9/20/13 Episode 55: Land

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 doing another part of my meta-series on card types. So I have talked about planeswalkers, I’ve talked about artifacts, I’ve talked about creatures, I’ve talked about instants and sorceries, so today I’m going to talk about land.

So I did an entire podcast talking about the mana system. So a few of the things that I need to talk about really were talked about there. So I’m not going to get too much into why land was used. A lot of times I start these by talking about “Why does this card type exist?” Well, lands exist because it’s needed for the mana system, I did a whole podcast on the mana system, I think the mana system’s really important, and so I don’t feel a great need to repeat that. Go listen to my podcast on the mana system if you don’t understand why land exists.

But today I want to talk about sort of—what is required? When we make land, you know, how are—how is land designed? And what is the role of land? I’m going to borrow a lot today from an article I wrote called “This Land is My Land,” that I wrote during Nonbasic Land Week many years ago. I have a few things I’ll add to it, so there’ll be some extra stuff there, and as always for the podcast I will go deeper in explaining things. Because I have a little extra time.

Okay. So. Let’s start. Land. So, lands in my mind, I should say—other than maybe planeswalkers, land has the narrowest design space. And part of the reason for that is there’s a bunch of restrictions. “Oh,” you say, “A bunch of restrictions? Let’s talk about those.”

Okay, so, in the article I listed five restrictions. I actually believe there’s a sixth, which I will get to today. So okay. Number one—okay, the most important rule about—about land is that it is not allowed to be strictly better than a basic land. So what, my friends, is strictly better? It’s a term that we use in R&D that I think gets used out by the public but not necessarily the way that R&D uses it.

What R&D means by “strictly better” is two cards that have the same mana cost, in which one of the cards just has more function than the other card. And in the vast, vast majority of normal play, that added bonus is just—just good. It’s just—you know, it just does more. So for example, if I had a 2U 2/2 creature, and then I had a 2U 2/2 flying creature, the 2U—the 2U 2/2 flier is considered strictly better. Now, yes, there are things that wouldn’t kill the ground 2/2. But if—Magic always has exceptions. If you—if you say “Oh, but…” you’ll never have anything mean anything. So “strictly better” means “in most cases.” Not that it—you know, yes, I can come up with a scenario where the 2/2 ground creature’s better to have than the 2/2 flier, but I’m working to get there. That is not normal Magic. In normal Magic, the 2/2 flier is better. Having evasion is better.

So when I say that no card can be better than a basic land, what that means is basic lands come into play untapped, and can immediately tap for a color. So if you can do that, if you come into play untapped and immediately tap for a color, you need to have some drawback if you're doing something in addition to doing that. And obviously if you’re just doing that, then you’re a basic land.

And so—now, once again as I make these rules, I will say the caveat I always say, which is “We break our own rules. When I say it’s a rule, you can give examples where we’ve broken the rule. We break our rules. But I’m giving you the default rules.” Every once in a while we will break our own rules. But we do it for a purpose and a reason, and so when I explain the rules, I explain our defaults. You know. Magic—Magic is definitely the kind of game where if there’s a reason, sometimes we will break our rules. And we have made lands that are strictly better than basic lands, but it’s not something we normally do.

So when I talk about strictly better, let’s talk a little bit about drawbacks. Because one of the challenges of—of making lands is that most of the time, you need a drawback. Because otherwise it’s strictly better. Okay. The first drawback we—we give lands—or maybe this isn’t even a drawback, which—it’s the one way we can make lands in which it doesn’t need a drawback, I guess. However you want to look at it. Is lands that tap for colorless mana. And—oh, by the way, I realized that (???).

So number two. Number one was that it can’t be strictly better than a basic land. Number two is it must produce mana. So let me explain that one before I get into—I realize that these might have been out of order, now that I think about it. Lands have to have an identity. It is important that lands have an identity. And what happened was, when Magic first came out, Alpha fifteen lands. It had the five basic lands, and the ten original dual lands. And the dual lands really were just extensions of the basic lands, right? Basic lands were “Hey, I tap for a forest—I’m a forest. I tap for green.” You know. And the dual lands were like “I’m a Bayou. I tap for a green or a black. I’m both a forest and a swamp.” 

