6/7/13 Episode 37: Lessons Learned Part III

All podcast content by Mark Rosewater

Okay, I’m pulling out of my garage. We all know what that means. It’s time for another episode of Drive to Work.

Okay, today, I’m going to do Part 3 of the Lessons Learned. So for those who have not heard the first two, it’s a—it’s a series I’m doing where I’m looking at all the sets that I have done and evaluating them to see what lessons I can learn from their design.

So today—previously, previously on… Drive to Work—the first time I talked about Tempest, Unglued, and Urza’s Destiny. Last time I talked about Odyssey, Mirrodin, and Fifth Dawn. So we are up to Unhinged.

So Unhinged was a very valuable lesson. Unhinged was interesting. So what happened was, a little history here of silver-bordered products. So we made Unglued, Unglued came out. At first it looked very successful, and so they—we—right away rushed into an Unglued 2. It was tentatively called Unglued 2: the Obligatory Sequel.

And then it turned out that Unglued, we had misjudged how much demand there was, and we had overprinted it, and anyway, it ended up not doing well compared to what we had printed. And so they put it on hiatus. But many years later, Randy Buehler—who at the time was my boss—came to me and said, “I think it’s time to make another Un set.”

And it had been a while, I think there was a gap of six years between the two sets? And so the first Unglued was mostly me with lots of people suggesting things. There was sort of—it was not a traditional design team. It was more like I was there doing things and getting a lot of input from lots of different people. Unhinged was a much more traditional design group.

And I think the lesson I learned from Unhinged—there’s a couple lessons. The first one is, the mistake that is the gotcha mechanic. So for those that might not know Unhinged, gotcha—gotcha said, “If I’m in your graveyard, and your opponent does this thing, and this thing could be all sorts of things, you may say “Gotcha!” and you get it back.

Some of them were verbal, they said certain things. One of them was laughing, one of them was saying numbers or flicking your cards. Or—just different things. And the problem with gotcha mechanic was, and I talked about this a little bit in my Lessons 2 podcast, so we played with it. And it was fun. It was a fun mechanic.

But when someone—the problem was, the team that was playing with it—we weren’t playing it as a Spike, essentially. We weren’t—we weren’t trying to min-maxing, we weren’t trying to like, you know, win at all costs. We were trying to have fun. And so what happened was, the gotcha mechanic, when you’re just kind of goofing around and having fun, you know, it’s like “I’m going to keep talking, but I’m going to try not to say this thing.”

But the reality is, the actual way to win if your goal is to win, is “Oh, I get punished for saying things? I will not talk.” “Oh, I get punished for laughing? Well, I better never laugh.” You know. So what happened was, the mechanic made people clamp down, and sort of not participate as much. And not have as much fun.

And so I’ve talked about this many times, but I mean this is kind of what I really learned this lesson, which is “You can make players do whatever you want. But you have to think about how they’re going to do it.” You know. You have to assume people are going to try to win at all costs, and like “Okay, well what happens when I put my mechanic through that grinder? What does it make people do?”

And the gotcha mechanic basically made people have less fun. It’s like, “You want to win? Have less fun.” And that was a huge problem. And so—I mean, one of Unhinged’s biggest mistakes was that it—I think we relied on the gotcha mechanic which sucked a lot of fun out of it. That was in my mind the biggest mistake.

Another thing that we had done, and we did this on purpose is, Unglued was a little more silly. And so we tried on Unhinged to be a little more sophomoric. To cut the fine hairs of comedy. And so it was a little more, you know, like, that’s where the ass jokes came from. So in the set there was donkeyfolk. And all the donkeyfolk had “ass” in their name. You know, “ass” as in “donkey,” but they were all puns, you know, “Smart Ass,” “Dumb Ass,” “Fat Ass.”

And it… in retrospect, I mean I kind of feel like Magic is a little better than that, like that style of humor.  I mean, there were people obviously who enjoyed it, and I mean it was fun. But I feel that, like, it wasn’t really Magic’s sensibility, that it was a little—I mean I love Un sets, I think Un sets have a really good place in Magic, but I feel like we kind of lowered the humor a little bit more than we needed to, and I felt like that didn’t work out great.

