8/16/13 Episode 47: Lessons Learned, Part IV

All podcast content by Mark Rosewater

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

Okay. Well, special edition today—we have what I call the Bread Truck Bonus! Yes, a bread truck is overturned on the freeway that I take to work. So I’ve been informed I cannot take my normal way to work. Which means I need to take a back way to work, which means, yes, yes, more show for you. Because I have to go the back way, and the back way, as you—I’ve done that before. I’ve done—I’ve done shows from the back way before, and it’s an extra—at least ten minutes.

So, bread truck bonus today. Which is a good thing, because I have a very flexible topic. Today is Part 4 of Lessons Learned! So for those that have never heard this podcast—or this series before, what I’ve been doing is, I went back and looked at all the sets that I’ve led, starting with Tempest and going forward, and then talking about what were the lessons I learned from that experience?

Because I think one of the most important things about doing a creative work is to look back and see what you’ve learned from each thing you’ve done. And that  even things that don’t necessarily turn out well often are very good teaching tools. And things that go well also can be teaching tools. I just think things that don’t go well—you get more motivation to learn why they didn’t work. So as I’ve talked about before, the mistakes tend to motivate you better. But successes can motivate you if you think to look back to see what you’ve learned, both positively and negatively.

So the first show I did Tempest, and then I did Unglued and Urza’s Destiny. The second show, I did Odyssey, Mirrodin and Fifth Dawn. And then the last show, the third show, I did Unhinged and Ravnica. Okay, today that means that we’re up to Future Sight.

Now, I did a whole—I did a three-part podcast on Future Sight, not that long ago, and that was me talking about how I put the set together. So the difference  by the way between the set reviews—or the set—whatever I want to call them, podcasts, and these, is that’s about how I made it, this is about how—what did I learn after the fact?

Now sometimes I sneak in a few lessons when I talk about the podcast—the podcast where I talk about the episodes. But—I’m sorry. The episodes of the podcast where I talk about making the sets. So—this—like, this really is about me sort of being introspective to say “What’s the takeaway?”

Okay. So, Future Sight. I’ve talked a lot about Future Sight, more so than most sets of the Lessons Learned. So, to recap, I mean I’ve talked about this  a bit, but let me—since I’m talking about my lessons learned.

The biggest lesson learned from Future Sight is the following. In fact, it’s a lesson that is true of not just Magic design, but of creative—creative works in general. The following dynamic often happens. You make something. It is successful. People like it. So you say, “You know what? I’m going to make more.” But now you feel like “Well, if I’m going to make more, I’ve got to add something to the process. You know, I can’t just make more of the exact same, I have to—I have to have something new.”

And so you make the next thing, and it’s like the old thing, enough that people still like it, but there’s a little bit of new stuff in it. And each time you make new stuff, you keep adding—just a little bit of new stuff because you want everything you sell to be something that people get excited about, and you want to have something new in it.

But the problem is, as time goes on, you get used, like, to the level—the baseline level that you start getting used to goes up. Because, you know, you start internalizing things, and just—you don’t even realize that things that once upon a time might have meant something, you know, that might have been complicated or at some level you’ve internalized so you don’t even think of them as a thing you have to worry about anymore.

Like in Magic, a good example is, when you first start playing Magic, creature combat is very, very complicated. And it requires a lot of thought about “Do I attack or don’t I attack?” With time, you just start internalizing some basic rules. You know. Like, you know, a very basic rule is, “If I have…” you know, “If my creature’s toughness is higher than your combined creatures’ power, odds are I want to attack.” I mean, there’s deathtouch and things that make that not true, but assuming we have vanilla creatures, and I have a toughness greater than your combined power, eh, I should attack.

Now, that’s not always true, and you have to read your opponent, and there are Giant Growths, whatever. But as a general rule of thumb, you kind of can look at the board, and if that’s true, you have shorthand in your head to go “Oh, that means I can attack.” Or, you know, just the idea that understanding your evasion or—there’s a lot of things that just—you internalize, and that might seem dirt-simple. Dirt-simple once you’ve played the game a lot.

But if you haven’t played the game before, it’s not necessarily that simple. That you had to learn it. And then what happens is, you get experienced, you kind of forget that you had to learn things. And so what happens is, is you kind of make your product, assuming that your learned knowledge is the baseline rather than no knowledge is the baseline. And so what that means is, if you keep kind of making things that seem to you as being of the same difficulty, but in reality you’re creeping up. You’re what we call complexity creep. That you’re making things more complicated.

And Time Spiral block kind of did this to us in general. Because what happened was—here’s a—let me talk about Time Spiral for a second. And then I’ll get to Future Sight. In Time Spiral, we said “Okay. We’re going to make some new mechanics. Oh, it’s all about time, so we’ll have suspend and split second and we’ll introduce flash as a keyword.” And you know, we had a few things. So we’re like “Okay, well we want—it’s the past, we want some nostalgia, so we’re going to bring some keywords from the past.”

And we said “Oh, cycling.”  You know. “Well, we know what cycling does. So that doesn’t count as a full, you know, full mechanic. And flashback. Well, you know, we’ve used flashback before.” We kept pulling mechanics, and we’re like “Well, you know, these aren’t as complicated as a normal mechanic. Because, you know, we’ve done these before. Some of them we’ve done multiple times before.”

But we ended up putting eight to ten, and like—a whole bunch of keywords. Some were actually--had words on them, some were keyworded, like thallids or slivers weren’t keyworded but were mechanics. And just sort of said to ourselves, “Well,” you know, “It’s okay. It’s okay. Because these—people know these.”