And so everything there was pretty straightforward. “We’re lands, we tap for mana.” When we got to Arabian Nights, Richard really played around with lands that there were lands that didn’t produce mana. There are lands that had static effects. There were lands that tapped to do things. And he really started playing around with it.

But I think what happened was, he played around so much that it started to lose identity. And one of the things that we realized is, it’s important. In design, it is very important that you’re able to maintain and keep a sense of identity. And the reason is, is things will blur together. When you start getting really technical and looking at the game, you can—you can do a lot. You know.

One of the—the habits of designers that I have to warn them about is, it is very easy to get clever and to do things with one mechanic that just make it look like another mechanic. For example. During Onslaught block we brought back cycling. And one of the things we came up—we figured out was, that you could do cycling triggers from the hand, and that “Ooh, those cycling triggers can be larger effects!” So you essentially could create something where there was a smaller effect, but you could pay more to get a larger effect. “Hey, that’s kicker!” It’s like “Look what we can do! We can make cycling look like kicker!”

And the problem with that is that the definition is very important. That if everything just sort of blurs together, your game loses cohesion. You know. And I want kicker to feel like kicker. I want cycling to feel like cycling. I don’t want cycling to feel like kicker. You know.  I don’t want the—if you’re not careful of creating delineations, then you just get soup. You know.

And that important part of any game—especially Magic, a game in which we are trying to sort of constantly reinvent itself, is that if you don’t have strong identities, you will lose yourself. That part of the restraint of designing Magic is not just doing things because you can do them. But doing them because there’s a reason to do them. “Just because” is not a reason to do something.

And it’s a dangerous—it’s a bright light. It attracts—it attracts the designer. It’s like, “Oooh, something we haven’t done before!” Or “something we have done before, but not in this way.” And I work really hard to say to them, “Look. Things have a definition. If you break your definition…” It’s why I’m a color pie purist, it’s why I’m very much a purist about card types and what they mean, but anyway, I was one of the people that laid down the law that says “Lands produce mana.”

Now, technically they could go get you access to mana, fetchlands are fine. But the lands have to have strong identity that says, “I’m about mana. That is part of my identity. If I’m a land and I do not get you mana, then why am I a land? Why aren’t I an enchantment or artifact or something else?” And so that is one of our rules. I say that because I’m going to go back to talking about the downside.

So first downside, or however you want to think of it, is tapping for colorless mana. That means I’m not strictly better than a basic land because I’m not tapping for a colored mana, and that tapping for colorless means that I have room to do extra on it. So if you think of basic lands as a baseline, it’s like, if I make a land that taps for a colored mana, well that’s the baseline. If I go above that, I need to have a drawback because I can’t be better than a basic land. If I’m below that, I’m allowed to have an extra ability without needing a drawback because there’s a little extra room.

Now, mind you, be careful. I will teach you my—the lesson—the lesson of Rishadan Port. So during Mercadian Masque block, we decided that we wanted to have more tap-for-colorless lands. To give people some choices. Because Mercadian Masques had a little bit of a mono-colored theme. It followed on the—it followed… Urza’s Saga? Anyway, it had a bit of a monocolored theme. And we liked the idea of having lands that tapped for colorless that (???).

Okay, so—getting lost for a second here. Oh, Rishadan Port. So I made a bunch of lands that tapped for colorless and did a small effect. And at the time, I wanted to go “What’s a small effect a land could do? Oh, tap a land. Spend a mana, tap a land. Oh, that seems like—it’s flavorful, and you know—and little did I know that I created a monster. And what that means is, sometimes you have to be careful because what seems like a little ability can sometimes be a strong ability. And in general, my lesson there is “messing with other people’s mana is powerful.” Mana denial is powerful, so be careful.