We also had a mechanic that—the half mechanic, where I had fractions, and the reason I included it was I thought that I was trying to find some simple things that we could do, like Little Girl for example was—cost half a white, and was a (1/2)/(1/2) creature. Well, that’s pretty simple. That’s a vanilla creature, in a—you know, in a—a silver-bordered vanilla creature. Those are hard to come by.

The problem was, it turned out that tracking fractions was a lot harder than people realized, and so what I had included to be something that was just simple, to, you know, make things a little easier, actually caused—caused it to be a little more complicated. And not necessarily in a fun way. It’s like, you know, “You have eighteen life, and you get hit by three and a half damage.  What are you at?” Like, “Uh… uh…” You know.

And, I mean, yes, you can get there, you have to stop and think for a second, you’ll figure it out. But t’s just something that kind of, your brain doesn’t naturally process super-easily. Unless you’re super-mathy. And so it ended up having the negative—the opposite effect of what I wanted.

Now that said, I—things I did learn about Unhinged that I was very happy with, is we messed around with sort of doing more minigames, we definitely—I like a lot of the stretching I did of sort of taking known mechanics like, you know, super-haste or things where I’m trying a different version of them. I mean obviously the slug went on to be the pacts from Future Sight. The—Old Fogey and Blast from the Past, which were cards that mixed and matched old mechanics, both were created by Mark Gottlieb, that clearly inspired, you know, the mix and match from Future Sight. In fact, it’s funny because we joke that Future Sight was Un 3, and a lot of Un 2 influenced Un 3.

And the other thing that I learned about Unhinged was that I feel that where Unhinged thrived, I think—we tried hard to connect some stuff and mechanics, because when Unglued was made, it was just like a hodge-podge, and I wanted it to—I mean, Unglued wasn’t made for Limited, where Unhinged was very made for Limited. And I was trying to give it a little more cohesion.

I think some of the stuff I—worked, I actually liked how the “artists matter” stuff worked, and the thing I most enjoyed about Unhinged was there was very solid card-by-card designs, that there was a lot of very neat things.Now, not all of them necessarily were understood, and part of doing a silver-bordered set is messing in an area that’s fuzzy a little bit, so people have to kind of figure out what’s going on, but I was really happy that there was a lot of just really cool individual cards in Unhinged.

And so that—I mean, the lesson I walked away from is, that when you’re trying to go outside the box, when you do something a little different, that you have to be careful to allow it its own movement. That sometimes what you do is, when you’re trying to make something, you follow the things you’ve done before. And like “Okay, I’m making a Magic set. What are the rules about a Magic set?”

And I think in Unhinged, I tried very hard to adopt the rules of how Magic are done to Unhinged, and I think some of it was successful, but some of it kind of made the set not do what it wanted to do because a silver-bordered set works differently than a black-bordered set. And one of the big lessons for me was, you had to learn to let things be what they wanted to be.

And I feel like—like I said, one of the trickiest things about doing a silver-bordered set is, that the constraint of “You can’t do this in black border,” which is one of the main constraints of a silver-bordered set, is very challenging. Yu know. That at common, you want to be able to do things that make sense at common. But, you know, what’s simple enough that it makes sense at common, but different enough that it is a silver border and not a black border? And so, like I said, I—Unhinged for me is, it’s not a complete miss, but I definitely made some huge mistakes that I learned from.

Okay. Next we got—Ravnica. The lessons of Ravnica are interesting. So, I think Ravnica is where—I mean, what happened was,  had taken over as Head Designer, in the middle of Kamigawa  block, but that had already really—the momentum of that had already happened. And so Ravnica block was where I got to start fresh.

And I went into Ravnica block wanting to have more cohesion. And so I think the lesson of Ravnica block—well, there’s a couple lessons. One was that the audience very much connects to cohesion. You know. That once you make a structure that the audience understands it’s a structure, that—I mean, I talk about this a lot, but humans not only like structure, they crave structure. The human brain just wants to structure things.

