11/1/2013 Episode 67: Creative

All podcast content by Mark Rosewater

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

Okay. Last time, I talked about the development team. And it dawned on me that there’s a third team. So there’s the design team, there’s the development team, and there’s the creative team. Are the three teams that sort of work together to make sets.

Now, to be fair, there’s also an editing team that edits it, there’s a digital team that does all our—I mean, those are other teams, I guess. But Design, Development and Creative are the three teams that kind of put the sets together, I guess. I mean, editing is an important part of making sure everything works and it’s correct, and so maybe one day I’ll talk about the editing team.

But today I thought it might be—since I’ve talked about the development team, that I might want to talk about the creative team. Because it’s a very important part of the process. And it’s a team that I work very closely with. In fact, it’s a team, once upon a time, that I ran.

Okay. So let me explain a little bit about the creative team. Okay, so in the beginning—in the beginning—there was something known as Continuity. So early in the game, the way it worked was, when a team would make a set—and remember, in the early days, they were all external. Every—all the teams were—that designed sets were external. They were responsible not just for the cards, but they were responsible for the naming and the flavor and the story and all—all that was just part of designing a set. You didn’t just design the mechanics, you also designed, you know, you named them and you—you set your story.

So, you know, the Ice Age story was made by the Ice Age guys. And the Mirage story was made by the Mirage guys. And, you know, the different, you know, the Antiquities guys did the Antiquities stories. So—but some time around—I guess around Ice Age, they realized that they needed somebody to sort of look at all the different sets to make sure that there was a continuity to it. Which is why they were called the continuity team.

And remember, early on, other than Arabian Nights and I guess Homelands, most of the sets were all in the same world. They were on Dominaria. So for those that are unaware, real quickly, the game of Magic takes place in a multiverse known as Dominia. Although we don’t talk about—we just call it The Multiverse these days. But originally the name of the multiverse was Dominia.

And then the plane that most of the action took place on in early Magic was Dominaria. And in—so in the first ten years of Magic’s life, there was a few times we left Dominaria but not a lot. Arabian Nights took place on a plane called Rabiah. See—“Arabian”—from “Rabiah.” Yeah, I know.

And then Homelands was on a plane called Ulgothra, Tempest was on a plane called Rath that  would later get overlaid with Dominaria. Mercadian Masques was on a place called Mercadia. And in Urza’s Saga, there—there was a few planes like Phyrexia and Serra’s Realm and a few other places. But other than a few places like that early on, most of early Magic took place on Dominaria.

And so the role of the continuity team was just making sure that all—all the sets had, you know, made sense together. That it wasn’t like one set said one thing, another set said a different thing, and then they didn’t match.

And eventually the continuity team sort of evolved into the creative team. So let me explain real quickly—what does the creative team do? So the creative team has a number of responsibilities. The easiest way to think about it is, they’re in charge of anything on the card that is not mechanical. So that would be the name of the card, that would be the—on the—the creature type, if it has a creature, although that’s the one area where mechanics and creative overlap a little bit. There’s the art, there’s the flavor text, the part in, you know, italics at the bottom that talks about the world. And—yeah, so that’s it. There—and the concept. The card concept. Not just the art, but what the card represents. Which the art tends to show.

And so, pretty much what happens is, so let’s say Design has an idea. Or we’ll take—what’s a good example here to talk about? Let’s talk a little bit about maybe Innistrad. Or—no no no, Ravnica might be a better example.

So Ravnica started with the idea that we wanted to do a gold block. And Invasion had done “Play lots of colors,” so mechanically I was interested in “play fewer colors.” So the idea was, instead of focusing on four and five color decks, we were going to focus on specifically two-color decks.

So at that point,  I go to the creative team, and I say “Okay. We are focusing on the ten two-color pairs.” And I said, “We’re going to focus on them equally.” Because I wasn’t going to play up allied combinations or enemy. I wanted to play them on equal level.

