1. All podcast content by Mark Rosewater

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

    Okay. So, I do these ahead of time, so sometimes it’s hard to plan. But if my math is correct, some time somewhat recently, I just wrote my 600th column of Making Magic. Okay, technically I had my 600th week, since not every week I write a column.

    But anyway, 600 weeks is still quite the accomplishment. I have figured out that I have written two million words in my column. Two million words! Which is pretty impressive in the sense that I don’t know how many people in their life write two million words, and I managed to do it just about designing Magic in this column.

    So yeah, today I’m going to talk a little bit about my writing and my column, and… I don’t know, just share some stories and talk a little bit about the ins and outs of doing a column. So, let’s do a little background. I’ve talked before on the podcast about how I got my foot in the door at Wizards, and that was through writing. And puzzle-making, I guess. But pretty much my start at Wizards was—had to do with my writing.

    I—my background is writing, I’m a pretty strong writer, and I was able to turn things in on time and I came up with good topics and so I ended up writing a lot of stuff in the early days. Eventually, by the way, I—or pretty early on, I had a Magic puzzle column called Magic: The Puzzling, and then I started writing a column that was an answer column called Magic Tricks.

    And I had some fun in that column, for those that have ever read that, I would tell this story that I would interweave my answers, but rather than just give the answers, I would weave the story—it was just a silly story, kind of a soap opera thing, it’s where I introduced my evil twin, and—you have to read it, I guess. It just was me being extra silly, and there was this kind of soap opera plot intertwined through which I would then explain the answers to the puzzles.

    Eventually, once I got to Wizards I started writing a column called Insider Trading, which was—it was just a column in which I would tease things, and—the flavor of the column was always like—you know, I—while I worked inside, I was one of you guys on the outside, and I was like a mole on the inside feeding you information, I don’t know if that made any sense, but that was the original idea of the column.


    And then when I became the editor-in-chief, I began writing the front… I don’t know what to call it, but like the—you know, the letter from the editor or whatever. And it was called “Mark My Words.” And eventually—I think those are most of my columns. I wrote one or two other little things. I wrote some stuff online for Sideboard and… but anyway, we got to the making of Magicthegathering.com/Dailymtg.

    So what happened was, when I was putting it together, I knew I wanted some inside columns. And I knew I was interested in doing one of them. I decided that I wanted a design column and a development column. And from Day 1 I knew I wanted to write the design column.

    So like one of the—one of my things right now is that I’m—I have written about Magic continuously longer than any other person. Because I go back to ’94 writing, and I’ve been writing continuously since 1994. I also believe I have written the most words about Magic, although Mike Flores might—if anybody beats me, it’s Mike Flores.

    I’m not sure, he and I have both written so much that I don’t think anybody wants to spend the time to go and count the words. And not everything we’ve written is readily available on the internet. So even if someone wanted to do the task, I’m not sure. So anyway, I’ll just say Flores and I are tied and that we both have written some crazy number of words on Magic.

    But. So the idea was, I wanted to do a design column, and—so one of the things that was important to me was that each column had a purpose. And so the purpose of the design column was to sort of capture the essence of design. And so it was very important to me that the column itself kind of mirrored what I—how I wanted design to be presented.

    And so I definitely wanted design to be thought of as being creative, I wanted design to be thoughtful, I wanted it to be something which could be explained, you know, I wanted people to understand that there were rules we followed but we broke our rules sometimes, and I really wanted the column to sort of walk people through what we do.

    And one of the things that I’ve discovered is, that I write a weekly column on design. On game design. That’s a very rare thing because most people who do game design don’t write about it just because—I’m lucky to have a place where people let me write about what I do and, you know, believe in my philosophy of sharing it with the public. Because one of the things I believe is that Magic is a better game for its makers interacting so closely with the players, and that I like explaining why we do things. Because sometimes you go “Oh, I might not have seen that, but you walk me through it and get some appreciation for things you would not get an appreciation for. And likewise, it opens up a two-way, you know, conversation, where we get feedback and that feedback’s very valuable for learning what worked and didn’t work.

    Okay, so today I’m going to talk about the making of my column. And I feel like there’s a bunch of different kinds of columns I write. I often say that writing my column is much like making cards in that I have many different audiences that I am addressing. That I’m on a—people often call it the Mothership, you know, Magicthegathering.com/Daily Magic MTG is—hey, we’re the man.

    You know, we’re the people who make the game. And so we have access to behind-the-scenes information that nobody does. And so, you know, I’m writing a column that nobody else could write. Which is a huge—like, one of the biggest problems about writing about anything, but, you know, Magic, let’s say, is just trying to get a take that’s your own.

    I mean, the two big things about writing, by the way, about writing a column is, one, you have to have a distinct take that’s your own, and you have to have a voice that’s your own. Now the good news for me is, because I’ve written a lot, I found my voice as a writer a while ago, and so you know, that’s one of the hardest things is, I’ve talked about this, I did an interview long ago, where I said that I think if you write a column, and people could just take your name off it and put somebody else’s name on it and nobody would know, then like what are you doing? That part of what you want to do is you want to stand out and make a claim that’s your own.

    Part of that is content, part of that is presentation. Content I’m lucky, because I’m doing something no one else can talk about. So when I talk about Magic design, I mean, I mean, you know, the closest is the Development column and I overlap in areas. But I’m really writing about stuff that’s uniquely to my own. And then presentation, you know, I’ve been writing a long time. My background is in writing. In fact, of all the skills that I have, I use in my job, writing is the one that goes back the farthest. I’ve been writing the longest. And so it’s true back in the day, you know, I wrote different kinds of things than I write now, but like I said. I’ve written two million words on—literally just in the column Making Magic.

    So I have some expertise to—I’ve put in my ten thousand hours that they say. Because Malcolm Gladwell, and the book Outliers talks about how to become an expert at something you need to put in ten thousand hours of constant feedback. Which I—my writing, I believe I have.

    Okay, so let’s talk about the different kinds of columns. So some of the columns I do are the—the regular mill columns, which is preview columns, or I do, you know, card-by-card where I talk about stories, or there’s just a lot of like, you know, “Hey, this is—the site is there to make sure you know about upcoming stuff,” so some of my writing is just doing that. Is just previewing things.

    But some of my writing I get to stretch a little bit, and I get a—you know, sometimes I do sort of what I’m there for, and sometimes I stretch a little bit, and one of the things I like as a writer is that I’ve had the opportunity to do—a giant swath of different kinds of writing. So—so for example, sometimes I have been able to really go a little more out there. So let me talk about some of my more out-there columns.

    So the one that gets the most mail, or got the most mail, is a column called Elegance. And what Elegance was is, it was a column with a very elegant idea. But—and then this is the interesting thing. People don’t realize that Elegance is actually a two-part article. Two weeks after Elegance, I wrote another article talking about Elegance. And in that article I explained what I was up to in Elegance, and I think a lot of people who read Elegance don’t go on to read the article after it. I think it’s called A Response to Elegance? Or An Elegant Response. An Elegant Response.  

    So—but anyway, it was a column in which you got there, and it was a fifty-word column in which every word hyperlinked to a fifty-word column. And that column was beloved and behated. Yes, behated is a word I invented. And it was interesting. It really, really split people down the middle. Like, some people, like, it was the best article I’ve ever written, and some article, like, hated it. Hated hated hated hated it.

    But I feel a lot about my articles like I do about my card design, in which, like, one of my favorite sayings is, if you make something that everybody likes but  nobody loves, you will fail. And my column is the same way. I would much rather make columns where some people absolutely love it and others don’t like it at all than just make a column where everyone goes “Eh, you know, it’s okay.” You know. And that—I wanted to sort of get some passion out of people.

    And  Elegance was just me trying to do something. But once again, if you go look at Elegance, and you hadn’t before, you’ve got to read the article two weeks later, because I explain—I was up to something. Like I said, I’m not afraid to experiment. I did another article… some of my articles I have to be careful not to talk about because some of the point of the article—like there’s an article I did called Mons Made Me Do It, where the fun of the article, if I tell you what I did, it misses some of the fun of it. So like go read it. I don’t want to tell you what I did. You know.

    I did an article called 80,000 Words where I did a tour of the building. And the whole article is 80 pictures of me—80,000 Words, a lot of people don’t get that. So it’s 80 pictures, because a picture is worth a thousand words. Thus it’s 80,000 words. A lot of people didn’t get that. But anyway, I even went back and did an annotated version (part II), the Director’s Cut, where I explain each of the pictures. But it’s just me giving a tour of Wizards, me and a little whiteboard where I write things on it.

    I also did a Choose Your Own Adventure pretty early on called A Day in the Life, because a lot of people had asked me what it’s like being at Wizards, and so I—I did a Choose Your Own Adventure. Which it was fun. It was very accurate of my day at the time, although it was a long, long, long time ago, so it’s not accurate of my current day. This was—this was back when I was, I think I was in Design at that point, but it might even have been—I might have even been a developer, not yet a designer, although I think I was a designer at that point. I was clearly not Head Designer yet, that’s for sure.

    The other thing that I—I’ve done is I’ve made a bunch of subtype articles. Here’s how you can tell that I—I’ve written my article so long that I have like sub-branding. Like Making Magic is the main brand, I’ve done some sub-brands.  So let me talk about a few of my sub-brands.

    Okay. So there’s Topical Blend. So in college, I did improvisation. For those that don’t know what that is, it’s when you get up on stage and you say to the audience “Okay, I need you to give me a relationship. A place. Whatever.” You ask the audience for input. And then you make a scene based on the audience’s input. And the fact that the audience knows you’re making it up is, they gave you the input. You couldn’t have had the scene already, they gave you what to do with.

    And I love improvisation because I like—I enjoy the kind of, you know, thinking on your feet and being fast and making stuff up and, you know, being spontaneous. And I enjoy that. And so I really enjoyed doing improv.

    So I was trying to kind of get an improv feel to my column. I wanted a challenge and I thought like, okay. So the idea of a Topical Blend, in case you’ve never seen one, is I ask the audience for a list of Magic topics and a list of non-Magic topics. And then, I take the top vote-getter in each category and I blend them together.

    So the first Topical Blend I did, the topic was “the ten biggest design mistakes you’ve made” and the non-Magic topic was”girls.” So I wrote an article—Topical Blend #1, To Err is Human, which talked about my dating life and compared my foibles in dating with my mistakes in design. And the interesting thing is, it is one of the best articles I’ve ever written. Maybe the best article I’ve ever written. It’s up there. And I never would have gotten there without me experimenting like this. I never ever ever would have gotten there. And so I—I like the fact that I was willing to stretch a little bit, and I feel like the end result was something that was truly special.

    So Topical Blend #2 was “designing a sixth color” and “Mark Rosewater is bleeping… batbleep insane?” Which was a thread—there was a humor site called Mise Tings that used to do a lot of humor, and they used to have a thread that would pop up all the time, where, you know, ”MaRo is batbleep insane.”

    And so anyway, that won, and so I—my article, which confused a lot of people, to this day, was when you went to the article, instead, you went to the forums of what was looked like a Mise Tings forum, where instead of reading the article you read people responding to the article. And then I wrote snippets of the article that people would quote. But the point was, the article itself was people responding to the fake article that didn’t exist. And that concept confused people! I got—it was a little out there. I liked it, I thought it was a very good article. But it was out there, and it confused a lot of people.

    My third Topical Blend—oh by the way, the name “Topical Blend,” my wife came up with that. We were looking for a name for the sub-brand, you know, for the column, and my wife came up with that. I really like it. Also, by the way, the sign that I did something interesting is that I have had numerous other people do Topical Blends. That’s a sign that, to me, of success of something, is other people said “Ooh, I’m going to do that.”

    And Gavin Verhey did one, and… did Jay Moldenhauer-Salazar? Someone who took over my column for one of our switch column weeks did one. And I think a few people have done them on other sites. But anyway—and by the way, that’s very—I’m honored by the fact that other people would try to do it. From a writing standpoint, by the way, it’s very interesting, and I mean any writers out there that like a challenge,  it is a nice challenge.

    My third Topical Blend was “my top ten favorite creatures in Magic” and “Dungeons and Dragons.” Which I—I felt was a little too easy, so I stretched a little bit. My fourth Topical Blend… was that the one I did? Was about magic—not the game Magic, but like “poof,” you know, like, you know, like rabbits out of hats. And what was the… because I was a magician in my youth, so I talk about being a magician in my youth. What was the crossover topic?

    Anyway, all these are—everything I’m talking about, so every hundred columns, and ideally I should have just written one from your time—I do a thing called One Hundred and Counting. And then Two Hundred and Counting and then Three Hundred and Counting. Where I review—I preview—or, not review. I review. I review my last hundred columns and I give them a grade from one to five.

    Oh, people always ask this, by the way—“Why—where are the ones? Where are the twos?” Like, the reason that the scale has ones and twos is, I have written ones and twos, I try not to, I write them infrequently, and if I realize I’ve written a one or a two I rewrite it. That’s why most of them are three or better. Because that’s my borderline acceptable.

    But I try to keep a scale that’s true for all the years. I don’t want to keep changing the scale. But since I’ve had ones and twos in the past, like, well, that exists on the scale, but I try to avoid them and I haven’t written a one in a while. I haven’t written my six hundredth article, so I don’t know whether I have a one or a two. But I don’t think I have a one. I might have a two.

    Okay. Other sub-brands. Nuts and Bolts! So Nuts and Bolts was an article that started because I thought that people might be interested in some of the more mundane parts of the job. And it ended up shifting from that to being more of a primer about how to do design.

    I did, by the way, do a bunch of articles that were loosely connected. Design 101, Design 102, Design 103, where I talked about beginning design mistakes. Nuts and Bolts was a little more like “Let me technically walk through how we make cards.” And I talked about design skeletons and how to fill them in and—(???) More so originally it was supposed to be more like “Let me talk about what mundane tasks,” and it more became “How to kind of process—how to do the process of making a set yourself.”

    Another sub-brand I do is called “State of Design.” So when I took over as head designer, I liked how every year the president of the United States does what’s called the “State of the Union.” Where he sort of talks about how he feels the country’s doing. And I thought “Oh, that would be neat for me to talk about how I felt design was doing.”

    And what I do is I usually have the chance to look at the previous year, and I try to be critical and say “Okay, what did we do right and what did we do wrong?” And try to sort of get an honest take on, you know, the lessons of the year but also the successes of the year. And sort of just look at it all.

    Any other? The other thing that—I guess it’s not—I haven’t branded, sub-branded it, but another thing that I do, and I do it once or twice a year, is what I call—I’ve kind of been loosely calling the Rosewater Files. Which is they’re kind of personal stories where—what happened was, I wrote the first Topical Blend, and it was a real personal column. I was talking about my dating life. I mean they were really actual personal stories.

    And I said that I—people really enjoyed it, and as a writer I said “Okay, well I like this, let me find a way from time to time to tell more personal stories. And I’ll find a way to tie them into Magic.” And since then I’ve done a bunch of different ones. I wrote an article about life lessons (part II), I wrote an article about things that I took from—lessons I’ve learned from design that applied to my life. I wrote about my wedding with my wife (part II). I wrote about my kids (part II). I wrote about my time on Roseanne (part II), which was a pretty dramatic—ex—huge roller coaster from exciting to very traumatic, you know, I wrote about that.

    And so I—I really like the personal columns, because they show off something about me—like one of the things I feel is very important is, I—my goal in all my writing is that I don’t want Magic just made by faceless people.  I feel like a lot of times, people are faced with—the things that they love, if they come from some faceless entity, it’s hard to bond because it’s like “Well, I don’t know who that is.”

    But that like—people bond with people. And I really feel like, you know, I want—I want to be one of the faces for the game. That I want people to say “I have some faith in Magic because I have some faith in Mark.” You know. And I think that it’s really important, and one of the things that I’ve tried hard with my columns and with the website is that I don’t want Magic being some faceless entity. I want it being actual people that you identify with. And I want to explain what we want to—like a big part of my column is, I want to walk through and explain what we are doing. You know.

    And at some level—I mean, I feel like we’re paving new ground. There is no game company out there that spends the time and energy to explain to their audience what they are up to. You know. I mean, it’s funny because sometimes I think players get so used to it that, you know, that they forget that like, you know, once upon a time, people made a game and it got spit out and you’re lucky if they wrote something about it. You know.

    We—I write a weekly column every week where I explain to you what we’re doing! And why we’re doing it, you know, and, I mean, you know, yeah, I can’t explain everything, but I explain a lot. And I go into great detail. You know. And I walk you through our processes. And that—that is—I mean, that’s a big part of what I started the column to do, and then I’m very, very happy that the column does do.

    Now, I’ve expanded out since then. You know, since this column started I now do a lot of social media in addition, you know, I have my daily comic, I have my week—I have my daily blog. I have a weekly podcast obviously. So I’ve expanded beyond just doing the column. But the column is kind of my core, if you will, you know, they talk about how like Star Wars has the expanded universe. But at the core of it is the film. At the core of my—you know, the Rosewater Expanded Universe is my column. It really is the heart of what I do.