Now the funny thing is, would we have ever made a set in which there were ten keywords? Ten keywords? Like we were—we were nervous when we were doing Dragon’s Maze, which has eleven keywords, and that was at the end of a block in which we had built up to it. But just starting out, out of the gate, here is ten to twelve keywords. We would not do that in a fall set. We never would do that. Yet we did.

We did do it, and the reason we did is we fooled ourselves into thinking that somehow, some of the keywords didn’t really—they weren’t full keywords. But they were! To the person who had never played before, cycling is a thing you had to learn. Flashback is a thing you have to learn. You know. And so what happened was, that Time Spiral block in general was just us sort of like forgetting, like internalizing the baseline and just forgetting that there’s complication that we had learned but other people hadn’t.

Now, what Time Spiral—the set Time Spiral was to the rest of Magic, I feel like Future Sight was to Time Spiral. Okay? So like, Time Spiral had—I don’t know, twelve mechanics in it. Future Sight, I quoted this—I quoted this quote—this statistic when I did my Future Sight thing. So before Future Sight came out, there were fifty-six keywords in Magic. And Future Sight had forty-eight. Forty-eight!

We were worried—we’re worried about having eleven mechanics. Eleven mechanics. We’re worried. Honest to God, in Dragon’s Maze we’re like “Oh my God, that’s a lot, we’re really packing it full.” We were concerned in Dragon’s Maze on having eleven mechanics. Okay. Now, mind you, Time Spiral had, I think, twelve. Okay? And Future Sight had forty-eight! Now be aware, some of the ones I’m counting are flying and first strike.               So I mean, whatever. It had thirty-six or thirty. Only thirty new ones. Only three times the set that had us worried about how many mechanics are in it.

So anyway, we—the first lesson from Future Sight is that you have to be wary of what the audience doesn’t know. That you can’t—it’s very easy to do insular design, which means that you assume things that are known.

So for example, another example of this is something we call nesting design. What nesting design is, is you do something. Thing one. And then you do Thing Two, and Thing Two is dependent upon you knowing Thing One. And then Thing Three is dependent upon you knowing Thing Two, which is dependent upon you knowing Thing One. You know. And that they—they nest.

And so what happens is, that it’s very easy for the designer to go “Oh, these all make sense” because they understand all of them. But—this is really important. The way a trading card game works, and this is—when I talk about trading card games in general, it’s something to always remember. You do not control the order the audience will see your product in. That’s very unique. Very, very unique to trading card games.

Any other game, when I open up the box I’m going to see everything at once. You know. Or the box instructs you when you do things. Or if I’m playing a video game, I see the first challenge before I see the second challenge. It’s one of the huge advantages video games have is they control the order that you process information. Which makes tutorials very—much much easier in video games.

Anyway, you don’t—so when you nest things, let’s say you see Thing Five. You might not know Thing Four exists when you see Thing Five. Well, that’s the problem. And Future Sight was just nested up the wazoo. You know. And like I said, some of the new mechanics—for example.

Some of the mechanics that were new to Future Sight—not new to Magic, but new to Future Sight, existed not even by themselves, but solely on what we call “Mix and Match cards,” which was “Here’s mechanic A from the past, and mechanic B from the past. And we’re putting them together because they worked well together.”

Okay. So not only would mechanic A you’ve never seen before be complicated because you’ve never seen it before, not only would mechanic B be complicated because you’ve never seen mechanic B before, but the only time you see them is together combined.

And like I said. I mean, I consider Future Sight to be my—my art house design. It is—for—for the audience that gets it, for the invested audience that understands what it was doing, it was a thing of beauty. I mean, I—I really do love all the sort of intricacies that we put into it. But—but, I mean, and this is a big but, you know, I cannot make a set for a small niche part of the audience.

You know, supplemental products like Modern Masters kind of taught us that there is an audience that likes to have a little more complexity, you know, but that’s—that is a niche audience. That is not a large audience. And when we make expert expansions, they have to be for all the audience. Bits and pieces of it can be for different segments of the audience, but as a whole, everybody who plays Magic has to find something to love in every expert expansion.

That’s another giant challenge, by the way, in designing Magic, is that in some ways, I have all these different audiences that want all these different things. Yet every expansion has to deliver to every audience. Now, the cool thing is, every card doesn’t have to speak to every audience, but some cards have to speak to every audience. You know.

And—I mean, the lesson of Future Sight was, you know, we kind of designed for ourselves and players like us. The super-invested players. And for that audience, for that audience, I mean it—it was—a thing of beauty. You know, it was—I am proud of it. You know. But I mean, I—my metaphor is, I feel like, you know—because sometimes what happens is, you—you—when you—when you are designing something, you—you kind of—you keep wanting to sort of build off where you are. You know.

 For example, this is a very common game designer problem. Which is that game designers look at game design as a challenge of their game design skills. And that’s not what it is. You know. It’s very tempting to go “Oh, how do I do that? How do I crack that?” And designers just—and remember, game designers are game players, right? So this is like—game design is their game. That they want to crack it. You know.

And that one of the things you have to watch out for, that you have to be very careful of, is that, you know, that you have to… your job is not to make a challenge for yourself. Your job is not to make game design as fun as game design can be. You know. Your job is to make a finished product that serves your audience.

And that Future Sight might have been a blast to design, and yes for a small segment it was a blast to play, but for the vast majority of my audience it was a failure. Because it did not deliver something they could—they could use. You know.