And then Brady took that idea and said, “Well, how do we make a world that focus on that?” And Brady’s the one that came back and said, “Well, what if it was guilds on a city world?” And I liked that idea, and so then I took it and I—I based a lot of the design and the mechanics off that. And so a lot of the way that design team works with Design, is we kind of go back and forth.

For example, on Lorwyn, we knew we wanted to do a tribal-based set, and so what we did is, we sort of sat down and talked about what tribes we were interested in. And then Brady had an idea where we could set it, and so Brady has this idea of maybe doing this Celtic sort of thing. So we went back and forth sort of figuring out what tribes made sense in the world. And then once—once we sort of cemented what we did, then Brady sort of wrapped the world to make sense of the choices we had had.

And, because we knew we were going to do this mirrored quality between these two mini-sets, Brady worked into the whole idea of a world that radically changes. And first we made Lorwyn brighter to make Shadowmoor darker.

With Mirrodin, we knew we wanted to do an artifact world, and so in fact the earliest concept from me and a guy named Tyler Bielman of an idea of a metal world. And then Brady sort of fleshed that out, and—but anyway, the idea of the design team—I’m sorry, the creative team is, they work with the design team early on to sort of figure out the essence of what’s going on.

You know. In Innistrad, it’s like “Okay, we’re going to do Gothic horror.” Well, then Design walked away and said, “Well, what are we going to need to do to do Gothic horror?” And figured out the monsters we want and stuff like that. But then we go back to Creative, and, you know, work with them to make sure that what we’re doing fits in with what the story is.

And Design’s role with Creative is interesting, in that Design leads in certain areas, that we have mechanical identities we need, but Creative also comes back and says, “Well, to be consistent, we shouldn’t do this.” You know. Creative is the one that said, when we were trying to build Theros for example, that said, “You know what? Elves don’t make sense in this world.” You know. “So let’s not have elves. Because elves don’t make sense. But oh, but merfolk do make sense,” you know, “the tritons are a key part of Greek mythology, and you know what? The tritons are basically merfolk.” Or, you know, “The dead of the world are kind of like zombies,” so like part of Creative’s job is to figure out where things fit in the structure that we have, and  where we can use things, and where, you know, we need not to.

So then what happens is, once that is figured out, then Design will create what it’s going to create. And during that, you know, the story has to start getting fleshed out a little bit, because in order for Design to do its job, we have to understand some essence of what’s going to happen.

One of the things we always try to do is I want the—the mechanics of the design to help tell the story as much as I can. Now obviously the creative elements, the name, the flavor text, and the art, have a much better job of doing that. But if there’s a certain conflict that’s happening, well, I want to have the conflict. Like Scars of Mirrodin, which was “Okay, there’s a war going on between the Phyrexians and the Mirrans. Well, I need to give an identity to the Phyrexians and I need to give an identity to the Mirrans creative—not creatively, mechanically. That design can play off of.”

And then what happens is, once—once Design kind of gets going, we check in with Creative every once in a while, sort of tell them what we want. We have to (???) out the block, so we’re sort of mapping out the block and making sure the story we’re trying to tell—the story Creative wants to tell is being matched by how the sets are structured out.

And like I said, it’s back and forth. One of the things that is interesting about Design and Creative is that Design sort of sets some parameters, but then Creative sets some parameters. And Design reacts to Creative and then Creative reacts to Design. We go back and forth. I talk a lot about iterations. And one of these days I’ll do an iteration podcast. But it’s very key to what we do.

But this is also, as is mechanics, an iterative process, where usually mechanics goes first. Design goes first and says “Okay, here’s some rough ideas for some mechanics.” And then Creative goes, “Okay, well if those are true…” Although these days we’ve been doing more top-down stuff, and top-down stuff sometimes has more of a creative start.