    And in some ways, it’s the most personal. I mean, not that I’m not personal in my podcast or in my blog, but those are done quicker. I mean, my podcast I talk for thirty minutes while I drive to work, and my blog I answer stuff quickly while, you know, but my column I take a lot more time on, and I think about, and I—I rewrite, and, you know, it’s the only thing that I rewrite. You know. Hey, when I’m recording, I’m recording, and when I’m done, (???) my thirty minutes. And my blog, I don’t—I mean, I might proof my answer after I write it, but I’m not doing a lot of rewriting. Or—maybe on a few very special questions. But most of the time I just answer the question.

    So… Making Magic to me is the one that I take extra care on. I mean, I actually work at home on Fridays because I work on my column on Fridays. That is important enough that I want to be able to, you know, really just give some time to it.

    The other thing people ask me about is the theme weeks. Let me talk about theme weeks a little bit. So, when I set up the column, or the website, I decided that I wanted every other week to be a theme week. And the reason I did that was a couple things. One was it was a gift to the writers, which is it is a lot harder to write anything than to write something. And that if I tell you “Hey, write anything you want,” it can be scary almost at times. The blank page can be intimidating. But if I said to you, “Write—write about the circus.” You know. Then you’d go “Oh, okay.”

    And the other thing is, the themes force people down paths that you might not have been forced down. Much like the Topical Blend. I never, ever, ever would have written that article. But I’m glad I did. You know. I talk about Mons Made Me Do It. That’s an article I wrote for Goblin Week. And I don’t think I ever would have gotten to that column if it hadn’t been Goblin Week and I’m just like “I’m writing a goblin column.” You know, but I did, and there have been a lot of columns that started because I was just trying to match something.

    Like I did a column for Zombie Week. I don’t remember the name of this one. Well, there are two Zombie Weeks. The first zombie week one I did, by the way, was actually a very—a fan favorite called I cc: Dead People. Which might be my favorite title ever of a column. In which the premise of the column was that each creature type has a liaison that communicates with us to talk about their happiness or unhappiness with how they’re portrayed.

    And Ga’Aark was the leader of the zombies, or the liaison of zombies, and the article was him writing letters to me, talking about the treatment of zombies. And really it was me just going through the history of zombies in Magic. And talking about how they ebbed and flowed. But it just had a nice spin to it.

    I have done from time to time, my creative writing will pop out, and, you know, I’ve done a bunch of columns from the point of view of, like I did a point of view of a common card when I did the Mirrodin review. I’ve done—I did—so I’ve done columns all about the color pie, in fact I’ve done a whole bunch of different parts of the color pie. I did ones about individual colors, I did the two color pairings, and then I did one where I interviewed each color. (White Black Green Blue Red) I did that during Shards of Alara theme weeks, where like it was, whatever, it was Esper week, so, you know, Esper’s centered in blue. So I interviewed blue and had in blue’s own words talk about what he believed and didn’t believe.
    And so you can tell my, sort of my background pops out. Like I like writing dialogue, so from time to time—one of the things I definitely have made one of my trademarks is putting in snippets of dialogue. I’ll do that from time to time. I also have made a big deal out of using asides, I’ve made that one of my trademark things. I do a lot of parenthetical asides, which I like. Ooh, traffic! So extra content for you. So… the… I was talking about… see, I lost my train of thought. I got stuck in traffic and I’m like “What was I talking about?” I was talking about writing—oh, from point of view columns. I do—like I said, yeah, I like the—I like my parentheticals.

    Another sort of trait that I’ve taken up that I like is I like sort of starting somewhere that doesn’t seem like it’s what this is about, and then slowly working your way to like get to the point where it is what the topic is about. That comes from my writing—that comes from my film background. That’s a big trick in film, where you start your story and you’re like “What’s going—what’s going on?” And the scene, and you know, and you slowly, like, things that seemed disparate slowly come together. So I—I enjoy that.

    Oh, by the way, my zombie column. So I talked about how we did two Zombie Weeks. The first zombie column was about I cc: Dead People, the second one I had already done a column about zombies, and so I came up with the idea of doing a column about mechanics that had died but come back, and I wrote it in a style of a, like a story, in which all of R&D gets killed. And I enjoyed that, I thought it was a lot of fun.

    That it was a very different take on—that’s another thing that I do now is, because we get theme weeks in which I’ve already done the theme week  once before, I try to find new ways to approach it. You know. That like, that I—oh, if I did something one way, I try to find a different way.

    I mean, the thing that I—that is important to understand is that—I talked about this in my Tales from the Pit podcast. Which is “Why do I write? Why?” Because for example, Latest Developments, I think Sam, Sam Stoddard just started writing Latest Developments. He is, if I’m correct, the sixth person to write Latest Developments. It was Randy, and then Aaron, and then Devin, and then Tom, and then Zach, and now Sam. And in between there was points where there was like rotating and stuff. So why is it? Why is it that there have been six people wrote the Development column and I’m the same guy writing all the Design columns?

    And the answer is, because I love to write. I love the act of writing. I am a writer. One of the things they say is “How do you tell if you’re a writer?” And the answer is “Because you write.” And what that means is that, like, writers just have a need to write. And I understand this is one of the reasons that I do write. In that there’s something—something about the writing mindset that just, you need to get things out, and you need to sort of—it’s part of the way that you process things.

    Like one of the things that’s very interesting about my column is, a lot of the interesting observations I’ve made about Magic came about me trying to explain them. And put them into words. And they made me realize something that I then went back and said “Oh my God, guys, I’ve figured something out because I had to write about it.” And that I find writing to be an awesome way to sort of clear your head and lets you sort of to look inside yourself.

    Another thing that’s important is, I feel that—that writing is a chance to kind of share in a very unique and interesting way. That it’s a part to make yourself sort of something bigger than just yourself.  And I—I don’t know. I appreciate that. I find writing to be a great joy for me.

    And that’s not to say it’s not—let me walk you through—how do I make a Making Magic? So what happens is, either I—it’s a theme week, so I know my topic, or it’s an off week, and a lot of the off weeks, while they might not be theme weeks, they’re, like whenever we get near a set I have to do previews, I normally do a card-by-card right after the set comes out. So I have a bunch of stuff that I kind of do that whether or not it’s a planned thing, it’s—I mean, it might not be a theme week, but it’s planned.

    And then on the off weeks, when I’m sort of away from a set, when I can do whatever I want, I slowly build up an inventory of things I want to do. And the way that—the way it works, by the way, is I’ll come up with both neat ideas for columns, and I’ll come up with topics. Like I knew I wanted to do an all-picture column, but I just didn’t know—it took me a while to figure out what I wanted it to be. And then one day I’m like “Oh, oh oh oh oh oh. I want to give a tour, oh, a tour would work well with pictures.” Or “I want to talk about my day,  a Choose Your Own Adventure would be a good life in day—you know, day in the life of R&D.” And so a lot of the times it’s finding the right idea with the right thing. And I like to experiment, you know, Elegance shows, like, Elegance was not—was not universally loved. There have been ones that really liked it. But there are people that hated it. I mean hated it.

    So here’s another interesting thing. So one of the things about my column is, I get a thread, I always read my thread, I always read my mail. My mail tends to be a little nicer than my thread. I don’t know why, my thread is a more—they—they’re a lively bunch. I do read them though. I do read it every week.

    And I mean, the feed—so another important part of my column, one of like the great, you know, gifts of my column is the feedback. And I, I value the feedback very greatly. Because part of doing my job is understanding what the audience wants. And so part of doing that is creating a rapport with the audience so that the audience feels like they can write to me, and like one of the reasons I want to be a—not a, to be a name and a person rather than some faceless thing is, I want people to feel like they can confide in me and say what they like and don’t’ like. You know. I want people to be able to be honest and say, “Hey, you did such and such. That upset me.” Or “You did this, that was awesome.” Or whatever. Whatever the feedback is, I want to be able to get that and that’s really important to me. And so—anyway, I just—I had to stop short, and my list of all my stuff went away! So I’m going to have to wing it from here out.

    Yeah, I don’t know if you guys know this, but I’ve started making notes for my podcast because what I’ve learned is if I write little notes down then I will try not to forget things, and if I don’t then I—I will sometimes—I will park my car, I used to—early on I would park my car, and go “Oh my God, I didn’t talk about such-and-such, how did I not talk about it?” So now I give myself little notes.

    You heard a little screech earlier. See, those are little sound effects of my car. You can kind of tell what’s going on. I had someone pull out ahead of me, and I had to screech my breaks so not to hit them. So you got a—and also, if you listen to me talk sometimes, (???) sometimes I will talk, and like you kind of can tell that my attention is not 100% on my podcast. That is because I am trying not to crash my car.

    Usually it’s pretty easy going, I’m on, I’m on, it’s all remote brain activity that’s doing fine, but when actions happen. So I, I do try to be safe, so for those that worry I’m not paying attention, I’m very much actually paying attention. Luckily, I’m good at talking to myself because I did improv for many years.

    And… yeah, I talked about this in my wedding column, which is I decided in my vows for my wife that I didn’t want to write them out ahead of time. Because I wanted them to feel not rehearsed but sort of fresh, and so I—I winged them. And most people, like—that’s what I’m trying to explain, I’m very comfortable sort of talking on my feet. And so when you’re willing to wing your vows at your wedding, odds are you’re comfortable sort of—you’re comfortable winging things. So. But I do like that I have some structure to the podcast. I’ve learned that—I think it helps.

    Anyway, I’ve come to Wizards. So—I don’t know. Today was more me trying to explain a little bit about one side of me. Making Magic is definitely a very personal part of what I do. I mean, so is card design, so is other things. But my writing is something that I—I’m happy that I found a place in this job to use my writing skills, because I’m very proud of my writing, and I feel like I have a lot to offer as a writer. And so I’m really happy that, you know, I have Making Magic, and I have a place where weekly I can share with people and talk with them, and that that’s—it’s—I think it’s both good for Magic and it is good for me as a human being. So I’m glad that I have it.


    Anyway, thank you very much for listening and for—for those that have read the eleven years so far that I’ve been writing, I plan to keep on continuing, so check in. And you’ll see me making Magic every week. Speaking of that, I have to now go to work! Because not only do I make Magic in my column, but also at work I’m always making Magic. Talk to you guys next week.
    0

    Add a comment

  2. All podcast content by Mark Rosewater

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

    Okay. Two weeks ago, I started talking about the design of Mirage. And then last week I continued talking about the design of Mirage. But I was not yet done. So today is Part 3 of Mirage design. So what I started doing last week is, I started telling a bunch of stories about cards. And the idea is I’m just jumping around, the stories are all over the place.

    The other thing to keep in mind is that I was not on the design team, I was on the development team for this one. And so I have plenty of design stories that happened during development, but a lot of my stories are more development-oriented or changes that happened during development or last week for example I talked about some art and some flavor text.

    So these stories are all over the place. I—what I’ve learned is, I talk about what I know, just because the stuff I experienced or saw is the easy stuff for me to tell the stories, so I wasn’t privy really to what went on during the design of Mirage, other than watching, you know, working on it with Bill during development. But anyway, I’ve got more stories to tell. So I’m going to tell them.

    Okay. So today I’m going to start with the Phyrexian Dreadnought. Dun dun dun! Okay. So here’s, here’s—here’s how that card came to be. So what happened is, when Alpha came out, Richard made two cards. One was called Lord of the Pit, that was a 7/7, and the other was called Force of Nature. That was an 8/8. Those were the largest creatures in Magic. Or… natural creatures, I mean. Rock Hydra could get bigger.

    Okay. So, then Antiquities, two sets later, the second expansion, Antiquities, had a card called Phyrexian Colossus that was a 9/9! And then a couple sets later in The Dark, there was a card called Leviathan. It was a 10/10! Then a couple sets later in Ice Age, there was Polar Kraken. 11/11! So you could see where this was going. It was a little game we were playing where we kept one-upping ourselves.

    So we got to Mirage, I said to Bill, I said, “Bill, Bill! We’ve got to make a 12/12.” And Bill was like “I don’t know. I’m not sure we should keep playing this game,” was basically what Bill said. “I—I don’t want to make a 12/12 just to make a 12/12.” He said “Okay. If you can make a 12/12 that’s interesting, I’ll put it in the set.” So the gauntlet, thrown down.

    And so basically I had to go off and make a 12/12 that was interesting. And so I—I came back and I said, “Okay, Bill. I’ve got a 12/12 trampler, costs one mana.” Now, for those of you that might not know this card, it is a 12/12 trampler, it costs one mana, when it comes into play you must sacrifice up to 12 power worth of creatures or sacrifice the Phyrexian Dreadnought. So it has a little extra cost.

    But, Bill was intrigued. Bill’s like “Okay, mission accomplished. Challenge—challenge…” you know, “…achieved.” And he put it in the set. And that card has gone on to have some notoriety because if you play it kind of honestly, the card is fine. But there’s a lot of ways to sort of have no expectation of actually saving the Phyrexian Dreadnought where I pay one, I get my 12/12, and yeah, yeah, it’s going to go away, because it’s going to be the 12 power you have to pay, but, you know, it triggers things, or it—anyway, there’s all sorts of shenanigans.

    But the card just started with me kind of—I don’t know, I—as I talked about last week, I like sort of having ongoing trends and things. I like little meta things. I liked the Atogs, I liked the mega mega cycle, I might have  had a lot to do with most of that stuff. But anyway, one of the things I’ve always enjoyed is, I feel there’s a—when I say metagame, I mean the R&D term—the players talk about metagame about what to play at a tournament and what’s good.

    The R&D metagame, which is a slightly different term, talks about all the things that encompass Magic. That Magic’s not just the playing of the game but everything that comes with it. And a lot of the community building is, I like doing things where people can anticipate things or predict things, and I think that’s an important part of Magic.

    Okay. Next! We will talk about Cadaverous Bloom. So this was a card I made. Once again, I did not make tons and tons of cards in Mirage, I made some, I’m just telling the stories because these are the ones I know. People are often like “Why do you always talk about stuff you did?” And I’m like “Because I know what I did!” And so anyway. I will tell—some of these stories are not about cards I did. But hey. Some of them are.

    Okay, so Cadaverous Bloom, what happened was, we had a bunch of gold cards in the set, and we didn’t like the black/green one so we killed it. And so there was a black/green hole, a gold hole, had to be rare black/green. So what I did was I said, “Okay. We’ve got to make a card.” And I said, “Well, what… what does black do and what does green do?” And at the time, black was very much about—or still is, giving up resources for advantage. You know, that you pay life to draw cards.

    And I’m like “Oh, well what if black could discard cards and get something for it?” And then I thought about “Okay, well what… what could it get?” And I said, “Okay, well that’s the black part, you can discard cards, so what’s the green part?” And I said, “Well the green part is getting mana,” you know? And I know black was—at the time was number two in mana, it had Dark Ritual and stuff at the time, and—but green could get you any color mana.

    So like “Okay. Well, black discards a card to get an advantage, get something, and normally if it was just a mono-black card it would be making black mana. Oh, but this is a black/green card, you can get any color mana you want.” And thus—one of the things that I—I’m a Johnny at heart for those that don’t know this. I love making engine cards.

    And—so what an engine card is, is a card in which you take one resource and you turn it into another resource. And they’re fun, I mean they make good Johnny cards because you can do shenanigans. But they also make good Spike cards because often converting resources can be very dangerous. Especially as is the case of this card, where it cost no mana. You’re just turning cards in your hand into mana.

    So it allows you to—well, this card caused all sorts of—this card did lots—so the most famous thing this card is for is a card called Pros-Bloom. Or Prosperous Bloom. In which Cadaverous Bloom was played with Prosperity, as well as a few other cards like Squandered Resources.

    And essentially what happened was—so before Prosperous Bloom, the thought of combo decks was, people were like “Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s fun. For the kids.” You know, like, like it was this goofy thing that people did. But it wasn’t a serious thing. It wasn’t something that you expected to see at tournaments or something.

    Well anyway, Mike Long shows up at Pro Tour Paris with the Pros-Bloom deck and wins it. And that really put combo on the map. You know, that really made a lot of the pros go, “Oh, maybe I’m not—maybe I’m not really thinking of combo correctly, that combo has the—if it’s fast enough and has enough versatility, oh, a combo deck can be constructed.”

    And anyway, it’s funny—one of the things—here’s a funny story is Mike Long—so, at PT Paris you had to use—the format was you had to use Mirage and Visions. It was Block Constructed but Weatherlight hadn’t come out yet. And it just so happens that everything you need to make Prosperous Bloom work was in Mirage and Visions. And Mike was convinced that R&D made the deck, chopped it up, and put it in the two sets. For like someone to find.