Okay. So number one drawback, you cannot tap for colorless. I mean, you can tap for colorless and not a colored mana. Number two drawback you can have is you can enter the battlefield tapped. EBD--EB—ETBT. As we call it. ETBT. Which sounds like itty-bitty. Which is cute.

So enter-the-battlefield-tapped just means that you can come into play tapped. The reason that that is such an awesome drawback—in fact, our favorite drawback—is it’s very simple, doesn’t take a lot of words to explain what it does, and it happens right away and you’re done.

One of the things about Magic in general is—and I’ll get to this later, but I’ll bring it up here in this part, is that lands have this problem of—people tend to think of their lands as separate from the rest of their cards. In fact, people clump their lands together and play their other cards separate from their lands. And the reason they do that is that lands mostly—the only function of lands is mana. So you just sort of keep them together.

What happens is, if the lands have function beyond just mana, it can be dangerous because it’s easy to forget they’re there. Especially if it has a global effect or something where you have to constantly remember it. And so we’re careful about that. The enter-the-battlefield-tapped is nice that you get it out of the way right away. One of the things about drawbacks in general is, one-and-done drawbacks are the best, they’re the cleanest, they happen when you play them, you’re conscious of it when you play it, you do it, and then done. It just does its thing. You know. An ETBT land is like “I pay up front, my cost, and then it’s fine.”

The biggest drawback with an enter-the-battlefield-tapped land is that it is bad for  aggro decks.  For decks that want to be faster. Because the drawback really is you get to use the mana more slowly, and for a deck that’s trying to be fast that’s really bad. And so while those decks are—while the drawbacks are very clean drawback design-wise, there’s a style of cards that it doesn’t work well on, in that if you were intending the land to be used for more aggressive means, it’s not a good drawback.

Next. Life payment. This is another pretty easy drawback. And then there’s a couple ways to do this. The simplest one is just “You pay some life when you play it.” You know, the lands from Ravnica block and  o Ravnica block definitely, like—I mean, they have an option, you don’t have to pay them, but if you want to have them untap, well then you pay the mana—the two life, and they come in untapped. And that’s pretty straightforward, it’s a life payment, you know, you change your—change your life total. It’s very fast and simple.

A lesser version of that is cards that every time you tap them you pay a life. City of Brass type things. Those are a little more memory issues—it’s easy for people to forget, especially on mana that “Oh, wait, I have to…” you know, “I had to pay a life to get this.” It’s clean and simple and easy to write. We do do them. We do do pain lands. But it’s something we want to be careful of. You know. And it’s easier to have painlands in which they play a major role than have a singular painland that doesn’t have a major role, although stuff like City of Brass is important enough for color that usually you remember it’s there.

Okay. Next is what we call depletion lands. What depletion means is you don’t get to use it every turn. Essentially a depletion land is I tap it, and then I mark it and it doesn’t untap. Usually the way we do it is like “If you tapped this land, put a counter on it, when you go to untap it, if it has a counter on it, instead of untapping it remove the counter.” And so what it does is essentially you get it every other turn. 

So that’s the stuff like Teferi’s Isle where it phased in and out, where I think you got it every other turn but it had a slightly different technique to do that.   The problem usually with this drawback is it is intensive in logistics. To track it. That it’s just a lot to track. And so we don’t tend to do too much because of that. If we find a clean way to do it, it’s the kind of thing we think about. I mean, if phasing were something we did regularly, phasing’s a little cleaner just because it doesn’t require counters. In general—I mean, we like counters, we use counters. But we want to be careful how many things have counters. And lands in general are—you’ve got to be careful.

Speaking of counters, another way you use counters on lands is the Gemstone Mine approach, is limited number of uses. Where the land comes into  play with a certain number of counters, they can produce whatever, usually colored mana, but sometimes choices of colored mana, and then—but that’s all you get. You only get so many uses and then you’re done.

