4/11/14 Episode 113: Day in the Life

All podcast content by Mark Rosewater

Okay, I’m pulling out of the parking lot. We all know what that means! What does that mean? It means I’m dropping off my daughter at mid-Winter Break camp. But it also means it’s time for Drive to Work. And, because I had to drop my daughter off farther away from my house, you get a longer podcast today. So, I thought of something that I could talk about that would fill up my extra time.

Okay, so one of the most common questions I get is, “What is a day like as a Magic designer?” And so today I’ve dubbed my podcast, “A Day in the Life.” I had a similar, by the way, article called A Day in the Life in which it was showing you how the R&D day worked but through a Choose Your Own Adventure. I did that many, many years ago.

But today’s a similar thing, it won’t be choose your own adventure, but I want to talk about what exactly—what do we do? You read all about—like I talk about my work, but from day to day, what is it like? What do I do?

So I’m going to try to walk you through a typical day. And I will talk about sort of each day, how there’s different things that happen. But okay. So in the morning, I wake up, get ready, on the way to work I do this, I do my podcast. The way it always works is, I have to do two a week, and so Monday and Tuesday I always do podcasts, and then Wednesday and Thursday if I need to do extras it’s when I do them. And then the ride home is when I listen to them and make sure they work.

Usually, about half my podcasts I take more than one take on. So usually on Wednesday I’m recording. Often on Thursday I’m not. Sometimes I am. The one other exception is when I do a sequence, like when I’m talking about a series, I will do them back-to-back-to-back so I don’t forget anything. So like let’s say I’m doing a four-parter, I might do them all in one week, that’s very common.

Okay, so I get to work. I go inside. So we work at a building, it’s a four-story building. And R&D’s on the third floor. Wizards actually takes up almost all the building. We’re not on the first floor. First floor has like workout facilities, and there’s some space down there but we have nothing on the first floor. There’s food on the first floor. We are on a good chunk of the second floor, all the third floor, all of the fourth floor. And R&D’s on the fourth floor.

Okay, so I get to work. So the first thing I do is I will check my mail and see—so I have a bunch of social media, so I get—first thing I will check is I check internal email through Wizards, and that’s actual work email. Like people send me stuff, things I’m supposed to be aware of, did I get meeting invites? We have a program that does all our meeting scheduling. So first thing in the morning I guess is double-check my calendar, see what I have for the day. Most of my meetings are standing meetings, meaning I have the same meeting at the same time every week. So I have a rough idea of what my schedule is. I have to check because I have extra one-of meetings. So—but anyway, check my schedule, make sure I don’t have meetings or find out when my meetings are.

Then what I need to do is I read my mail, first is I will read my internal mail, because that’s work stuff, then I have external mail. I always try to read all my email. Sometimes I get behind, but I eventually will catch up.

Also, the morning’s the time where I might, if there’s a certain topic for the day, what often happens is in the social-media-verse, that there’s some issues, someone might write an article, I might read an article or read some forums. It’s a chance to sort of get a touch on what is going on, and I have a bunch of means, through my social media, to know when something’s happening.

For example, my blog is a very good place where people will ask questions, and so if something happened, someone asks a question about it, I can track it down and figure out what’s going on.

So anyway, usually in the morning I will catch up and just make sure that I’m up to date on all the messaging and such. And then some mornings I have a meeting. So the way it works is, every design team meets twice a week. We usually meet for two two-hour meetings twice a week. And it is—they’re scheduled such that they’re somewhat separated. And so I am on all the design teams, and so I—it depends what time of year. Usually there’s two design teams ongoing at any one time. Every once in a while there’s three. There has been known to be four, although that’s very rare.

So anyway, so often for example, in the morning I’ll have a design meeting. So what does a design meeting mean? Well, it depends. Some of the design meetings are my team, I’m running them. Some of the design teams I’m just a design team member. I mean, I’m also there in the capacity of Head Designer, in that while I’m sitting on the team, doing team things, I’m also making sure—the reason I’m on all the design teams is to make sure I understand what’s going on with everything. Usually if I have issues with the design team lead, it’s not done in the meeting. In the meeting I’m just another team member. If I have issues, they happen one-on-one outside the meeting.

