic Specter back, people were worried. And like, you know, it wasn’t Hypnotic Specter that was the problem. It was Dark Ritual. A spell.

So anyway, the game began, spells were bonkers. Creatures were not remotely bonkers. What’s happened in the last twenty years is, we’ve slowly ramped up the creatures so that creatures matter now, whereas they used to not matter. Like for example, when I was playing, during the Legends era, for example, um, I played a little blue/green weenie deck. Why did I play that? Because nobody was playing creatures. Like there was a period of time in which you were an idiot to be playing creatures. You know, and I’m a rebel, so I was. But… or maybe an idiot. I don’t know.

But the idea was that—it was this environment where it was just dumb to play creatures. There were so many good ways to kill creatures that it just was silly. And so what happened was, we said “Okay, look. Creatures are fun.” You know, the path. The path, we’re talking about. Creatures are the fun path. Creatures lead to you doing fun things. And sowe decicded to make the game make you care more about creatures, because we believe that it is a more fun game when creatures matter.

Now once again, I’m not trying to say creatures have to always matter. I’m not saying creatureless decks should never exist. I’m not trying to say that you can’t make powerful spells. Because we do make powerful spells. Just because we make powerful creatures doesn’t mean we no longer make powerful spells. You know, spells have come down in power since the beginning, because as I said they were bonkers! Now they’re merely good, and creatures are good.

You know, this idea that spells are just, they’re only bad comparatively to where spells used to be. You still play spells in your deck. They are still good. You know. In the last year, the Pro Tour, we had two different decks that didn’t have a card with the creature type on it in the deck. You know, it’s not like… people aren’t playing decks that are just loaded with creatures, that’s all they ever play. No, there’s other decks that get played.

But creatures lead to fun gameplay. Creatures make interaction. Creatures allow interesting decisions. The creatures stay on the board, and so they create like—one of the things that’s important when you’re designing a game is, you want to make sure that, um, you have interesting decisions, and that there’s a lot going on. In addition to, you know, inertia and stuff. And creatures are nice because you put them, and they create interesting board states, and you have to make decisions about them.

You know, for example, so one of the things is, way back, we used to do a promotion. There’s a thing in Seattle called Bumbershoot, which is—it’s like a get-together with lots of bands, and, kind of a indie cred thing. And Magic used to go there. And at the time, we were selling a product called Portal. For those that don’t remember this. And Portal was Magic Lite. Portal was—“We’re just going to give you creatures and sorceries and land. Done.” No instants, no artifacts, no enchantments… obviously no planeswalkers. So the idea is we just boiled it down to three basic card types. And so what happened was, I did a lot of teaching. I was at Bumbershoot teaching people how to play. And I remember I (???) interesting.

So at one point, I—uh, there was a lull, so I was playing another Magic player. Someone else who was teaching. And all we had was these decks. So once again. They were creatures with basic, basic abilities, OK? Nothing complex. Pretty much mostly—mostly French vanilla, maybe one or two little tiny effects. But I mean, super simple. They’re sorceries. Super simple. And not even a lot of sorceries. Mostly creatures.

So we’re playing a game between each other which was, I would say, 80% creatures, 20% spells, and the spells weren’t back-breaking spells. They were common and uncommon kinds of spells. And the creatures were all simple, mostly French vanilla or vanilla creatures. So we were playing a game with, as stripped as you could. And what I found interesting was—and we were both Magic players. We had an interesting game! We had a very interesting game.

I think people—I think people get caught up sometimes, that they forget that the bare basics of creature combat is actually very interesting, and there’s a lot of neat decisions to make. You know, if I have some creatures, you have some creatures, I’ve got to figure out, you know: A. If I attack, how would you block? And depending on how you’d block, am I happy with that? You know, is there a means in which you’d do something I’m not happy with? You know.

Or—uh, I mean, we were playing with sorceries and creatures. I couldn’t even bluff. If I attacked, he knew I wasn’t doing anything. You know, normal Magic has instants and even there you’re bluffing. So take bluffing out of it. And just the idea of “What is he going to do? Let me think it through what his things are.” Now I might not know what other (???), you know, what other creatures he has in his hand, he might supplement with.

But the idea was, it was a very enriching, cool game. And that creatures—like I said. Just the act of playing with creatures is a good game unto itself. Makes Magic—I mean, it is fun. I’m not saying that the other stuff layered on the top is not also good, but the core basics of creature play, of creature combat, is, unto itself, a very good game.

Okay. So. Creatures have this nice element to the game that they have some permanence, that if done correctly they help make the game end, I mean one of the big dangers by the way is stalemates, and that’s why, if you notice, we tend to err on having a little more power than toughnesss, although there’s environments where that’s not always true. We tend to make sure there’s plenty of evasion, you know.