Also there are cards that have a cost when played other than life payment. Most common that is either saccing or bouncing a land, that’s pretty flavorful and those lands sometimes can tap for multiple amounts of mana because you’re going down a land—I’ll get to that one in a second. I’m talking about how much mana your lands produce.

Other ones—another drawback is cards that can’t produce mana by themselves, Reflecting-Pool type stuff, or like “Well, I’m very useful, but I need other things to make me useful.” And then a corollary of that is things that need other permanents and stuff in play, you know, the cards are like “Oh, as long as you have so many or don’t have so many lands in play,” you know, “as long as you have five or less lands you can do this.” And, you know—things that sort of reference what other things there are. The first one I talked about is more like “Until I get other things I can’t do something.” And the other ones tend to be “I can do something up until the point where I have a certain amount of things, then I can’t do it.” So it can hit both sides.

Anyway, there’s a whole bunch of land drawbacks. I mean, one of the challenges of making lands is that there’s not a lot of clean drawbacks. I mean, the reason we constantly go to enter-the-battlefield-tapped is, it’s such a nice clean drawback. I mean, life payment is really only—and tap for colorless are the other ones that are at least pretty clean.

And like I said, it’s tricky. Because you don’t want lands to be complicated. You know. Part of the appeal of lands is that you have your Magic deck, you have your sixty cards, or, you know, forty if you’re playing Limited, and sixty percent of your deck basically is spells and, you know, those are complicated. There’s a lot going on. And so forty percent, roughly, gets to be your land, and then most of the time your land, you don’t—I mean, you have to think about it when building your deck, and obviously you have to worry about what colors you have and stuff sometimes. But pretty much like, I get my land, I use my land to play my spells.

And that—we don’t want the land—the fact that the land doesn’t have a lot of baggage on it, a lot of things you have to remember, we consider to be a good thing. You know. We definitely could pile a lot more onto the lands, but I feel that would do a disservice. I feel like the lands being simple and easy is a big part of the lands. You know.

And one of the things that I love about lands, this is one of the things that’s awesome about land, is we talk about variance of play, and I love the fact that there are tiems when you are just begging. You are begging. You’re—you’re calling to the gods and saying “Please, please let it be a land!” You know. And other times you draw a land you’re like “No, not a land—anything but a land!” The fact that this card type can go from like—you desperately need it and you’re just wishing it to be there to times where you’re dreading it showing up. It’s kind of awesome. That the land—land does a very good job of creating that kind of variance. I mean, I’ve talked about this already. But I think that’s important.

Okay. So number one is you can’t be strictly better than a basic land. Number two is you have to be connected to land in some way—to mana in some way. Number three. Lands cannot produce more than one mana. Now, there’s exceptions to this, I talked about earlier that if you have a drawback where you have to bounce or destroy other lands, sometimes we let you tap for two mana. But that’s only when we create equity so you’re not going up in mana.

So why—why does this rule exist? Yes, yes, we broke this rule in the past. The reason this rule exists is, mana is the—what’s the word I want to use? It is the safety net of the game, if you will. That it’s a very important tool to say “You know what? You can’t do too much too fast.” That we sort of regulate how quickly you can sort of evolve as a planeswalker during the game. And when we start letting you break that, and in the past we have many times, it just causes problems.

For example, let me talk about Ancient Tomb. So in Tempest, I made a land, or the team made a land which you paid two life and tapped it and got two mana. And we’re like “Okay, two life? Get two mana? That’s—that’s a pretty substantial cost.” And the answer was “No, no it wasn’t.” You know. In fact, Randy Buehler and Erik Lauer--CMU, Team CMU—built an entire deck for the Tempest Pro Tour built around basically abusing that one card. Because it is so powerful.

And that just—one of the lessons we’ve learned time and time again is, if you let people have mana quicker than they’re supposed to, it just gets degenerate. And so once again, all these rules and we can break them for proper reason, but this is the rule that says “Hey, we get burned every time we do it, be really, really careful. Playing with fire.”