In fact—here’s an interesting thing I learned. When I went to Communication school, I had to take a class in aesthetics. And what that is, is the brain—I used to call it “the science of beauty,” but what it means is, there’s this idea that, you know, art is completely subjective. You know. That each person likes a different thing.

And what science kind of said is, no no no, the brain is hard-wired so that certain things are just attractive to the brain. There’s certain things that humans crave, and that if you’re going to understand sort of the appeal of things, look. Let’s study how the brain works because there are certain aesthetics that just will feel more natural to humans. You know.

And that one of the tenets of aesthetics is, humans crave balance. That they—sorry. They crave completion. They do crave balance. But they crave completion. And that they want order to things. So the idea is, if you take a picture and you just randomly splatter dots on the picture, and then you show it to a human, the human brain wants to see something in those splatters of dots. Is it a face? Is it a—it’s like looking at clouds, you know, the humans just want to see something. You know.

And it’s funny that how we look at random patterns, your brain will just connect the patterns. You know, it will find ways to make the things mean something. And that one of aesthetics is saying “Look, that’s—the brain is going to try to make things matter. It’s going to look for structure. So when it finds structure, it latches on, because the brain craves structure.”

 And Ravnica really—it’s funny, because when I went to school, I went to Communications school, Boston University, college of communications, class of ’89, and one of the things that they really communicated to us was that, you know, communication is about understanding how humans function. That if you want to be good at communicating, you better understand how humans receive information. And, you know, the Aesthetics class was like “Look! People like, you know, synergy and balance and completion and structure and—there’s things humans just need.  And if you are going to do your job as a communications person, you need to be using those tools to help you.”

And so a lot of block structure, when I sort of took over as head designer, I said “Look. I want to embrace it.” You know. For example, when I started the website, well—I did a whole podcast on this, I think, where I talked about how the website—or I did an article on it. How the website started. And essentially, you know, the high end said “Magic doesn’t really have a good website. We need a good website.”  And that got passed down to Bill, who was the VP, and Bill passed it down to me because I had the Communications background.

Well the way I made the website was, I said, “Let’s just apply every rule to Communications that I know, you know, and do stuff like have regular schedules so people can, you know, expect things, and just play into the nature of how humans function.” And one of these days I will do a Communications podcast because it’s a cool topic.

I did the same thing when I took over as Head Designer, I said “Okay, let’s apply the same technology to how sets are structured.” You know. And if you notice, one of the things that we’ve been getting better at, and Ravnica was like the big lesson of this, is “Look.” You know, “If you build a structure, they will come.”

And that when I first proposed it—I mean, if you think about it in a vacuum, what I proposed during Ravnica was a little radical, I said “There’s ten color pairs. We’re going to have a set. We’re going to do four of them.” “How about the other six?” “No.” Now, at the time people were like “What do you mean,” and what I would say is “No no no. You’re thinking too much of the sets. If all we made was that Magic set, yes, players would be screaming from the rooftops “What do you mean there’s no other colors? Where are the other six colors? How did we not include them?”

But that’s not what we did. What we did was present it to them as a whole block. And by presenting it as a whole block, what we say to them is “Okay, you understand that you’re not getting it here, but that means you’re getting it later.” You know. And that using that—I mean, taught me a lot about how, you know, if you want to build something, like once upon a time, blocks were just a collection of things. Like you made a set. And then you made another set. And then you made a third set. And you would evolve what came before it, but you weren’t planning it out.

Here’s another way to look at it is that when you write soap operas, and by soap operas I mean any ongoing storyline in which—I mean, comic books are soap operas in this regard, just an ongoing storyline where there’s a big—different people, and the story never really ends. That’s the key to a soap opera. It just keeps going. I mean, comics are the same way, where, you know, Superman’s been in the comics for eighty years, ninety years, and like, it’s not like he solves his problems and things are done. No, no, the same cast of characters keeps coming back.