    And I could not convince him otherwise. I’m like, I’m like “All the pieces were made by different people. Like I made Cadaverous Bloom, I know Bill made Prosperity, Elliott made a few of the cards—like, you know, it’s not all made by one person. I go—and, and… it’s funny, because one of the things—I mean, I—the players always want to assume that we’ve planned everything.

    And sometimes we did. But sometimes just we made open-ended interesting cards and they clicked together in neat ways. And, you know, we don’t always necessarily plant things. I know people like to think we do. And I’m not saying we never do, we have. But it’s funny. It’s the expectation of players of sort of what they think we do.

    Okay! Next up. Okay. I’m going to ask you some trivia questions now. A few trivia questions. Trivia question #1: Daring Apprentice is a card in Mirage. It is the first card to ever have something happen. Now, this is not rules text. Not about the rules—it’s not—it’s not about what the card does, it’s about—the question is more meta. Like, this card did something in the grand scheme of Magic. That had never been done before. And the answer is: (highlight to see) It is the first card ever to be errata’d before it came out. And here’s why.

    The card on it has an ability where you can use it to counter a spell. And at the time, for those that might not know this, when Magic first came out with Alpha, there were actually three different kinds of cards that you could cast during your opponent—you could—sorry, three kinds of non-permanent cards. There were sorceries, there were instants, and there were interrupts.

    So what interrupts were was, before 6th Edition rules, there was no stack in Magic. The way it worked was, you could cast your spells, and certain spells, interrupts, said “Hey, if I—if you cast an interrupt, nothing can be played in response except other interrupts.” And in order for counterspells to do their thing, they needed to be interrupts.

    So Daring Apprentice was supposed to say on it, “Hey, play me as an interrupt.” But we forgot it. And the card did not work. It countered a spell. And if it wasn’t an interrupt, you know, didn’t work as an interrupt, you couldn’t counter the spell. So we knew that the card wasn’t going to what the card said. And so we put errata out saying “Okay, guys, it works, it works. It’s an interrupt.” Or, you know. Works as an interrupt. The funny thing is, after 6th Edition, the card got errata’d back. So it was the first card ever to get errata’d, and now it doesn’t even have errata.

    Okay. Trivia question #2. What card in Mirage was called Mirage up until the set officially got the name of Mirage and then we changed the name of the card? Now, I know since then we have made sets in which we have, you know, a card in the set had the same name as the set. But at the time we didn’t do that. So what card was it? Shimmer. The card Shimmer was called Mirage during, I don’t know, all of design and most of development. And we were going to keep the name until the set officially got called Mirage.

    So real quickly, I don’t think I talked about this last time, another interesting trivia question is “What set had two different code names?” And the answer is Mirage. Okay, that one wasn’t too hard. But what are the two different code names? Well, when Richard first got the set, when he first put it together, the team that made it nicknamed it, you know, gave it a name of “Menagerie,” which means, like, a zoo.

    And when it got to Wizards, it got a new nickname, because all the—code name, because all the code names at the time were Macintosh sound files. Real quickly, the reason for that is because when I first started working at Wizards back then, everybody had a Mac. The entire office had Macs.

    And whenever you opened a folder, or back then you opened a folder that had the name of a Mac sound, it would go off. And so we named all our code sets at the time after the Mac files because then our folders when we opened them would make a sound. Which sounds silly even though—it sounds silly because it is silly. But we did that.

    So Mirage’s code name once it got to Wizards was Sosumi. Which people thought was a joke, like “So sue me, like people thought we were doing something illegal or something. But anyway, I think that might have even been the last—well, Coldsnap had a Mac name to be retro. But I think the—other than that, I think Sosume was the last Apple sound code name. But anyway, the set does have two code names. Little trivia question.

    Okay. Let’s see if we can do another trivia question for you. Okay. Telim’Tor is a guy in the set. He’s a character. Telim’Tor is an anagram, much like Mangara was an anagram of “anagram.” What is “Telim’Tor” an anagram of? Okay, and the answer is: Mr. Toilet.

    Okay, now the next trivia question is: “Why… why… who is Mr. Toilet?” And to the best of my knowledge, Mr. Toilet was a nickname of Don Felice is my guess? I know it wasn’t Charlie or Bill or Joel. In theory it could have been Howard or Elliott… I believe it was Don Felice. Oh by the way, I made a comment in Part I that I realized was slightly incorrect. So when I said Don Felice—an anagram of Don Felice was Feldon’s Cane. That is not correct. The original name for Feldon’s Cane was Feldon’s Ice Cane. And that is an anagram of Don Felice. But it got changed. So it is no longer.

    Now there is another Magic card that has Don Felice as an anagram, and I think it is… Delif’s Cone? If that’s correct? Anyway. Little side note. Okay. Any other trivia questions I can ask here? Oh, before I get into that. Telim’Tor. So there’s a real funny thing about Telim’Tor.

    So we were making a little joke about—or, I mean, Telim’Tor came in from the design team. They were making a joke about one of the team members. And one of the cards—Telim’Tor’s darts, in playtest—er, in design, was called Telim’Tor’s Tiny Darts. Because it pings for one. It’s a very weak thing. But we had no end—no—we had a lot of fun in playtesting going “I plink you with my tiny dart!” And I think the name just didn’t fit in the card. We were going to call it Telim’Tor’s Tiny Darts. But I don’t know if Continuity just didn’t like the name, or—I don’t know. We changed it. It might not have fit. So let’s see. Any other trivia, or just move on? Okay, I’m going to move on and talk about some other stuff.

    Okay, so I—from time to time I have mentioned the fact that I have worked on Roseanne. I was on staff for Roseanne. My big—my high point in my writing career for television. But I have never yet told a story of how my Roseanne days affected Magic design. Dun dun dun! Okay, so here’s the story of how a card in Mirage was affected by my time on the staff of Roseanne.

    Okay, so for those that might not know how a sitcom writing staff works, so what happens is, you have a room and you have the script and basically you sit in the room, it’s called the Writer’s Room, and just, you go through the script many many times, trying to sort of up the jokes. Just make the jokes funnier. And what will happen is, the way it tends to work is, you—somebody writes a script, or a couple people write the script, and the first week the actors act it out. And then the writers watch the actors. And then they see what works and doesn’t work. And then they make notes where the jokes kind of aren’t working or something, and then they come back and the room, all the writers in the room, try to fix the  jokes.

    And in general, because we’re trying to make humor, we’re trying to keep the room pretty light. You know what I’m saying? You definitely want the, you know, if you’re trying to make comedy, you want people to sort of, you know, have a—you want it to be fun. And so one of the things that often happens is, you know, people do things to entertain one another. They tell stories. So one of the writers, one day, tells this story. He had been at the zoo the previous day. And he tells the story about the zoo.

    So at the zoo, there’s these creatures called meerkats. So a meerkat are these little tiny creatures. If you’ve ever seen the Lion King, I believe Timor is a meerkat. Like, Timor and Pumbaa. Pumbaa is a big warthog. So Timor—I’m making his name up—is a meerkat.

    So what meerkats do is, actual honest-to-God meerkats like at the zoo, is, he’s watching them, and one of the meerkats would see something, and they would sit up. Sit up on their hind legs, and take their front legs, and hold them in front of themselves. Now, this is a recording, so me demonstrating that does not do a lot of good. Imagine if you had your hands kind of held up against your chest, but sort of just sitting there. And you know, just holding—holding down. And like perched up.

    And so what happened is one meerkat would perch up. And as soon as one meerkat would see another meerkat perched up, he would perch up. And that would keep going on until all the meerkats would perch up. And then in one minute they would sort of break and all go back to their thing. And he was just saying it was this very funny thing.

    So from that, we would play games in the room, so we started this little game that said, “At any moment, any member of the writing team could perch up like a meerkat. And if they did, whoever saw them must also perch like a meerkat. Until every single person in the room perched as a meerkat. And then we would just break. Now the funny thing about this is we didn’t talk about it. It wasn’t explained. It just kind of happened—naturally happened one day. And this was a little game we played. Now where it got really fun was when somebody was in the room that wasn’t on the writing staff and didn’t know our little game.

    So for example, one day Martin Mull, who was on Roseanne, he played her boss for a while when she owned a diner, anyway, he would occasionally come to the writer’s room and help out. Because he’s very, very funny. He was a comedian and awesome, and so we gladly had him in the writer’s room whenever we could.

    So one day we’re in there, and we’re talking about something, and somebody, I don’t even know who—not me—somebody perches like a meerkat. So I see it, I perch like a meerkat. And one by one, everybody perches like a meerkat. But the thing is, you can’t break until every single person perches like a meerkat.

    And Martin Mull, who has no idea, has never seen us do this, is sitting there as everybody else in the room is silent, perched like a meerkat. And so he looks around, he’s like trying to figure out what’s going on, and so finally, he makes the meerkat—he perches like a meerkat. And then we break and continue on. And say nothing. And that was just a wonderful moment. Just watching Martin Mull like “What is going on?”

    Anyway, I shared this story with R&D. And they thought it was very funny. We even played the meerkat in R&D for a little while. Back in the day, by the way, a little side note is, when I first got to Wizards, there was a thing that we referred to as The Game. And what the game was, there was a series of rules about what you had to do, and if you didn’t do those things, you—I don’t know, got punched in the arm or something? And—so basically, there was a whole bunch of rules.

    And the game was this multilayered complex thing. Like there’s certain words you couldn’t say, and when certain words were said you had to do certain things, and if you did something if not, then you couldn’t talk, until someone said your name, and it was complex. It was just this little game. I think Skaff had designed this game, he and his friends during college. But anyway, for a little while, the meerkat game got merged into The Game. And R&D did it for a little while, and it entertained us.

    But anyway, when we were doing Mirage, the meerkat—because we were doing the meerkat thing, we decided to make a meerkat. And so the meerkat—I don’t even know that the card had anything to do mechanically with the card as far as it being a meerkat. That having a meerkat in the set was 100% tied to the Roseanne meerkat game that I brought to R&D.

    Okay. Next. Grinning Totem. Okay. So. I love—I get a lot of theories, for those of you that read my column, you get to hear about my theories. Many of my theories I think have proven to be pretty valid and become a pretty—a staple of how R&D functions. But sometimes I come up with a theory that kind of doesn’t quite work out the way I thought. You know, doesn’t quite prove itself.

    So I had a theory, when I first got there, of what I called the “marquee card.” The idea of the marquee card was, I thought that every set—well, Ice Age had just come out before I got there, and Ice Age had a card called Jester’s Cap. So for those that don’t know, Jester’s Cap is a card that allows you to go into your opponent’s library and permanently remove three cards. You know, from the game.

    And before that card, we had never allowed people to touch other people’s libraries or take cards out of the game. We had never done that. And so the card was really eye-catching because people were like “Oh my God, this is amazing.” Even whether it was or it wasn’t. It just was really out of the box. And I said, “You know, maybe what we want every set to do is have one card,” and I thought it needed to be an artifact or a land, meaning it needed to be part of any deck. That part of being a marquee card was this crazy did-something-you’ve-never-seen-before, but that anybody could play.

    And so I decided that we should have marquee cards. And so I went to Bill and I said, “Bill.” I explained my theory, I go “We need a marquee card.” And Bill is like “Well, if you made something good enough, I’ll put it in.” You know. The gauntlet’s thrown. A lot of Mirage is gauntlet-throwing and me trying to make cards.

    And notice what happened. A lot of my design on Mirage was, we’d get a hole—one of two things. Either we’d get a hole and I’d try to fill it, Maro is an example of that, or I felt we had a need and I would say to Bill, “Here’s our need,” and Bill would say like, “Well, make a card, and then if there’s—A., if the card is good enough, and B., I can find a spot for it, I’ll put it in.”

    Sometimes I would—I’d combine those, I would go, “There’s a thing I want to make and there’s a hole” and I’d combine them together. But anyway, so I said we needed to have a marquee card. Bill’s like, “Well, make a card.” So I made Grinning Totem. And so for those that don’t know, Grinning Totem is a card that allows you to go in your opponent’s library and cast a spell out of your opponent’s library. You’re casting their spell. We’d never done that before.

    I mean now it’s funny because, like whenever we do something, later Magic does more of it. You know. And now the idea of messing with your opponent’s library, you know, taking cards out, or doing some things with their cards, or casting their cards, don’t seem quite as crazy.

    Now be aware, by the way, there was a card in Alpha that allowed you to cast a spell out of your opponent’s hand. Word of Command. But we’d never let you cast a spell in your opponent’s deck. So anyway, I made Grinning Totem to be that. It definitely created some excitement. But it—I later realized that the marquee card—I don’t know, my theory didn’t quite hold out.

    I did by the way—well, I tried to make a marquee card for Tempest, interestingly enough, Volrath’s Helm—or Helm of Volrath. I think it was called. But the card that got put out didn’t end up being the card I meant to be the marquee card. The marquee card was supposed to be—because Volrath with his helm, could control people’s minds, was supposed to be Mindslaver. But we couldn’t work it out. There’s some rules issues and mana burn was causing us problems. But anyway, I would later go on to do it in Mirrodin, but that card was made to be the marquee card of Tempest although it never ended up in Tempest.

    Okay, next. Goblin Tinkerer. Okay. There’s three things that I love. I mean, more than three, but three that matter for this case. And when I say love, I mean Magic-wise. I love my family and such. Okay. Number one! I love artifacts. Like before I came to Wizards, my favorite set bar none—well, I mean I loved Alpha, but my favorite expansion was Antiquities. Why? Because it just—artifacts! You know. I loved artifacts. I still do love artifacts. I did make Mirrodin, and I made Esper, and I made Scars of Mirrodin. So. I—I am a fan of artifacts. Anyway, I love—A. A. One. I love artifacts.

    Two, I love changing things into other things. My favorite card, or one of my favorite cards in Antiquities, was Transmute Artifact. Which I would later go on to tweak with Tinker. Okay, I would later go on to break with Tinker. But Tinker was just me trying to like take what I loved about Transmute Artifact and just, you know, simplify it a little bit. A.k.a. I guess break it in half. But anyway, I love changing things into other things.

    Three, I love the graveyard. Love the graveyard. So for example, by the way. If there ever was—the following format ever got made. The format is a Designer’s Choice. Where you pick a designer of Magic, and then you could play any card that designer made in your deck. The winning deck of that format, I believe, would be Rosewater Dredge. Because I—not only did I make the dredge mechanic, I have made like 95% of the cards you would need to make the most awesome dredge deck ever.

    Because I love the graveyard. You know. Bridge from Below, Narcomoeba—I don’t know, name it. I have made a vast, vast majority of the cards that use the graveyard very powerfully and efficiently. Including making the dredge mechanic. So anyway, take those three things together, take a love of artifacts, a love of changing things, a love of the graveyard, voilà! Goblin Tinkerer. Anyway, that was definitely me just making the kind of card that I would like to make.

    Also, another thing that I liked about the card was it’s what I would—used to call a puzzle card. Which was, back in the day, I made Magic: The Puzzling. Which was, you know, like a chess puzzle except it was Magic, and you were in-game, and like, you know, win the game or something. You’d have some objective. Usually winning.  And Goblin Tinkerer was an awesome puzzle card. Because all you had to do is put a couple artifacts into play, a couple artifacts in your graveyard, and like, now you had all these interesting options. And you—it really was—with one card you had all these, you know, avenues for the person solving the puzzle to go down and figure out what they could do. And so, it’s definitely—both the kind of card I loved as a player and the kind of card I loved as a puzzle crafter.

    Okay, what is next? Next is—oh, another trivia question. What was the first Mirage card to be printed? Now this is a trick question, and probably not one you know unless—unless I talked about this during Homelands. The answer is Memory Lapse,  Because Memory Lapse, although designed by the Mirage team, actually came out during Homelands.

    How did that happen? Well the way it happened was, Bill Rose had come out to Wizards—I think he might have even been doing his interview for the job, but he came out for some reason. And then while he was there, they were doing the final touches on Homelands. So he sat in. And they had a hole for a counterspell. And so they might have even had the art—I’m not sure. But anyway, they had a counterspell. I think this actually was late enough that they might have had the art.

    But they needed the counterspell. And so Bill said, “Oh, I have a great counterspell, it’s in my set.” You know, in Menagerie. And so they ended up taking it because they needed it, because it was like last—they just needed something good, and Bill had a good spell. So they put it in. So Memory Lapse ended up coming out before Mirage, the set it was designed in. There’s some other cases of that happening. We often will steal from the future.

    One of the rules of R&D is, whatever set is chronologically coming out the next, has priority if they really need something. So if you’re desperate for something and the set that’s coming out after you has it, I mean, barring that thing being crucial to the upcoming set. You usually can take it. It’s like, because that set has some time to replace it. Where you’re like under the gun and got to get it out the door. So we borrow from the future quite a bit.

