3/29/13 Episode 27: Bad Cards

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. Before we start today, I want to let you know that I checked the traffic conditions, and there is an accident on my way to work! There’s a bunch of red. So we might have a longer podcast today. As such I’ve picked a topic that I’ve been wanting to talk about that I have a lot to say on. The topic is “Bad cards.”

So long ago, when I started writing my column, Making Magic, I think the sixth column I ever wrote is a column called When Cards Go Bad. And what happened was, when we first premiered, we started doing a thing called Ask Wizards, which we don’t do anymore. We do it occasionally. But it was a daily feature back then. And the idea was people asked something, and then we get a Wizards person we think is the best person to answer it.

So one day there was a question about why we make bad cards, and I said, “Look, bad cards have to exist,” and whatever. I gave a short… I said “This is a more complex issue, but bad cards have to exist.”

Anyway, a guy wrote to me… Nathan, I forget his last name, and said, “What do you mean bad cards have to exist? They don’t have to exist.” And I printed the letter, and in the response I wrote him a letter about why bad cards do have to exist, which became the article, “When Cards Go Bad.”

I also revisited it not too long ago to sort of do a bit of updating and talk about it. But this is a really important idea. If you care about game design, this is a very important topic. And so I felt it was worthy of a Drive to Work. [NLH—See also: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly Truth, and Tom LaPille also did an article from Development’s perspective.)

So I’m not going to cover exactly the order that the article covered it.  Because I wanted to sort of approach it from a slightly different vantage point. So the question is, why—metaphorically almost, why must there be bad cards?

And so one of the things that I like to talk about is that I think people sometimes don’t understand the value of things and where they come from. That there’s  assumptions that certain things are always better than other things.

For example, the idea that strong is better than weak. Built into our society. Strong is good! Weak is bad. But think about this. What is a fuse? A fuse is something in your box, your electrical box that is weaker than the things around it. That’s designed to blow if there’s a power surge. And why is that? Because if not, it would cause a lot of damage. But by having one sort of weak spot that’s purposely put in, it protects the larger system. It is something that is made to be weak, but is doing a service by being weak. And that the whole mindset that strength is good and weak is bad doesn’t quite understand the bigger picture.

Now, here’s something that I talk about a lot, but let me sort of explain it here, which is the goal of game design is not to make things easy for the people playing. That’s not why they’re playing a game. I’ve talked about this in my article, about how when you design an object—somehow it’s always a lamp. I think maybe it’s my go-to. Anyway, when you design a lamp, you want to make it easy how to use the lamp. Like, the on switch should be obvious. You should know where it is. You should be able to get to it. It should be easy to push. The light should go on. The goal is to make it as easy as possible.

That is not how game design works. Not remotely how game design works.  Game design is you are trying to throw obstacles in the way of your audience. The audience doesn’t want it easy. “Here’s a game, roll a die. If you roll one through six, you win.” Okay, not a very exciting game. Even roll two through six, you win. Eh, still not that exciting a game. What you want is something where you say “Okay, you’ve got to roll a six on a six-sided die, but…” and there’s some parameters to it. That your goal is to do this thing, but there’s parameters.

And the funny thing is, maybe it’s because I come from the world of TV and film, that I’m a storyteller. That’s my background. And so I always compare game design to storytelling. And storytelling is very similar, which is it’s not fun if your… so you always have a protagonist in a story, and your protagonist wants something. That’s key, right? It’s key to any story. Your protagonist has to want something. If they don’t want something, it’s kind of hard to have a story. But they want something.

And then, you throw obstacles in their way. I had a teacher who explained it as the three beats of a story are, “man goes up a tree, throw rocks at the man, man gets out of the tree.” And it’s kind of the thing is, you have to make it hard for your protagonist to get the thing they want. For example, Dorothy gets caught up in a tornado and lands in [Oz.] Well, what does Dorothy want? She wants to go home. Well, does Glinda the Good Witch go, “Okay, I’ll send you home?” No. Or does Glinda even say, “Hey, you’re wearing ruby slippers, if you click those together you can go home?” No. Okay? The point is, there’s some obstacles in her way.