When you plot episodic, soap-opera-ish things, there’s two ways to do it. One method is, that you make a lot of open-ended things. You just keep going “I’m not sure what’s going to happen, but I’ll keep—oh my God, somebody kidnapped… his uncle! Who is it?” And, you know, we’ll leave it—and you make hooks. So that later on you can come back and you can connect on to the hooks. And when you have an incident happen, you know, when, you know, something happens, you don’t necessarily always know the results of it. But you laid hooks down so that later you can tie onto those hooks.

A second way to do it is the plotting method, where it’s—when, you know, when Joe’s uncle gets kidnapped, you know who kidnapped his uncle. You know exactly, you know, you know the outcome of that. Now the reason hook plotting is very popular is, it takes less work up front. You know. It’s like, “I plan it, leave hooks, later on I’ll solve it later.” And if you’re trying to do something quickly, it allows you to do it faster.

But, the downside is, the plotting version has a lot more… it just feels better. You know. And the thing I talk about, so like—I love when you’re watching something and something happens and you’re like “Oh, wait a minute. Four years ago, they said this! This is this!” You know. Now, you can do that same event with backward plotting with hooks. Sometimes.

But the best stuff—like, one of the things I loved about Scars of MIrrodin was, we knew in Mirrodin that the Phyrexians had invaded. And we laid down very subtle clues, not enough that it drew much attention, but when we were able to go back, people could go “Oh my God, they were there the whole time.” You know. That was awesome. I love doing stuff like that. And, I mean, what Ravnica said is, “Let’s do more plotting. Let’s kind of think out where things are going.” And that got us to start doing that way intra-block, within the block, it got us to start to do that way between blocks, where we’re more conscious of where things are coming and we’re working ahead and knowing what’s coming next and trying to make things work together. So Ravnica taught me that.

Ravnica also taught me another thing, which is if you look at the mechanics in Ravnica, I’m not saying there aren’t some good mechanics. But they are what I think of as Tier 2 mechanics, meaning they don’t need to take up as much space. A Tier 1 mechanic has to fill a lot of space. And usually in Magic, before Ravnica, like, the key mechanics were the Tier 1 mechanics. You had a couple mechanics where they filled a lot of space.

So along comes Ravnica, and I’m like “Well, let’s try a different approach.” Because I needed to do 4-3-3, I knew I needed to do ten mechanics. So I said, “Okay, I can’t do big mechanics, let me search for smaller mechanics.” And what I found was, I got to find a whole different set of mechanics that had a different, like, set of criteria. You know.

For example, there are a lot of mechanics where you’re like “I can do, you know, eight to twelve maybe of a card, maybe fifteen if I stretch it, but I can’t make a major mechanic. I can’t make a Tier 1 mechanic. But oh, it’s an awesome Tier 2 mechanic.” And that finding the spaces for that really helped.

The other big thing that I really learned from Ravnica was that—before, before, if you go back in Magic, the focus was always on mechanics. And, like, it was always about what the mechanics were. And what I realized is not that the mechanics weren’t good, not that I didn’t like the mechanics, but the mechanics served a higher purpose. The set wasn’t about the mechanics, the set was about the theme, and you know, it was about the guilds. And the mechanics served the guilds. The mechanics weren’t the forefront, they were down the road. They served another purpose. You know.

And something I think—I think that is fascinating, in that the idea—like, I think that shifting mechanics from being the forefront marketing to being one of the tools. Now, obviously we market with mechanics. But literally once upon a time, “What’s the new set?” “Here’s the two mechanics.” That’s how we sold sets. And now, it’s about “What’s the set?” “It’s about this thing. It’s about the guilds. It’s about a war between the Phyrexians and the Mirrans. It’s about, you know, a world torn by, you know, monsters, eating away at the humans.” You know, like you’re trying to set some structure that it’s about something. That it’s not—the mechanics serve a purpose, and they’re not just there to be there.

So—what else did I learn from Ravnica? The other thing I learned from Ravnica was—I think that, it’s funny, that I’ve always definitely been one to sort of go with my gut. But Ravnica’s also the set where—I think what happened over time was, I more and more embraced sort of being what the set was, and I think that Ravnica was the first set where, like, I went full throttle. Like, I look at something like Odyssey, and I’m like “Yeah, it was a graveyard set, and it definitely committed to being a graveyard set, but I wasn’t so defined what it was.”