And that—like there’s all sorts of fun things looking back at Future Sight, you know, and saying, “Oh, this is so awesome in that it was this neat challenge to make all these things work, and fit it in, and…” And like I said, it was, from a designer challenge, you know, let’s play the game of—it’s the Game Design Game. It was a lot of fun. I mean, in the sense that it was really challenging. You know.

The future-shifted cards especially were like “Make a card that Magic could have done—or sorry, could do, but has never done. Oh, and by the way, you know, you can repeat it once or twice, but mostly they have to be all new. Every new thing you’ve done has to be different from another new thing you’ve done. And then make this whole thing feel like it’s one cohesive set.” You know.

And the thing I did was I played into the whole future theme, but once again. If you’re not catching—it was a hard theme to understand if you did not get all the pieces. So a lot of the audience, not only do they not understand all the mechanics, but like they didn’t even get the theme. It just seemed like a jumble of cards.

Now, the other big lesson was in the future frames. So one of the things when you do design and you make changes, is that—oh by the way, I see a sign. So because there’s an accident on the freeway, the direction I am going is really, really crowded because everybody’s avoiding the freeway. So, anyway, for you guys to experience what I’m driving. It is—today is going to be a long one. I guess for the best for everybody. Oh, and I’ve been told the bread truck guy is okay. So. Nobody was injured. Which is good. I’m not—I don’t want anybody rooting for accidents for a longer podcast.

Okay, so, the other big mistake we made in Future Sight was when we made the future-shifted frames, we were really—I think enraptured in the idea of “What could we fix?” And in fact, in fact, I explained this during the Future Sight thing, the future-shifted frames were actually we tried to redesign the frame—or we did redesign the frames. In 8^th Edition. When we did the new frames. What we used for the Future Sight future-shifted frames was our initial proposal for the frames for the 8^th Edition frames.

And we were being a lot more radical. We were putting the—we were changing where the mana symbols were, and we just changed the whole look of it. And one of the things was, like if we could start over, there’s a bunch of things we’d change. One of which is the fact that probably having the mana on the left would have been the right thing from the beginning of the game.

But here’s the problem. You can only shift things too much. So, I just recently wrote—it just recently got published, but you guys have read it many weeks ago, because I do this way ahead of time, but I just did my article on communications theory talking about how you need comfort and surprise and completion.

And one of the things was, I think Future Sight had a lot of surprise, but it didn’t have enough comfort. And the future-shifted frames are a good example where we should not have moved the mana. I know it’s cool, for the people that get it, I know that as a glimpse of what we could have been, but the problem was, people have to use the cards. And even though it would be nice if all of them were on the left, they’re not. They’re on the right. And so it is hard to use ones on the left when most of your cards have it on the right. And so I think it was  a little too disorienting and it threw players a little too much.

And that one of the—so the other lesson of Future Sight in general is, comfort is important. That surprise is important, and Future Sight was chock full of surprise,  and it even had a lot of completion in that there’s—we did a lot of things people had anticipated, that we—look, we did, and we hinted at one day maybe we’ll do. But it was lacking in comfort. It’s like “Oh, I did—is this Magic? Why is this Magic?” You know. And it really felt alienating. So those are the two big lessons learned of Future Sight.

So let’s move on to Shadowmoor. Okay, so Shadowmoor—first and foremost, the biggest thing of Shadowmoor—Shadowmoor is a brown—a groundbreaking set in the following regard. Which is that—for example, when I was in film class, every once in a while I talk about how we’d watch a film, and like “What’s going on,” but my teacher would explain it. Shadowmoor is one of these sets that did something so groundbreaking that you—like, you don’t realize it at the time, but—so here’s what it did.

Here’s what it did that we had never done before. From Mirage, the introduction of the block—I mean Ice Age messed around but it wasn’t really—Mirage was kind of the start of what we call the modern block. For Mirage, all the way through Time Spiral, every year was a large fall set, a small winter set, a small spring set. Large small small.

Now, it was just the default. That’s how Magic was made. So what Shadowmoor did is it did something that happens in science that’s a pretty big deal. Which is—and not just science, but science is where you see it. Is where something is a given. It’s just a given. And so people—work off that as a given. And then one day, someone says “Hey hey hey! Is this a given?” And questions the very foundation of something that was just assumed to be truth.

The classic example might be Galileo. Right? Where it was just assumed that the Earth was—you know, the sun revolves around the Earth. Because the Earth was important, so clearly everything revolved around the earth. And one day Galileo’s like “Hey hey hey! Maybe the Earth revolves around the sun! I got a little proof that says maybe that’s true.”

Now, things didn’t go too well for him in the short term because people do not like change, that’s a universal thing. But he was correct. You know, he definitely identified the fact that they’d assumed something that wasn’t true. And Shadowmoor did that. Shadowmoor was my Galileo moment, where—so what happened was, the reason it got made, when I get into the podcast I’ll go a little more into this. When I do the Shadowmoor podcast.

Is I—the puzzle set before me was—we had done a fourth set with Coldsnap and Unhinged, and I said to Bill, “Let me try to design it so that I make the fourth set feel organic to the block rather than just as an extra add-on thing.” You know, that I wanted to make it more organic. And so Bill said “Okay, go—you know, (???) what is the word I’m looking for? Go do it.” You know.