Like Theros, for example, we started with the idea of we wanted it to do top-down Greek mythology, and Brady suggested at the time, you know, that an enchantment theme might work well thematically with it. Now that—it was left up to me going, “Well, how could it work with it?” You know. But we definitely started from a—Theros was much more of a Design—I mean a Creative-centered place. “Oh, we’re doing Greek mythology.”

Okay, so once that happens, then Design chugs along. Some time during design, Creative—I’m sorry, the creative team will usually let us know who they think the planeswalkers are, what the major characters might be. It doesn’t always happen before design ends, but usually it happens late in design. So we—on the large set at least, so we can sort of design some of it.

And then, once it gets to Development—so early on, I’m missing something else. So. So the job of Creative is—one of the things is to do what we call world-building. Which is, you know, we have to flesh out an entire world, because we have to—when a Magic set goes, it has all these cards that have to represent there. So the creative team, their job is to figure out--no matter what we do mechanically, they have to figure out how to represent it. And so they have to build a world that will make sense for what they know the needs of Magic are.

So for example, Magic worlds have a very quirky set of needs. First off, there’s the five colors. There’s going to be—not—we can be—we’re not always literal, you know, the—the city plane didn’t have literal mountains necessarily, but—well it did have some little mountains. But the idea is, there’s always going to be islands and plains and swamps and mountains and forests and, you know, there’s always going to be—we have to make sure the five colors are represented, we have to make sure that all the different range of creatures—like, mechanically we know white creatures are going to be in this range, this size, you know, this percentage probably going to fly.

And so creative makes a chart to figure out, you know, what goes where. And when we’re looking at a world sometimes, you know, they learn how to… “Well, here’s all the things we need to represent.” “Oh, we don’t really have a big blue flying thing. You know, in this world, sphinxes don’t make sense. Well ooh, what would be our big blue flier in this world?” Or whatever.

But they have to figure out sort of what things are going to be. You know. And that—part of worldbuilding is—like the way the worldbuilding works is, they have a rough idea, then they bring in some artists, then they usually spend a couple weeks sort of fleshing out the world. And the artists—actually more than a couple weeks. And the artists will come in and, you know, draw iterations of things and then the creative team will work with them to go “Ooh, we like this,” you know, and the artist will try a lot of things until they find things that they’re happy with. And then little by little they start building like a visual world.

And then eventually they make a book that sort of shows the artists kind of different examples of the world. To help the artists when they have to draw the world. And usually the idea is “Here’s what the world looks like, here’s what the people look like. Here’s what the clothing looks like. Here’s what the monsters, you know, key monsters look like.”

And it’s interesting because one of the things that’s kind of nutty is, for example, when the movie Avatar came out, Zendikar had come out six months before Avatar. And one of the things that’s very interesting is, there are a lot of qualities to Avatar—sorry, a lot of qualities to Zendikar that matched—Avatar had made similar decisions.

But we had no idea, you know, the movie hadn’t been out—you know, the game came out before the movie came out, so we had never—we had not seen the movie, and the creative team didn’t know. And so the creative team—I mean, and they—I’m sure they spent years and years and years putting together the world of Avatar. And we have a year. Because next year, we’re making a different world.

So this is something that—talk about props to the creative team, our creative team makes a world every year. You know. I mean, sometimes we go back and revisit worlds. But even then, there’s lots of work to be done. And so, you know—the creative team’s like responsible for making a world a year, which is kind of nutty. I mean, nobody else I can think of is—is churning out that kind of, you know, environments, at that rate. Which is very impressive. I mean, the creative team does awesome work.

Okay. So now the world is done. Works with Design, okay Design hands the file in, now we’ve got it to Development. Okay, so early on in Development, Development sort of has to go in and make some changes. But early on, they have to start doing what we call “card concepting.”