And Ravnica was the set where, like, “I know what this set is. I know what it’s about. I—like, it was very crystal clear the essence of what it was. And I think that it taught me—like, once I saw the reaction, it’s funny, at the time when I did Ravnica, that Time Spiral was coming up next. And I thought Time Spiral was going to be the be-all, end-all, like the set to end all sets.

And Ravnica I was like “Oh, well, I think this is good, but, you know, you know, I mean I don’t (???) Time Spiral, and Ravnica just, you know, went gangbusters, and I think that I, it made me realize that, you know, identification is important, that giving people sort of something to connect to, it made me realize even more the power of the color wheel, that like the colors were so powerful that all you had  to do was get two colors together, and that like meant something. And it had a relationship. And it had a feeling. You know. And that—the power of that. The potency of that. You know, the idea of saying…

Because one of the things that we had done is, we’ve committed very hard to making the colors mean something. You know. And like I said, I am a color pie guru. I love the colors. And I want the colors to have identity. And what Ravnica set is, “You know what? The colors are so awesome that there’s a next layer that you can go to. That you can say ‘Okay, red means this, and green means that. But what happens when red and green get together? What does it mean?” You know. “What if red’s with white, or with blue, or black?” You know.

And that each one of those, each one of those ten combinations took on its own identity. Which was, I mean, very potent. And I think—the funny thing is, like what happened during Ravnica was, I had dictated two-color pairs. But Brady brought to the table the idea of this guild identification. Of the guilds. And that once we went down that path, that’s like ‘Oh, well let’s apply color philosophy to color pairs,” I was like “Bam!” It was exciting.

And the thing that was funny is that I was really excited—this is what happens sometimes when you’re a designer, which was it was playing right into my wheelhouse, which was I love color pie. I love color pie philosophy. So it’s like “Oh, oh my goodness,” it’s like “Figuring out what red and green do together? What black and white do together?”

I was like fascinated. And I was a little worried, I’m like “Well, I’m fascinated, but… well, will other people be as fascinated? Is it just me?” You know, because I love the color wheel. Is this just, like, you know, because sometimes you second-guess yourself, because you’re like “If I… is it something that I personally love that wouldn’t be general?” You know. Because like I’ve talked about this before, that one of the things you have to be very careful about is understanding your biases. Because your biases will influence you, and that’s okay, but you need to offset them, you need to understand them. So that your biases are checked, essentially.

And that was the set where definitely I was trying to check against my own bias because I loved the concept. But it turned out that, the very thing I loved was really what people loved, that self-identification is an important part of the game, I mean the color wheel has always done that.  But like the guilds allowed it in a little more fine-tuned way, that having ten, that had a little more nuance to them. A little better.

I mean obviously down the road we’ll have shards, and we started experimenting with three-color, but I don’t think three-color ever quite had the passion of two-color. I think two-color… three-color has a lot of leaders going on, where two colors it’s pretty clear. Like what each two-color represents is very clear. Where three colors, it’s a little muddier. I mean, what we did in three-color world was we made a center color, so it was about the center color and how the allies shared the essence of the center color. It’s a little bit different. Meaning a three-color in which they’re all equally shared.

What else can I say about Ravnica? I mean Ravnica also taught me—it kind of taught me the, the idea of using things as glue. This is a concept I haven’t talked too much about. Which is, when you’re building a set… maybe glue is a bad metaphor. So I’m going to use a Lego metaphor. So… although Lego doesn’t quite do the job…

So imagine you’re building something in which some things… some things you can attach to, and some things need to be attached. So essentially the way to think of this is, some things stand as a base. And that you can—that they’re… okay, I’ll use my glue metaphor. That they’re sticky. That you can… you can stick things to them. And other things, they themselves aren’t sticky. They need to be stuck to a sticky thing. I guess this metaphor’s not necessarily going the way I want it.

What I’m trying to say is, certain elements of a design essentially work well with other things, and other things need something to work with. And that, in a set, you need to make sure that you have the glue within the set. Which is, in a design, that there are… I’m not doing the best job explaining this! In the design, there are… okay. I’ll change my metaphor.

