2/14/14 Episode 96: New World Order

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. Today, I’m going to talk about something that revolutionized how we did design. Something called New World Order. So let me explain how it came to be, and what ramifications it has on how we do design, because since I’ve been working for Wizards now over 18 years, there’s been a few different things that have radically changed how we do things. This is one of them. And so today I’m going to talk about it.

So to understand New World Order, let’s first talk about where we were around the time of… I guess it was like Lorwyn Block, you have Lorwyn into Shadowmoor. That era. Because we were on the cusp, right before we were getting Shards of Alara.

Anyway, what had happened was—actually, we’ll go back a second. Future Sight had come out. Time Spiral block had come out. And for the first time, we had this weird statistic. Up until Time Spiral came out, we would look at sales and we’d look at tournament organization, like how many people were playing in tournaments, and they tended to be lockstep. Meaning if tournaments were doing well, sales were doing well, and it showed this tight-knit bond between the two.

But Time Spiral did this weird thing that we’d never seen before, in which sales were down but tournament attendance was doing fine. I don’t know if up’s the correct term, but they were not trending on the same line. And that was very different. We’d never seen that before.

And that’s when we realized—at the time we called them The Invisibles, but the idea was, there are people who play who don’t participate in organized play, that are hard for us to see because they’re not somewhere that we can easily monitor.

But for the first time, because there wasn’t a lockstep between tournament play and sales, we knew that there’s this group that wasn’t being reflected in tournament organization, but was obviously being reflected in sales.

And so we took a look at what was going in Time Spiral block, Time Spiral, Planar Chaos, Future Sight. And what we realized was that the complication of the game had raised. So let me talk about that a little bit, because complexity is a huge part of New World Order. So let me explain.

So what happens in any game is, you make a game. People like it. Now, we’re a trading card game. That means we need to come out with more cards. It’s what we do. The game is constantly changing and evolving. That’s the essence of Magic.

So we have to keep coming up with new cards. Well guess what. That means we do new things. Partly we need new things because to sell it you need new things, and partly because we’ve done the old things. If you’re trying to make cards you haven’t made before, you have to do things you haven’t done. And so with time, you start making up new mechanics. You’re forced to. And so what that means is, the game just has more in it. As time goes on, there’s more and more in it.

Now. We’ve created the Standard format to sort of keep a balance of how much complexity is in Standard. The main way to play Constructed, we found a way to keep the power level relatively flat. By having things rotate out. So when new things come in, old things go out. There’s only so many cards you can play with. That helps keep the power level sort of level.

But, we had a different problem, which was that we were—acquisition is what we call acquiring new players. So there’s three things we talk about. We talk about retention, acquisition, and reacquisition.

So retention is the players we have—can we keep them? Are we making them happy? Do we want to keep playing? Acquisition is can we get new players, can we get new people to play? And reacquisition is can we get back old players that used to play but stopped playing.

And so those are the three things we’re constantly thinking of. And each one of them is very important. If we don’t keep our players, like if we’re constantly changing, then there’s no continuity. And the game, you know, doesn’t evolve. We’re all about having a community, and part of having community is having players that play for a long time.

Now, Magic right now, the average player of Magic is like 9, 9 ½ years, I think? That’s a long time for a game. For those that don’t know in the gaming world, that’s a really, really long time to have people play your game. In fact, it’s insanely long. The only games that have that kind of measurement are stuff like Chess and Go, which have thousands of years behind them.

But anyway, so we want retention. That’s important. We want to make sure that we are doing things that people like. But another important part is acquisition, which is you need fresh blood. Why? A. because some people will leave your game.

And I’ve talked about this before. The reason people leave Magic—sometimes people are unhappy with Magic, that can be one of the reasons they leave, but more often than not people tend to leave, we’ve found, because of circumstances that actually have nothing to do with the game. Usually your social circumstances change, meaning “The people I play with aren’t available to play anymore.” And the second thing is, something changed—“I move, or my job changes, or I don’t have the time, or I don’t have the money…” Something changes where I don’t have the access to the things I need.