So “card concepting” is “what does the card mean? What does it represent?” So I have a card that says “Spend R, do three damage to something.” Or “1R, do three damage to something.” Well, what does that mean? What is it? How exactly is it being portrayed? You know. And—this one’s a pretty straightforward one. It’s like “Okay, it’s direct damage of some kind, well what kind of energy source? Is it lightning? Is it fire? Is it earth? Is it ice? Is it sonic? You know, what is it? How are they doing the damage?”

And they have to write a description so that—the idea is, they concept and write a description, and that gets—Jeremy Jarvis is the art director, he always—he doesn’t concept, but he does a pass on the concepts to make sure that he thinks his artists can draw them. And so we have to concept every card.

Now, we tend to concept in waves, meaning that—the whole set isn’t done—isn’t usually done all at once. It’s done—it’s done in pieces. And that allows us to do things like let an artist have some interpretation to do something. And then show other artists what that artist did in the world. That helps us to have things in—happen in chunks.

But anyway, we concept what the cards are. Now some cards—sorry. Do three damage, that’s easy. That’s direct damage. That’s not a hard one to do. But sometimes, Design makes a quirky card. You know. “Choose one: destroy target enchantment or artifact, or target creature gets +3/+3.” And you’re like “Uhh… what the heck… what does… so I either destroy things or I make something bigger? What is that?” And so there’s tricky things where Creative sort of has to kind of figure out how to make some—make stuff make sense. You know. 

And Design and Development try hard not to make too many of those, although sometimes there’s a card where like mechanically it’s just perfect for what we need, and it’s quirky, and we let Creative try to figure out how to represent it. But anyway, so cards get concepted. That’s the next level. We figure out what they are, descriptions are written.

Okay. So once the card gets concepted, it then goes to Jeremy, who’s the art director. And Jeremy’s job is to get an artist to draw it. Which is, by the way, a lot more complex than you might think at first, because what Jeremy wants to do is A. he’s got—so most of our artists, or almost all our artists are freelance.

And so Jeremy has, you know, a Rolodex full of artists that he uses. And what he wants to do is he wants to make sure that each individual card is given to an artist that will best do that card. Just as the card concept has to spend time and energy going, “Okay, this is a fireball…” Or—and also sometimes they want to get creative. It’s not just a fireball, it might be “Oh, this person’s made a giant hand of fire that is swiping at the enemy.” You know.

And who is being damaged? You know. It might be—if we’re in Ravnica, like, “Oh, it’s—the magic is from this guild, but it’s fighting this other guild.” You know. “Oh, it’s Izzet magic, but it is—it is attacking a Orzhov priest.” Or whatever. They have to figure out the context. Not just what it represents, but does it make sense in the story? Is it showing anything? What part of the environment is it showing? And they have to make all that make sense.

Then Jeremy, the art director, has to say “Okay. This is showing, you know—oh this piece is supposed to be a close-up of, you know, an Orzhov priest in—in one of their churches with stained glass behind them.” Let’s say. And so Jeremy’s like “Oh, who’s going to—which of my artists do I think will do a real good job of, you know, intricate close-up person with stained glass in the back, and, you know, who—who really can do that best?”

And Jeremy has to juggle because he’s got all these different pieces of art that have to get done, and so, you know, he has to look at all the art to figure out who’s best for this and who’s best for this, but if I—if one person would be good for A and B, but I could only have them do one, well maybe they do A and this person does B.” And there’s a lot of figuring that stuff out, and there’s a lot of relation with the artists, and Jeremy does an amazing, amazing job, which is pretty clear if you’ve seen Magic cards. But there’s a lot that goes into figuring all that out.

And on top of that, Jeremy also changes the art style based on the set you’re in. So if we’re doing Gothic horror, well that’s a different mentality and maybe a different group of artists. Or a different subset of artists. Where if we’re doing Theros, it’s brighter and got a Greek feel, and you know it’s got a certain quality that he’s trying to get. So each year, Jeremy’s job is visually to have a cohesive look to that year. But, year to year, Magic changes. The cohesive look of Innistrad is not the cohesive look of Theros. Which is not the cohesive look of Return to Ravnica. You know, each one has its own look and feel.