And so I—set out to say “Well, how can I make a four-mana block work?” And I decided that stretching something to all four sets was just too much. That it—we already had issues with third sets, of stretching to third sets, and like we’ll never make it to a fourth set. So I came up with the idea of what if instead of one block, it was two mini-blocks? But in order for the mini-block to work and read as mini-blocks, I had to change and make large-small-large-small. Which meant the third set, the spring set, instead of being a small set, would have to be a large set.

And that… “What?! The third—the spring set, a large set?!” You know. And I questioned the very basic nature. And if for nothing else, if Shadowmoor did nothing else, it made us question the block structure, and we realized “Oh my gosh, we—we’re not—we’re not tied to large small small.

And that was huge. The idea that we could use the block structure itself to tell—to do the kind of design we wanted to do opened up all sorts of doors. You know what I’m saying? It did all sorts of things. And I think what you’re seeing now—I mean, Return to Ravnica, the most recent block, is a perfect example, where we did large-large-small because that’s what it needed to work. Like we couldn’t have done it without doing large-large-small. And we were able to because we’re like “Oh, okay, what does the block need to be? Well, let’s do that.”

And I think Shadowmoor, to me, one of the big lessons is, look, don’t always assume something is the way it is. That wonderful things happen when you question yourself. And Magic is a game that has to constantly reinvent itself, so—the big lesson to me of Shadowmoor is “Don’t assume anything is—is locked.” You know, that—that anything that—that—everything—you have to examine things, and—and be open to the possibility of change.

I’m not saying everything has to change. You know, I’m not saying, you know, we’ll take givens, but it does mean that things that we assume is true, we have to be able to question. And that some of the time, we have to realize that we can change things that seem locked.

And that’s important—that’s also important because part of our job as the guys who make Magic is to surprise all of you and do things you don’t think we’ll do. Well part of the way to do that is to take things that everybody thinks is a given, and show that it’s not a given.

Okay. Now. That was a good thing Shadowmoor did. I think the other lessons of Shadowmoor  were more constructive. So when we did hybrid, we introduced hybrid in original Ravnica block. Now, we do what we call the godbook study, which is market research where we go to players and we say, “What do you think? What do you like?” And we ask about all the things in the set.

Hybrid technically I wouldn’t actually call a mechanic, it’s more of a tool in that—I mean, it’s—it’s all words. But, I mean, it’s a tool, and that’s a tool that you use to do things. And we treat it a little differently. But nevertheless, for the purpose of the godbook study, we listed everything.

And so what was the number one thing people liked about Ravnica according to the godbook study? Hybrid. It—in fact, it beat out gold. You know, traditional, multi-colored cards. Which have always done really, really well. People like gold cards. Now given, it was hybrid’s first time out, it  was novel, but nonetheless, it scored the highest. Which said to us, “Okay, people—this really piqued people’s interest.”

So I said, “Okay. Well, let’s…” Like, when you have a mechanic, there’s two ways to use a mechanic. One is you can do splash with it, which is you do smaller amounts of it but you really push and make it exciting. And usually when something is new, it’s splashier. Next is you can use utility with the mechanic, where you can say “I can use as much of it as I need, and it’s not—the goal is not to be splashy, but just to be functional.” And you figure out how to build the design around that thing.

So hybrid in Ravnica was splashy. Hybrid in Shadowmoor, the idea was I wanted it to be utility. Let’s figure out how—my goal was, how much hybrid could I have? Basically, how high could I turn up the hybrid dial and what could I do with it?

So the problem was, I think, my metaphor for this one is, I feel like you came to our bakery. And we made you a special, like mini-tart. And you said “Oh, that is—that is the best mini-tart I’ve ever had. Mmm! I love that mini-tart.” And we said “Okay,” so you come back, you know, you come back a couple weeks later, and you say “Oh, I love the mini-tart.” And we give you, like, a twenty-pound tart. And go “Here’s the tart.” And you’re like “Oh, I liked the little mini-tart, but I don’t know if I want to eat twenty pounds of…” like, we just overwhelmed you.

And then the lesson of Shadowmoor is that if people like something at some level, you have to be like, you know, we just turned up the volume too much. Now, I’m not—I’m not upset we did the experiment. Sometimes I say we do something and it sounds like I wish we could have undone it. I didn’t want to undo it, I just—we learned something from it.

Which—and like I said, a lot of—I don’t mind making mistakes if the mistakes we make are brand-new mistakes. You know. I feel like my job as a designer is, I have to try new things. And if I’m afraid of making mistakes, my job will suffer. I mean, one of the—one of the big truisms that I’ve made about Magic is, the greatest risk to Magic is not taking risks. You know. That Magic—Magic is dependent upon us being willing to experiment with things.

So I’m—I’m not upset that I tried the experiment with Shadowmoor. In fact, I’m a huge fan—Shadowmoor-Shadowmoor-Shadowmoor draft is one of my favorite drafts of all time. But—and that will get us to the second theme in a second. So—anyway, lesson number two of Shadowmoor is there is (???) as too much of a good thing. That, you know, you can turn up the dial too high. And I think with Shadowmoor, we turned up hybrid too high.

Part of it was hybrid design is hard, and it forced us to push a little beyond what we should because it was hard to do. And another part was—just I think it was more special if it wasn’t overrunning you. This is the lesson—I also learned this lesson in Champions.

Champions is the set where we decided to have a legendary theme, and so I convinced everybody to make all the legends—all the legendary creatures at rare—all the creatures at rare in legendary. And it just became this special thing, but we did too much of it and too much of a special thing lessens in the specialness in that—not that you can’t up the volume, I think that’s okay. But you’ve got to be careful not to overdo it.