    Okay. Next. Consuming Ferocity. So this is an example of a card that was an awesome idea, another card I did, an awesome idea that didn’t quite play out the way I hoped. So the idea that I had about the card, which was—was very simple. Was, you know, you—you enchant it, and then—the idea of the spell was, you make this—you give this thing some magical energy, and it gets stronger and stronger and stronger. Until that magical energy just burns them out. And destroys them.

    And so the idea was that you cast it on your creature, and it gets better and better, but in true red fashion it kind of burns itself out. Like, it just, red—not thinking the long game. And so I made the card, but what ended up happening was, the—it just got more complicated than I really meant for it to be.

    That just the—this is what happens from time to time, it happened with suspend, is when you make a card, and you—you know, you… like, in your head it’s a very simple idea. But when you actually have to write it out and put words on cards, then it just gets a lot more complex meaning there’s busy work that you have to do and make the player do that just is like “What? What?” You know.

    And Consuming Ferocity is exactly one of those kinds of cards, where like in theory, like, in the mindspace and the idea of it is pretty simple, right? But when you actually write it out and people are reading it, it’s the kind of thing your read twice and you go, “Wait, what? What happens?” And suspend is an even worse—where like, the idea of, you know, I get it for cheaper but it takes four turns to play, but when you have to manipulate all the counters and everything, it just—it confuses people.

    And so one of the things we do now in design is, we actually will template things—well, rough templates, but we actually will have the Rules Manager do rough templates early so we can look at something and understand it, like “Oh, is this going to be as easy as we think it’s going to be?” Because one of the things that happens a lot in design is, you make something and you think it’s going to be super super simple and obvious and intuitive, and when you actually write it out, it’s not. That the way—what you need to do with the game mechanics to make it happen makes it not—not as—it doesn’t shine as much.

    That—and that one of the rules of design is, you have to understand the means by which you have to communicate your game mechanic to the audience. That you have to go through templating. You have to go through the rules. And that sometimes, what seems so obvious isn’t when you actually have to communicate it. And that’s a very important lesson to have.

    Another important lesson to have came from a card called Ekundu Cyclops. So that was a card that, whenever another creature attacked, it had to attack. You know. And on the surface it seemed pretty cool. It’s like “Well, you know…” It’s a card that says, “Well, if people are attacking, I’m attacking.” You know.

    And—but here’s the problem. It’s a card that had to do something, but it cared about another card. And the problem is, people would attack all the time, and like they just wouldn’t look at their Ekundu Cyclops. They just wouldn’t look at it, and so like, they had nothing to remind them that “Oh, by the way, you have to attack.” Because the card said “Hey, if something else happens, you have to do something.” And people would miss it all the time.

    And what we learned is that, you know, it’s bad to make—you have to be careful to make a card in which, like, “I must do something, but something else must happen.” And that—we do do some triggers and stuff like that, you have to be careful, but usually we make the trigger big enough that it matters. But the problem especially with Ekundu Cyclops was, sometimes like the player, you know, it wasn’t that they weren’t thinking about it, they were just like “Oh, I can’t attack with it” and put it aside, and then a new creature comes out and they’re not even thinking about Ekundu Cyclops.

    And once again. That’s an example of design that, like, seems simple, and then in actual play people kept messing up on it. And so we don’t do that exactly anymore. What we’ll do now is, we’ll make a card for example that says, you know, “If—you know, if I attack, you know, something else must attack.” Or “I must attack with something else.” Or, you know, things in which it sort of reminds you that—the card itself says “Hey, I must be involved with other things.” And not like “You must remember even when you’re not looking at me that I might have to do something.”

    Okay. Next—so one of the things that I talked about last time was how Mirage came up with some things we hadn’t done before, like they were the first sets to do them. I talked about stalking and skulking, and one of the ones I forgot about was the card Thirst.

    So what happens is, in Limited, it’s important that every color at common has some way to deal with creatures. White obviously had pacifism effects, black had creature destruction, red has direct damage, green now has Prey Upon-type effects, before it would try to do more stuff with Lure or things in which its creatures would try to (???) your creatures, I think Prey Upon’s a better solution.

    But anyway, blue needed something. Like, “Well, how could blue, you know…” Because blue doesn’t destroy things, it’s not blue’s thing. And yeah, blue could counter creatures, but what happens if blue can’t counter them? So we wanted to give blue some answer to it. And the idea we eventually came to which has now become a pretty staple part of blue in common is the idea of a lockdown card. That blue has an enchantment that says, “Well, you don’t untap.” You know. And sometimes it taps your creature, sometimes it doesn’t. But it gives blue kind of an answer. And Thirst I’m pretty sure was the first time we had done this. It was the first card to do that.

    And one of the things about Mirage that I like to explain is that Mirage is, was—I don’t know, ninth set to come out? I mean, it was a relatively early set. And what happens is, whenever we make new sets, we always stumble across new things, and like one of the things that makes the game awesome is we keep experimenting, we keep finding new things that work, we bring those things to the game proper, and that each set kind of evolves our technology of kind of learning what we can do. And I think Mirage was a big step technological-wise. There’s a lot of individual things that got done that went on to become just how Magic functions. You know.

    On top of that, Mirage is the start of what I call the Silver Age of design. It was the first set really that had block design. It was the first set where Limited—the thought of Limited was a big part of how the set got designed and developed. You know. And that Mirage was a milestone. I think that when you look back these days, it seems a little on the bland side only because, you know… For example, the story I tell is I was in film school, and we saw a film called The Great Train Robbery. And when you’re watching this film, it seems like the goofiest, you know, like, it just seems so childish, but like, you know, the (???) is, you know, we have none of the effects. It’s all very silly. You know.

    And at the end of it, you know, I’m watching it, and this is the dumbest thing, and my teacher’s like “No no no no. See how they were at the train station, and then the next shot they’re at the bank, you know, or that, you know, that meant that they’re at one place, and if you cut, now you’re at another place. And the audience goes, ‘Oh, they’re at the same place.’ You cut back and forth, the audience will believe they’re at the same place. Because that didn’t happen before this film. That didn’t exist. Something that’s so ingrained in your, you know, mental mapping of how you look at film, something that’s like just a given. Just that is how film works. This is the stuff that did it.”

    You know. And that, you know, yeah now it looks so simplistic because, well, it did something they hadn’t done before. Mirage did a lot of that. There are a lot of neat innovative things that, like, Mirage did, that when you look back, it might look a little on the bland side, but that’s because things you take for granted, they’re just part of Magic, were, you know, a key element of being there. So.

    Anyway, that is—I’m now at work and I’m parked. I’ve actually been parked for a minute. But I wanted to finish up. So anyway, I—I hope this is—my final part of my Mirage three-part. Like I said, I have great respect for Mirage design, I think that Bill and Joel and Charlie and Don and Elliott and Howard made an awesome set. You know, I think the development team was coming into its own. And we really—this was the first real set the four of us developed.

    And I’m very proud. I think like, you know, in the test of time, Mirage was a good set that did—led the way to a lot of things. It wasn’t the most exciting set, but I think it laid a lot of groundwork and I think it did a lot of good solid things that got built upon. And I feel like it has, in my opinion—in my mind, a very central place in Magic history. Like I said, it’s the start of the Silver Age of design. That’s a pretty big deal. So.


    Anyway, I’ve got to go make some Magic cards now, so it was fun talking all about Mirage design, but it’s time to go make the Magic.
    0

    Add a comment

  3. All podcast content by Mark Rosewater

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

    Okay, last week I started talking about the design of Mirage. But I didn’t finish. So I’m going to continue talking about it. So for starters , I mangled the story last week. So I did a little research, to have a better understanding of what the story was. I was in the ballpark, but I made a few mistakes.

    So there were three different nations, and the three nations—remember there were three that were sort of in conflict? So there were three nations, and the nations were the Zhalfirins, which were a military kingdom, the Femeref, which were the religious state, and the Suq’Ata. Which was a trading province. And they are—when the story begins, they’re having squabbles amongst themselves, but a planeswalker named Teferi has been doing experiments and phased out the entire continent of Jamuura. Which is where this takes place.

    And when the story begins, I think it has just come back. And that gets the attention of Kaervek and Mangara, and Jolrael I think. And so what happens is, Kaervek is the bad guy that comes and he kidnaps Mangara and its’ the Jamuurans trying to stop Kaervek. That’s the main thrust of the plot. And so essentially they have to gather together, and they get the heroes together, and they end up using the Weatherlight ship to travel there, but the main part of the story is trying to free Mangara from the Amber Prison.

    But the—when I talked about the three different states, it wasn’t the—last time I was sort of implying that it was built around the mages. It wasn’t. It was actually built around the areas. The different sections of Jamuura. You know, the different people.

    Anyway, what I want to do today is tell some card stories. And these are all over the board. These are—once again, a lot of my stories will be things that I was directly involved with because I know them, but I just wanted to talk about just a lot of different stories. I mean mostly I want to jump to different cards.

    So I’m going to start with my favorite card in the set, because it has a personal attachment. So most people know my nickname is MaRo, but not everyone might know why. And Mirage is why. So there was a hole—we were making cards one day, we made a hole in rare green.

    And I said “Oh, I have a neat idea for a card.” And basically the idea I had was, it was a card that got bigger—it was as big as your hand. You know, it was */* where * was your hand. And I liked—green has this flavor of growth and the idea of a lot of green’s creatures, you want to sort of start small, and they keep getting bigger over time. And so I thought it was a good fit for green. It’s interesting the Maro ability makes sense in blue and green for different reasons. I mean, green plays into the growth aspect, where blue plays into the knowledge aspect. So it’s an ability we use in both.

    But anyway, Bill Rose was taking down notes. And when he wrote the card down, I didn’t have a name for it. And so he just wrote down “Maro,” which is—what Bill used to do in our mail system was, he would try to figure out the shortest number of letters that you had to type to get somebody’s name to show up. And for me, if you typed M-A-R-O, I was the first name that showed up. Because MA is Mark, RO is Rosewater, it’s the first two letters of my first and last name.

    So the card came out and then it just ended up becoming my nickname, so online I get called MaRo constantly, and that comes from this card. I love the card Maro, I’m a big fan of it, the artwork has an awesome story too.

     So last week I talked about Sue Ann Harkey, the art director of Mirage, and she was at an art show and she saw this picture that she loved. Now be aware. This was a piece of art that the artist just made as a piece of art. It wasn’t for Magic, it wasn’t—it was called The Green Man. And she was captivated. She’s like “This is awesome.” So she bought the rights to the picture. So Maro is unique in that it’s one of—maybe the only one where the card wasn’t made for Magic. It was just an artist made a card, and we bought the image.

    Now I later actually bought the photo. It’s one of my four Magic photos that I own—four pieces of Magic art. I own Maro, I own Look at Me I’m the DCI, I own Mise and I own Jester’s Sombrero. So. Anyway, they’re all cards that have some personal attachment to me, you know, that I have some personal attachment to. So. And—anyway, that’s Maro’s story. Next we talk about Lion’s Eye Diamond.

    Okay, so Charlie Catino, who I brought up before was on the design team. He wasn’t on the development team but he was on the design team. And he was trying to make a bad card. Charlie loves making bad cards. And one of Charlie’s beliefs is, that you know, the set has to have some bad cards. And Charlie was in the camp of “Well, you know, every set should have a few really bad cards.” And so Charlie was trying to make a really bad card.

    So the card he made was, it’s an artifact, it costs zero, and if you sacced it and sacced your entire hand, you could get three colorless mana. So I saw this card and I said “Okay, Charlie, if you’re going to make a bad Lotus, you know, bad Black Lotus, at least make a Black Lotus.” So I convinced him to change it to be three cards—you know, three mana of one color like Black Lotus. So the idea is, “Okay, it’s just a really bad Black Lotus.” Black Lotus did that and didn’t make you discard your hand, Lion’s Eye Diamond made you discard your hand.

    And the interesting thing about Lion’s Eye Diamond is that at first it was—I mean, we got angry mail, “Why’d you make this card?” Whenever we make a bad card, we’ll get people who are like “Why did you make this card?” But the funny thing is, it didn’t turn out to be all that bad. In fact, I believe it is now restricted in Vintage, it’s banned in Legacy… it is a powerful, powerful card. Because it turns out that getting a Lotus—even with discarding your hand—still can be very powerful. And so Charlie did not quite accomplish his task of making a very, very bad card.

    Speaking of very, very bad cards, here’s another card to talk about: Horrible Hordes. So that’s a 2/2 Rampage 1. Rampage, for those that might not know their Legends, was a mechanic that showed up in Legends that was actually evergreen for a little while in Magic. What it meant was, if I was blocked, for every creature beyond the first creature blocking me, I got +N/+N where N was Rampage N. So Rampage 1 means “So this is a 2/2 creature, that if you block him with more than one creature, it gets +1/+1 for each additional creature beyond the first.”

    So one of the reasons we stopped doing rampage, by the way, is rampage—the “beyond the first” thing is annoying. Because what it does is it says “I just don’t matter almost all the time.” You know. Because opponents know it has the rampage, so, you know, first of all, people do not block with multiple creatures all that much. I mean it happens, but not as much as you think it does.  And second, when they rampage, you didn’t have to do that.

    And this card was almost a joke because it’s a 2/2. Like a lot of the other rampage cards are big.  Like, you know, a 4/4 or a 5/5 where you kind of have to double-block it to kill it. But a 2/2—a 2/2 can just be chumped by a 2/1. You know. And so the card was originally I think called Horrible Horrible Hordes, and then they shortened it to Horrible Hordes because Horrible Horrible didn’t fit. But the card was made to be bad, and the name was kind of like thumbing the nose at you, like “I’m a bad card!” But even—the funny thing is, even that card did see some play in Limited. Even as horrible as the Horrible Hordes were.

    Okay, so the next card—Foratog. Okay, so Foratog was just made by the Visions design team to be some kind of nature spirit or something. And I saw it, and I—in fact, the stats were—it was a 1/2, and you sacrificed a forest and it got +2/+2 until end of turn. And I was like “Hey, that—that’s an Atog!” You know. It had—it even had the 1/2 stats, it sacced something and got +2/+2. You know. And I think originally it might have been—it might have been G? G and tap? And I convinced them to sac a forest.

    Anyway, it was very, very close to an Atog. And I’m like—little side note. So Antiquities, up until I worked for Wizards, Antiquities was my favorite set. I’ll talk about Antiquities. I loved Antiquities. Loved loved loved Antiquities. And I was a huge fan of Atog.

    Now for those that don’t know, when Antiquities first came out, Atog was a hated card. Hated card. People hated it. They didn’t really understand—actually, it’s a pretty powerful card, but people didn’t get how powerful it was. And it was—I think it showed up, it was a common, and then it showed up in Revised I think, and so like at one point in Magic it was the most-printed card in Magic. And so people somehow didn’t like Atog. But I loved Atog.

    And so when I saw this chance to sort of make a new Atog, I was very excited. And I remember I had to sell it a little bit, but they—it wasn’t that hard. They’re like “Oh, okay, yeah.” They too sort of had—they had some appreciation for Atog. And then once I did that, like this set wheels in motion.

    One of the themes today is, a bunch of cycles—cycles that start in Mirage that go bigger than Mirage. And so one of them was the Atog cycle. So what happened was, we ended up making—in this set we ended up making Foratog, which is a green Atog. There already was a red Atog. And then we made a blue Atog, Chronatog in Visions,  we made Necratog, a black Atog in Weatherlight, and then in Tempest we finished it off with Auratog, a white Atog, so we made a little Atog cycle.

    And that was pretty much my doing. I—people have their pet agendas, and I love Atogs so I wanted to make sure that we made more Atogs in the game. So I did do that. On my current list is figuring out how to get Atogs back. They’ve sort of drifted away. But I’ve not loved the loss of Atogs!

    Okay. Speaking of cycles, I now need to talk about the Mega Mega Cycle. So the card here is Teferi’s Isle. We used to make a lot of Gilligan’s Isle jokes about that card. You know, “Here on Teferi’s Isle.” Anyway, so what happened was, we had this card. So Teferi was a main character, and what happened was, he had taken a big chunk of Jamuura and phased it out.

    And so we loved the idea of a land, you know, that itself had phasing. But since Teferi was a blue mage, we’re like “Oh, it should tap for blue.” But we had this dilemma that normally when we tap for a color, we make a cycle. And we didn’t really want to or have room to make a full cycle, so we came up with this idea. We said “What if this was part of a cycle? It’s like the Auratogs.”

    But we went a little further. Not just a cycle. A mega, mega cycle. We decided to make a cycle larger than any cycle we’d ever made. Or—larger in time. So what happened was, Teferi’s Isle shows up in the first set in Mirage block. Then, in Stronghold, the second set in Tempest Block, the next block, we made Volrath’s… Volrath’s Stronghold? So we made the black one, and then in the middle set—I’m sorry, the third set of Urza’s Saga in Destiny, we made the green one… and then the next year was Mercadian Masques, and then the second one… did we make the red one? And then in the first set in… what was after Mercadian Masques? In Invasion we made like the white one? (Editor’s note—Teferi’s Isle, Volrath’s Stronghold, Yavimaya Hollow, Kor Haven, and Keldon Necropolis.)