Okay. So now, that gets done. Now, once that happens—so once a card has mechanics, and it has, you know, a concept, and it has art on the way, now next is names and flavor text. So the card has to be called something, and there’s a lot of rules for names. Names—one of these days, probably next—probably next time that I carpool with Matt, because Matt and I have both done naming, and naming is tricky. Last time he was in the car we talked about flavor text. But naming—usually the person that does flavor text on the set does naming as well. They’re intertwined.

And so you’ve got to name the cards. And the names have a functional job, which is people have to refer to them. And so there’s a whole bunch of rules about names. I’m going to do a whole podcast on naming, so I won’t get into it. But someone has to name the cards. The way it tends to work is, there’s freelancers that work with the creative team, and that they will send them “Okay, here’s what we need. Here’s an art description and here’s what the card does.” Or give them enough detail to be able to write names and flavor text. And then people submit names, and people submit flavor text.

Now, flavor text—the idea of flavor text is: A. to add some flavor to the card, B. sometimes to kind of explain what the card is doing, C. build up the world, and—or advance the world and the story, or—you’re trying to—to add to the creative element that’s going on.

Now notice that these are all somewhat concurrent. I mean, the card concepting happens before art happens. But oftentimes the name and flavor text, they haven’t even seen the art when they’re doing the names and flavor text.

And then what happens is once the art comes in, you know, once we have names and flavor text and art, then someone’s got to look at them and say, “Do these all work together?” Because sometimes you’ll have this awesome name, but the art comes in, just that name and that art don’t work. And then you have to make changes.

And—I mean, there’s all sorts of things that can happen. I mean, the art is a laborious process, so, you know, every once in a while, maybe a piece doesn’t come in because something happened, the artist wasn’t able to get it done because, you know, extenuating circumstances. And so it’s like “Oh,” you know, or—there’s all sorts of different things that can happen. But anyway, so when the dust settles, you know, the card has a name, has a flavor text, has a piece of art—flavor text if it fits. And it has art.

Okay, so now—what does it all entail? So there’s an entire team built to do the creative. And not only are they in charge of the cards, but Magic has a—you know, for example, Duels of the Planeswalkers. You know, there’s a lot of creative in that. There are comic books. There are a lot of other things to get done that Creative’s got to at least, you know, keep their eye on.

Some of them—like the comic books are (???) external, with consultation with the creative team. Something like Duels of the Planeswalkers, I think are just done by the creative team. But there’s a lot of different things to do, because the Magic IP is very big. You know. The story’s big, and the worlds are big. Somebody’s got to make sure that things are being consistent among the worlds, that—you know, if the comic book decides it wants to visit a world, you’ve got to make sure that what they’re doing is—connects with how the world is represented.

Now the creative team—so once upon a time, they—here’s the interesting thing, which is—while I have been on development teams, and so I definitely understand how development has been done, I’ve never led a development team. I’ve never been in charge of development. But on the creative side, I have done card concepting for sets.

For example, Urza’s Legacy,  I did the card concepting. As well as for, you know, Unglued. For Odyssey and for both Unglued sets, I did the names and the flavor text. You know. The—I’ve never been in charge of art, although I have had a—I have been very involved in art in working on different sets that I’ve done. You know. I have been very involved in frames and stuff like that.

And, for a while, when I first became Head Designer, they—I actually was in charge of the creative team for a while. The creative team—somehow my job wasn’t enough. The creative team reported to me. And it was very interesting. I had an opportunity to, you know, to work with the creative team, and I was very involved in sort of—I mean, I didn’t do the work, but I managed them.

So I was very involved in what was happening. So I—I oversaw the creative team during—basically Return to Ravnica and—not Return to Ravnica, Ravnica and Time Spiral. So those two worlds are the ones that I—I was overseeing the creative team during that time. And it gave me a very big insight that, you know, being in charge of running the creative team means that I—I’m very privy to a lot of the things that the creative team has to worry about and care about.