Okay, number three—that was number three. Number four. Lands that make colored mana tend to come in cycles. And once again—I guess even Teferi’s Isle was part of the Mega Mega Cycle. So. We do them occasionally without a cycle. But pretty much what happens is, we like to have balance in the game. Which is, you know, we roughly like to have as many red cards as green cards as blue card.

Now, in the last five years we’ve loosened that up a little bit at higher rarities. You know, mythic rare doesn’t always have exact even. And part of that is just the numbers. It’s hard to always make it even so we sort of said “Okay, well we’ll—we’ll try to average it in the larger scope of the game, but, you know, any one set…” But at lower rarities, at common and uncommon, there’s the same number of everything—you know, of red cards and green cards and such.

And the thing about lands is, usually if we have a land that produces red, we’re like “Well,” you know, “It’s not really fair to have a land that produces red.” And we’ll balance it out. So most of our land, when we do them, come in cycles of five. Meaning that the lands—if it’s a single color, it produces for all that color, and if it’s a dual color it tends to follow some cycle, either, you know—Ravnica had a large ten-card cycle, sometimes we’ll do five-card cycles with allies or enemies or—every once in a while we’ll do a four-card cycle that hinges around the same one color like we did in Torment. And there’s a couple different ways to do that. But it is true that when you’re making lands and you’re thinking about colors, you tend to have to think about cycles.

Next. Lands cannot do things—cannot do colored abilities without requiring colored mana. So one of the things to remember about lands, and artifacts too, is that they do not require colored mana to get into play. Any land and any artifact can be played in any deck.

Now, the reason you don’t often play all lands in all decks is a lot of times they have a function for one deck. If I tap for a red, well I kind of want to go in a deck that needs red. I’m kind of wasting—I’m kind of a waste if I’m in a deck that doesn’t need red. And so land—the mana part of it tends to self-regulate.

But the problem is, let’s say I created an ability on a land that was something unique to a color or something that one color doesn’t normally do. Well, that gives people access to something they’re not supposed to have. Like one of the problems—one of—with Stone Rain (I assume he means Strip Mine) is land destruction was not supposed to be something that everyone had access to. But Stone Rain just said “Hey, I’ll give everybody Stone Rain.” And you know what? Really, really cheap too.

And so one of the things we have to be careful about with lands is, to make sure that we respect the color pie with the lands. It is very easy with lands and artifacts to mess with the color pie. And so one of the simple rules is, “Okay. Let’s say I want to do direct damage on a land. Fine! Require red mana.” You know. If red mana’s in the activation cost, it’s like “Well, I can’t use that unless I have access to red mana. If I have access to red mana then I am fine.” And so we’ve got to be careful when making lands to make sure that you are not—you know, you’re not exceeding the role of—of the colorless domain.

Okay. Now rule number six. This was not in the article. Because you get added bonus here on Drive to Work. Don’t require too much focus. Okay, so this rule I explained a little bit earlier but I’ll go into detail. Which is that lands by their general nature don’t have as much scrutiny. You tend to keep them separate from the rest of your cards, you tend to clump—literally you lay them on top of one another. And that if you make a land that requires too much attention, it will cause problems because people’s natural nature is to not spend a lot of time and energy on lands.

“But…” you say, “But if we just did more of that then players would learn!” And my answer to that is—whenever I talk about how something’s difficult, I always get the answer of “Well, players just need to learn.” And here’s—here’s my response. A response from MaRo.

Part of what you’re doing when you’re creating a game is you’re creating an overall experience. And that in order to understand the experience, you have to realize that the experience is made up of smaller experiences that create a whole.

For example, you know, if I want to go to—to Disneyland or Disney World, they have spent a lot of time and energy figuring out lots of different things so that your entire experience has a sort of feel to it. You know. That the reason they’re hiding little Mickey shapes everywhere or just—they’re doing a lot of random surprises or, you know, they make a lot of ability to interact with kids and they do all sorts of things that—that each one by itself is a separate unit to say “Hey, here’s this nice little thing.” And that when you put them together it creates an overall experience. Like Disney has a feel when you go to a Disney property.