    So like it was a cycle that took five years to make, it went first set, second set, third set, second set, first set, so we even did a little pattern. But anyway, that’s the kind of dedication, taking five years to finish a cycle. There was a—I don’t know, one of the things I enjoy is I like having larger patterns happen in Magic. And when I can, I try to do those.

    It’s a little trickier nowadays than it was back then, because back then because it was the same group of people doing every set, like, if we wanted to set something and four of us decided, well we were the development team every set and we could make it happen. Now there’s lots of different development teams and so it’s a little harder to have a single agenda go through. You’ve got to push a little harder to make that happen.

    Okay, so, next. Let me talk a little about—a little about my flavor text writing. So there’s two pieces of flavor text—three pieces of flavor text that I wrote for this set that I wanted to talk about. So first is—first I’ll talk about the one that has lasted the longest. So what happened was, on this set we got the art in earlier than we nowadays do.

    I think the art came in—the way the art waves worked back then, we actually had the art in earlier than we now do, and so when we were writing flavor text I had the chance to look at the art to write the flavor text. And so we got the art back for Pacifism. Which is this creature, sort of mean-looking creature, but he has this kind of look on his face like he’s been—he has a spell on him and now he’s all pacified.

    And I just—something about him just, I don’t know, I decided to give him a name. I think I called him Grokk, I think? Grakk. Grakk. And I—I had this little thing about how this was the first time that he had a warm—warm fuzzies. Anyway, the piece of flavor text I wrote on a lark, I thought was fun, and it has just stuck around. Like, I don’t know how many pieces of flavor text I still have, in like the core set, but so far, Pacifism… keeps sticking around.

    One of the running jokes in R&D is because the card says, you know, “for the first time,” is that every time we’ve reprinted it we should have said “for the second time,” “for the third time.” But anyway, that’s a piece of flavor text that somehow hit a note and stuck around.

    The second piece of flavor text was for Dwarven Miner. So Pacifism was “For the first time in his life, Grakk felt a warm and—warm and fuzzy?” Is that right? So the flavor text for Dwarven Miner was “Fetch the pest—fetch the pestridder, Paka—we’ve got dwarves in the rutabaga.” And that—I was so tickled by that flavor text. Just the idea that like in Jamuura, the dwarves are kind of like, you know, pests. Like “Oh, you’d better go get the exterminator, we’ve got dwarves in the rutabaga again.” And I just—somehow, I was—this one tickled me to no end.

    And I got in a big fight with our editor at the time, a woman named Darla. Because she kept wanting to change little words. You know. Like instead of—I think I had “We have dwarves in the rutabaga,” and she wanted to say “dwarves…” like, “…beneath the rutabaga,” and I’m just like “Nooo, that blows the rhythm of the joke!” And so like I really loved the (???) flavor text, and like I had this drag-out fight with Darla about whether or not it should be in or beneath or ‘neath or—anyway.

    The third piece of flavor text I wrote might possibly be the greatest flavor text I’ve ever written. For a card called Reparation. So what happened was, back in the day, this was my young’un days when I was a single man, and pretty much I lived at Wizards. I mean I didn’t technically live—I had an apartment, but other than sleeping I was at Wizards all day long.

    I mean the way it worked is, I’d get to work, I’d work all day, at night-time all of us would go out to eat. In fact, one of the stories is, when I first started dating Lora, she’s over at my apartment and she goes to the cabinet to get something to eat because she’s hungry. And she opens it up and there’s nothing. She opens the fridge, there’s nothing. There’s literally no food in my house. She’s like “Where’s your food?” And I’m like “Oh yeah, I don’t eat here.” Because back in the day, just R&D ate out every meal. Which probably wasn’t the healthiest thing for us, but we ate out every meal. And so I was—I never ate at home. In fact, I was barely at home.

    So anyway, I was at work late one night, and I mean late. Two, three, four in the morning. And I’m working on some flavor text because I was—I was a die-hard working machine. We also goofed around and played games, I mean it wasn’t just work and we had fun. And work was fun.

    But so anyway, it was late at night, and we had just gotten some new art in, I was writing some flavor text. But I got the art from Reparations. And I’m like “What the—what in the world is this art?” And it was this couple, a dark-skinned couple with, you know, robes, and there’s like a white man that looks like a priest character, and he’s handing them this bag that looks like, you know, it has gold or something in it. And in the background, you can see flames. Like—like—you know, like things were on fire. And I’m like “What? What in the world is going on here?” And so—now given, I’m punchy, punchy tired. So I write the flavor text “Sorry I burned down your village, here’s some gold.”
    Reparations
    And I—I really, really I wrote it because of Michael, so Michael Ryan, who was at the time an editor for Magic, he and I would later go on to be the people who did, or started doing the Weatherlight Saga, he and I were the ones that pitched the Weatherlight Saga, (???) tell that story.

    But Michael and I are up late working on flavor text, and I’m just—I think I was trying to just make Michael laugh. I don’t even think I was serious. I don’t think that I was like trying to make flavor text as much as I was trying to make Michael laugh. And I showed this to him, and he started giggling. And I started giggling. And we laughed and we laughed and we laughed, and I’m like “I’m turning that in!”

    And then they used it! I—as, whatever as my witness, I—I—when I saw that actually was chosen, I was flabbergasted. Because I thought it was funny. But I’m like—like—I just didn’t think it would be picked. But anyway, it’s one of my—of the ones I’ve written, it’s one of my favorites. I mean, I like Dwarven Miner and (???) other ones I’ve written—I wrote it when (???) but not in Mirage, about the advantages of using zombies (???), and I wrote a couple ones for Jaya Ballard. I wrote a bunch of Jaya Ballard ones. That I liked a lot. But you know, fighting fire with fire.

    Anyway. Okay. On to the next card. Let’s see. How about Brushwagg? This one’s funny, I—I know we got Brushwagg from--from the design team. And the  interesting thing about Brushwagg is somehow, I mean we decided just to give it, like, to give it a name, and then just its creature type was its name. Somehow just the whole package of Brushwagg—there are fans of Brushwagg. I have letters that say “When are you making more Brushwaggs?”

    And the thing that I don’t know by the way about Brushwagg is, if you’ve seen it, there is like this looks like this giant tumbleweed, and then there is this cat. Now, the question is, is the cat part of the Brushwagg, and that like he has this like porcupine-like middle part? Or is the Brushwagg eating the cat and the cat is the victim of the Brushwagg? I have no idea. I don’t know. I don’t know. But maybe one day we’ll make another Brushwagg. It is a card that I get a lot of—it gets a lot of attention for what really is a silly card that is not particularly powerful.
    Brushwagg
    Okay, next. Skulking Ghost! Okay, so another thing that Mirage did is it introduced a bunch of things that went on to be just things Magic did. And the  funny thing about Skulking Ghost is that the idea was, the card was made is, it’s this ghost. And like the second you sort of even approach the ghost, you know, it’s ephemeral. Right?

    And so the funny thing is, R&D started calling that ability “Skulking.” And we would—like I think we  made a Skulking Cyclops. And the hilarious part is, the skulking wasn’t the mechanic! The ghost was the mechanic! Like the ghost disappears because he’s so ephemeral. The skulking was just an adjective for the ghost. But we started calling it skulking. In fact, we still do. It’s the nickname in R&D for that ability.

    Now, what happened is, originally it was in black because it started in black, but at one point we said “You know, this makes a lot more sense for illusions.” Right? That you make an illusion, and then as soon as you—once someone questions the illusion, then it pops. You know. Like it has reality until someone questions it and then it goes away. And so we’ve kind of shifted it over to blue. Blue needed it. So instead of skulking now—it’s sometimes called skulking, but it’s the illusion ability.

    Another ability that started (???) was Stalking Tiger. We still refer to that ability as Stalking. What Stalking Tiger is, is you must be—you can only be blocked, sorry. You can only be blocked by one creature. It’s something we put on green. So usually it goes on bigger creatures, it says “Hey, only one thing can block me,” and so it becomes hard to deal with if, you know, if it’s on the bigger side, because only bigger things can block it. Small things can just chump it, but you can’t double-block it.

    And stalking, by the way, I like way better than rampage because it has a similar impact but it’s just simpler. It’s easier to grok. We do occasionally do new rampage, by the way—we don’t call it new rampage, where everything gets a bonus, but that’s not something we do tons of.

    Okay, next. Let me talk about art! So there are a couple cards in the set—so Sue Ann Harkey, who was the art director, was an amazing art director in the sense that she got wonderful artists, so they drew amazing paintings. I mean, this is—just as a—if you wanted to put the art up in a museum, you know, this set has a very cool feel to it. It had a lot of the African background, and it just was very neat. And she found a lot of artists that went on to be staple Magic artists. Sue Ann Harkey was an awesome, awesome art director.

    But one small problem with Sue Ann was she didn’t know Magic. She did not know Magic. And so what happened was that we would do things, and we would get art back that didn’t work with what the card did. So I’m going to talk about a couple examples of that.

    First is Goblin… Scouts. So that card in the design file was Dwarven Scouts. But the card right now makes 1/1 mountainwalkers, but originally it made 1/2 dwarves. And the problem was, we got the card back, and we’re like “Those aren’t dwarves. Those are goblins maybe trying to dress up like dwarves?”  Like they looked like goblins. They did not look at all like dwarves.
    Goblin Scouts
    And like I said. Sue Ann was not super familiar with fantasy. You know? That she came from a background of fine art, and so, like this—she didn’t really get distinguished between “Oh, this is a goblin and not a dwarf.” And so it didn’t look like a dwarf. And so we had to change the card.

    Another card we made is Sunweb. So Sunweb originally was not supposed to be able to block I think white creatures. And then we got back the art, and it’s a giant like white dragon in a net. You know. And—and visually speaking, I understand that a dragon doesn’t necessarily have to be a white creature, but like you don’t want something that’s just all white. Especially in the sense that it had a white dragon. Like so we changed it so it couldn’t block small things. But like “Oh, well that’s a white thing.” Like, “The card that can’t block white things can’t be shown blocking a white thing in the art.” So we changed it so it could not block smaller things. Because the smaller things sneak through the web is the idea.
    Sunweb
    The other one was Waiting in the Weeds. So, I’m a squirrel lover…  hopefully that won’t be taken out of context… I’m a big fan of squirrels. In fact, when we get to Urza’s Legacy, we’ll talk about how I did the card concepting, you might notice there are a lot of squirrels in Legacy. I also picked the creature type for Odyssey—a bunch of squirrels.

    Anyway—but anyway, I was gung ho to get squirrels into Magic. They did not exist yet in Magic. So there’s this card that made these tokens, and I’m like “Oh, this could be squirrels. This could be squirrels!” And so I talked to the R&D people and I’m like “Here’s our chance, guys, we can make squirrels.” And they’re like “Well, uh…” and I’m like “Guys, guys, guys. Squirrels.” So I cared, they didn’t, so we made a squirrel. I mean, they didn’t dislike squirrels, I think I convinced them squirrels were awesome. But I got them to go along.

    So I made the squirrels, and then the art description for this thing was, “All these creatures are hidden  in the bush, you can’t even see what they are, you just can see the reflection of their eyes—their irises or whatever, their eyes.” So like “Okay.” So we get the art back, and it has these cats in it! Like the artist put the creatures in it! Like you weren’t supposed to see the creatures! And we’re like “Oh, okay, I guess they’re cats…” And I had to change it. And so like Waiting in the Weeds was supposed to be the first squirrel card in Magic! And it was not. I would later get squirrels in. But that  always made me sad because that was a great chance to have the squirrels that we so much beloved.
    Waiting in the Weeds
    Another thing to talk about when we’re talking about art is, this is not something we do at al anymore. But back then, one of the things that would happen a lot is, we would get art in and then the art—eh, doesn’t quite match the card we had. And so we used to do is we’d have meetings where we’d lay out all the art, and then we’d have all the cards, and we’d assign them one for one.

    So the first thing we do is like “Here’s art that has to go with this card.” You know. “This shows this thing, that’s this, oh.” You know. The only card this can be on. But what we’d end up with is, we’d have about 30 or 40 pieces that were a little ambiguous exactly what they were, and then we would try to mix and match stuff to make all the art fit. Because sometimes, the art that came back didn’t quite work for the card that we’d made, but we were able to sort of shift things around.

    Now, like I said, that does not happen anymore. But back in the day, back in the time of Mirage, that very much was. I mean, we made 20, 30 swaps in art. And like I said, it stemmed from—Sue Ann would make gorgeous things but not all of them quite lined up. And so we fixed them sort of by shifting things around, you know, sometimes we would move mechanics.

    Okay. Next—as we’ve been talking about swapping. So let me talk about Gibbering Hyenas and Mtenda Lion. So, Gibbering Hyenas is a 3/2 for… 2G I think? That can’t block black creatures. And Mtenda Lion was a G 2/1 that your opponent can pay blue to stop it. Now originally, those were swapped. Originally, Mtenda Lion was a G 2/1 that can’t block black creatures. But the idea was, it’s a 2/1! Who’s blocking? You’re going to attack with him. But it turned out at the time, we were afraid.

    Now obviously, the creature curve has improved much over the years. But at the time of Mirage, it was thought that green couldn’t have a G 2/1. That’s slightly too good. Which is funny, because white got a W 2/1, but we just thought like somehow green couldn’t do that. And obviously, you know, as recent sets have shown, G can get a 2/1, in fact it can get it in hybrid and have an ability on top of it. But at the time it couldn’t.

    And so we swapped those two cards around. And  I think it’s funny because I think that Mtenda Lion was—we thought it was going to be this really powerful card and then last minute we had to switch it, and it ended up being something that like, you know, more of a footnote than a card that really defined something at the time. But when we were there, we really thought it was going to be something that was going to be, you know, a little bigger.

    Next, Unyaro  Bee Sting. My bane! My bane! So this card—I’m not sure what card has caused me more frustration in all of Magic. Probably Desert Twister, which when I get to Arabian Nights I’ll talk about. But anyway, this might be—this is up there. Because somehow this established that like “Oh, green can do direct damage because bees are green.”

    In fact, Aaron Forsythe, if you ever get a chance to spellsling against him, he has a duel deck that he has made that’s a special duel deck that he made just for spellslinging, and it’s called “Birds vs. Bees.” And he always likes to show it to me because he knows it riles me. That bees—I—I think bees have been misappropriated in Magic, and somehow they’re used to allow green to have direct damage when it should not have direct damage! That is wrong. I mean, it can hit fliers or whatever.

    But anyway. Unyaro Bee Sting is one of those cards that like I didn’t like at the time, I tried to stop it—that’s, by the way—here’s one of the most frustrating things about Magic is, when you see something, and you go “This is wrong. I need to stop this.” And you fight to stop it. And you fight to stop it. And you fight to stop it! And you cannot. And you just cannot convince enough of the people that it needs t obe stopped. And then it happens. And then the next time people are like, “Oh, we’ve done it,” and you’re like “Noooooo!” Ay yi yi.

    So, somehow bees—bees will be the death of me. I don’t mean literally. Hopefully I won’t get attacked by—“MaRo attacked by bees.” But holy moly. In fact it’s funny, because when I get to sign—people send cards for me to sign. And the #1 card people ask me to sign is MaRo, because it’s the one named after me from Mirage. #2 is Look at Me I’m the DCI, I did the art for it, I’m the artist. And #3 is Hornet Sting. Hornet Sting! Like, it’s not just cruel, I mean, like, you go to, like, Bill Buckner and like “Here’s the ball that went through your legs and like you lost the world series. Could you sign this please?” Maybe someone did that. I have no idea.

    But anyway, Mark Rosewater making a sports reference is actually somewhat, like, minute and detailed. So just a little side note, when I was in college, I’d never really been into sports. I went to Boston University, I was there in the summer of ’87, ’88, and I got into baseball because it was Boston playing New York and they were playing at Fenway Park right down the street because I lived on… right near there. And we literally, when people had home runs, I could hear them screaming!

    And so I said “Okay,” I got really into it because a lot of people from New York in the school, and like that was—I got my dreams crushed and hopes and like “Okay, why am I taking an interest in sports?” Anyway. So. Sports had a chance, and it crushed my dreams, and so I moved on.

    So, let’s see. What other cards can we talk about? Raging Spirit! Let me talk about Raging Spirit. You’re saying, “What could Mark possibly have to say about a Hill Giant, 3R 3/3, that for two mana can make itself colorless?” That card screwed me over. That’s what I can talk about it.