So, what has happened is, a lot of organized play is to try to solve the first problem, which is “If you don’t have someone to play, we can help you get someone to play. We can provide other people to play with.” But the other things, if you don’t have the time or the money, or—there’s other factors, we can’t control that. And so people are going to come and leave the game.

Now part of that crowd is what we call reacquisition, the website probably is our biggest reacquisition tool, which is we have this tool. If you leave Magic, we have this thing you can sort of monitor, keep your pulse on the game even if you’re not playing. I know a lot of people have told me how they’ll read my column even though they don’t play anymore, and that something about something I’m talking about gets them excited and they come back.

Most players who leave Magic come back to Magic. That’s very, very common. In fact, most players will take a hiatus from the game and come back to it. If you talk to Magic players, that is a very, very common thing. And the reason is, like I said, most people don’t leave because they’re unhappy with the game. They leave for other factor, and when those factors change, something can draw them back into the game. That’s why reacquisition is very important. The website does a really, really good job of reacquisition. There’s other things we do. Duels of the Planeswalkers and Magic Online can be good reacquisition.

Anyway, so we were looking at statistics, and we were realizing that acquisition was going down. That we were acquiring less players than we used to. Now that is a canary in the coal mine, if you will. That’s dangerous. What that’s saying is, if you don’t have fresh blood coming in, that is the death knell. Your game is going to die if you don’t have fresh blood coming in.

Partly, one reason is because some people are going to leave, and you need new players to replace them. But also, it’s important to just have fresh blood in any system because it just adds an important mix. Just like on R&D we like having fresh blood, in your gaming system you want new people coming in. That you want people constantly discovering and excited. The established experienced players are very, very valuable to us. Insanely valuable to us. In fact, most of our work is on retention. The vast majority.

Whenever I talk about acquisition, people always feel like “We don’t care about the existing players! We only care about the new players!” No no no. 90% of my time is [retention.] Most of my time is making a Magic game that’s awesome for people that play Magic.

But, I do need to spend some time on acquisition. Acquisition is very important. And a lot of times, when we talk about the importance of acquisition, I think people think like we’re trying to (???) the sake of retention. No no no no. Retention is super important. And like I said. Most of my time, 90% of my time is spent on retention. Not on acquisition. But, acquisition is important.

So we figured out that our acquisition was going down. And that is a danger. If you don’t fix that problem, you know, it’s a sign that Magic is going to be in trouble. So we looked and said, “Okay, what’s going on? Why are we having acquisition problems?”

Well, I’ve talked about this many times, which is I believe that Magic’s greatest flaw is its barrier to entry. And what barrier to entry means, it’s a gaming term, which means how easy is it for me to get your game? Part of it might be “What do I need to do to start?” Part of it might be “How hard is it to learn?”

So  Magic has a big barrier to start because it’s a complex game. Now, the funny thing is, at its core, the base game is not that complex. But when people see the game, you tend to experience through other players, and like it’s a game with thousands of pieces. Like, any one person doesn’t know all of them. That sounds pretty complex. And to be fair, it is complex.

And so Magic is intimidating and there’s a lot to learn. So, we’ve done a whole bunch of things to try to help with barrier to entry, like Duels of the Planeswalkers was a big one. But anyway, New World Order would be another huge one.

So what happened was, we were looking at our numbers, like “Look, we’re not acquiring players.” And so if you looked at your game, it’s just obvious. Like I said before. As you age, as an ongoing game that keeps putting out new content, you are forced to make new material. And the thing to remember is, the new player, let’s put them at zero on the scale. Okay? They know nothing.

Now, maybe, maybe, maybe, if your game gets big enough and is around enough, over time, like, Monopoly in my mind isn’t a zero, because when you walk in to learn Monopoly, the zeitgeist of the culture behind it, that you know something about Monopoly. I mean, you might only be starting at a one or a two, but at least you walk in knowing it’s a property game, or knowing there’s Boardwalk, or something. You know something about it. Magic hasn’t reached that point yet. Hopefully one day it will. So it starts at zero. People don’t know anything.