For starters, she’s informed she has to go see the Wizard of Oz. Who, as we all know, he can’t get her home. But that’s the point is, she has to be sent on journeys and do things, and like in the end, she has to discover, “Oh, she had this within her.” You can’t find that out right away.

Games are the same way. When you start playing a game, you want to have a game challenge you. In fact, if you play a game, and I’ve learned this, and it’s too easy the first time, you go, “Eh, that’s not too exciting.” What you want is a game that challenges you. And to be fair. One of the things about Magic that is one of the saving graces of the game—not saving graces, it’s an awesome game, but one of the strong things about the game is it is a challenging game. That no matter how good you are at the game, there’s something about the game that says, “Wait, there’s more for you to learn.” And that’s an awesome part of the game.

I’m now on the freeway, and thus far I do not see traffic. So I don’t know. See, you guys—here’s the funny thing. I’m rooting for no traffic. I’ve got a meeting to go to. You guys are like, “Hmm, traffic jam sounds good.” So I’ll let you know how the traffic jam—right now though, I expected to see something I don’t. So it might have gotten clear by now.

Anyway, so you want to challenge your audience. You want to throw things in their way. Okay, so why do bad cards do that? Well, for starters, one of the big things about Magic is that you want to make people have some challenge. Okay? But here’s the problem. Number one, you have lots of different people with different skill sets. I want to make a game challenging for everyone. Not just for the top end player, not just for the bottom end player, for everyone.

Well, how do I do that? One of the ways to do that is, you have a sloping degree of skill. What that means is, you want to make sure that every person who enters the game, at their level there is a difficulty. That there is something to challenge them. At every level you want them to be challenged.

And the reason that you want bad cards is, your beginning player isn’t going to know much better. And then you want to make sure that you have—ooh, okay, I’m now hitting traffic. Cheers went out! Yay traffic! Okay, I’m starting to stop now, so we’re actually hitting this accident.

Okay, so you want to make sure that there’s layers that go along. That every player has a challenge for them. And so one of the things in design is we want to make sure that there’s cards that challenge everybody. Also, equally important, not only do you have to challenge people, but you also have to give them victories.  That if you stymie people too much, if you never let them solve anything, they’ll give up.

Like, one of the things that’s interesting, Mark Gottlieb, former rules manager, now the design manager, he as a hobby, and (???) professionally, designs puzzles. And so he and I have had a lot of talks. My wife and I like to throw parties, and I tend to make puzzles for the parties. So I dip my toe in puzzle making. Not quite as much as Mark has. And one of the things he said is that the goal of a puzzle is not to outwit your audience, it’s to make something that is challenging but solvable.

And games are the same way. That you want to have challenge, but if it’s too hard, literally, if you sit down and play and it’s like “Well, let me explain 8,422 rules you need to play this… first, check. Is the sun out? What season is it? Is there a cow within distance?” I don't know, like if you get too complex, it just doesn’t, you know, people will just give up. So what you need to do is you need challenges, and you need victories that (???). So you need to make the game scale such that when people enter the game, right away they figure things out. And right away they’re challenged. Both things need to happen.

So how do you do that? Well, that’s where bad cards, especially for the low end, are important. You need the new player, when they walk in the door and they look at the game for the first time, they go, “Oh, this is better than that.” Right out the door they need—now, even if, by the way, they’re not 100% correct. For example, one of the things we’ve learned with a new player that’s a very obvious thing is, they assume bigger is better. My theme from earlier. Like I remember, when I opened my first pack, I had a Craw Wurm in it. 

Now, back in the day, back in Alpha, they were a little stingier common. So like I had 1/1s, 2/2s, maybe a 3/3. And then a 6/4! 6/4! This thing is awesome! And I felt like I’d cracked something. That’s important. By the way. The fact that they are always correct is not key. You want them to have victories. They can later learn that some of the victories weren’t really victories, as long as the sense is feeling like they learned something.

But, some of the victories have to be true, and some of the reasons for bad cards—oh, I got past the accident. That was not a very long… “Nooo!” The audience is like “Nooo, where is the accident?” So… I know you guys aren’t rooting for an accident. You’re just rooting for the jam, not the accident.