    So back in the day, I used to make a puzzle column called Magic: The Puzzling. And basically I would make puzzles in which you had to solve them. Modern-day Duels of the Planeswalkers has something similar, where like—I basically had chess puzzles, where like “The game’s in play and here’s what goes on and here’s what you have. And here’s what your opponent has in play, and win this turn, or, you know, do something difficult.” Usually it’s “win this turn.”

    So anyway, I had this puzzle that I’d made. I had made a book of puzzles. The puzzles were very popular, so before I came out to Wizards I actually made a puzzle book. And I made fifty puzzles for the book, but in the end we decided to make twenty—the book be twenty-five puzzles. So I had twenty-five puzzles that I had already made, so I decided I wanted to use these puzzles, so I thought I’d repurpose them in The Duelist. But because there were new sets coming out, I would try to redress them and add things that had to do with the current set to make them feel current.

    So one of the things I did is I had a Hill Giant in my puzzle, so I swapped the Hill Giant for Raging Spirit. I said “Oh, okay, it is a Hill Giant that can turn itself colorless.” And the fact that it could turn itself colorless broke the puzzle. In fact, I think it might be the first puzzle where like I had to make an apology “Oh, the puzzle doesn’t work.” Because I changed the Hill Giant for Raging Spirit. That card broke my puzzle! Anyway.

    See, that’s my little memory of that card. I’m sure other people are like “I won Limited all the time with it” or whatever. But. To me, it’s the card in Mirage, or one of the cards in Mirage that I hold my vendetta. You know. Whatever. Eighteen years later, curse that card.

    Anyway, I see Wizards coming up in my front range. So I look at my list, I have lots more cards to talk about. So I am not yet done. I will—I’m going to spend another—another—at least one more—probably just one more. I don’t have that much more. I have enough to talk for another car ride in.

    But anyway, I hope you guys are enjoying my—my glance through Mirage. I’m trying something a little new, in that I’m trying this idea of spending some time where I go through cards. Where  I actually talk about individual card stories. I do that on—I do that in my column, whenever sets come out, and people like them, and I thought it might be fun to do that. Anyway, I’m experimenting with this. So I’ve got to get some feedback what you think.


    But anyway, I’m now—it’s time for me to go to work, so thank you all for listening, and it’s time to go make the Magic.
    0

    Add a comment

  4. All podcast content by Mark Rosewater

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

    Okay. So today I’m going to talk about one of the very first sets I ever worked on. Now I did a podcast on Alliances, which is the very first set I worked on, but Alliances, like I said was, there was a billion people. I had thirteen people on the team? Something crazy? Mirage was the first team in which I was a major portion of the team. Of the development team. Remember, I was hired not as a designer but as a developer. So in my early years I did a lot of development.

    So Mirage—so what happened was, I’ve talked about how R&D has different waves, sort of thinking about the people that were there. So Wave One of R&D mostly were people that were playtesters in the original Magic. So we’re talking about Skaff Elias, Jim Lin, Dave Pettey. And at the tail end of that would be Charlie Catino, which I’ll talk about today.

    Wave Two, people I consider to be people that came in the next sort of two years in, would be me, Bill Rose, Mike Elliott, and William Jockusch and Henry Stern. Although Henry—Henry wouldn’t start until Tempest so he wasn’t there yet. So Wave Two, what happened was, Wave One was there, they had worked on Magic, Wizards got big enough that all the Wave One people went to work on other products or left the company. So they brought in this new wave of people, Wave Two, to sort of take are of the day-to-day of Magic. So meanwhile, Richard and Skaff and Jim, you know, all those, they were off doing other products and other things. And so the four of us were essentially Magic R&D. And so the Mirage development team was the four of us—me and Bill and Mike and William.

    So, let’s talk a little about the design team. So what happened was, when Richard first wanted to playtest the game, he went out to different groups that he knew of gamers and got them to playtest. Now eventually there would be some intermingling, but when it first started, there were different sections of people that he knew.

    For example, the East Coast playtesters were people that made Ice Age and Alliances and Fallen Empires and Antiquities, which was Skaff Elias, Jim Lin, Dave Pettey, Chris Page, those were people he met through school. Through U Penn, I believe. So this next group he met through bridge. There was a bridge club that he went to. So at the bridge club he met Bill Rose, Joel Mick, Charlie Catino. In fact, this whole group, I believe, are bridge club people.

    So the design team for Mirage, Bill was—Bill and Joel I think were the co-leads of the design. And then Charlie Catino, Don Felice, Howard Kahlenberg, and then Elliott Segal. So I want to talk a little bit about the design team.

    Because I’ve talked a lot about Bill, there’s not too much else to say about Bill—I mean, there is things else to say about Bill. I’ll tell a little story about Bill. But I’ve told a lot more fancy history stuff. I’ll tell a little—one of the things I used to do when I used to go home and talk about where I worked, that I would find some idiosyncracy—like little funny stories about each of my coworkers. Just, you know, to sort of show the lighter side of them.

    And this is the story I used to tell about Bill, is—Bill loves making brownies. He—I mean, Bill—I’m not sure what it is exactly, but Bill just loves cooking brownies. He likes baking brownies. And one day, Bill said to himself, “You know, life is better when I have a brownie. So you know what? I’m going to make sure that every day, I have a homemade brownie.” And so what Bill did is he made brownies, and he made sure that every day he had a brownie. And he’s, like—he wanted to see how many days this could last.

    And it went on for quite a while. It went on for months, I believe. And finally Bill was like “Okay, okay. I don’t need a brownie every day.” But it was funny that like just—you know. And (???) I have parties with my wife and I Lora, we have parties all the time. And one of our running jokes is, when we would invite Bill to one of our parties, because he made awesome brownies, we would always invite “Brownies plus guest.” “Brownies plus one.”

    But anyway. Like I said, I’ve talked a lot about Bill. I mean, there’s plenty more to say. But I mean, Bill was one of the original playtesters. I mean, he is the one person in the Wave Two of R&D that was one of the original playtesters. The rest of us were just Magic players, you know, Bill was actually connected in the game from very early on.

    And the other interesting factoid about Bill is, I was trying to figure out where drafting came from. And that the earliest drafting that was done in Magic, way way before Magic started, goes back to Bill. That Bill’s the person that did the first drafting. So anyway. If you like to draft, way way way back when, the precursor, the person who started drafting with Magic was Bill Rose.

    Okay. Next, let’s get onto Joel Mick. So Joel… when I started, Joel was in R&D, and essentially he had the job I have now except back then, the Head Designer and the Head Developer were one person. And so he was the Head, you know, Designer/Developer. And quickly, not—not too long after I was there, maybe after a year or two, he went on to the Brand team, and Joel Mick for a while was the Brand Manager.

    And Joel was the Brand Manager during a lot of big innovations. Like Joel’s responsible for putting the rarity on cards, putting the… what else, the, for the premium cards, the collector number, you know, Bill was very big at both sort of putting more information on the card and about sort of making the collect—making it a little more fun to collect by adding the premiums and stuff. And Joel was… Joel was a lot of fun. I mean, Joel was definitely someone who was very focused. And he ended up leaving Wizards a little bit after we were bought by Hasbro.

    But—in fact, I saw—he swung by the office once a couple  years ago, and he’s doing well, and has a family, and—Joel was a fun person to work with, and then he always knew what he wanted, you know, some people are indecisive. Joel was never indecisive. And Joel—I think Joel was one of the better Brand Managers. I mean, Magic’s had some very awesome Brand Managers, so I’m not going to say he’s the best, but he was definitely one of the top. I think that a lot of good happened under his reign as Brand Manager. And that he—a lot of good things, a lot of good things came to Magic because of Joel.

    Design-wise, I believe—so when Mirage got made, he would have been—he was still the Head Designer and Developer. So he put together the team, I assume. But—put together the team is incorrect. Now we select people, right?  Like, “This development team needs these people.” So when we started, for the first couple years the development team was “The guys who did Magic R&D.” That’s who the development team was. So myself and Bill and Mike and—William, were just—we were the development team. And then Henry got added a year later, and then the five of us were the development team.

    Okay, so—oh, I want to add—let’s see, Don Felice. So I’ve met Don a bunch of times, I can’t say too much about Don. The little Magic trivia about Don is Feldon’s Cane is an anagram of Don’s name, with Don Felice. And they had tried to get Don’s name into a card earlier, and something happened. I forget what the card was. That it was supposed to be—was it Feldon’s… Don Felice… I’m trying to remember the story.

    Anyway, Don’s a… Don’s a nice fellow. I’ve met him a couple times.  He’s never worked at Wizards, but he back in the day would swing by every once in a while, so I had a chance to, you know, have dinner with him a couple times and talk with him.

    I think I met Howard Kahlenberg once, at an event, and Elliott Segal—or, I take that back. I think I met—no, I met Howard once, I think I met Elliott once. But I don’t have stories of either of them. They never really came out to Wizards. I saw them at events. And like I was introduced by Bill or somebody for two seconds and said hello.

    But the six of them—anyway, let’s talk about how—how Mirage came to be. So when Richard first sold Magic—when it was clear that Magic was going to get made, Richard realized they were going to need expansions. Although once again, let me stress that in Richard’s mind, what was going to happen was, Magic was going to sort of refresh every year.

    So the first year was going to be called Magic: The Gathering. The second year was going to be Magic: Ice Age. You know, that each year would be a new game, and that—remember, the card backs were going to change originally. And the idea was, this was this year’s game. This is this year’s game. And that the cards would be compatible with each other, and I don’t think Richard thought too much about the backs, like them being incompatible, he just thought like each year it would be a new sort of set of Magic that you could play, and that would sort of revamp what Magic is, and that the cards were compatible, you could play them together, and then basically Arabian Nights was going to have a different back, and then Skaff convinced Richard that not—not to change it, and that the back—Magic backs then had a consistent back.

    Anyway, when Richard knew that they were going to need more stuff, more sets, he went to—he had three kind of groups that he dealt with. One of which was the East Coast playtesters that he knew from school, one was the bridge club, and one was his friend “Bit,” Barry Reich.

    And each one of those—so, each of those playtesters, they ended up working on Ice Age. They made Ice Age. And Barry worked on a set called Spectral Chaos, which we would borrow pieces of it for Invasion. The domain mechanic is Barry’s—the Barry mechanic—he made it. And then the—the bridge club, they made a set they called Menagerie. And the idea of their set was, they had a story they wanted to tell, and the story was about three wizards that got in a war. And see if you can—if you know—if you know your Mirage, maybe you can name the three wizards.

    So the three wizards were Kaervek, Jolrael, and Mangara. So where’s the name Mangara come from? For those wordplay aficionados, Mangara is the word “anagram” anagrammed. They thought that was funny. In fact, one of the things is, back in the day, the—people who made the set did a lot more naming.

    Like now, nowadays, I’ll make a set, and I mean if I have a good shot at a name I will name a card that, and some of the names will stay, if I have a really solid name it sometimes will stick around, Innistrad for example we had a lot of top-down stuff, and, you know, there were plenty of cards that we made, that, you know, some of the cards like Jar of Eyeballs or, you know, Creepy Doll started by the name and then the name stayed because that was such a perfect example of what the concept was. But back in the day, most—I mean, the cards were mostly named by the designers in that, you know, so the designers would do a lot more of the story and stuff. Now there’s a whole creative team.

    So the Menagerie, that was the code name, the Menagerie team had an idea for the idea of this war between three people. Now, I don’t know if they had planned for it to be set in an African-style—so, Mirage’s art director was Sue-Ann Harkey was her name.  And Sue-Ann Harkey was an awesome art director, I think that she headed a lot of—a lot of people that went on like Kev Walker, Paolo Parente, a lot of people that went on to be very staple Magic artists for a long time were discovered, you know, or found by Sue-Ann Harkey.

    The one quirk about Sue-Ann Harkey, which I will get to when we get to some of the stories about the set, is she did not understand Magic. She knew art, and she was a very good art—she knew her art. She was very good with that. But just didn’t know Magic. So we had—we had a lot of problems of the artist would paint something that she didn’t catch. And we would have to change a card because the art actually contradicted something about the card mechanically.

    That happens very infrequently nowadays because Jeremy Jarvis, the current art director, like, is much more up on Magic and you know what we need, and, you know, a lot of times the art and the mechanics have a lot of, you know, there’s a looseness there that, you know, the art it just represented the concept, but sometimes the art does something so emphatically that it’s hard for the art to mechanically do something. As we’ll get to—there’s a whole bunch of cases of that happening.

    Okay. So, they made Menagerie, and what happened was, Richard had promised his team that they could make some stuff, and meanwhile at the same thing, Peter Adkison had also gone, and he found some people to make sets. So if you look at the early sets of Magic, okay, so Arabian Nights was done very quickly by Richard. And Arabian Nights was done fast because they didn’t realize how fast they would need another set. And so Richard did Arabian Nights very fast.

    And Antiquities was done by the East Coast playtesters, so that was one of Richard’s groups, Legends was done by Steve Conard, Richard’s very good friend and one of the founders of Wizards. Which was one of Peter’s friends. And then The Dark was done by Jesperd Myrfors, who was the art director at the time, was one of Peter’s friends, and then Fallen Empires was done by the East Coast playtesters, so that’s one of Richard’s friends, and then after Fallen Empires was… Ice Age, Ice Age, which was East Coast playtesters, and after Ice Age was Homelands, Homelands was done by Kyle Namvar and Scooter Hungerford, Scott Hungerford, who was Peter’s… people Peter knew, and then after that was Alliances, which was the East Coast playtesters again.

    So in early Magic you can see, like, some were done by Peter’s friends, some were done by Richard’s friends. In fact, a lot of the early ones, you’ll notice were done by—I keep calling them the East Coast playtesters, but Skaff Elias, Jim Lin… Skaff Elias, Jim Lin, Dave Pettey, Chris Page. Because they—three of them came out, they were the ones that were at Wizards so they were a little more hands-on, so I think a lot of their stuff got done earlier because they were just there to sort of maneuver it and work on it.

    I just thought of something! I forgot somebody. I mean, I mentioned him in passing, but I did not talk about Charlie Catino! Which is a grave, grave error. So I’m going to jump back there. Here’s the thing I know. My podcast started getting transcripted. That when you hear me talk, and like I’m jumping around, like okay, that’s how people talk. But somehow when you read it, it just reads odd. So me being absentminded.

    So Charlie Catino. So, I right now, if you look at Wizards, and talk about how long you’ve been there, I’m not—we’re not—not counting the people who were previously at TSR, stayed—you know, and then came over to Wizards, so some of them go longer. But just—have started working at Wizards, ended working at Wizards, the longest amount of time working there, I am number eight. The eighth longest. Bill is number seven, because Bill started two weeks before me. But number one! Number one, so the employee who’s worked the longest at Wizards consecutively, is Charlie Catino.

    And Charlie was one of the original playtesters, he came out a little earlier than Bill, Bill had some responsibilities, Bill was at the time working in a chemistry lab. He was running a—he was the administrator, I think, of running a chemistry lab, and so Bill had been tied up and stuff, so it took a while for Bill to sort of get through that. Charlie was able to come out earlier. He didn’t come out as early as the original group, like Skaff and Jim, but he came out in January of ’95. Like I came out in October of ’95, he came out in January. Or February, actually.

    Actually, here’s a little—a little funny tidbit. So when I got hired, for the people that don’t know the story, I was out visiting, I said like I’d be willing to move to Wizards, and then Mike Davis who was the head of R&D at the time said “When can you start?” And then, many weeks went by and I hadn’t heard—I hadn’t heard from them. And so I finally called Mike Davis and he said “Oh, well, yeah… you know, the Magic team’s interested in hiring you, and The Duelist is interested in hiring you, and R&D’s interested in hiring you, so we’re trying to figure out, you know, who’s going to hire you.”

    So know at this time, this is early Wizards, when I talk about Wizards, that things are very—you know, HR also—young. You know. Not a very experienced HR. So I hadn’t yet negotiated anything, and he told me that three different sections of the company were fighting over me. So when I went to negotiate, what I was told by someone who had done this was that it was harder to negotiate money, you can only push money so much, but just ask for anything that you can think to ask for. Just come up with other perks.

    So one of the perks I thought to ask for was I asked for my start date to be technically January 1 of 1995 for all benefits. Meaning I would get a vacation right away, you know, that I—I just said “Look, assume I start at the beginning of the year, and then I accrue all benefits.” Now it turns out that that got me stock options because I was there longer. So it ended up being a really good deal.

    The funny thing is, the way HR figured out how to do this is, they just stuck me in their computer as starting January 1. And so every year, January 1 it was like “Congratulations! Happy anniversary!” Because I negotiated that start date, as far as HR is concerned, that is my start date. So the funny thing is, Charlie is the actual oldest employee, but on the books I am the oldest employee because I negotiated for an earlier start date. Anyway. Little side thing.