So… essentially, by the way, the reason I do not anymore run the creative team—in fact, I don’t even manage my own team. I don’t even manage the design team anymore. Was just—it needed its own dedicated person. The fact that I was splitting my time between the Design and Creative was not helping anybody. That Design needed a lot of attention, Creative needed a lot of attention. And so we decided that, you know, look, Creative needed its own people running stuff.

And Creative’s even gotten bigger. When I was there, my team was… five people I think? And now the creative team is… nine people? Ten people? Trying to add up in my head, a little bit in my head. And so the—the relationship that, like I said, that the creative team has is that they want to have a consistency, and the juggling is that Design and Development are trying to make the game—the game play as good as it can be.

And the creative team—I mean, their job enhances gameplay, that when you take a card and you give a good flavor to it, it makes it easier to remember, when you give it a good name it makes it easier to talk about. The art obviously is the identifier for most cards, so like—if you’re doing your job well, the creative definitely enhances what is going on. But the needs of Creative are a little bit different from the needs of Design and Development from a gameplay perspective.

And so one of the places where—I mean, conflict’s the wrong word, but where there’s the most—different desires is, sometimes Design and Development have gameplay needs that contradict creative needs.

Now, normally we try to all work together and, you know, sometimes it all works perfectly. “Oh, this is it, and that’s perfect, and this is the Creative and this is what it does,” and it all comes together and it’s like this perfect little ball of wonderfulness.

Sometimes, it’s kind of like—for example, let me give the story of the werewolves. So the werewolves is an interesting story. Where I’m putting together Innistrad, and I realize very early on that one of the problems was, everything in Innistrad wanted to be black. Because horror leans toward black. It’s creepy-crawly, and it’s got monsters, and it—you know, it definitely has a very black sort of mentality to it.

But the problem was, the set can’t all be black. You know. I had to make four other colors. So one of my guidelines was I said, “Okay. I have to make sure that whenever possible, I am going somewhere else to do things.”

So the werewolves. So I knew we wanted to do vampires and werewolves and zombies at the time. What I call the Big Halloween Three. Which is Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Wolfman. And so Frankenstein is a zombie, Dracula is a vampire, the werewolf—Wolfman is a werewolf.

I knew zombies had to be black. I just knew they had—I mean, they’re—they’re literally the dead raised up. You know. Black is all about the dead. You know. And the same with vampires. That—literally—zombies and vampires are the two characteristic races of black.

So like--we figured out a way, because like I knew I wanted two colors for each of them. So I’m like “Okay, well science—you know, Frankenstein is a science-made zombie, not a necromantic zombie, but a--you know, science bringing the dead to life. So we said “Oh, if we play up that aspect, that can be blue. Zombies can be black and blue.”

And then we figured out that “Well, if you make your vampires more bloodlusty, you know, a little more reckless, you can make them red. So okay.” But it meant--okay. I need to make the werewolves, and I don’t want them to be black.

So the obvious place to go was green. And I went and talked to Brady—Brady was the Creative Director at the time, (???) mention Brady, Brady Dommermuth. For a long time in Magic was the Creative Director of Magic. He’s no longer with us, he moved on to some other stuff, but a lot of stories I tell involve Brady because he’s the one who was there. You know. Nowadays we’ve got, you know, Doug Beyer, Jenna Helland, and—and the whole crew. But back—some of my stories I’m talking about this (???) with Brady.

And so Brady agreed that green made a lot of sense for werewolves, because, you know, they’re feral and they’re almost—they are like wild monsters—wild beasts, which is, you know, I’m a human, and when I turn into a werewolf, I have no control. I’m just—I’m not thinking—oh, whatever the werewolf wants to do.