And also the other thing we do, so let me talk a little about virtual vanilla. So, New World Order came along, and the idea of New World Order, for those that don’t know, and at some point we’ll do a podcast on New World Order, the short version is, we need to make the game—the barrier to entry lower, so that new players can learn to play, because the barrier kept getting higher as we added complication, and it was keeping people from being able to join the game. And the game will die if there’s not new people that can join it. Okay. So, part of doing that was just making the board complexity simpler. And so one of the big tools of that was being more careful with your creatures.

And so a side effect of that was, we ended up doing more creatures—well, we started doing what we call “virtual vanilla.” Which is a term I came up with. And the idea is, when I have a creature on the board, the simplest creature is a vanilla creature. Vanilla creature is defined as “Has no rules text.” A Grizzly Bear. A Hill Giant. Notice I’m naming old-school Magic cards. But—so the idea is, it’s just, it’s a 2/2. That’s it. It’s a 3/3. That’s it. It doesn’t do anything else.

So one of the things we learned is, one of the ways to get some interesting things in the game is to make what I call “virtual vanilla.” Virtual vanilla is, after the first turn it’s in play, it is essentially a vanilla. By the way, I got in trouble on this, I defined virtual vanilla on the first test, the first Great—for the second Great Designer Search, and… but our definition of virtual vanilla—a vanilla counts, because a vanilla—it’s true that after the first turn a vanilla acts as a vanilla creature. But a lot of people were confused because virtual vanilla implies “Well, it’s virtually vanilla, it’s not really a vanilla.”

But anyway. A mistake in the question. So the idea of virtual vanilla is, after the first turn, it is for all intents and purposes a vanilla. And so what that means is, it’s nice because it allows you to have a card that matters and does something, but then after that, look it’s just a vanilla creature. And we know that Magic with vanilla creatures, like I said with my experience with Portal, is good gameplay. And that, you know, we could have a few creatures that are a little more complicated, and that’s why we have higher rarities. But that at common, you know, it’s nice if there’s not too much going on at common.

Now, we do also do what we call French vanilla at common, which is creatures with a single ability, and those are things that are not too hard to track. You know, a flying creature or a first strike creature, and a lot of that stuff’s where we get evasion from to help things break through.

But anyway, part of making virtual vanillas was “How do we make cards that—after the turn they come into play, are vanilla creatures?” So one of the big ones is what we would call Enter the Battlefield effects. ETB effects. Meaning that I have a creature, it comes into play, it does something, and then after that it’s just a creature.

And the reason that ETB creatures have been so awesome for New World Order is that the beginning player, the inexperienced player doesn’t—I talk a lot about what I call lenticular design. Meaning that cards in which the more experienced player sees more strategy in them. And Enter the Battlefield creatures do this really well. Here’s why.

So let’s say I have a card that does something, like, you know, gets me mana or gains me life. Or does something—not destroying the opponent’s creatures. Those are a little—anything that destroys, players feel so obligated to use them that they hold them back. And those can cause problems, meaning we have to be careful with those. But just a thing that does something, you know, it has some small effect.

A lot of times, understanding when to use that, for the experienced player, you know, like let’s say for example I draw a creature that gains me life. And I’m low enough on life that my opponent might be making decision based upon how many, you know, how much life I have left. So he’s doing math. Now I have a creature in my hand that changes the math. Now, a beginning player just goes, “Can I play it?” and plays it. Oh look, I gained some amount of life, yay. And they’re happy.

Now, an experienced player might say “Oh, you know, is my being lower in life changing their strategy? Do I might want to hold this back a little bit and not let them know that I have more life? So they might, you know, because maybe they’re going to make some sacrifices thinking they’re closer to beating me, and then if I hold this back, they might make some bad decisions because they don’t have full information.

And what’s awesome there is, that card, for the experienced player, there’s actually some good decisions that could be made. But for the inexperienced player, whenever they play it—they don’t think ahead. In general by the way, one of the ways to tell inexperienced players from experienced players—well, there’s multiple ways.

But anyway, one of the interesting ways is “How many turns ahead do they look?” I feel like a beginning player looks zero turns ahead. A beginning player just is like “What am I doing right now? What could I do on this turn? What spells could I cast right now?”

An experienced player, like, I believe someone like—Jon Finkel’s my go-to, you know, one of the things that made Jon Finkel such—uh, makes, he’s still around—makes him such an awesome player is, he looks so far ahead. You know, he’ll do something you don’t understand, and then twelve turns later it pays off, and you’re like “Ohh! He was looking twelve turns ahead!” You know. And that’s the sign of a really experienced player is that they [???] figuring out what you need to do, so they go “Oh, I need to make the decision now, because this is going to matter—or could matter—in twelve turns.”

