3/7/14 Episode 102: Evolution

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. So today, I’m going to talk about a concept of the game I’m not sure people think all that much about. Although it’s a very key part of the game. So let me start by saying that I believe I was seven years old the first time I played Monopoly. Way back in 1974. And let’s say I broke out Monopoly forty years later. How different was the current Monopoly from that first game of Monopoly?

Now clearly I’m older, and so the way I approach it is different, but the actual game. How different is that game of Monopoly? And the answer is, “Ehh, there’s little tiny changes.” Free parking used to be a house rule and now it’s in the rules. And they’ve changed a few pieces around. But the board is I think identical—I mean, yes I can buy all these newfangled Monopoly. But if I just want normal Monopoly, I think the board—I mean, while they’ve redone the board, the actual properties are all the same. And the base game, forty years later, is pretty similar.

Now, let’s say somebody played Magic and went away for two years. And two years later they play Magic. It might be radically different. I mean, the core of the game hasn’t changed, but so much else can change. The cards have changed, the mechanics have changed. Maybe some rules have changed. The color pie could have shifted. I mean, lots of things can change.

And so today I want to talk about evolution. And how that plays into how Magic functions as a game. Because one of the things that’s interesting is that there are two types of games. What I will call “static games,” and what I will call “evolving games.” So a static game is like Monopoly, which is it’s the game that it is. If you play it now, if you play it forty years from now, it’s the game that it is. And static games change a little bit over time, but not much. I mean, chess, at some point they added the en passant rule and it didn’t exist. But I mean, chess has been mostly the same way for a long, long period of time.

Now, there are other games, and Magic is one of the other games that we call evolving, which says it’s an ever-changing game. And in fact, one of the qualities about Magic, and one of the things—like, when you look at our market research, one of the things we look at is the average playing length of a player. How long has the average player been playing? And last I looked, it’s somewhere around nine years. Nine years for a game!

Now for those that don’t know much about games, or don’t know the stats in the gaming industry, nine years for—this is average. The average player has been playing nine years. That is insane. There are very, very few games that exist that one person will play for nine years. And not at the consistency that people play Magic. It’s one thing to say “Yeah, I played Monopoly as a kid, and every once in a while I’ll play Monopoly, so I’ve been playing Monopoly for 40 years.” Ehh, how often do they play Monopoly? Maybe, maybe once a year? As a side note, I don’t play a lot of Monopoly.

But people who play Magic, they play Magic all the time. And so as an ongoing hobby, as a game you’re invested in, nine years! I mean, it’s funny. Like, you look at the video games, and like you can’t play a single game for nine years because probably the system has changed three times. It’s like, nine years ago you had two previous iterations of the game system you’re playing on now.

Although to be fair, the closest thing to an evolving game in video games is that you’ll have a game—Halo, then Halo 2, then Halo 3. Which is sort of like an evolving game. The only thing is it makes jumps. Where Magic sort of is an ever-evolving game where, like, there’s no Set One and Set Two, and so it’s constantly evolving from Stage One to Stage Two, where if you look at something like Halo, that there’s a Stage One, and it’s that for a while, and they stop and then a new one comes out a couple years later. Magic is always coming out, in some ways, it’s always constantly changing and evolving. And so one of the things I want to look at is how evolving games work, and what it means for Magic.

Okay. So let’s explore Magic. So the first thing I want to look at is, “What exactly evolves in Magic?” And the answer is “almost everything. Almost everything.” So for starters, the cards evolve. Meaning the cards you play with, especially if you are focused on Standard, right? The Standard environment, which is the last two years. Standard’s constantly evolving. Two years later, two and a half years later, I mean there’s some overlap in cards, the core set has some cards that stick around, but this radical, radical overhaul. And the cards that define the environment constantly shift.

I mean, that’s one of the big things that separates—so let me explain. One of my theories about why Magic is popular is what I call the Crispy Hash Brown theory. So what is the Crispy Hash Brown Theory, for those that have never had me talk about it before? The following concept. Which is when you have hash browns, the best part of the hash browns is the crispy layer on top. Ooh, goodness. It’s awesome. And at some point you eat through the crispy layer, and you get the rest of the hash browns, and you eat them, and they’re okay, hash browns are good, nothing against hash browns. But none of it’s quite as good as that top crispy layer.