Now, when Magic first started, when Richard first made the game, let’s say it was a 15 to learn. Well, over the years it got up to what, a 20? A 25? A 30? Like, it just got harder and harder to learn. Because the beginner’s still at zero, so the jump to get into the game, as time went on, we realized we were making the gap farther and farther. So we looked at Time Spiral, we said, “Okay. There’s just a million and one things to memorize, and all this stuff… we’ve got to simplify. We’ve got to make things easier.”

So in Lorwyn, we were very vigilant about how words were on cards, and what each card did. Can you read the card and understand what it did? And so we made a big jump in trying to simplify the cards. And what we found was, when you played with Lorwyn, or especially Lorwyn/Morningtide—in fact, we had a prereleaseat work, which was a Morningtide employee prerelease.

And one of the things that’s interesting about the prerelease is, a lot of people that work Wizards, they’re not R&D members, they’re other people in the company, and a lot of them know Magic, a good chunk of them know enough to play because they work on Magic so they’ve learned how to play, but they’re not gamers. They didn’t come to Wizards sort of being a Magic fan necessarily.

And so it’s an interesting thing to look at. These are people that play Magic that are not die-hard Magic players. They don’t know every intricacy of the game. And we were watching them at the Lorwyn/Morningtide prerelease. Now remember, Lorwyn was a tribal set, had eight races, and then in Morningtide we introduced five classes. So now every card had a race you cared about and a class you cared about, and anyway, there was a lot going on. There was a lot on the board.

And we were noticing just that people were having trouble playing. We actually noticed a few people quit. Like, “I just can’t handle this.” And they stopped. And we’re like “What’s going on?” And we said, “Okay, let’s look at what’s going on.” And we realized, “Holy moly, there’s a lot going on. Every card cares about other cards, and you’ve got to look around…” Just looking at the board, forget hands existed, they wouldn’t be able to track what was going on on the board.

Okay. And we realized we had a problem. So that’s when we realized how there’s three different types of complexity. Let me talk about that. First there is comprehension complexity. This is the thing we tried to fix after Time Spiral block, which is “Can I understand what the cards do? Can I read the card, and tell what it does?” That’s comprehension complexity. The second is board complexity. Which is, “Okay, I have these cards, and they’re sitting in play, on the battlefield. Can I understand what it means, what they do? Can I comprehend the board state?” And the third thing is what we call strategic complexity. “I have a card. Do I understand the ramifications of how best to use the card?”

So what we found was, comprehension complexity and board complexity were causing problems for new players. Strategic complexity, interestingly, was not, because they didn’t know what they needed to know to even be aware it existed.

For example. What we found was, for example, let’s say death triggers. So death triggers are triggers that go on a creature… or actually, even simpler than that. Enter the battlefield triggers, what are called ETB triggers. It’s just “A creature, when it enters the battlefield, it does something.”

Now, an experienced Magic player looks at that, and they say, “Well, there’s an ability. This is a spell. I want to think about when I want to cast this spell.” Likewise with death triggers, that’s a good example. When the creature dies, it does something. “Well, I want to think about what I’m going to do, because when it dies this is going to happen.”

Now, an experienced player might not play a creature right away that has an ETB ability that they want. Or, might make blocks or do something interesting, or attack with a creature that has a death trigger they want. They think about—their actions take into account what the card does.

Now, a beginning player, you know what? They play a card. When it comes into play, “Oh, ETB effect. What happens?” When their creature dies, “Oh, death trigger! What happens?” They don’t plan ahead, because that’s beyond them. They’re not thinking about that. When you’re first starting to play, it’s like, “Oh, things happen when they happen.” You don’t plan ahead.

And that’s okay. It’s not bad for them. It’s not like they’re not having a good time when their creature dies and something happens. They might not be maximizing it, but they don’t know they’re [not] maximizing, so no harm, no foul.

But the problem with comprehension complexity and board complexity is, it causes them problems. They recognize they don’t understand what’s going on. If they can’t read a card and read it, they’re baffled. If the board has too much going on, they get frozen. They can’t understand what’s going on. And so we realized we needed a way to lower our complexity, especially in comprehension and board complexity.  