So the other big thing is, and I’ve written up—the draft reminded me of this one, is—so the set after us was Shards of Alara. So what had happened when we went to Ravnica, people loved gold. When we did Invasion, people loved gold. When we went to Ravnica, people loved gold. We knew the players really enjoy, you know, traditional multicolor cards.

And so we decided to try an experiment of instead of waiting four years to go back, that we’d wait three years. And so we went back faster than normal. And so the problem was, because I was doing hybrid, I said “Well, hybrid isn’t really multicolor.” Because I was very much in my designer brain. Because in my designer brain, I was like “Well, multicolor is and, and hybrid is or. Those are very different.”

But the problem is that a lot of times—this is a common mistake that designers will make is, and developers as well. There is a very different mindset to the behind-the-scenes crafting of something and the front view of it being done. You know. That when you’re making art, you are very aware of the nuances of what you’re doing. And what happens is, there are things that you, the designer see, that the audience is not going to see.

So here’s a perfect example. Let’s say we wanted to put buyback and entwine in the same set. Well, the designer in me, I’m like “Oh, no no no, those are both—those are both, you know, kicker variants. You know, both of them are spells in which you pay something, you pay extra amount of mana, and then you do something, you get the card back for buyback, but you—you combine the two effects for entwine.”

So, you know, in the designer mind, these are really close. But in the—in the player end, you know, on—not looking at how they’re structured and what they do, they’re very different. Buyback is all about repeating something. Entwine is about combining modal spells. Yet that from the consumer end, those—you know, those don’t seem quite as—as the same as they do from the designer end.

And a lot of times, when you’re designing something, that my problem was, I wanted to do hybrid, when I get to the Shadowmoor podcast, I’ll explain why it was so important. But I wanted to do hybrid, and I knew the next set was multicolor, but what I said was, “Okay, instead of playing up the multicoloredness of hybrid, I’ll play up the monocoloredness of hybrid.”

And what I mean by that is, I said “Okay. For example, normally in a draft you cannot draft—or, it’s hard to draft monocolor. You can do it. But it’s hard. And the nice thing about Shadowmoor draft was, normally if you—if you have five colors evenly spaced, twenty percent  of the cards can go into your deck. Because any one color makes up twenty percent of the cards. Assuming lands and artifacts are gone for a second. In this set, forty percent—in Shadowmoor, forty percent.

So you could draft either hybrid card that had your color. So you had twice as many cards that you could draft. Which meant you were enabled to draft multi—monocolor the way you never were able to do in any other set ever. And I was fascinated by that. But here’s the problem is, I’m like “Okay, I want to play up the monocolor aspect.

But I—but I was forgetting—look, a hybrid card has two colors on it. Literally—literally, you know, a red-green hybrid card is red on the left and green on the right, and the mana symbol is red and green. You know. The idea that I could sort of shift the—the thought process to it being monocolored rather than multicolored just didn’t take into account the end experience of how the audience is going to see it. You know what I’m saying?

In that I—one of the big mistakes with Shadowmoor was that—it’s one thing to do the—like, let’s say we did the (???) hybrid set and we did it the way you would expect to do it, and now we’re coming back. Maybe that’s the time where I do things a little differently than you’d expect.

But the first time you do something, you really need to play into the expectation of your audience. If your audience really would expect to see something, if you don’t do that, then you kind of confuse your audience. And I talked about this a lot, but this is a very important—I—I  talk about trying to use human nature to your advantage as a designer.

And one of the ways you do that is, humans have intuition. Humans are going to assume things. And the thing is, you can go into intuition, you can with the flow, or you can fight the flow. And my example there is, you know, imagine a strong gust of wind. You can walk against the wind, or you can walk with the wind.

Or another metaphor might be the walking sidewalk at the airport. The moving sidewalk. Is you can walk with the moving sidewalk, and if you walk with it, you feel like you’re The Flash. You zoom, you’re just going by, you’re going so fast. Or you can walk against it, and then you feel like you’re going nowhere. Right?

And I feel like intuition is that moving sidewalk. That—hey, walk with it. If you walk with it, things seem breezy. You know. That you the game designer are zooming along like The Flash. But if you go against it, you feel like you’re walking in place.  That yeah, yeah, you can walk against—against the moving sidewalk and eventually get where you’re going, but it’s a struggle.

And I feel like Shadowmoor did some of that. That I struggled—or, I—I mean, the reason I struggled was the obvious thing I couldn’t do. But if I couldn’t do the obvious thing, maybe the answer was I was doing the wrong thing. You know. And that’s a—that’s an important lesson to have, which is when you look back and say “Why didn’t you do the obvious thing?” “Well, I couldn’t do the obvious thing.” Well, maybe if you couldn’t do the obvious thing first, the choice of the thing you did wasn’t the right choice.

And that’s part of the way that I think about—about hybrid the first time out. I mean, the hybrid in Shadowmoor, was that if you’re going to blow out hybrid, that’s not the way we should have blown out hybrid. That we really went against expectations, and that that ended up burning us and it caused a lot of problems.

So, while we’re talking about going against expectations, let’s talk about Eventide.The second set. So I felt like in Shadowmoor, that I went with the ally hybrid colors. And I felt like “Oh, well, I’ve left out the enemy hybrid colors, and, you know, it worked really well in Invasion when we did the allies and then did the enemies,” so I’m like “Oh, well we’ll do our own little Apocalypse version for Eventide and now we do the enemies.”