So anyway, the—you need to make sure that some of their victories are true honest victories. And part of that is, look. You need to put cards in that are so bad, so bad that lower-level players go “Oh, I’m not going to play that.”

And here’s the thing. Players, especially beginning players, have very little ability to correctly figure things out. But they have some. And so what you need to do is play into that. Now, the funny thing is, some of the challenges, right, are false victories, in which they think they learned something, and then later they learned they needed to relearn it. I’m being stopped again! Today is a crazy day of stop and go. So you want to have a nice range for people. So that’s the number one thing. The bad cards allow your lower-end players to have their victories, and have their challenges, and be able to move up.

Another thing that you need is you want your top players to have an advantage. Now, a lot of games make the fault of giving the top players too much advantage. It is important in your game that the low-level player has the dream of beating the top-end player. They shouldn’t do that most of the time, but they can have the dream. And a game in which you don’t have the dream is a lot harder to get into. Because if everybody who’s better than you is going to always beat you, there’s no hope.

And games need hope. You, the player, need to feel like if things go right, if the stars align, I can beat the best Magic player in the world. I can beat Jon Finkel, or whoever we’ve determined is the best player. I don't know. A lot of people could be.

But I can beat the best Magic player ever, if the stars shine, you know. For example, I personally have beaten Jon Finkel. Now, I have only played him—I don't know, we’ve maybe played ten times in my life. And he’s probably beaten me nine out of ten. But I did beat him once. And there’s something fun about going, “Hey, there was that change, I was able to do it.” I might actually have beaten him twice. But anyway, not many times.

And the reason that you want to give that is that you want to help the lower-end player, but at the same time, you want the top-end player to feel confident. If your game has too much randomness in it, or lack of skill, then the top-end player goes, “Why am I playing this? There’s no advantage for sticking in energy, for me—why am I going to spend my time and energy to learn things?” I talked about how important strategy was in my Top Ten article, right? Top Ten Things a Game Needs podcast. And article.

And part of that’s important. So you both need your beginning player not to get lost, and you need your experienced player to feel like there is something that they can get better and achieve, and that there is a reward for being the better player.

So, bad cards not only help the worse player to have a chance to win, they also help the better player. Wait, what? How is that. And here’s why.

So in design, we play what we call a flat power level. And what that means is, we cost all the cards to be playable. Why do we do that? The reason we do that is, the goal of design playtests, especially early design playtests, is not to get the sense of a balanced environment. That’s late design and development. Early design, I just want to play with all the cards. I just want to see things. “Is this fun? Is that fun?” And so everything’s very aggressively costed because we just want to play with it.

Now, one of the problems is, when you go to build decks, you can build anything. It’s not hard to build. There’s not a lot of challenge to building a deck. “Everything’s good. Anything can go in.” Now, my goal there is not to maximize, I’m not trying to challenge myself as a deck builder. At that point, I’m trying to experiment. And so I have a lot of motivation to play different cards. “Ooh,  I’ve never done that before, let me see what that’s like.”

And that in early design, the goal—in fact, one of the problems we have sometimes is when developers play an early design playtest, they try to build the best deck they can. And a lot of times I have to say to them, “Oh, no no no no, not yet. Just find something fun to play.” Or even, let’s say they do one playtest where they build the best deck, I go, “Fine, you did that. Now next playtest, play different colors.” Our goal is not to find what’s broken in the early design playtest, it’s to find what is interesting and fun.

Anyway, I bring this up because I have played a lot with a flat power level. I play a lot in design. And one of the things I realized is, so for example, we will invite other people in the Pit to play. And some of them have never played before. Meanwhile, I’m the lead. I’ve played every test most of the time. I’ve been in every single playtest. And so what I’ve discovered is, if I have a sealed playtest, and I’m playing with someone who it’s their first or second time playing, and I have played twenty times, I have much less advantage. Because they can’t go that far wrong.