Now. Enter Matt Place. So Matt Place was a developer. He no longer works at Wizards, but he worked there for quite a while. Matt used to be a Pro Tour player, he won PT Mainz back in the day. And he was a very good player, he and I were very good friends. And Matt and I were talking about this issue. And the big problem we had to solve was, how do we make the game simpler for newer players without necessarily taking away the strategic complexity and the depth that the experienced players want? And that’s when we made an important realization.

Matt and I made the following realization, which is: a beginner buys less cards. Why? They’re less invested in the game. When you first start playing the game, it’s one thing to be invested, like, once you’ve been playing Magic for nine years, or whatever, you know you’re buying the latest box. You might buy two boxes. You might buy three boxes. You understand the investment. It’s your hobby. You spend time. You spend energy. It’s something you’ve said “I’m dedicating a chunk of my time and money to.” But a new player, they don’t know that yet, necessarily. So they’re going to sample it first. And so new players just buy less cards than experienced players. That’s just the way it is. A known fact.

Okay. Now, if you take that into account, commons became really important. Because what we realized is, in every booster pack, there are fifteen cards. On average, there are ten common cards. Ten common, three uncommon, one rare, which one out of eight is a mythic rare on average. And then one basic land card.

Okay. So if you are a beginning player, and you just buy five packs, let’s say, pretty much of the cards you own, two thirds of the cards are common. And another one fifteenth is basic land, which is simple too.

Okay. So two thirds of the cards are common. So if you’re a beginning player, most of what you have in your hands are common. Now, if you’re an experienced player, you’re buying a box. Or two boxes. Or three boxes. The commons don’t mean as much because you have four of every common. You are focused on the uncommons and the rares and the mythic rares.

And what we realized is, “Oh, well the commons mean more to the beginning player than they mean to the experienced player.” Now, they have a big impact on Limited for the experienced player, but we’re like, “Okay. What if we took common, and we set a bar for complexity, and just lowered the bar?” And what would happen was, if we made commons simpler, for the beginning player we would make the game simpler. Because they have not yet graduated. You know, to them, very few of the cards are uncommons and rares and mythics. Two thirds of the cards are commons. Two thirds. That’s a lot.

So if we could toe a line at common and say “Okay, here’s the complexity we want for the beginning player.” And so what we did is, here’s the policy we came up with. We said, “Okay.” Matt and I wrote a whole document up, we said, “Okay, here’s what we want. We have a line. Eighty percent of your cards must, must be under the line no matter what. Twenty percent can be above the line.

We call these “red-flagged.” So what red-flagged means is, if you break one of the following rules, you get red-flagged. What red-flagged means is the design team and then the development team has to acknowledge that you are meant to be there. It’s not that you can’t stay, but if you get red-flagged, the powers that be have to sign off that you’re there. And the idea is, we want to make the designers and developers responsible for understanding the complexity that goes on at common.

Now, New World Order has a bunch of different things. There’s definitely different ways you red-flag things. So I’m going to walk through them. But first, a sip of water. It is important to drink when you’re talking nonstop for a half an hour. That’s why I’m always drinking. That and my love of cold water.

Okay, so. First red flag, I talked about this not too long ago, comprehension complexity. Which is just, “Is the card wordy?” We don’t have a (???), but pretty much if you are four lines or more of text, you’re red-flagged. Do you have four lines or more of rules text? If you have four lines or more, you’re red-flagged, it means, “Hey, what’s going on?”

Now, that doesn’t mean you can’t stay, and there’s exceptions. For example, reminder text—one of the things that New World Order does is says that we expect players to have to learn new things, and new sets can have new things, but at common, concentrate your new things. You want to have a new mechanic, fine, but that could be your new thing.

One of the things to make it very complicated is to have—let’s say, for example, twenty percent of your set is [red-flagged], it’s over the line. If all those cards are pushing in the same direction, that’s a lot simpler. If you have one new mechanic, and of your twenty percent, fifteen percent of your twenty percent is just the new mechanic, well, it’s one mechanic. Learn the mechanic. Then, okay, the other (???) aren’t too hard.