The problem—the problem is, for starters, I was still stuck in the mindset of—that this is more monocolor than multicolor. And in my mind, “Oh, well if you’re drafting monocolor, hey, what does it matter?” Right? You know, that you can just—if I’m drafting black, well, fine. The first pack, I’ll have black/blue, and I’ll have black/red, oh and in the second pack I’ll hit black/white and black/green.”

But the problem was, if you weren’t thinking that way, that this just flew in the face of what you were expecting. So Eventide took a set in which—and the funniest thing was, I wasn’t caring about color, but yet the shift of Shadowmoor to Eventide was all about color. Right? It went from ally to enemy. It’s like, I made a shift that I put the focus on the thing that I wasn’t even focusing on mechanically.

And then the—the other problem was that as much as I tried to avoid the multicoloredness, I couldn’t. Because I just (???), so we ended up making cards that got rewarded for having both colors. Because it’s something that hybrid does well. And then I wasn’t even following my own guidelines of trying to do a monocolor thing. You know.

And so it was a mish-mosh. It was like the major thrust was trying to do monocolor stuff, but I had some multicolor stuff, you know, and then Eventide as a whole just went against expectation. And then—and this is a problem that we’ve solved since then. The other problem that we had was I wanted Eventide to matter.

And I was making such a radical shift in what it was doing because I was going to enemy color—sorry. Yeah, to enemy color hybrid, that here was my problem. It was the third set in a three set block. And you were going to draft—I’m sorry, not a three-set block. In a two-set block. But you still were going to draft large-large-small. Meaning you were going to draft a pack of Shadowmoor, a second pack of Shadowmoor, and then Eventide. You had one pack of Eventide drafted third.

Now, when Erik Lauer came up with the idea of drafting backwards, I was ecstatic. And why was I ecstatic? Specifically for things like Eventide. Because what happened with Eventide was, because we had themes that were different, we had to make them so loud so that they had a chance to maybe be played in Limited that it just overwhelmed things. And it threw the set off balance. You know. That we were trying so hard to make it work for Limited that it just threw everything out of whack.

And the reason I’m really happy that we draft backwards now is it says, if the third set has a theme, you get to introduce that in pack one. And players are aware of that in pack one. And they can choose to embrace it. And as long as your other two packs go along with the theme, then you can—the audience can draft that.

But if it’s reversed, if they don’t know about it until the end, well A., only the most knowledgeable players will even know to do it, and B. it’s very risky to draft for something you don’t know you will get. You can’t say “Okay, I’m going to do this,” and then in order for us to make people do that, we had to make it so loud that it just—it just—it muddled things up. And that one of my thoughts in general, about Rosewater Rumble, we seeded them. And Eventide was the sixteenth seed.

Fifteenth was Fifth Dawn. And it’s funny. Fifth Dawn’s problem was that I was kind of trapped in a block where everything was breaking around it. And all the things I wanted to do I couldn’t do. But Eventide was not. Eventide was me making decisions where I just made the wrong decision.

You know. Where, like I said, the shift into the enemy colors was bad, the forcing things so that you could try to play it in Limited ended up not working well—just the messages in general. It—it was a very unfocused set. As much as it needs to be. And that—I mean, I’ve done a lot of sets, and Eventide I think was my weakest design. You know.

And that—like I said, it’s important—that’s another very important lesson in general is, Eventide wasn’t an early design of mine, I’m, whatever, ten in or something. Eventide was like my tenth design. And it was probably my worst. And so one of the things that I also learned from Eventide is—you know, you can’t get comfortable. You know, that one of the things that’s very easy to do is for somebody like me, that’s like, who’s like, I’m on, you know, I’m working on my twentieth design or something like that right now.  It’s very easy to go “Eh, I know what I’m doing.”

But the problem is, Magic… one of the things that I love about Magic, one of the reasons that I’ve been doing this job for almost eighteen years is, it doesn’t get boring. And why doesn’t it get boring? Because every set is a challenge. Why is that so? Because the rules keep changing. What we’re doing keeps changing. That I can’t just rely on sort of skills of the past to get by. I have to keep resharpening my skills because each set demands me doing something different. You know.

And that that is a very important sort of, I don’t know, life lesson for me as a designer is that hey, yeah, I’m an experienced designer, but I—I have—I have to approach each set as if, you know, I—I can’t assume anything. I have to approach—I have to approach each set like, “Hey, this is a difficult set. I have to pay attention to this set. I can’t just coast.” That you can’t coast on sets. You know. That Magic is too hard to coast. And that—that was one of the big lessons of Eventide for me, is that, you know, you just can’t—you just can’t, as a designer, especially for Magic, like, every set’s hard. There’s no such thing as an easy set. You know.

And the funny thing is, I keep trying to do more and more with my sets. So not only is every set hard, but I keep raising the bar on myself because I’m like “I want to make Magic better and better.” And so I’m not happy merely doing what we did before, I always want to one-up.

So for those that matter, I’m now sitting in traffic, I’m close to work, but I don’t know how close I am to work because I am sitting in traffic. Meaning that I—I—today is a special long show for you guys. So—almost like a bonus—an extra bonus—we’ll see how long this ends up being.

But it is so long that I might have time to talk about the next set! I’ve never done four sets in one of these shows. But I guess I will today. So let’s get to Zendikar. So Zendikar—so Zendikar is funny, in that when I first started doing Zendikar, nobody really had any faith in it. I’ve talked about this during my Zendikar podcast.