And the same thing is true for—should be true for your game. Which is when you come to Magic, I want to make sure that all the things come together to create the right feel. Now, that is both positive and negative. What I mean is, in a positive way, you want to make sure there’s the right things there.

For example, if I’m doing a top-down set, Innistrad or Theros, I want to make sure I’m paying attention to the details. I want to make sure that every little nuance is playing to the top-down feel I’m trying to get. You know. And if I make one zombie that just is a little too speedy, it breaks the feel of zombies being a slow, plodding tribe. That I have to be very careful.

And the same thing holds true for overall sort of feel and complexity of the game. That—its complexity does not tend to come from “Here’s one super-complex idea.” I mean, we’ve weeded those out, you know, we don’t tend to do “Here’s twenty lines of text on a card,” you know, Ice Cauldron or something anymore.

And so where complexity really comes from is just saying “Oh, this is okay. Oh, this is okay.” I mean, it’s kind of like—the other metaphor I’ll use is let’s say you’re on a diet. And you’re like “Okay, I only want so many calories.” Well that comes from looking at all the things you eat and saying, “Oh, each time you eat. Do I want to eat these calories?” And that if your attitude when you’re on a diet is “Oh, I’m just going to eat these few chips. They’re just three potato chips. That’s fine. It’s not—three potato chips.” And then later on in the day you’re like “Oh, I’m just going to have this one piece of candy. This little tiny piece of candy.” You know.

And that if each time—like, any one of those in isolation might be okay. Maybe on your diet you can have a couple potato chips or maybe on your diet you can have a piece of candy. You know, if that’s your one, you know, treat to yourself, hey, that might be okay. But if you’re doing it constantly, then you’re undermining what you’re up to.

And the same is true for complexity. If I keep saying, “Well, they could learn this,” “Well, they could learn that,” then what you’re doing is you’re, you know, cheating on your… complexity diet, if you will. That you are throwing at the players more than they—than they can handle. And part of making sure that you can do that is holding firm and saying, “This is complicated.”

And another part of keeping the game simple, like I said. Lands are a big part of keeping the game simple. You know. When you draw a land, especially, you know, a basic land, it’s like “Okay. I’ve got a land, I know what it is, I can play it, I can not play it, but I know what it is.” Not a lot of mental energy here. Once I’ve grokked the concept of land, and you need to understand that pretty early to play Magic.

And so we do try to keep lands from having too much complexity on them. That lands are not the place to put lots of complexity. Now, that doesn’t mean we never have a complex land, it doesn’t mean that, you know—but as a general rule of thumb, and that’s kind of what today is, is talking about lands and saying “How do we treat lands?” Because lands are—lands serve such an important function in the game that the mana system’s very important, that we don’t want to put too much weight on them. You know. That’s another important thing in your—game design tip for the game designers out there, which is you have to weight your design such that you evenly distribute the elements that are necessary.

What that means is, let’s take complexity. Complexity is easier if you spread it out so that everything—now, once again you’ve got to be careful not to make too much complexity because it will make it too hard, but when you’re doing complexity you want to be very careful to make sure that you’re—you’re weighting things so that the—like, you don’t want one element in your game to handle too much and—for example, the cards are doing a lot with the mana system. I’d rather not use those to also convey other complexity. I’d rather that be simple, that you get land and land does what it needs to do. And that when you’re designing something, it is possible to put too much stress on any one system.

Now, as I—I do like when games kind of double-function—when game systems have double functions, and that instead of having ten things you could have five. Some of that is good. But you also want to be careful not to say “Oh, okay, I have ten things, and of the ten things I have to do, one element of the game system is holding up eight of them.” That’s problematic. You want to sort of spread the wealth of how different elements of your game are helping you. And then if you put too much stress on any one piece, you will blow out that piece and cause problems.