The first time you see landfall or the first time you see infect—okay, the first time you see a mechanic, you gotta learn what the mechanic does. And infect has extra counters and landfall has a trigger, and there’s different things you gotta learn. And that those things aren’t necessarily things you normally care about. But we said, “Okay, if you have to care about something you don’t normally care about, that’s red-flagged. But,” we say, “You get one thing brand-new to care about. And concentrate that new thing.” Every game can have one new thing to care about that you don’t normally care about. And then you can concentrate.

Now, every once in a while we’ll have a second thing if that second thing’s simple, or if those two things together are simple, but you always get new one thing at least. One new thing you have to think about. Landfall says, “Every time a land is played, you have to be aware a land’s being played.” Okay, that’s the one thing. And we did a lot with it. So New World Order says, “Whatever you do, you introduce something new, and you should be introducing something new, consolidate that new thing.”

Okay. So we look at wordiness, we look at “Are you doing a new thing that’s something you have to track that they don’t normally have to track.” Next: are you affecting another card in play? If the answer’s yes, you are red-flagged.

Now, some of that is okay. Now, for example, Samite Healer, when we talked about Samite Healer not being New World Order-compliant, a lot of people are like “What?! What?! I’ve played that since the beginning, since Alpha, that card is so easy.”  But think about this. I have a card in play that says, “Any combat that can happen, you have to adjust for the fact that maybe it won’t.” Maybe there’s one more point of damage you have to account for.

So if I attack with a 1/1, two 2/2s, and a 3/3, and you block with two 2/2s and a 4/4, like, “Oh, okay… well, I now have to take into account that maybe some things I think are going to die aren’t going to die.” Because you can save one point of damage. And all of a sudden, this one card influences a lot of other cards. So what we say for New World Order is, if you have an impact and you affect other cards, you are red-flagged.

Now, if you affecting other cards decreases decision-making, we normally tend to allow you to stay. For example, with tappers.  In white. When do tappers get used? In one of two cases. Either you’re about to attack, where you say “I’m going to attack,” I go, “Wait, I tap that creature.” Now there’s no decisions. When you attack, there’s one less creature, you don’t have to think about whether you’re going to attack with it or not. So that reduces decisions.

The other is, “I’m going to attack, and before I attack I tap your creature.” Now you have one less creature to block with. Once again, less decisions. So tappers are good. They require less decisions. Before the player has to make any decisions.

Samite Healer’s like, “Okay, you’ve got to make blocking decisions, but you don’t know yet what I’m going to do.” So cards that affect other cards are red-flagged. And another thing that got red-flagged was we red-flagged all cards that caused 2-for-1ing. And we red-flagged any card that could kill more than one creature. These are kind of combined.

So 2-for-1 meant it gives card advantage or it could repeatedly kill things or repeatedly get rid of things. Those were pushed up in that those also create complex board situations. You know, if I have a card you can’t deal with, it’s not that Magic shouldn’t have those. Once again, the whole point of New World Order is not that the game can’t have complexity. It’s that we want to concentrate the complexity. That we want the complexity on a few cards that matter.

And one of the underlying ideas behind New World Order is this: when you play a game, there’s a certain amount of energy you have to take just to be aware of what is going on. Just to be conscious of the board state. And what we said is, that is not where the fun of the game lies. The ability to track everything that’s going on and watch it and know that it might be relevant.

For example, when we took mana burn out of the game, one of the issues about mana burn was, “Here is a rule you have to learn, that you have to learn very early in the game, and it just doesn’t matter most of the time.” Yet you have to know it because every once in a while it matters.

And like I said, we playtested, it didn’t come up for months. And it’s like, “Why am I learning something right out of the gate, when the game is chock-full of things to learn, that I have to pay attention to?” And so one of the things we’ve been doing over the years is trying to pull out things that like, you just have to pay attention to this even though it doesn’t matter. Most of the time. And that just uses up your mental energy. Your brain can only absorb so much. There’s only so much you can do.

And you know what? There’s lots of strategic decisions we want you to make. Use your brain on those strategic decisions. Not on remembering what’s going on. Not on remembering obscure rules or remembering things that happen every once in a blue moon, or just keeping track of what could happen. There’s plenty going on. There’s plenty of decisions in the game of Magic. In fact, a game of Magic is insane, really, of how many decisions you have to make during the course of the game. There’s a lot of decisions.