And my metaphor is that for most games, that crispy layer is the exploration part of playing the game. That okay, when you first play tic-tac-toe, it’s like “Okay, this is cool. What if I put an X there? What if I put an O there?” And little by little, you start to figure out how the game is played. I mean, I have kids, so I had the chance to watch this firsthand to see when my kids were real little, they loved playing tic-tac-toe. And it was like a game of total randomness. “I’ll put an X there, I’ll put an O there! Like, who knows what’s going to happen?”

And as they get a little older, they start to realize, “Oh, I see.” They start to understand that there’s those parameters. And eventually, my kids haven’t quite got there yet, at least my youngest ones haven’t, that you realize that “Oh, it’s a solved game.” Like, “Oh, no matter what, if I understand how to play, I will never lose. It will be a cat’s game every game, a tied game every game if I know what I’m doing.”

And other games have a similar quality. Like, Othello you start learning the importance of the corners. When you get real good at Scrabble, for example, it stops becoming—like when you first start playing Scrabble, it’s like “Ooh, what word can I play?” And then when you start becoming good at Scrabble, it’s like “Oh, I need to memorize the two- and three-letter words. I need to memorize all the words that involve the top-scoring… I need to know every word with a Z in it or an X  in it or a Q in it.” Because it’s all about maximizing the score. It less becomes about language on some level, and becomes more about pattern recognition.

And I’m not saying that’s not fun. I’m not saying that people don’t have great enjoyment out of it. But what happens is it moves away from the discovery process and sort of trying to figure it out to you have to start learning the strategies and there’s a lot of memorization usually and studying of the experts. Chess is similar in that once you get good enough, you start learning about opening moves, and a lot of good players have sort of mapped out what the opening moves are. And so it becomes a lot of memorization and understanding what people are doing.

And like I said, the rest of the hash browns are good. But the crispy part of the hash brown is the best part. In my opinion. And I believe that the discovery part of gaming is in some ways the most fun. I think you have the highest highs in that part of the game. The discovery process.

And what Magic does is it keeps regrowing its crispy layer. That Magic’s a game in which—why do people play for so long? Because that part of discovery keeps going. That by evolving, by constantly changing, it’s like you’re always rediscovering the game. One of the reasons it’s hard to get bored of Magic is Magic keeps reinventing itself.

One of the things—I’ve said this many times, but in some ways, Magic isn’t one game but many games. That are all tied together by a rule system. And so—I mean, this year we’re playing Theros. Last year we played Return to Ravnica. The year before that we were playing Innistrad. And the Innistrad game and the Theros game and the Return to Ravnica game are connected, knowing how to play one helps you play the other, but you know what? There’s different rules. And there’s different things that go on, and there’s different things you can do, and the cards are different. And the environment is different. And that in some way, Magic evolution, it keeps becoming a different game.

And that’s kind of part of the exciting part is that you have the investment already built in, you know how to play. And obviously each year there’s new rules to learn. But once you know the basics, learning the new rules isn’t too tough. So, okay. The cards evolve. The mechanics evolve, right? Every year, we make eight to twelve new mechanics and we bring back old mechanics and rotate out mechanics.

So let me talk a little bit about one of the ways that we think about this, is so imagine that there’s five boxes for mechanics. Box #1 is what we call “evergreen.” And what evergreen means is, it’s always there. Examples of evergreen mechanics would be flying, first strike, haste, trample, vigilance. Things that are just every Magic set is going to have this ability.

Next is what I call “deciduous.” Which means not quite evergreen, but what it means for us is they’re mechanics that we are allowed to use whenever we want. Hybrid’s a good example. Any set, any designer on any set, hybrid is always a tool available to them. If you wanted hybrid in a set right after a set that has hybrid, as long as it makes sense in what you’re doing and it fits into the core of what your set is, fine.

So deciduous mechanics are things in which—they’re tools that get used, usually, and that the mechanics that are used when we needed them, usually these mechanics are used on somewhat a regular basis. Like every three to five years most likely you’re going to see this mechanic. And sometimes more than that. Sometimes often. Cantrips, in my mind, are a deciduous mechanic that yeah, most of the time we use them, but we don’t always use them.