Imagine… okay. I’m an architect. And I… I, the lead designer of the set, am crafting my building. Now Development will later have to actually, you know, assemble everything, but right now I am crafting what it is. And so, some things are decorative, and some things are bearing. So we look at walls, there’s decorative walls and bearing walls.

What a bearing wall is, is this wall is holding up the building. You know, if some person goes, “I want to move a wall,” and they move this wall, that would be bad news, the building comes tumbling down. Other walls are decorative walls, which means they’re there, they have a purpose, they’re separating a room, but they’re not doing the job of holding up the building. And what you—what’s important is, when you are building your set, you need to understand your bearing walls from your decorative walls. You know. Some mechanics bear the weight of the set design, and others do not.

And this is something I talk about a lot with Development. Because what will happen is, when you take a set and you turn it over to Development, they will goof around with it and try to figure out how to improve it. You know. You have your blueprints and they’re going to try to improve it.

Sometimes, what they’ll say is “Oh, oh, oh, this wall’s in the wrong place, it’s too confined, we need to open it up, or whatever, and we need to knock down this wall.” And my job as the lead designer of the set is to either say “Yeah, no problem, you can knock down that wall,” or “No, no, no, no, no, don’t knock down that wall. That’s a bearing wall. Don’t knock down that wall.”

And that what Ravnica really taught me was to get a good sense of where—to separate what were the decorative walls from the bearing walls. And that I think early on when I designed, I—I mean, I might have intuitively understood it, but I… I didn’t intellectually get it as much. And

Ravnica helped teach  me this, is the idea that—understand what your bearing walls are. You know. And that a lot of what happened in Ravnica was, I was defining everything by the guild, and so I said “Okay. Well what must I have to define the guild? How do I make sure there’s a set, that the guilds come across.” And the guild mechanics were decorative in the sense that if one guild mechanic didn’t work, I could swap it, but the existence of the guild mechanics as a structure, that was a bearing wall.

I mean, I couldn’t not give Dimir a mechanic. You know. If transmute had not worked out, I could have changed something else. We had another mechanic, and we changed it to transmute. You know. And that—I think Ravnica did a very good job of making me understand the idea of what is bearing from what is decorative. And—and that has served me immensely.

Especially with—I talk about this a lot. Magic is an interactive creative experience. You know. That—interactive is the wrong word, but it’s a group experience. It’s not one person making something. You know. I’ve written stories before, and when you’re writing a story, especially something that’s going to be read, like, I have control of everything. You know. And I might have an editor read it later, but I am crafting the story, and the story I want to tell is the story that will be told. You know.

And that’s not true in Magic card design. In Magic card design, I have a vision, but once I pass it along to Development, their job is to make the vision the best—is to fine-tune. You know. Keep to my vision, but fine-tune the execution of the vision. You know, how it’s going to be done. And that—a big part of doing that is understanding so I can explain to Development when there’s a bearing wall and when there’s a decorative wall. Meaning when they want to change something, I have to understand when changing that thing will be problematic or not. Because as the architect, I have a much better understanding of the infrastructure of what’s going on. You know.

And that—anyway, like I said, one of the lessons of Ravnica was getting a better sense of understanding infrastructure. Because—because I used the guilds as my infrastructure, and the guilds are a little more noticeable. I mean what happens sometimes is, sometimes your bearing walls are bright and loud. In Ravnica, the bearing walls were the guilds. It was loud. You know what I’m saying? It was hard for the Development team to miss that. It was very loud. Sometimes your bearing walls are much subtler. You know, what’s important is much subtler. And so starting with Ravnica where I had very vocal and clear sort of bearing walls to see, it was a very good teacher because it helped me understand that. So.

But anyway, I am now at work, and I’ve gotten through two! This will go on forever! So I got through two this time, so there will be some future—not next week, but there will be some future lessons I’ve learned. So anyway, this was Lessons I’ve Learned #3, I hope you enjoyed it, and it’s time to go make the Magic.