The—so, the other thing with creatures in general is, so, like I said, the ETB effects—and also there’s death triggers, but those aren’t as simple. Death triggers means when it dies something happens. The reason that it’s nice is, when you front-load a creature with an ETB effect, essentially you’re putting a spell on it. Meaning that some value of the creature is based on the spell, so the remnant of the body is worth less. You know. And so that’s a neat way to make some small creatures sometimes. Or sometimes you can make a big creature with a big effect and it just costs more. But like I said, that’s another interesting way to imbue creatures with extra flavor.

I mean, one of the—one of the tricky things about creatures is, people understand the basics better than spells. Like, for example, if I make a spell, especially if I’m messing around in some territory that we haven’t done a lot, you don’t know what it costs.

I mean, like I—for example, one of the things that happens is, when I make a card, I tend to go to Development and I say “Okay guys, cost this card.” Because I want the card to be, you know, in the ballpark, and I like, sort of—I predict what I think is going to happen, and then I ask the developers. So I can get a cost.

If I’m doing a creature, I’m just not that far off, there’s too many creatures to compare against. You know, it is very—it’s much, much easier to gauge the power level of creatures because of—there’s so many of them, and because they have power and toughness and that means something, that structure’s pretty well (???). Like I—you give me any creature, and I can compare it to some other creature that’s similar, and I—I’m in the ballpark.

Where spells, you know, I sometimes go off to Development, and I can be off by huge amounts of mana because oh, I’m just underestimating how powerful that spell was. Whereas with a creature, I can’t underestimate too much. ”Oh, it’s a 4/5 base creature? Well for starters, I know it means blah.” You know.

So creatures, the—like I said. They add a lot to the play of the game, they add a lot to having interconnected between the players, that there’s a lot of thought that goes into them. I think creatures have a lot of lenticular-ness to them, and that understanding—just, for example, understanding like when to attack, like when’s the right time to attack, that requires a lot of experience if the board is more complicated.

You know, if—fine, if there’s two creatures in play—I take that back. Even two creatures in play, beginners will have problems with. But—but, let’s say there’s three or four creatures on each side. Or hell, six creature or seven creatures. The more experienced player has a much better idea of when to trade and what’s valuable.

And like—one of the things—so here’s a classic story. I’ve told this in my column. But I’ve never told it—never told it on the podcast. So every once in a while you have a moment where you do something, where you make a big Magic discovery. So, I—this was during Invasion. We were playtesting, and I used to work in the Future Future League. I used to play in it. I don’t have time anymore. But I didn’t do a lot of deckbuilding because deckbuilding is not my forte. I mean, I’m a good Johnny deckbuilder, but actual competitive decks, not my thing.

So Randy Buehler built me a deck with a card called Kavu Titan. For those who don’t know, Kavu Titan is 1G for a 2/2, and then you can for 3GG make it a 5/5. But Randy—we had run out of Kavu Titans, so Randy put in Grizzly Bears. Now, it was Randy’s intent that the Grizzly Bears were Kavu Titans, but he didn’t tell me that. So I played them as Grizzly Bears. And I went 4-0 that week. I swept.

And then at the end of the week Randy realized my mistake and says, “Oh, Mark, Mark, Mark, those aren’t Grizzly Bears, that’s Kavu Titan. The next week, I go 2-2. And the lesson there, which is a very important lesson is, that I was underestimating the importance of the 2/2. That having a 2/2 on turn 2 can win a lot of games, you know, even if you’re giving up your 5/5 on turn 5. You know. And that—it really taught me the lesson of, that, different cards are valued at different times.

And that’s especially true of creatures. You know, that part of creatures, and understanding creatures, is understanding when they’re valuable and what they do what they do for you. You know. And that part of designing creatures is making sure that they give you interesting decisions in different ways, you know. And like I said, no matter what! No matter what, when the creature gets in play, that’s always an interesting decision. Creature combat is an interesting decision. And there’s a lot of neat things that go on there. And just knowing when to push, or knowing when to try to sort of get advantage, or knowing when to trade, all that is just something that like requires knowledge, but it’s kind of a nice core thing in the game.

Now one of the things we’ve learned, so one of the things that—we do these things called focus tests. Where we get people, we get behind a 2-way mirror and we watch them play. And there are all sorts of reasons we do it. Sometimes to see if they understand how to play, do they get instructions, but sometimes we teach them how to play, and then step back and just watch them do what they do. I mean the goal isn’t comprehension, it’s more of “Okay, now that we’ve explained the basics, you’re a beginning player, what do you do?”

And one of the interesting things of watching creature combat with beginners is, they will just refuse to attack. I mean, if you have no creatures in play, and I have creatures in play, and I can’t attack you, they will attack. But the second that like I could block, and that creature could kill my creature—not all, but the majority of beginning players become much more hesitant to attack.