Okay, next we come to what I call sort of the favorite mechanics. Examples here would be cycling, kicker, flashback. These are mechanics that we know deliver. We know do the job. And what I would say is, probably in a seven- to ten-year period, you’re going to see them at least once.

Next we have the semi-regular, not quite regular mechanics, but sort of they’re things that we’ve done once that I think we’ll probably do again. Every once in a while. It’s like every twenty years you saw this mechanic, it’s kind of like… it’s not quite as good as our other regular mechanics like cycling and kicker, but it’s something that like if you have the right place to put it. That I imagine it coming back. Like it’s a mechanic… what’s a good example of box four?

Would be… something like wither. Which is I don’t expect to see wither all the time. But I do imagine that just, there’s a right place, where “Oh, wither’s the perfect… yeah, it just feels right.” And wither comes back. And I don’t think we’ll see wither all the time. Wither’s not something I see on lots of occasions, but eh, every once in a while, when it just really fits what we’re doing, I can imagine seeing it.

The fifth category are things we do and then that’s it. One and done. Now be aware, we never plan for things to be in box five. We always hope things are at least in box four, we aim for box three. We have hope that maybe things show up in one or two.

And the interesting thing is, take something like when I made Mirrodin, okay? So we made Mirrodin, equipment ended up becoming a one. Evergreen. Every set has equipment. Or you could argue—I guess it’s evergreen, you could argue it’s deciduous in that I can imagine us doing a set without equipment. But probably evergreen.

In the same set, we had imprint. We had entwine. We had affinity. And so like, “Okay, well imprint’s probably a four. It's like ehh, in the right place, the right time, I could see us bringing it back.” But it’s not something we do all the time. Affinity probably is a four or five. I’d like to say we’d bring it back one day. Maybe not as affinity for artifacts. And entwine, entwine’s another one that’s like between three and four. I like entwine. But like, we did it, (???) mechanic became evergreen, other ones became something that maybe we’d revisit.

In Innistrad, for example, double-faced cards in my mind ended up being a three. People really liked them. And I feel like it’s something we’re going to do—I’d be surprised if every ten years you don’t see double-faced cards. And also morbid ended up going over really well. I think that’s another mechanic that probably falls in the three category. That I’d kind of be surprised if in ten years you don’t see morbid again.

But you think of like Dark Ascension, like I said, maybe… what’s it called? It’s called desperate—desperation in design. The one that if you have a low enough life, then you get the extra bonus. [NLH—Fateful hour.] That’s something that I don't know if we’re doing it again. If we do it again, it’d be for the right place, it perfectly fits, maybe we’d do it.

So anyway, mechanics are something that we evolve, and that there is some things that come back but there’s a lot of things that—we constantly are making new things, every set will have new mechanics, every block will have new mechanics.

Now, one of the things that’s interesting, as we evolve, is how we evolve has been changing. I talk about this, that the two big things that’s happened over time as we evolve is we’ve made two changes. Actually, I’m jumping ahead of myself. So, we evolve cards. We evolve mechanics. We evolve themes.

So maybe I’ll just make this point here, I’ll jump to it later. One of the things that has happened… I guess what I’m trying to say here is, not only do we evolve the game, but we evolve how we make the game. That R&D itself evolves. Design evolves. Development evolves. And that one of the things we’ve seen over time is how we treat the game and how we think of the game has changed.

And the two big things that have changed over time—one is the scope. That what I talk about is when you first started playing in Alpha, the scope was on card level. That Richard really was maximizing every card, making every card as flavorful as it could be. And then with time we pulled back a little bit. We pulled back to sort of the mechanics. And then pulled back to the theme. And then pulled back to the overall feel of the set. And then the block. And then the structure of the block. And then the meta-block. And that one of the things about Magic is, we keep pulling our focus back to look at more things. So we’ve gotten more and more holistic over time.

And now just once upon a time, if we had an awesome card that in a vacuum was just neat, we would make it. And now it’s like, “Oh, but no no no, it has to fit in the larger sense of what we’re doing,” and that if we have awesome cards we save them for the right place to do them. That you don’t just do an awesome card just because you can do it, you do an awesome card in the right place. That when you get neat ideas, you save them.