And what happens is, once you have a flat power level, power then comes from synergy, not from individual cards. And so yeah, my deck’s a little better, I know which cards play better with each other, I have a better sense. So there’s a little bit of (???). But I have a lot less to choose. And the idea is, if Magic was completely flat, then anybody who drafted wouldn’t be that far off. I mean, better players would be more synergistic, and they’d have slightly better decks. But not that much better decks.

And one of the things about having bad cards is, not everybody knows what the bad cards are. And so a player might take something that’s really not that good, allowing the better player to take the better card. And that having the wide spectrum of good to bad really does give the better player a huge leg up. Because they now can maximize understanding good from bad. Where a less good player won’t.

Now, whenever I talk about this, whenever I talk about the flat level of design, I always get people that say, “Wait, wait a minute? You can make a flat level design? Why don’t you do that? You should do that! Magic should do that. Magic would be more awesome if Magic had a flat design.” So the answer is, there’s reasons we can’t do that in development. I’ll really quickly get into it. I’m more a designer, but I understand the principles here.

One is that you can’t make everything at the level you need to be without doing what we call “power creep.” For sure you do power creep, because there’s things that pre-exist. So if you want these cards to be equal, you start having to raise the power level to make everything be equal. And then you’ll have overall power creep as you go along.

That the way I like people to think about it is, imagine power being a resource. That the development team only has so much. They have a tank of power, and they can put so many—or points is how I often talk about it. They have so many points to distribute. And the point is, they don’t have enough points to distribute to everything. If they did, the overall power level would raise, and then you have power creep problems.

And what power creep—for those that don’t know what that is—is, imagine we made a set, and the next set the cards are better than the first set. Well, now you don’t want to play the first set, you want to play the second set. But in order to make a third set, those have to be more powerful than the second set. And so you keep having to make things more powerful. And what happens is, well in the beginning, “do three damage” was good. Well, now you have to do four damage. Now you have to do five damage. You get to the point where it just escalates and escalates, and the game spirals out of control.

And the development team works really hard to keep that from happening. Using a device that I call the Escher Stairwell. What the Escher stairwell means is, Escher is an artist who was famous for drawing optical illusions, and one of his famous paintings is a stairwell—he has a bunch of these, there’s a stairway where people keep walking up. But obviously you can’t keep walking up, but you can in an optical illusion. [NLH—the auditory version is the Shepard Tone.]

And the way that development does this is, they make some things better that become the focus, and then put other things down. And the focus isn’t on the things that are weaker, the focus is on the things that are stronger. So since you are always looking at the stronger stuff, it seems like each set, something’s stronger. Because something is, but you’re not sort of watching what’s weaker behind it.

But anyway, another really important reason that cards are bad is that they can’t all be good. We can’t. We couldn’t do it. And there’s only so many cards that can be played in the environment. I talked about this in my article, which is if you said, “Okay, let’s make our goal to make things as flat as possible,” even then something’s just going to be better. Maybe it’s synergistically better. Maybe just there’s a deck for it to be played in. Whatever, there’s a reason by which some cards are better than other cards.

And power is relative. Ancestrall Recall might be the most powerful Magic card ever made. I mean, there’s some argument there, but one of the most powerful ever made. But tomorrow,  I “U, draw five cards,” then “U, draw three cards” looks kind of weak. I mean, “U, draw seven cards” [makes it look] even weaker. It’s all a matter of perspective.

And that what’s bad is just correlated to other things that exist. But we can’t make everything good, because no matter what we do, there’s always going to be something better. I mean first of all, we have the mana system to work with as our major tool for balance. Not a perfect system. A lot  of times the right cost of a spell really would be 2.3 and a red. Or 3 and 1.4 reds. Magic can’t handle that. So it’s an (???) system. So it means you can’t even make the cards exactly the same.

With a lot of other factors, something’s always going to be the better thing. Something’s always going to be good. And so not only would you have power creep issues if you tried, in the end, some cards would still be better than other cards. You’re never going to get around that phenomenon. And so bad cards have to exist, in the sense that there’s always cards that will be relatively worse than other cards in the system.

Now. Here’s another point to think about bad cards, is I often talk about how Magic is many games to many people. And what I mean by that is, Magic is—I mean, I’ve talked about this before in the podcast, that there’s many ways to play. And in some ways, when you pick up Magic, you’re picking up a game system. And then there’s different options of how you want to use that game system.