And the werewolf acts like an animal in a lot of ways. So Jeremy—not Jeremy, Brady was very on to doing green. But I knew that I needed a second color, and when I looked at what we were doing, I figured out that the second color that made the most sense was red. And I felt like a lot of—thematically what vamp—sorry, what werewolves are about is the idea of—of you’re sort of stuffy, but when you become a werewolf you’re sort of following your gut. And while that’s like instinctual, it’s got an emotional impulsive aspect to it.

And Brady at first was kind of skeptical. He didn’t see it. You know. Or—he thought they were so green that it didn’t make sense to go into another color. But eventually I came to him and I said “Brady, I have to be in a second color.” You know, In order to… because I was doing tribal, I wanted enough choices and options and I find if tribal’s locked in one color, it makes it very narrow, and you don’t have the bandwidth you need to sort of make variety. And if you put them in two colors, then people can choose to play one color or the other, or both.

So Brady finally came around. And then, you know, I explained my sort of concept of, you know, werewolves as being this emotional outlet. Which Brady understood and he came to embrace, and then I sort of got him around to the idea of “Okay, look, mechanics needed the second color.” Because Brady was like “You know, creatively they should just be green.” And I was like “Well, they can’t just be green.” You know.

And that—that’s the kind of thing, the interplay that we have to work with, where sometimes Creative has to sort of stretch a little bit and go, “Okay, how could we make this work?” And what I often say on this thing is that Design is not as flexible as Creative. Creative just has more—like, Design—there’s only so many ways you can do a card. And that you’re much more locked in how you can do things.

In fact, one of my issues on Kamigawa is the way that we did Champions of Kamigawa is, Creative made their stuff, locked it in, and then Mechanics tried to match it. And it’s very ham-fisted, if you will, because the only way to match it was very sort of—it wasn’t subtle. And that what we do nowadays is we—we sort of weave things together.

Like, the thing I love about Theros is that a lot of what’s going on is subtle and woven into the gameplay, and that when you first look at it you might not realize what’s going on. But if you start playing, you’re like “Oh, I see. Oh, I got my hero, and he has an ordeal and he’s being tested by the gods. Which makes him stronger. And when that happens, he’s strong enough that he can fight the monster that’s sort of found the monstrous side of itself,” and like it all starts coming together, like “Oh, I see how this all—how this all is working.” You know. And that part of that is, working with Creative, and a lot of times Creative’s job is to try to figure out how to make things work.

Now, Mechanics try to make things work too. You know. Sometimes Creative says “Oh, it really needs to be a certain way.” And mechanics try to see if we can make it work. But it’s more often Creative can make something mechanical work than Mechanics can make something creative work. Although we do—Mechanics can try to match things as much as we can.

So the creative team—the one interesting thing is they are not in The Pit. The design and development teams are both in the pit. But the creative team, what we found was, they do a lot more writing, and a lot more stuff where you have to kind of be—you need to be quiet, and The Pit is… not quiet. In fact, it’s pretty loud.

Because Design and Development do a lot of arguing, and there’s playtesting, and one of the things that kind of—one of the—I don’t know, the way R&D works is that there’s a lot of interplay and talking, and you know, like a lot of times we’ll just be playing a game, and as you’re playing, you’ll realize something, so you yell to the relevant person. You know. “Hey Dan, CW01, it needs first strike!” Or whatever. You know. Or, “We gotta increase the cost because it’s—it’s causing this problem,” or “Oh, this makes this (???)” or whatever it is, we just yell out in the middle of playing to sort of fix things—or just start getting conversations or arguments or discussions or whatever. The pit’s a noisy place.

So Creative is off in their own little area. It’s not far away. But—and—so when you need something, you know, you go over to Creative. A lot of times what will happen is, I will-when I get myself in a box, or—because one of the things right now is not only do I do design, but we do advanced design, which is even farther ahead.

And the tricky thing about advance design is, when I’m doing design then Creative has pretty much signed off on what we’re doing. When we’re doing advanced design, it’s kind of even before design is 100% bought off on what we’re doing. So I’m sort of getting ideas from them and then trying some stuff and going back to them, and saying, “Well, what do you think of this?”