And the other thing that we do that’s changed, the other way R&D’s evolved is that we start earlier and earlier. That we do more and more advanced thinking and planning about the set. Once upon a time, it’s like, “Okay, time to make the set, let’s go.” And then we started getting to the point where we thought ahead and we started picking themes ahead and mechanics ahead, and now we do advanced planning ahead, and that we spend more and more time sort of plotting where we’re going.

And one of the things that’s funny is, every time I think, like “Wow, we’ve gotten pretty advanced in how we think about it,” and then we just keep upping our game. We keep notching it up. And that’s another thing that is very interesting in the way the game evolves, is that it doesn’t just evolve in the game itself but behind the game.

The other big thing that evolves when you look at Magic is I keep talking about to me, the heart of the game is the color pie. And the reason it is is, it gives a proper feel to everything. And while the core philosophies haven’t changed, the execution of our color pie is a constantly evolving thing.

 

Like one of the things is people always ask me, they want us to print a document that shows what color does what. And we’re very hesitant to do that, because that document, it’s an ever-changing thing. And that anything we write down just might be different tomorrow. And that for example, the game started and Fog was in green. And then at some point we’re like, “You know what? Fog maybe makes more sense in white. It’s all about preventing damage, white is very much about preventing damage and damage protection.” And we moved it to white.

And then we played with it for a while, and we’re like “Oh, well it thematically fits in white, but white doesn’t need it.” And so we moved it back to green. And there’s been a lot of cases like that where we figure out what things want to be and figure out where they are. And we shift around how things handle it. And sometimes things shift back and sometimes things continue to shift.  

For a while in R&D, we had this idea of there was a thing for a while that we called the “Ultimate Base Set.” And the idea was that all our work doing the core sets was just us figuring out the perfect version. And then each one was us inching closer what the perfect version was. And eventually we’d have the Ultimate Base Set. The ultimate thing that would be the perfect introductory—this locked core set.

And eventually what we realized is, “No, what makes Magic Magic is the core set isn’t locked. The things are always shifting and changing, and that there’s nothing that’s a given.” Like one of the things I was very happy with is we did this little thing where we were tracking what cards had stayed in the core set the longest. We called it Core Set Survivor. And I was very happy when finally… it was Giant Spider won it. It beat out Giant Growth. Giant Spider was in every single core set. And the next core set, we didn’t include Giant Spider. And why?

I mean, there are a bunch of reasons why. But the reason I like to believe why is I like the idea that Magic has survived—I mean, barring basic land, Magic has existed now in Standard without every card. That there’s no card that Magic needs. That Magic needs a mix of cards, it’s not that Magic didn’t need some stuff, and we want some things from the past. But the fact that Magic has existed without any one thing. That Magic isn’t any one card. No one card defines Magic. It’s a collection of cards that define Magic. And I think that’s really cool. I think that’s kind of neat.

So here’s another thing that I think is important, and maybe it has to do with the mindset of how we think about it, is that Magic is a collaborative game, it’s a collaborative art form, if you will. Meaning that when I write a story, if I’m a writer, I write a story, I have complete control. I can do what I want. If I want the main character to do something, well, no one else is there to tell me they can’t. And I do it.

But in Magic, I oversee the advanced design and often I’m leading the design. But even when I’m done, even when I’ve been living with a file for a year and a half to two years, and then I hand it off to a developer, that developer is then a new set of eyes. And while I consult, a different set of eyes are looking at that. And the creative team are doing their thing, and the editing, and there are so many people involved in making a set. And that while I definitely can push a set in certain directions, I don’t have complete control. And in some ways, no one person has complete control.

And so one of the things I think is kind of neat is that I feel like the game is this living, breathing thing that kind of does what it wants to do, and that collectively we get it there, but that… like one of the things I’ve talked about when you’re working on a set is I like trying to understand what the set wants. And the way I explain this is, when I playtest a set, I sort of get a feeling from the set, and like I mean it’s not literal, but the set speaks to me. That the set sort of tells me about what it needs. And that a lot of the relationship I’ve created over the years, a very intuitive one, is sort of learning from interacting with the set, what it’s missing. Or what it wants.