That I was very intrigued on doing—having lands matter, and so it just became this very—it was an uphill battle because I had something I believed in that very few people believed in. In fact, the only person that to my face said, “I believe in you, I believe in this,” was Mike Turian, by the way. Who I did not give credit to in my Zendikar podcast. He’s the one person like, “I believe in you.” And everybody else was like “Eh, I don’t know, Mark.”

So lesson number one of Zendikar—oh, and here’s the funny thing. So literally like I am trying to pitch Bill about, you know, like why the set is an awesome set, and to Bill’s credit, I mean, he let me have time to demonstrate what I was doing. But I remember in the early days, you know, like having to defend to Bill what the set was.

Now flash forward to many years later, and Bill is like, talking to me about other sets, and he’s like, “Make it like Zendikar.” Like, Zendikar became like the go-to example of how Magic sets should be. And so it is very funny to go from the—a place in which I’m fighting to like try to prove it should exist to it being the staple in, you know, the—the sample that other sets are supposed to follow.

So lesson number one of Zendikar was, kind of, believe in yourself. And that—one of the things about my job that is—it’s one of the harder things, but I mean it’s something that I’ve embraced as being what my job is, is my job is to show people the future. And my job is to show people a future that is—is not a safe future, but is a risky future in the sense that my job is to keep taking risks. (???) this podcast.

And what that means is, is that I have to go and talk to the rest of the department and the rest of the company and say, “We should do this. And this thing, we’ve never done before, and there’s no sign that it will work.” But! I think it will. Meaning my job is to constantly, constantly take ideas that are risky ideas and convince people that they’re the right thing to do.

Now, if you follow my work at all, you will know the following theme, which is “Humans fear change.” They—as a species, and I talk about this in the comfort, humans—humans—humans are—humans need to change, but they don’t—they don’t handle change well.

And so a lot of times when I pitch something—and the funny thing is, like, you know, when I first pitched split cards, people were like “You can’t do that. You can’t change how a card looks.” Or I pitched Ravnica, and they’re like “Four-three-three? You can’t not have some of the cards—you know, some color combination in the set.” Or even for Zendikar, where I’m like “It’s about land.” “It can’t—you can’t have a set about land.” You know. And that—or double-faced cards.

Well, whatever. Just infinite “You can’t do that.” The number of times I’ve been told “You can’t do that.” And that it is my job to go “Yes I can.” You know. And that the thing that I always assumed, when I was younger, is I go “Well, I just have to do this enough times. I do it enough times, and people go, ‘well, you know, last time we thought it was a crazy idea and Mark said it would work. It did work. You know.’ And that it would become easier. That people would go “Well, Mark gets these crazy ideas, but, you know, hey, they tend to pay off, so let’s listen.”

And to be fair, I do get some of that. I—I get farther with crazy ideas than most people would. But—but, I still, you know, like Innistrad I had the double-faced cards, and, you know, there was a contingent in R&D, like, saying, “Absolutely, positively we should not be doing this.” You know. And the set was even in development by the time, like, some of the louder people were—and—but, I mean, it is the nature of the beast.

It’s the nature of my job. And, you know, it’s not—it’s not a fun part. You know what I’m saying? Like it’s—sometimes you have days where you get a little battled down. You know. Or you think everybody’s on board on something, and then four months in they’re like “Let’s question whether we should even do this.” And there’s days I go home where I’m like, “Really? Why do I keep doing this? Why?”

But the answer is I—I do love what I do, and every job has things that are harder—harder parts, but—anyway, one of the harder parts is, you know, and the lesson of Zendikar to me is, I’ve got to stick with my gut. I’ve got to defend the thing I believe in. And that—my track record is pretty good. You know, my gut is pretty good.

The other thing about Zendikar is New World Order happened kind of in the middle of Shards of Alara. But we retrofitted it in Shards of Alara. Meaning that we—we didn’t make Shards of Alara with it in mind. We just, after the fact, once we sort of solidified what we wanted, we went back and said “Well, what changes can we make?”

So Shards of Alara had some elements of it, but Zendikar was the first set where I sat down and just designed the set. And I knew of New World Order. And I had to embrace New World Order. So one of the—one of the also the big lessons of Zendikar in my mind was that New World Order really worked. That it’s—it’s one thing to come up with an idea, and I mean it sounded good in theory, but one of the big questions was, you know, can you make a compelling set that follows New World Order?

Because one of the fears was, well what if it doesn’t? What if, you know, it’s just not compelling enough? And what Zendikar taught us was “No, you really could.” Zendikar was a very fun, interesting environment, you know. I mean obviously, sets that follow it, you know, Scars of Mirrodin and Innistrad and stuff would also follow and also be very interesting sets, and so—but this was the first set. So lesson learned—Zendikar was the very first set that did it, and so the other big lesson of Zendikar was that New World Order could work. You know.

And—oh, here’s another—here’s another good important lesson. So when we were looking at land mechanics, we looked at maybe forty, fifty land mechanics. And what I realized was that for a while we were thinking of doing a mechanic in which spells had a—your land drop was part of the cost of the spell. So instead of—instead of playing a land, you could use it to cast this spell.

 And what we found was, it—people didn’t want to not play their land. People wanted to play their land. So we ended up flipping it around and saying, “Okay, well what if we reward you for playing a land?” And that was a—what I call, you know, a light bulb moment. Right? Where… “Bing!”