    Okay, so, Charlie… Charlie was on the design team for Tempest, so the design team for Tempest if you remember, my very first podcast was me, Richard Garfield, Mike Elliott, and Charlie Catino. Now Charlie, now, works very little on Magic, he works a lot on Duel Masters and Kaijudo, which is a game we make for the—well, Duel Masters is—we started a game for the Japanese market and then we moved it over to here, and over here it’s called Kaijudo. Yes.  It has an English name in Japan and a Japanese name in the United States.

    But Charlie for a long time did a lot of work on Magic, although even at this point he had moved on meaning he wasn’t on the development team. But he had been on the design team. And one of Charlie’s quirks for the longest time—in fact it might still be going on—is when Charlie’s name was in the Alpha rulebook, I believe it was misspelled. And then what Charlie did is, from then on, he purposely misspelled his name but differently in every credit he got. So whenever you see Charlie, his name’s always messed up, and that’s a running thing that Charlie does. Charlie is an awesome guy, he’s a lot of fun, and when I get to the card by card Charlie—there’s a few stories that Charlie—about the set.

    Okay. So now that I’ve talked about the people—oh, let me get back. The fun of my—this is how my brain works, I just (snapping fingers quickly) bouncing around… Okay. So we were talking about how the set finally got made. So Ice Age had gotten done, and Bill was now coming to—to Wizards, and Joel was now the Head Designer, and so Joel and Bill said “Okay, this is a perfect time, why—Bill’s going to be here, you know,” and they set it up so that Bill would lead the development for Mirage.

    Which, by the way, (???) my trivia, there’s not a lot of times where the head designer of the set was also the lead developer. Nowadays you’re not—we don’t let that happen because we want a second set of eyes. But Bill was the co-lead of Mirage design and the lead developer of Mirage. Like I said, which is a rare thing these days. I believe Aaron, by the way, also did this because Aaron I think was the lead designer of Lorwyn and I believe he was also the head developer—the lead developer of Lorwyn. So I think he was.

    Anyway, so what happened was, they’d decided that it was a good time because Bill was going to get there and Bill and Joel were now both there. And that way they could oversee their baby. And like I said. The idea of the set was, they wanted to tell about this world and this story, about this war between these three wizards. And one of the wizards—so Kaervek is the—you know, the evil one if you will. And what happens is Kaervek kidnaps Mangara, and he imprisons him in the Amber Prison. And so Jolrael has to go rescue Mangara. And in order to get there to free him, they end up using the Weatherlight. The flying ship Weatherlight.

    That’s where the Weatherlight… I think—I’m trying to remember when we made the Weatherlight story whether or not we knew… I think we knew about the idea of the Weatherlight ship and we—I think that was already part of their story, and we said “Oh, we could make the Weatherlight ship the home base of our characters for the Weatherlight saga.” And so we ended up borrowing that and said, “You know, a flying ship seems like a good…” Because we knew we were going to—every year we were going to go to different worlds, and we were like “Well, in order to do that and have a cast of characters, well they would need to travel from world to world.”

    And then we ended up with the flying ship and… so anyway, the—Sisay and the Weatherlight, you know, make an appearance in Mirage and Visions, and then in Weatherlight obviously the whole story kicks off, the Weatherlight saga. And so, anyway, they wanted to tell the story, I know—I mean Teferi was involved… because Teferi was doing experiments… I’m trying to think, I mean I don’t know exactly how the whole story plays out. I know Mangara gets imprisoned by Kaervek… anyway. But anyway, they were trying to get a feel. Teferi was also involved. Teferi… was it four wizards? I thought there were three wizards. Anyway, Teferi was involved, he was doing experiments, so that leads us to one of the mechanics.

    Okay. So the set had two major mechanics. Flanking and phasing. Now phasing—the idea was that Teferi was messing around with time, and the idea of phasing—and I don’t know which came first, my guess is that phasing came first and the Teferi part of the story was to justify phasing. Phasing was a mechanic that said, “You are there every other turn.” So let’s say you play it on turn one. Turn two it disappears. Turn three it’s back. Turn four it disappears. Turn five it’s back. And so the idea was, you got a much bigger creature than you would normally get because you only had the creature half the time.

    And I—well, the—phasing was interesting. I mean, the gameplay of phasing was interesting. It had a few—the biggest problem I think was how long it took before you could attack with a phasing creature. So if I played the creature on turn one and it had summoning sickness, turn two it would phase out, turn three it could attack. So it’s like I had to wait three turns to attack with this phasing creature.

    I think that was—that caused a lot of problems with it from a—from Constructed. We did figure out a way to make things Constructed with phasing, which was things that could phase themselves out. So phasing as a means to protect oneself, meaning “I’m there all the time, but whenever there’s a threat I can phase myself out,” meaning I would go away and then come back next turn. And that turned out to be something that was good. Especially when it didn’t cost you mana. But we’ll get to that.

    So phasing was sort of a costing mechanic, and then flanking was a combat mechanic. So what flanking was is whenever you were blocked by a creature without flanking, it got -1/-1. Flanking was supposed to represent horseback. Horseback would go on to be represented by horsemanship, in Portal Three Kingdom. But the idea was that I’m up on a horse. And so if I attack you, you are at a tactical disadvantage because I’m higher than you. But if I run into somebody else that has a horse, that’s on horse, well there’s no disadvantage.

    And so flanking was represented—because one of the things they were trying to do was, it was a war between these different wizards that put together their armies, and I think part of what they were trying to do was that each—each section had their own army and cards that represented their army. Between this fight. And so… I’m not sure whether the horse—flanking was one particular army. It would have been Jolrael’s army because Jolrael was the one that had all the animals and such. So maybe it was Jolrael’s army that had—so… anyway, you can tell my knowledge of (???) story.

    But anyway, so phasing and flanking were the two named mechanics. There were a few other not named mechanics. So probably the other big thing that—biggest thing that they introduced was Mirage was the first set to have charms. And so charms were cheap spells that had three different effects. So they all cost one colored mana and then you got three small effects.

    And the idea was, sometimes there’s effects that were just too small to put on cards. And so the idea the team had was, “Well what if you gave people an option?” That any one of them wasn’t worth the card, but the flexibility it gave you with the three of them was worth the card. And charms would go on to be very popular, so much so that, I mean, we keep redoing charms. We keep making new charms. Now obviously we just—Return to Ravnica had two-color charms that we hadn’t done before. And so… but yeah. Mirage was the first set to have the charms.

    It also was the first set to have… I’m not sure what to call them. I think people call them insta-enchantments. But they were enchantments that you can cast essentially with flash, although flash did not exist at the time. Oh but oh, the trick about them was they weren’t straight up flash. The trick about them was, you could play them normally like a normal aura, but if you played them at instant speed then they only lasted for the turn.

    So essentially, they were kind of like an instant that just lasted until end of turn although technically they did, you know, go on the creature. Or it was an aura that stuck around, and you kind of had your choice. Later on we would simplify that to just being… we would just put flash on auras because like we don’t need the—there’s enough negative from auras, we don’t need them to fall off if you cast them with flash.

     Oh, something I forgot on flanking, by the way. I’m a little scattershot today. Flanking—the problem with flanking was, the self-referentialness to flanking, meaning only flanking creatures—like if you had flanking, you didn’t get -1/-1, it made a lot of flavor sense because it was the flavor of the horses, but mechanically it caused problems. That people didn’t seem to remember that, that it was…

    One of the reasons flanking hasn’t come back is because we kind of liked the cleaner version, which is just “Block me you get -1/-1, to anything that blocks me.” And that remembering—the self-referential element actually makes it—made it harder for people to play and harder to remember, and that’s one of the reasons that flanking—the reason phasing hasn’t come back is it just had a lot of rules complication.

    It’s one of those things where if we actually—I mean, we’ve figured out how to write it on the card, but modern-day phasing really is flickering. And the idea that we can send things away and come back. A lot of what made phasing valuable wasn’t that it was there every other turn, but rather that it had the ability to go away and come back. And so modern-day sets have flickering, which captures I think the best part of phasing.

    But—phasing hasn’t come back because it’s just kind of complex. There’s a lot more going on, like it had this weird thing where it kept—like if you had enchantments on it it kept the enchantments, but it didn’t trigger comes-into-play effects but I think it did trigger leaves-play effects… it was complicated.

    The other thing that it introduced which  you also saw in Return to Ravnica was the guildmages. So the way it did guildmages was it had a monocolored card that had two activations, one in each of its allied colors. And then the guildmages as we redid them in original Ravnica and then we had a new version in Return to Ravnica, was more about “I have activations of the color that I am.”

    But they still had multiple activations. The guildmages always had two activations. Guildmages always had two activations. I’m not sure—somehow that—the guildmage-ness. But that was the first set to do guildmages.

    Another big thing that you would see us do later but this is the first set that did it is Spirit of the Night. So what Spirit of the Night was, was a card which there were three cards, Breathstealer, Feral Shadow, and Urborg Panther, and if you got all three into play, you could turn them into the Spirit of the Night. Which by the way, was supposed to be Spirit of the Nightstalker, but it didn’t fit—the words didn’t fit on the card. And so we had to chop it to Spirit of the Night.

    And other people don’t realize this, but I think if you combine all the power and all the toughness, the… like if you put all of them together that’s what makes the creature. And this was the first time that we’d really done the idea of multiple cards can make up a singular card. And Visions would do it again—we’ve done it a bunch in Magic. But this was the first—like, remember, Mirage was relatively early. Mirage is, you know… year three of Magic?

    And so—I mean a lot of things—I mean—oh, the other big thing Mirage did, I didn’t even bring this one up is, Mirage introduced the concept of a block.  Now I understand that Ice Age kind of had Ice Age and Alliances and they counted Homelands for a while, but—Alliances was meant as a follow-up to Ice Age, but it wasn’t in the same terms, where Mirage was the first set where like “It’s going to be a block, it will be large-small-small, it will go on the whole year.” You know, Mirage was the first modern-day set where the sensibility of being a block.

    And also by the way was the first set where it really developed the idea of thinking about Limited. Now we had a lot to learn, we did a lot wrong, I mean we had a lot of room to grow, let’s say, but Mirage was the first set in Development where really—I mean when I talk about the ages of Magic, I talk about the Golden Age, the Silver Age, Mirage is the beginning of the Silver Age as far as design goes. That it is—you know, it is the set in which we for the first time we were much much more conscious of the idea of a block, the idea of Limited play, and it was the entry of the new wave of developers. Like I said. So Mirage to me is the Silver Age if you will of Magic design.

    Anyway, I have just gotten to work. And what I realized is, I have all these awesome stories about cards, and so I am going to have to continue this to next week, we’ll do part two, so today I mostly talked about the makeup of the team and the mechanics and stuff, but next week I’m going to talk about—it’s going to be full of stories. Because there’s lots of stories about Mirage. And I’m trying to make these—the recaps of set designs a little longer because I know you guys like them so much. So next week we’ll do part 2, which will be about stories—Mirage card stories.


    Anyway, I’m glad you joined me for today, it was a lot of fun, and it’s time to go make the Magic.
    0

    Add a comment

  5. All podcast content by Mark Rosewater

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

    Okay. Two weeks ago, I talked about—I started my Golden Trifecta series of podcasts, where I talked about the three things that I believe Richard Garfield did when he created Magic. The three awesome things he put together to make the genius that is the game Magic.

    So one is the concept of the trading card game. I talked about that two weeks ago. Second was the idea of a color pie, I talked about that last week. Today I’m talking about the mana system. I’m excited for this podcast, because everybody understands the genius of the trading card game. Everybody gets the genius of the color pie. But the mana system? Not as much beloved. So we’re going to talk about that today, because I feel that I want you all to have as much respect for the mana system as I do, because it is awesome. And I think that it is much maligned.

    Okay, so for starters, here’s my first issue with it is, I think people, when they look at the mana system, try to—their viewpoint is from the negative. So for example, let’s imagine I was going to try to pitch you on cars. And I said, “Okay. Well cars—for starters, they create pollution, they’re expensive, you need insurance to use them, you know, your chance of dying goes way up, lots of accidents happen in cars, and there’s drunk driving, and oh my God it causes deaths every year and accidents every year, and…” You know.

    And when you look at cars from that vantage point, they sound horrible! They sound horrible! They just pollute the air and cause accidents, and—but, but, but, think about society without cars. I mean for starters, there’s no Drive to Work. Right away. But seriously, I mean, you know, I live half an hour away from where I work. That could never happen. You know. And if everybody had to be right where they worked, that would make things a lot harder. You know. Or imagine just the fact that, you know, there’s no trucks, or you know, the life we know it is very dependent upon cars.

    And it’s very easy to look at the negative of cars and go “Well, that seems pretty bad,” you know, and I think that’s what people do with the mana system. Like they look at the negatives. Like is mana screw a great thing? No, it’s not completely bad, I’ll get to that in a second. But I mean that’s—that’s not the selling point, you know, the selling point of mana is not mana at its worst, you know, it’s mana at its best.

    Let’s talk about the mana system. What exactly does it do? Now I’ve mentioned this a little bit in the last couple weeks but let me really nail it down. So number one. Is the game needs to have what we call flow. Right? Meaning that I want to have things I need to do, but we need the game to sort of evolve as it goes along. Now, there are a lot of other games that don’t have a mana cost system, and one of the problems that they have is, well if I can play any card, you know, A. it’s hard to have different cards have value.

    Like the mana system for starters says “Look, lower—cheaper cards have value. Now, they have value at a certain time in the game, but they have value. You know, in your opening hand, a one-drop is amazing. You’re happy to have a one-drop. In fact, you put them in your deck because you’re hoping on the first turn you get them. You know.

    And in the same sense, later in the game, a six-, seven- or eight-drop, those are amazing, but they’re horrible in the opening game. So for starters, the mana system, you know, makes cards have different values at different times. And that’s very important for a trading card game. A. it’s just a way to make more cards have value, but B. you want things to change over the course of the game.

     Getting a little bit into game design here, a game has—if you’re trying to create a game, what you want to do is the game needs to go through stages. Well why is that? Well actually, let me (???) a little parameter to that. Unless your game is really short. A really short game doesn’t necessarily need this. By really short I mean like a five-minute game. Maybe you can get away with it. But if a game is longer than that, essentially, people’s attention span is not that long. It just isn’t. And that the way you keep their attention is you keep changing things up. You know.

    If you watch a TV show for example, well the parameters are what’s happening. Things change in the story, right? That, you know, things are—incrementally get worse, usually, is how they tend to work, until you resolve the problem. You know. Where things get bad, it’s like “Well, things can’t get worse,” and then bam, the next thing comes along. You know. And they way they design TV, as someone who does—or, did TV, you, every commercial, like you up the ante. So they’ll come back after the commercial break. You know. That “Oh, things are bad—oh wait, things are worse! How are they getting out of this one?” You know.

    And games have a similar quality in that you don’t want the game to just be doing the same thing. You want the game to grow as the game evolves in some way. Meaning the players have to shift and change as the game moves along. Part of that is to keep interest in the game, part of that is it adds a lot of strategic depth, right? You know. If Thing A is always good, you know, that’s not as good as “Well, Thing A is good at a certain time, and you have to know when and where to use A.” Later on, maybe A’s not so good, you know, and that adds a lot of strategic depth.

    So the mana system also does this beautiful thing where it creates change in the game. The second thing it does it creates inconsistency. Which means—let me explain this. Is—so one of these days I’ll talk about communication theory. One of the things that communication theory says humans love is surprise. And what that means is, you kind of—you like not knowing things. And one of the things that the mana system does for Magic is, you don’t know how the game’s going to play out. It does a very good job of creating variety in gameplay.

    Because for example, if I draw exactly what I need early on, you know, well, do I have the mana that I need? Now, given, drawing off the deck also creates variety, which is very important, and that’s another big part of the game. But the fact that I don’t know when I’ll be able to cast my spells and my—the rate my mana grows.

    I mean, I have a little more certainty of my one, two, and three spells, you know, I can mulligan, I mean I—I can pretty much guarantee that I—if I have the one drop, I should be able to do it on turn one. But once you start getting to three and more mana cost, you don’t quite know when that’s going to happen. You know. And the fact that some games, your third drop happens on turn three, and some games it happens on turn 6, is important. In a couple ways.

    One is variety of play. That’s very important. The second is that part of what makes a good strategic gameplay is the ability to adapt on the fly. So here—let me explain that for a second, which is if you have a game that has a static skillset, which means “I just need to know how to do Thing X.” The games tend not to play out as interestingly because if I can do the thing then I can do it.

    Now, sometimes there’s some variance. So let’s take tiddlywinks as a… so tiddlywinks is a game, for those that don’t know it, it’s a kids game, where you have a little round piece of plastic, and you have another little piece of plastic, and you’re using pressure to pop it into the air to try to get it into a cup.

    Now that’s a skill-based game, okay. Now, the idea on a skill-based game is “Well, there’s some variance, maybe I mess up,” you know, but the problem is, it’s a skill that you can practice and get pretty consistent at. And the problem eventually is, at one point like you can just do it. Well there’s not a lot of surprise when you can just do it. You know.