The other thing, by the way, for—and this is important too. Is that players will grok rules to components, and that if—if each component is one rule to them—video games do this, by the way. In which I’m going to teach you how to do something. And give you the basic thing. And they keep adding one element. And that one element does one thing, and the players one for one can say, “Oh, oh, I see, the spring’s  in the game. Well, the spring lets you do blah-blah-blah.” You know. And that having the ability to sort of grok the game, because each component is tied to one idea, is very important.

And that’s another thing when I’m talking about card types. Each of the card types is trying to convey a certain thing. You know. And that land is about mana. Land’s about getting your mana. And I’m not saying you can’t add a little extra bonus to that, it can do a few other things. But you want to be careful.

And, by the way, you want to have your functioning lands at higher rarities. I don’t like common lands doing all that much. I much prefer if I’m going to do that, to push it more up to uncommon. And if I have something that’s a little more complex than that, I will push it up to rare. Or mythic rare. Although we don’t do a lot of mythic rare lands. You have to be pretty special to be a mythic rare land. Because the need to keep it kind of simple and the need for the—mythic rare likes to be a little splashier, and so it’s kind of hard to do simple and splashy lands. I mean, it’s possible, but it’s tough.

So what else (???) about lands? Oh, here’s another thing that people always ask about, which is rarity of lands. And this is a—let’s call a sticky wicket. Because lands serve so many different functions. For example, lands are the backbone of the mana system. That’s true. But lands have also become a big attraction to sets. Meaning when we put in a—a good cycle of lands, it just draws attention to the set. It makes people happy to buy boosters of a set.

And one of the challenges is, and like I said—we have compel—competing needs on some level. One side is the—kind of the design side of just “make the game as easy to play as possible, give everybody all the resources they need and make that happen.” The other side is there’s just business concerns of, you know, “Look, if we want to keep making Magic, we have to sell Magic. And we want people invested in buying packs.”

And that, you know, part of—like one of the things I explain all the time is, I have resources as a game designer that are almost insanely unheard of. You know, right now, I will do predesign for a year, then I will do design for a year, and then there’s another year in which Development’s working but I—I get to peek in and make notes, you know, and give further feedback. So that means almost three years I get to work on something. Three—for those—those that aren’t game designers out there, especially in the non-video-game world, nothing—three years—three years—it’s insane.

And the reason that I’m—I have the ability and I have a team of—I have a team of designers. Right now I’ve got six designers working on Magic. And the reason I have these resources is because of the financial—the fact that the game is able to make the money it is and that it, you know, that because it sells so well it allows us resources, and because we have resources we are allowed to make the game as good as it is.

And that if Magic sold a quarter of what it sold now, look, it would—the game would—it would reflect in the game, because I would just have less resources to work on the game. I might have less time. I for sure would have less people. You know. And that—the reason lands sometimes are sitting at rare is because, I’ll be honest, sometimes it’s important to be able to sell—to get people excited for sets and sell sets.

And there’s a balance. That’s why we always try to make sure in a set that requires certain land restrictions, that we’ll have common lands or uncommon lands. It’s a reason why we’ve worked very hard not to put utility lands at mythic. I mean, every once in a while we’ll do a splashy land at mythic. But, you know, you’re not seeing dual lands at mythic.

So, I mean, it’s a balance. Like I said, it’s—it is tough, that one of the hard parts about making Magic, or making any game but I’ll talk about Magic, is that there’s lots of different forces at hand doing a lot of different things, and that, you know, I have to make sure the game plays as well as it can play and that the game sells as well as it can sell. And that both of those things are important. And that if I neglect either one of those things, it causes problems and so my job is to find a way to make them both true.

So anyway, I have come—I’m here at work. And so I had fun today talking about land. Like I said, land is a—is tricky, because it is so important in so many different ways. But there’s so much subtleties and things you have to worry about it.

So, anyway, I hope you enjoyed hearing about land today, and I guess it’s time to go make the Magic.