And then finding a way to give to that. And one of the neat things about how we make Magic sets is, we start, we have a jumping-off point, but then we let it go where it’s going to go. Time Spiral started out a set all about time. And time-based mechanics. And the whole nostalgia theme that ended up really taking over the set, that wasn’t there when we began. That a lot of what happens is, we start one place, and that we let the process and let the set sort of take us where it will.

And that’s one of the things, by the way, that is neat, is that in an evolving game, I mean there’s nothing against static games, static games are fun, some of my favorite games are static games. But the thing that endears me to Magic is that it is something that—like one of the things I’ve heard a lot is kids get into Magic, and I talk to their parents, and I say, “Why do you think your kid got into Magic?”

And I’ve  heard this numerous times. Which is a parent will say how their kid was really smart, and they were just bored with everything. That they were having problems in school just because nothing could keep their attention. And then they got to Magic, and Magic was bigger than them. That it wasn’t something they could just crack. That it was—like one of the things for example that I talk about in development is, “Why do we make broken cards in development? Hasn’t Development learned enough by now—hasn’t Development figured out how to do things that we just can avoid having broken cards?”

And the answer I give is, the goal of R&D, of Development as well as Design, is to make a set for the players to explore. And if we make something simple enough that Development can figure out what works and what doesn’t work, then the audience will figure it out. You know what I’m saying? I mean, Development is a handful of guys. They’re good, and they’re top players, but guess what? In the real world there are top players. So if we can figure it out, you can figure it out. And so what Development does is, they make a system so complex that they can’t quite figure it out.

And sometimes, things don’t quite go the way they had planned. But if they didn’t make the system complex enough that even they couldn’t figure it out, then if they could figure it out, you all could figure it out. And then Magic would be much less fun.

Like one of the joys of having an evolving game is allowing the audience the crispy hash brown discovery time. That I love, for example… one of the things that’s a lot of fun is we do reprints. One of my favorite things to do with reprints is bring back reprints that mean something different in the context. It’s like, “You know this card, this card meant something. But in this set, it means something different and you’ve got to figure that out.” Or most sets we do Thing A, but this set we’re doing Thing B. Why are we doing Thing B?

 

So one of the big fights we have in R&D all the time is, one of the things I’m a fan of is—not a lot of them, but a few cards that just do something weird that isn’t the way we would do things. So for example, this came up during Shadowmoor. Where we had a lot of themes with -1/-1 counters, and there’s lots of ways to remove -1/-1 counters. So what I wanted to do was make—in fact, we did something similar to this, but I wanted to make—I think it’s a 4/4 flier, 3/3 flier, and then I think what I wanted to make originally was a 4/4 flier that came into play with two -1/-1 counters. And it’s costed as if it were a two-powered flier. So for example, imagine 2U, 4/4, comes into play with two -1/-1 counters.

Now, we do 2U 2/2 flier all the time. All the time. And the idea is, I love you open a pack, and this could even be at common, where you’re like, “Okay, this is weird. Why are they doing this?” Because what I find is, Magic players don’t go, “I don’t get it,” they’ll go, “Oh, okay, why are they doing this? Why would this set want this? Why didn’t they just make this a 2/2?” And I think it’s kind of fun to do some of those cards that make people question what’s going on. And want to explore the environment.

The other big thing about an evolving game, by the way, is that I think it challenges the players in a way that’s very different. So one of the things is, growing up, I played a decent amount of tennis. My parents were both very into tennis. Definitely encouraged my sister and I to play tennis. And one of the things I learned is, the way to get better, probably in any sport, tennis is what I did as a kid, you wanted to play people better than you. And why is that? Because the way you get better is pushing yourself.

And I feel—gaming is a similar thing, which is if you want to get better, you need to play games that really push you. I mean, the reason tic-tac-toe is not really thrilling to most adults is there’s no pushing in tic-tac-toe. And there’s other games even that aren’t solved, like tic-tac-toe, but they’re just, “Eh, you kind of know the basic strategies.” It’s just not that much fun. And then either you play somebody that doesn’t understand the basic strategy, and then you win because they don’t understand it, or you play someone that does, and then you’re just—a lot of times the nuance is not there.