And in no way are we—when people talk about simplifying the game, “dumbing down the game,” it’s like, “Look. There are already more decisions in the game of Magic than most players can comfortably make them all correctly.” I talk about the “perfect game,” which is imagine you were playing, there’s a team of ten pros watching you from behind a two-way mirror. Every time you make a decision, they check whether you made the right decision or the wrong decision. At the end of the game, how often do you have a perfect game? Every decision you made, you made the right decision.

And the answer is, most players never have a perfect game. Maybe Jon Finkel a couple times in his life had a perfect game. There’s just too many decisions in Magic. There’s too much going on. It is almost impossible to make every decision correctly.

And look, if we can lessen the amount of mental strain of just “Here are things to keep track of even though most games it doesn’t matter,” let’s lessen that. Let’s make the mental energy about “Okay, what does he have in play that can block? What do I have? What do I have in my hand? What might he…?” There’s so many things to think about. Focus on that. Focus on the core part of the game.

Another part of it is that, “Look. Let’s have cards that matter, especially in Limited. Let’s have cards that matter. But we don’t need to have twelve cards that matter.” That’s one of the problems with Lorwyn/Morningtide, was every card in play affected every other card in play. It’s like, “Okay, what’s… how many… how many… you have this many soldiers and this many elves, and this many…” like, “Ay yi yi!”  You know what I’m saying?

Just keeping track  of it all was too much for most people to bear. And so New World Order says, “Let’s pull it down, let’s limit the number of things you have to track. And let’s spend this mental energy optimizing the things you do have to care about because those are hard.” One of the stories I tell is I was teaching people Portal, which is like simple Magic. It’s like sorceries, land, and creatures, and that was it. No artifacts, no enchantments, no instants. And like just simple, simple creatures. A few of them had basic abilities, but no real complex things on them.

And, just playing that—in fact, the demo game I think didn’t even have effects on the creatures. Just like they were mostly vanilla creatures. And I realized just watching people play with vanilla creatures, how complex blocking and attacking is with vanilla creatures.

And so anyway, New World Order is saying, “Let’s dial that back.” Now I’m at work. I have not given every single red flag. I guess it’s not really worthy of a whole other podcast just to name all the red flags. But be aware that the gist of the way it works is, there are things that make the game complicated, and what we want is, “Look, let’s have those things. Magic is a complicated game. We want it to be a complicated game. But we don’t want every moment of every possible… you know, the game is not a better game for every moment being complex.

And, here’s a very fascinating thing. When we changed New World Order, and we were playing in the Pit. Now notice, the Pit. R&D guys. These are hard-core, long-term players. Most of them were Pro Tour players, many of them—like, Pro Tour-winning players. A few of them were in the hall of fame.

And what we found was we liked New World Order. We liked what it did to the game. It made the game more fun for us. Because you know what? Yes, maybe we’re capable of tracking things, but does it make the game more fun? No it didn’t. And boiling it down and allowing you to sort of put your mental energy in what really was the most cool things made the game a better game. And that is, to me, the biggest thing of New World Order.

But anyway, I am at work. One of the things I’m hoping today to make you understand is, a lot of what improving Magic is finding and figuring out what makes it awesome. What makes Magic such a great game. And what we’re trying to do is extract the things you don’t need and leave the things you do. And that New World Order was a big, big lesson in going, “Oh, here’s some stuff the game’s always had that it doesn’t actually need.”

And that lessens the game for the vast majority of players. There are people that love complexity for complexity’s sake, and whenever I say New World Order they’re like “Oh, the game was so much better when I had eight thousand things to keep track of! And I love when because my opponent forgot this, I won.” Okay, yeah, there’s players like that. But I think most players, most of the pros I’ve talked to agreed that like, you know, not having extraneous things to care about that don’t matter most of the time does not make the game more fun.

Anyway, that’s what New World Order’s done, I think it’s helped everybody, I think it’s very, very good for new players, actually I think it’s good for experienced players, and hopefully you enjoyed hearing about it today.

So, much as I love talking about improving Magic, I also like making Magic. Time for me to go. Talk to you guys next week.