And it has a shared rule umbrella. I mean, obviously once you learn one Magic, it’s very easy to pick up any other kind of Magic. But we have to deliver to that. Meaning people like Commander. Well, we’ve got to make cards for Commander. People like Standard. We’ve got to make cards for Standard. People like Vintage. People like—name your format, there’s a billion formats. Not a billion. A lot of formats. And we’re trying to make for Limited and draft, and we’re trying to make cards for all different formats.

And the reality is, if we make a card for another format, odds are it might not be good in your format. But that’s okay. Because not every card is going to be for every player. And some of our bad cards are just “Hey, this is aimed at somebody, and you’re not the person it’s aimed for.” And that’s okay. That look, we need… so here’s another important thing of game design, which is people do not need to like everything.

In fact, one of my maxims is, if you make a game that everybody likes but nobody loves, it will die. Because what makes people—this is human nature for a second, but what makes people get attracted to somebody is the high highs of something. And you can’t keep high highs forever. That’s not how humans function. Humans will look at something, and they’ll look at the high highs of it, and the low lows. And if the high highs (???) the low lows, then they’ll generally go “That was an awesome thing.” If the low lows (???) anything else, then that’s a bad thing. And that really, when humans look at an experience, they go to the extremes. It’s how they remember it.

And so usually, the thing that is a thing you really like gave you a bunch of high highs. And that is what made it memorable to you. There was a moment of just sheer bliss. And that moment of sheer bliss carries a long way. Because life is not full of constant moments of sheer bliss. They happen every once in a while, you enjoy them when you can, but that gets you a long way.

Like, I often talk about being a parent, that parenting is a lot of work. It’s a lot of work. A lot of work. But it gives you moments of sheer bliss. And that hey, it’s not easy to get sheer bliss, and so you’re like, “Okay, I’ll put in the work and I’ll do this.” Because the high highs are really high. And so the key to making a game work is making sure that you have the high highs. That I want to make sure that every set, there’s at least a couple cards that just bam! That you go, “That is awesome, I love those cards.”

And that in order to do that, I’m willing that some of the cards will miss completely. And by the way, that’s not even a bad thing. Not even a bad thing. That having a range of things makes you value the things that are higher. That one of the reasons when you put your money in the machine, the little 25 cent machine and you get a little toy out of it, the toys are varied in purpose. That it’s more exciting to A. not know what you’re going to get, and know that “Oh, there’s a range of things I can get.” And “that’s this little thing.” Or “Oh, that’s this big thing.”

I mean, obviously Magic cards—you know, there’s commons and there’s mythic rares. There’s different things you can get. And humans love that. That’s very exciting. But part of that means is, when I’m designing something, I want to make sure that I’m making high highs. And part of doing that is, I have to focus. I have to hyperfocus. I have to say, “This is my audience. This is who it’s for. This card has to be good,” and make sure they love it.

And if I allowed myself to force myself to make other people like it, I’m not going to get as high a high. The second I say, “Well, I’m going to make this for both Group Player A and Group Player B, well, maybe if I make a few decisions to help Player Group B, I’m lessening it for Group A.” I’ve got to focus.

Now, sometimes you make something, both Group A and Group B like it. But I always feel when you’re designing something, you have to know who your audience is. Design for that audience. The other audience hates it, does not matter. Doesn’t. Because you’re shooting for the high highs for the audience you want.

Now, that other player, you’ve got to give him high highs somewhere else. You’ve got to give him a card that he’s going to love. And to be honest, the real trick of doing set design is you have all these audiences, and everybody needs to have a card they love. But there is no way to do that without making cards that other people will hate, because the thing that makes one person love it is irrelevant to another person.

You know, for example, if I make some awesome legendary creature that’s just this neato commander, that like is expensive because it kind of has to be expensive to pack in all the awesomeness you want, but in Commander it’s okay. Commander games go longer. They can have larger commanders, more expensive commanders, and hey. They’re excited. If you make a commander that just offers something that they’ve never had before, a certain color combination, you can do something, they get really excited. That’s an awesome thing. That’s a high high for them.