    But what happens is, by adding a little variance in, imagine for example all of a sudden the cup moves, you know, the cup is on a moving, rotating basis, and how it moves is not always the same, well your skill at flicking is still important, but now there’s actually more skills. I’ve got to gauge where I think it’s going. You know, if it’s going in a certain direction I’ve got to aim in that direction. All of a sudden it makes a more dynamic game. And so in a—in a game, when the person who’s doing it has the right skill set, having to adapt their skill set to the situation is very skill-testing and adds a lot of strategic complexity to a game.

    Now once again,  real quickly, I—there’s three kinds of complexity we talk about: comprehension complexity, which is “When I read the card, can I understand it?” Do I know what it does? There’s board complexity, which is “Can I understand looking at the board, what is capable of happening?” And then there’s strategic complexity. “Do I understand the big picture, what is going on?” Not what can happen, but what strategically matters.

    The first two complexities are something we have to be very careful about. I know I’ll do a New World Order podcast one of these days. But the third one, strategic complexity, beginners can’t see it, so it’s something that we like to have. Your game having a lot of strategic complexity makes your experienced players happy. And the mana system adds a lot of strategic complexity. That’s another important part of it. Because you don’t quite know what you’re doing, you have to adapt on the fly.

    You know, if I always knew—so for example, one of the ways to look at games without a mana system, or without Magic’s mana system, is to look at other games. Now I’m not going to name games by name, but you guys can fill in the blanks. So for example, imagine a game where I know I have my… my… turn…  I always have my mana. I know—turn one I’ll have one, turn two I’ll have two, turn three I’ll have three. Actually, I’ll name a name, because it’s a Wizards game. Duel Masters does this. Which is the game we made for the Japanese market.

    And, we, like many others, fell into the trap of going “Oh, well mana—Magic’s system, maybe that’s the problem.” You know, you get mana screwed. So Duel Masters uses—you can turn any card into a land. Is the idea. So essentially think of it like any red card can become a mountain. Think of it that way. And what we learned was—what I learned was, when you know your turn three drop is always on turn three, that takes a lot of the dynamic element of the game. Your strategic complexity goes down. Because I just know. I know turn three I’m going my three-drop, okay? And so that’s a very different animal than “Well, I know sometimes I have it turn three, but it might be as late as turn 6. Or 7. You know. And I think a lot of fun Magic games are not where everything goes perfectly, it’s the one where things go a little awry.

    Which is funny, by the way. I like to compare games to entertainment. The best stories are ones where things don’t right. You know, for example, there’s not a lot of heist films where, like, “Everything just goes perfectly. Nothing goes wrong.” No no no. The best heist films are like “They have it carefully plotted. Oh, but then, such and such breaks. Or someone doesn’t show. Or some person who’s not supposed to be there is there.” You know.

    And a game is the same way. I think if you think back to the most awesome games you ever played of Magic, they were not games in which everything went perfectly. Like it’s not like “Oh, I made my turn one drop, then I made my turn two drop, then I made my turn three drop, and I just beat him.” That’s not the most memorable games. The most memorable game is, “I got my first drop, then I didn’t get my second drop. Or I got my second drop on turn three but then I didn’t get my third drop until turn seven! I had to last for seven turns with two mana!” “So did you lose?” “No, I won!” Those are the amazing games. You know. Or the games where like “You’re at one, and they’re at twenty, and you win!” You know.

    And the mana system’s important because you need things to go wrong. You need things, you know, I know people look at mana screw as always being a bad thing, but you know the times in which it doesn’t quite work out but you have to scramble to make it work. That’s—there’s a lot of fun in the scrambling.

    I mean one of the stories I tell, I think I told this in my column but I don’t think I’ve told it in my podcast is, when I was in college, I—I think my sophomore year, I was in a dorm—Miles Standish, for my BU alums, and we—there was a homecoming where you built a float. And our—the money that, you know, internally your dorm spends a certain amount of money and they just decided it wasn’t important. So we got very little money to build the float with for our dorm.

    And so those of us—I was on the student council, or whatever, and so I was volunteered to be there, but there was like… I don’t know, six of us? Like a lot of floats had like, you know, fifty people. We had like six people. We had no—you know, we had no money, they gave us a little tiny bit of money. We had the—the least amount of supplies you can imagine, and like “Okay, we’ve got to make a float.” And I had a blast! I mean, we did it! We did it, we stayed up all night. We stayed up all night making the float. And like, we were like borrowing supplies, and stealing supplies, and like we were doing everything we could to make it work. And we came up with what I thought was a very clever float, you know, given our constraints, which were a lot of constraints.

    Okay, flash forward a year. The next year, we teamed up with another dorm. And so we both put a lot of money into it so we’d have an awesome thing. So that year we had tons of people, and tons of money, and lots of supplies, and it just wasn’t—I mean, I was there, I did it, it just wasn’t—the year before was so much more fun. And I think a lot of it is the sense of there is great joy in making it work. In, you know, and as someone who likes the challenge, I mean one of the reasons you play games is you enjoy the challenge, you know, games are all about mental challenge, is, you know, it is fun from time to time to have things not quite go your way. And I think the mana system does a lot of that. (coughs) Hold on a second, I will take a sip of water. My podcast. Because… as I cough here. Okay. See, no editing to my podcast.

    So, the other thing that’s important about the mana system is—I think people love to rail on mana screw. But there is a few things that are good. So one of the things, I know Richard Garfield talked about this, is that you want a game to do the following, where players can blame their losses on luck and their wins on skill. And let me explain why that’s important. Humans—the human psyche is fragile. Humans—when you get down to the core, have problems admitting that they made a mistake. Humans are not good at it. Now, it’s an important skill, by the way, and if you want to get better at Magic, recognizing that you losing is your own fault is very important. Little side thing.

    But anyway, players—their egos need a little protecting. And so the problem with a game that has no variance built in and no luck built into it is—like when you play someone in chess and they beat you, you just lost. You didn’t lose because you got unlucky, there’s not a lot of luck in chess. Well, there’s a little bit—I won’t get into that. I wrote a little subarticle on that one and it caused all sorts of stuff.

    Anyway, I mean, you lost, right? You lost. They were better than you, you lost. And that’s hard. Because if you want people to play your game, the vast majority of people playing your game aren’t going to be good. You know. And no matter what, somebody’s going to be better, and the better players are going to win, and the worse players are going to lose. So if you make a game in which the better players always win, that’s a problem, because you’re not going to get new players.

    That’s another very common thing that happens when people go “I’m going to make a better game! I’m getting rid of the mana system!” What they find is, “Oh, well you don’t have mana screw, but then the best players always win.” And that might be great for the best players, and maybe that small subset’s really happy, but you are—as a game designer, you have to make the game not just for your winners but for everybody who plays. If losing your game is not fun, you are in trouble. Because people will stop playing. And then the people who like to win don’t have anybody to play, and then your game fails. Okay? You need—it is important that everybody have a chance to win.

    Now, it’s fine that the better players win more, you know, and also as I was explaining, is not only should your bad players win some of the time, but when your bad players lose, they need to have some sort of ego cushioning if you will. And the nice thing about the mana system is the mana system is an awesome scapegoat. It’s a wonderful—it’s a great scapegoat. In fact, one of its best devices, best roles that it serves, is if you want to blame your game on your mana, you can.

    Even if it has nothing to do with your mana. I love watching people, like I used to be the head judge of the feature match area. And I would watch matches, and then from time to time, someone would come up to a player after they’re done and go “How’d it go?” And I’d hear the player explain what happened. And so much of the time they would just say “Oh, you know,  I got a bad manas or bad draws,” and the other play would go “Okay,” and they’d walk away.

    But I watched the match. They didn’t have bad mana or they didn’t have bad draws. They just lost. They made bad decisions or whatever. But it’s a nice excuse that anybody can give. And that is important. You know. You want ego cushioning built into your game. Because you want players to feel like when they’re not ready to admit—players have to—you have to learn to admit your mistakes.

    That’s something that comes with—comes with more experience in the game. Of learning that I’m responsible for what I do, but until they get there, your game needs to give a little bit of ego cushioning. So that if the player wants something to blame, they can. Because if they blame the game for their losses, it makes them not want to play the game. And as they mature, they’ll learn, like “Okay, hey, I’m responsible for my losses, not the game,” but it is important.

    And also, I sort of jumped in the middle of explaining that one, it is important that your bad players, your beginning players, whatever, can win, you know. I mean, for example, if I’m going to play against the best chess player in the world. I don’t know who that is. I’m going to say Bobby Fischer—I’m pretty sure he’s dead or very very old, so I know he’s not the current best, but I saw a movie. And they mentioned him. So if I’m going to play Bobby Fischer, I have no—I know I’m not going to lose. It’s just—“Ooh, I get to lose to Bobby Fischer.” You know. I mean—I can’t win. I can’t beat Bobby Fischer. “Oh, I—I’m going to play Bobby Fischer.” Maybe I’m excited to lose to Bobby Fischer, but I know I’m not going to beat him.

    But let’s say I sit down against Jon Finkel. Odds are—odds are—I’m losing to Jon Finkel. But I can dream. I can dream that I, lowly player, that I can beat Jon Finkel. Because maybe he gets really mana screwed and I get a perfect draw, and maybe—maybe there’s a chance. And that’s important. Hope is a very important tool. You know. Your game has to have hope. Players have to have a dream. You know. And so that is why variance and that is why having stuff built into your game where the beginning player has hope is very important.

    Another thing the mana system does is it creates drama. Because—I talked about how the best games have to do with coming from behind. But another thing that’s neat is, I talked about—two weeks ago, I think, the difference between suspense and surprise. It’s an Alfred Hitchcock thing. Where surprise is “bomb under the table, bam, it blows up,” suspense is “you see the bomb, and then you watch the people talking, and you like don’t quite know when’s the bomb going to blow up.”

    And a lot of the mana system has that, which is—there’s this focus in the game. Like you look at your hand, and you’re like “Okay, well if I—if I—what’s going to happen?” Well, if I get my mana, I’m doing this. If I don’t get my mana, I guess I’ll do this.” You know, you’re planning either way. But it creates this great suspense in the game because, you know, the land creates this very, like, “I need this thing. Is it this thing?” You know.

    And what you want to have happen in a game is, you want clear moments where your players want things and they understand what they want. Because a lot of the ways suspense gets created is you go “I understand what I need.” You know. And the problem with some of the more advanced games is, the beginner player doesn’t know what he needs. Maybe the advanced player knows “Oh, you need this right here,” but the game player doesn’t know that.

    And land is crystal clear. “I need to cast my three-drop. I have two land. You know what I need? Another land.” And so it’s very clear, it creates a very clear suspense. That people get. Everyone understands. And that, you know, you want to have moments—and Magic’s obviously a card—a card-playing game, you want moments in a game, if you’re having a card game, where the draw has drama to it. You know.

    And, the other thing that’s fun is, that, another great moment is, when your opponent draws something, and they don’t—and they’re thinking, another great—I think another very interesting point in Magic is the people-reading. It’s like they draw and I’m like “Ooh, did they draw it? Is that what they need?” You know. And there’s a neat moment where they’re kind of thinking through what they’re doing, where you’re trying to figure out “Did they get what they wanted or didn’t they?”

    And, like I said, as you get more advanced in the game, a lot of the giving away information or not becomes really important. Because reading your opponent becomes important. But like I said, that’s another thing, a little sense there, like I mean, I mean I—really when you cut down to it, part of what I’m trying to explain today is there’s all these facets of a game that a game needs. You know.

    That your game wants drama and your game wants suspense and your game wants a cushion—ego-cushioning. And your game wants to let beginners win, and your game wants to have tempo, and all this stuff your game wants, and all of it—all of it is done by the mana system! You know. The mana system creates this, like, very nice clear thing.

    And another thing the mana system does by the way, I talk about the color pie, but part of this really is the mana system is, the fact that each color has its own kind of mana is actually the core of what separates colors. I mean, the color pie defines what they do, but just the idea that like one color’s easier to play than two colors, that’s the mana system. And that’s really important. You know. That—I mean, the mana system is the thing that divides up its colors and says “Hey,” you know, “You can only play so many colors.” And the greedier you get, you know, the more risk there is associated with it. You know. I think that’s a very interesting part of the game, that you have to consider how risky you want to be with your mana base. You know.

    And, by the way, another thing the mana system does is, while it gives beginners a chance to win, interestingly, it gives them hope, at the same time it gives a leg up to advanced players. Because what happens is, as you get better, you understand more the value of—of land and of land as a resource, and you build toward it. That’s another way that lets good players beat bad players is, they better understand the mana system.

    So think about this. The same thing that gives hope to beginners also allows the more experienced players to win more. Okay. That’s interesting. How many things can do that? That’s a very impressive feat. That it helps both ends of the spectrum. It helps the raw beginners and it helps the experienced—you know, veterans of the game.

    So anyway, like I said. There’s all these things it does. All—I’m saying, it helps balance the game, it separates colors, it helps make cards have values beginning and end—middle and end of game, you know, like I said it’s the ego cushioning, it does drama, it helps with tempo—like I said. All this stuff. It’s just dripping with things it does. You know.

    And like I said. I--I think what happens—that’s—here’s why—let me talk about why I think it’s maligned. Richard built the system as a means to cushion the ego, to let people be able to blame their losses on luck. And he did it almost too well. It is too easy to blame your losses on luck. Like I was saying earlier, I think it’s—it’s hard for players to come to the realization that they lose because of their own actions. Because the game makes it so easy to blame the game that it really takes a lot to own up and go “No no no, this is all me. This is not the game, this is me.” And I think what happens is, that’s why people, I think, blame—when they go “What’s bad about Magic?” they want to blame the mana system.

    Now, that said. Is it fun? Is it a good game when I just draw no mana and my opponent runs over me? No. Of course. Of course it’s not good. But—go back to my car example. Is it good that cars pollute the environment? No. No it’s not! And, hey, over time, we’re trying to find ways to make the cars less pollute the environment. You know.

    And with the mana system, we’ve spent a lot of time trying to fine-tune how to give you enough mana to make sure that your mana issues can be addressed if you’re aware of them. You know, we also do a lot of smoothing mechanics and things in the game that like if you’re aware, we help you with mana. You know, we’ve improved mulligans over the years, and we’ve done things to help you with mana. Our goal is not to create that moment.

    But that moment has to exist in order for the other cool stuff to happen. You know what I’m saying? There are going  to be car crashes. There are going to be some smog. There’s going to be, you know, insurance. I mean, the negative of the system is going to exist. You know. The system is not all positive, and we work on some of it.

    Now some of it—like I said. Some of a bit of mana screw is good. You know. I do think it’s important that you don’t always get what you want. That you have to adapt on your feet. That sometimes a good player loses to the bad player just because they get unlucky. All that is good work and does good stuff.

    But this focus on kind of the negative aspect, I think really makes people think of “Oh, well I associate unfun with this thing, oh this must be the flaw in the game.” And so really unfairly, the mana system has become—I mean, it was made to be the scapegoat, and because of that it now becomes—you know, it becomes a thing people want to blame with what’s wrong with the game. And the funny thing is, it is one of the things that’s great about the game. It is one of the true defenders of the game.

    And today’s podcast was me trying to say “Look. This thing you want to—besmirch, like is one of the things that’s really giving you—that Magic is, in my mind—now, I’m biased, but greatest game ever made. Awesome game. My favorite game. Okay? And look. One of the reasons that Magic does all the awesome things it does, a lot of that actually rests on the mana system. This thing that you probably have besmirched your whole—your whole gameplaying—well, some of you have.

    And I’m trying to say right now, one of the reasons Magic’s as fun as it is, is this thing that you love to dis, it is awesome, and it is making the game fun for you. Even if you don’t understand it. That’s how awesome—that’s how awesome the mana system is, is it’s going to suck it up and let you pick on it, and let you make it the scapegoat, when it is doing the yeoman’s work of making the game fun.

    So that’s why I, today, have defended it. Now I just parked, so—it’s all I get today to try to defend the awesome mana system. But anyway, I hope the last three weeks have done a little bit to make you think a little more about all the stuff that Magic has going on. It is—I mean, hopefully you know it’s an awesome game. That I think you know. But why? Why is it an awesome game? There’s many other reasons, I’ll have some other podcasts talking about other reasons why it’s an awesome game.

    But the golden trifecta—so, you know, the trading card game aspect, the color wheel, the mana system, all of them. Richard Garfield is a genius. Each of those by itself, by the way, genius. But he put them all together to make Magic. Which is—I might be using the word awesome too much. I probably do. But this time I’m using it correctly. Magic is awesome.


     Okay. Well, it is time for me to go to work, so I guess I will say goodbye. It’s time to make the Magic.
    0

    Add a comment

Loading