We’re on like, I understood the idea of intuition and playing to intuition so people understood things. But something that I—I mean I guess I understood on some level, but I—for the first time, very consciously understood it. When I made this decision about landfall was, players are happier when you reward them for doing things they want to do.

Now, that sounds so simple that it—“Really? It took you that long to understand that?” But it actually—it actually—it’s a pretty deep idea. That it sounds so blatantly obvious that it’s easy to not actually understand this concept, so I’m going to explain it. Because I’m sitting in traffic, so why not.

Which is, there’s a lot—part of making games is making challenges, and making people fight—fight to solve things. Right? That’s an important part of games, and you definitely want some of that in your game, where the audience has to kind of not do what they expect.

But that doesn’t mean that you can’t—so one of the things I talk a lot about is that you the game player will lead the audience wherever you lead them. Players will do what wins the game, not what is fun for them. And that is super important for game players—game designers to understand.  If you say “To win the game, you must do this boring thing,” they will do the boring thing, and then they will hate the game. You know. They will blame the game.

And rightfully so, they will blame the game. Because the game told them to do something. And they put their trust in the game. Because when you sit down to play the game, you’re like “I want to have a fun experience. I will assume the person who made the game know what they were—knew what they were doing.” And, you know, as a game designer, you have to be able to—to make a game that allows the audience to do what is fun for them.

Now that doesn’t mean you don’t—you can’t fight against expectations or you can’t sometimes make them find fun where they didn’t realize fun was, but—and this is important. If you make your audience do something that they don’t want to do, or won’t enjoy, you better have a really, really good payoff.

Because what happens is, at the end of the game, the—pretty much this is the—my—this is my—here’s how you determine whether or not you have a good game. I, new game designer, have made a game—how do I determine if my game is any good? And it’s very easy. Play a game with somebody. At the end of the game, say to them, “Do you want to play again?” If they say yes, maybe you have a good game. If they say no, you do not. It’s that simple. If somebody does not want to play your game a second time, you are doomed. Doomed.

Because a good game makes the audience want to play the game again. In fact, I talked about this in my Ten Things Every Game Needs, but I’ll—once again, it’s important, so I’ll stress it. You want to end your game when your audience still wants to play it. Not after they’re done playing it.

Meaning—let’s say the game—the actual amount of time I want to play a game is—of this particular game is twenty minutes. If you stop at fifteen, I’m like “Oh, that’s awesome. I want—let’s play again.” Because I’m still eager, I still want to play it. You ended the game before I wanted it to end. But let’s say you go to twenty-five minutes. Well, I’ve sat there for five minute going, “When is this game going to end?”

In the first game, I’m like—I’m nipping at the bit. Like, I want some more of the game. The second game, I got my fill, and I’m like “Eh.” And then I—and then, remember. People remember things from the last experience they have of it. Okay? Well—and—people can experience from the height of something. But—meaning if I go on a—if I go to the beach for the day, and I injure myself in the middle of the day, probably going to remember the injury because that’s the highest level thing.

But assuming nothing stands out, I tend to remember the last thing. And so if you play a game, if the ending of your game—even if the game was exiting. It was thrilling, exciting, the first twenty minutes, things were awesome. But the last five minutes were boring? People walk away from the game going “That game was boring.” Even though eighty percent of the game was not boring, that they tend to walk away with their experience because they ended with the—their thought when they ended the game is “This game is boring.” And so Zendikar taught me this lesson, which was—like I said, a very important lesson, which is try to let your players do what they want to do. Make the game about your players doing the things they want to do. And one of the things, for example.

When I was trying to do tribal in Onslaught, when I was trying to pitch the idea that Onslaught should be a tribal set, my argument for the time—at the time was, people like making tribal decks. They suck, and that’s how you know people like making them. Because people keep making them although they suck. You know?

And that one of the signs that I point out is, when you see decks that people keep doing, even though they’re horrible, you know there’s something there. There is something there. Because people would not keep doing it if they were that bad unless there was a reason. And the reason is—this thing is fun. You know, tribal decks are fun. Not for everybody, but for the audience that likes tribal decks they’re a lot of fun.

And the lesson of Zendikar was taking that lesson I sort of learned from Onslaught and sort of pulling it in and saying “Hey, that’s not just true about—about mechanics or about decks, that’s true about every card.” You know. And that if I wanted to make somebody love a card, the card has to do something that that player wants to do.

Now, once again,  not cards for every player, maybe I do something where a card does something that you don’t want to do. Maybe the card’s not for you. You know. But if I make a card, you know—and like for example, Doubling Season is—one of my favorite cards I’ve ever designed. You know why? I made Doubling Season for myself. And people like me. And I said, “You know what? I love counters. I love tokens. I love doubling things. You know what would be the most awesome thing in the world? That all my counters and all my tokens are doubled. That would be awesome!”

And I made a card that you honest—I made it out of love for something I as a game player just loved. And you know what? I don’t think when I made it, that I—I quite understood how many people would love it. I just understood that I would love it, and I knew there were people like me. And I said “Oh, well, to me this was so exciting to me that if I just excite some people, hey, it’s worth doing.” And it turned out to excite a lot of people. And so it ended up being a great card.

So anyway. I am actually here at work, and this is a record. This is the longest podcast I have ever done. At 51 minutes. So anyway, I hope you enjoyed the extra-special bonus of the Bread Truck Bonus, and I hope you enjoyed my fourth Lessons Learned where I talked about four things! That’s a new record, although the accident helped.

Anyway, but it is time for me to get to work, I’m a little late, so thanks for listening in, and it’s time to go make the Magic.