And the funny thing is, as you get better, one of the things you realize is, whenever two creatures trade, it’s usually to somebody’s advantage. I mean not 100% of the time. But most of the time, it is better for one player than the other player for the creatures to trade. And the thing you have to learn is, if you’re the attacker, if it’s better to trade for you the attacker, you should attack. If it’s better to trade for the defender, then you shouldn’t attack. You know. But you have to understand when the trade is in your favor and when it is not.

And that to me—by the way, as someone who has played this game for a long time, learning that—and I’m still learning that. Well, this is fascinating. I mean I, for a long time, like one of the things that I tend to do is, to help me with growth as a player, is to figure out some part of the game that I know I’m not good at. You know like for example, one time I was like “You know what? I suck at mulliganning. I’ve just got to be more aggressive with learning how to mulligan.” You know. And I spent more time and energy when I was mulliganning, asking good players and saying “Do I want to mulligan this or do I won’t, and you know I spent some time thinking about mulliganning, and even then I still could be better. But, you know.

So one of the things I spent some time with is trying to figure out attacking. After the whole incident with the Kavu Titan, I’m like “Why… okay. How... what… where do I want to be, and what am I doing, and that—what I learned was like a lot of players, early on, that I was just—I was being timid. I wasn’t pressing where I could. You know. And a lot of times, by the way, if you keep losing games, with your opponent at low life totals, sometimes the answer is you just weren’t aggressive enough in attacking. And that—now. There’s dumb attacks too, and you have to learn about that.

But the thing I love about creatures is this conversation I’m having right here. There’s so much to learn, there’s so many interesting decisions about when to attack and not to attack that it adds a lot of strategic elements to the game.

Now another important thing about creatures is, they’re just awesome. I mean creatively they’re awesome. You know, that, for example, we always have packaging on things. You know, nowadays, we’re more likely to put planeswalkers, but before planeswalkers exist, what did we put on packaging? Creatures. Why not artifacts? Why not spells? Why not—why always creatures? And the reality is, creatures are just one of the most compelling things creatively we got. You know, I mean people love the zoo. I mean, it’s—creatures are just dynamic.

And they—I mean, one of the things is that creatures lend themselves to action. They lend themselves to being. I think that Magic is a visual medium because art’s so important to us. I think we just make creatures look awesome. You know, I think that it’s a lot easier to make creatures look awesome than look—you know, I mean, you can make beautiful landscapes, but at some point, you know, without something really dynamic to the environment, hey, a forest is a forest, you know, and it’s a pretty forest, but at some point it’s just a pretty forest. Whereas, you know, a creature you’ve never seen before, or something in action, I don’t know, it just—creatures really have a strong appeal.

And the other reason, like if I had to pick one creature—one card type, I’d pick creatures, is players love creatures. You know what I’m saying? It’s like no mistake that we’ve been pushing on creatures. I think they do a wonderful thing for the game. I think they add a lot of value and strategic complexity, both helping the beginner learn but also make the more experienced player have something to bite into and to get better at.

And on top of all that, they’re just beloved. They are cool. Creatively, you know, it’s just a very cool thing, you know, and like I said they’re very dynamic in the game because, you know, when you have a creature in game, the game is going to mostly end, you know, if one person has the creature advantage. And that makes the other person have to do something.

Like another thing, by the way, is the idea of a clock. It’s a term in game terms, which means “How many turns before I die?” I look at the board, whoever has the advantage, how much damage are they doing, how many turns before that amount of damage will win the game? So one of the things that creatures do is they provide a clock. Which I think is very valuable. You know. I think a game’s much more dynamic when you’re like “Okay, okay. In three turns, I’m going to lose the game unless I change something.” Because one of the things about game design is you want to push your game player toward action.

That’s another big gameplay thing. You want to encourage your game players into action. Action makes games fun. Doing things makes games fun. Not doing things—not particularly fun. You know, one of the reasons that we’ve been shying away from making counterspells so good, or at least—I don’t mind having counterspells be there as a tool, but the reason we’re not making a deck full of counterspells is—that’s a deck of inaction.

Inaction is not particularly fun for the guy playing against it. I mean maybe the guy playing it is having a blast, but we like Magic to be about action and not inaction. Because we like games. Games should be about action and not inaction.

Anyway. I have now parked, I am at Wizards, I’m excited we’re talking about creatures. But let me just wrap up. So, mostly what I want to say today is creatures are awesome, they do a lot for the game, they do a lot for, like I said, all these different elements of game design, they just make the game fun and exciting and dynamic and, you know, there’s a learning curve to understand how to use them. But they also, you know, you can make—if the board is nothing but simple creatures, that is not overwhelming but definitely still has depth to it in gameplay.

Anyway, creatures do so much awesome things. So that was my message today. My message in my thirty-minute drive is “creatures are awesome.” So anyway, hopefully you got that message. Anyway, I’ve got to go, so it was fun talking about creatures, and I’ll be back and at some point talk about the other card types. So, it’s time to go make the Magic.