And so that’s an earlier—that’s a lot of my discussions because I’m the Head Designer. A lot of my discussions with Creative are like, “We’re trying this crazy thing that you haven’t thought about. Think about it.” That’s a common sort of discussion we have.

But—I think at some level, the creative team—well, here’s the interesting thing. I—I think the art gets tons and tons of props because it is so front and central that it gets a lot of attention. In fact, one of the things, when I talk about the strengths of Magic, one of Magic’s greatest strengths is its art. Is that when you pick up a card, you just get this beautiful piece of art every card. And that’s just so compelling.

You know, one of the things that’s interesting is, I playtest all the time with stickered cards. And then every once in a while, you know, a new set comes in, and I get a chance to play with the new set. And it is so much more fun to play with—with real cards.

And the funny thing is, really the only difference is that the creative is done. That there’s art, that there’s names, and sometimes on stickered cards the names are real. Usually there’s no flavor text on stickered cards. But somehow having the art—just, the whole thing—it’s just—I don't know, it’s really breathtaking, and it’s funny, I’m so used to using stickered cards that like, it really is this—this breath of fresh air every time I get to play with real cards. I know for the public, they (???) play with these real cards, but to me it’s kind of a special treat when I get to play with art.

And it makes me realize, like—I think that people recognize the art. I think that people, like, get what the art does for the game. Or—I mean, it does more than they realize, because it also helps signify things and set tone and does all this other stuff. But I also think there’s a whole creative element. That the name and the flavor text and the concepting and the world, and that all the elements that go into the creative of a card really enhances what the card does.

And one of the interesting things is like watching Theros as we show a card, and that people go “Oh, it’s this,” and “Oh, that’s why it’s this,” and “Ohh!” You know. And like just—it’s fun when it all comes together, and that—when the creative elements are shining, like, it and the design elements and the development elements are all going in the same direction. That--that really is the key of R&D is getting the design elements, the development elements, and the creative elements to all be going in the same direction.

And I often talk about advanced design’s job, which is to set vision, so that everybody else has a unified vision to follow. And that—I mean, and not just with Development, I talk about that a lot. But one of my jobs in Design is making sure that I have a mechanical heart that Creative can pay off on. That Creative can do something cool with. And that I work with them early on to make sure like—one of my big things is I’m very big on structure. I’m very big on archetypes and trying to tell a story that’s—that is relatable and understandable. That we know we can make the cards to do.

But—but anyway. I’m now at work. And I had a little bit of traffic today. So anyway, I hope you enjoyed today’s—I’m—one of the things I hope about the last podcast and this podcast is, I want people to appreciate the hard work that is done by the development team and by the creative team, I think Magic, the last—you know, set of years has been just hitting it out of the park every year, and I’m very, very proud of my design team, I think Design’s been doing an excellent job.

But Development also has been doing an excellent job, and Creative has been doing an excellent job. That I think the three teams have all sort of found a place to work in harmony and just sort of nail it, and I—anyway, I think everybody—(???) podcast, because of how awesome the work is.

And today is saying, “Look, there’s a lot that goes into Creative, more than you might even realize,” and that, you know, next time you have a card, take some time to really look at the creative elements and see all the little nuances of what’s going on, and really look at the art, and look at the flavor text, and the name, and, you know, think about the world and how it fits, and it’s impressive.

When you—I mean, the creative team spends so much time and energy making it all make sense that, you know, I think it’s fun sometimes to sort of think of the card as a whole. Not just as a mechanical thing, but as a whole essence that represents something. And I—I think that’s what makes Magic shine is that all those things come together to make something greater than the sum of its parts.

But anyway, I have to go make more cards today. So that we  can put creative to them. So anyway, thanks for joining me this week, and it’s time that I was making Magic. Talk to you next time.