And that one of the things that an evolving game does is it keeps the players on your toes. And like I said, one of the things that’s the belief in R&D is, while we want to make sure to keep complexity in check, I have no problem pushing what we call strategic complexity. There’s three types of complexity I’ve talked about. There’s comprehension complexity, do you get what the card does? There’s board complexity, do you understand its role on the battlefield? And then there’s strategic complexity, do you understand the ramifications of what the thing means?

And both the board and the comprehension complexity, we have to be careful with. That can make it hard to learn how to play. Strategic complexity is nice because it’s kind of hidden. Meaning you don’t see it until you’re ready to see it. And so I’m fine, I like testing players, I like pushing. When we talk about complexity, we want to make sure the game is easy to learn. But that doesn’t mean we want to make the game easy to master. We want “a minute to learn, a lifetime to master.” Okay, more than a minute to learn.

And so one of the things about an evolving game is that I get to constantly do that. I get to keep surprising my audience. I get to keep pushing in ways that are different. I get a surprise. One of the other things that evolving games do that I love is that there’s not a lot of surprise in Monopoly once you’ve played Monopoly enough times. When I sit down to play a game of Monopoly, I might be surprised at the interaction with other people, Monopoly has some interaction that comes with it, and people could surprise me, but the game itself, it’s hard to surprise me. It’s just the same thing.

Where Magic, one of the things I love as a game designer is that I get to surprise my audience every year. And not every year. Every set I get to surprise my audience. Multiple times a year, I get to do something. Like, one of my favorite things is, I love watching previews. And one of the things that’s funny is, there was a director that said that one of his favorite things to do was to go to premieres, to go to screenings where people are seeing the film for the first time, and watch not the film but the audience. And that one of the things is, he wants to see the reaction of the audience.

And so, when sets get previewed, I do the same thing, which is we work very hard on our sets. I love seeing the players’ reactions. And I love initial reactions. Like one of my all-time favorite memories is Invasion was coming out. And we had made a conscious choice to not reveal the split cards. Now, it turns out that a sheet got out on eBay, and the hardcore rumormongers knew about it. But the average players did not know about split cards, and we had not advertised them. We had not put them in any of our previews. There were five of them, they were uncommon, and so I went to the prerelease. In fact, it was in the old Wizards—we had a tournament center by University of Washington.

And so I’m down in the basement, watching people open packs. And I watch this guy open a pack. And then he turns it sideways, so I know that he got one. And his face just, like, he couldn’t contain his excitement. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. And it took him a minute to understand what was going on, and then I could see the light bulb going off, and this giant smile came to his face, and then he turned to his friend and he showed it to his friend, and it was—I don’t know, it just was…

One of the things that I love about my job is, I feel like I get to bring joy to the world. And that I love seeing feedback. It is fun when you get to do something that makes people happy to see them actually being happy. That that was the great moment where I literally made someone super, super excited, and I could see it.

And remember, I fought so hard to get split cards in that set. That I talked about this when I talked about Tempest, in my very first podcast, that getting split cards… not Tempest, when I talked about Invasion. Not my first podcast. But an early podcast. Getting split cards in Invasion was a major, major feat that Bill Rose and I managed to accomplish, and so being able to go and see it and see the reaction, anyway, that was an awesome, awesome thing.

Anyway, I can see work, so I’ve got to wrap this up. Mostly what I was trying to say today, just thinking about that, is that Magic is a very special game. It’s not the only evolving game. There’s other evolving games. But it is very special in the way it functions, and that it is a neat thing to work on because I get to kind of constantly help reinvent what the game is. And I get to sort of watch the game change itself. I mean, obviously I have a hand. But in some ways it’s sort of like we put impetus in and see what the game does, and respond. It’s kind of like writers talk about how you make a character and then put them in a situation and see what he does. I feel the game has a similar quality to it.

But anyway, thank you very much for joining me for today. Like today, sometimes I like to do different topics, and today was more of a thought piece, if you will. But as much as I like talking about Magic, even more, I like making Magic. So see you guys next week.