But some other players are like, “What?” Something like a competitive tournament player, it’s like, “Whatever, I’m never playing that card! That’s useless to me!” And I’m like, “Okay, it’s useless to you. But it’s a high high for somebody.”

And another thing that is—one of the things I talked about was one of the great risks of Magic design is taking no risks. Another reason we have bad cards is, we try things. We experiment with things. Like, one of the things I will do all the time is, I’ll say—you know, I say to somebody, “What do you think of this card?” And you go, “I don't know. I don’t know. I don’t know what I think of that card.” “Will the players like it?” “I don’t know if the players will like it.” And I get intrigued. I’m like, “Really. Let’s see.”

And the reason for that is, part of being  Head Designer is, design is a resource. So there’s a finite amount of it. There’s a lot. We’re not going to end the game any time soon. But there is a finite amount. And so I’m always looking for new veins of design.

So whenever I hit something that no one understands, I’m like, “Yay! I want to explore this. Will people like this? Will they not?” And sometimes there’s obvious things I know people will like, and a lot of design is “Oh yeah, I know who’s going to like this.” But sometimes it’s like, “I want to experiment a little bit. I want to put something out there that I’m not quite sure what’s going to happen. I’m not quite sure how it’s going to work. I’m not quite sure how it’s going to get reacted to.”

And that some of the bad cards are us just trying stuff, and saying, “Hey,” you know, sometimes Development’s pushing a card that they think maybe will be a hit, but it doesn’t. Or maybe it’s us just making something that says, “Oh, well, if something goes in a weird direction, here’s an answer.” But it never does so the answer doesn’t mean anything.

Some bad cards, it’s just R&D kinda doing what we need to do, which is trying things. You know. And that that is a very important part of the design process and development process is testing things out and trying things, and on some level there’s no beta. Like, we have to put things out and try it. And if people like it—you’ll notice, there’s a trend where we will put feelers out, and some of them fail, and then you don’t see them again. Or we retweak them and try them again. Or, something’s a success, and bam, it comes back. Maybe a whole mechanic.

Like you’ll notice, for example, one of the things we’ve been doing a lot of in recent years is we’ve been finding successful one-of cards and making them mechanics. You like this particular thing, and like “bam,” okay, we’ll give you a whole bunch of them. And that a lot of times cards are a great place to experiment for mechanics. That if I don’t know if a mechanic will shine or not, well, the best way to do that is just give them one card to try out.

Anyway, I see work. So I don't know how long today was. We had a little bit—it’s funny, because I heard there was an accident, I’m like “Okay, let me do a topic I can talk a long time on.” And I don’t think I had long. Maybe it’s something I’ll come back to one day. It’s not really a two-parter because I said most of what I wanted to say.

And ultimately, the thing I want people to think about bad cards—the reason I wrote the article in the first place, the reason I wanted to talk about the topic today is the idea that bad is bad—that sounds silly. The idea that a bad card serves no purpose kind of shows that you’re not understanding what it means. A card is bad because it’s a relative value. But just because it’s bad in a relative value doesn’t mean it might mean something. That cards that are bad in one regard could be really strong in another. And that is what gives them value.

And, ironically, sometimes being weak, as with the fuse, is itself a strength. And so kind of what I want to say is, for all you designers out there, don’t be afraid of A. things that are weak. Don’t be afraid of things that aren’t obvious. Don’t be afraid of your audience not liking something. One of the big challenges of being a designer is evoking emotion, and not all of it has to be positive emotion.

Most of it should be positive emotion, but hey, you do want to occasionally frustrate your player. You want to occasionally make them mad. You want to occasionally make them sad. You want to create an experience. You want them to sort of have this experience to overcome and to live. And that that is not filled with just happy moments. Yes you want happy moments, you want your high highs, those are very valuable, but you need a breadth of experience. And to do that, you need a breadth of tools. And bad cards or bad pieces or bad components are a key part of that. That is a big part of game design.

Okay, it’s now time for me to go. So anyway, thanks for joining me for my bad card discussion, and I guess it’s time to make the Magic.