So what will happen in design meeting—I mean, there’s a bunch of different things. A very common thing we’ll do is we’ll have a topic. The lead design will pick some topic. “Here’s an issue in the set that we need to work on,” or “Here’s a mechanic that we need to think about.” Sometimes you get homework, so sometimes, like for example, yesterday I was in a meeting. On a team which I wasn’t running. And Mark Gottlieb was the lead designer, we were working on trying to figure out a way to do something. And so he gave us some homework in which he said, “Okay, here’s the parameters. Try to make eight to 12 cards that demonstrate the different kind of things you can do in this space.”

And the team had 16 members. Every member of the team did their version, and then we sort of shared notes and looked at what we did, and then we used the meeting to break up and figure out the different ways people had tried it, to look at different avenues. And anyway, and then we generated some cards. It’s very common in meetings. A lot of time now we do in-meeting card generation. It has proven quite valuable. In fact, a lot of the cards that ended up being the most popular cards in Innistrad and from Theros, the two sets I led, both were like very much done in-meeting. I’m particularly a big fan of designing in-meeting. I like doing that.

Sometimes, your design meeting will be a playtest. And if it’s a playtest, then instead of meeting in the meeting room, usually we’re in The Pit, and sometimes they’re sealed, sometimes they’re draft. Usually the way it works is, earlier in the process it’s sealed, and then later in the process it’s draft for Design.

And the reason for that is, early design is much, much more about trying to get a feel of things and get a sense of the cards and what’s fun. It’s less about environment because you haven’t sort of fine-tuned it yet early on. Early design is much more about sort of figuring out what you want to stress and what you want to do. So you have a lot of different ideas you’re playing around with so you can figure out what the good stuff is. So you can sort of take the good stuff and make more of that, and cut the stuff that isn’t working.

And anyway, early on, drafting doesn’t make a lot of sense. You don’t have cohesive themes yet. But later in design, once you’ve started building the themes, then you want to do drafts because you want to get a sense of “are the themes working, can people draft it?”

Now, when it gets to Development, they do more drafting, because the entire point of Development is it balances the environment, of which drafting helps a lot to learn. But in Design, we tend to do drafting later on.

So anyway, I’ll go in, I’ll have a meeting, usually in the morning, so I get in somewhere between nine and 10 in the morning, depending on my day and obviously dropping kids off and that. Usually the meetings in the morning are 10 to 12, so they’re two-hour meetings. And then after my morning meeting—some mornings I don’t have a meeting, and usually when I don’t have a meeting, that’s when I’m doing my homework, for example I’m designing cards. That’s when I’m—a very common thing that I have to do as Head Designer is look over other people’s card files, so when I have downtime, a lot of times I’ll look through card files.

In fact, there’s two different passes I tend to do. One is just as Head Designer, sort of “is the design up to snuff?” and the other is, I tend to do a color pie pass on stuff. Sometimes I combine those into one thing. Where I’m just making notes like, “White’s not supposed to do this.” Stuff like that. I tend to be the watchguard of the color pie.

A lot of other designers definitely try to stretch it a bit, and some of that’s good. Bleeding in the right place in the right way is good. But people often push boundaries a little bit to see if they can get away with stuff, and my job is to sort of go, “No no no, you can’t do that.”

So often I’ll read over other files. Sometimes there are other internal documents I need to read. R&D has a wiki, I have to sometimes read stuff on the wiki. The creative team might have put some stuff together that I have to look at. There’s just a lot of different material to look at to read. And sometimes there’s correspondence. Not only do I read my email but sometimes I have to write emails, and communicate stuff to people.

Okay, so after my morning meeting, I will have lunch. Most of the R&D folk go out for lunch. That’s very common. I tend not to. The major reason is, on Monday, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, I exercise. The only reason I don’t exercise on Wednesdays is Wednesday is comic day and I go get my comics. So Wednesday is my non-exercise day. Friday I work at home. So I’m not in the office on Fridays.

And so I always exercise during lunch. I’ve been using my exercise to catch up on geeky TV that I have missed. This is some stuff that my wife doesn’t want to watch, and so it’s harder to watch at home, and so like in the last couple years—let’s see. I caught up on Doctor Who, I caught up on Torchwood, I caught up on Fringe, I caught up on Orphan Black. I caught up on Flight of the Conchords. On The Guild. Right now I’m watching Arrow. So anyway, I watch different things that I’ve been wanting to watch that either I know people like or I’ve heard good things about. Just plays into my area of interest.

So anyway, I work out during lunch. Usually after workout I have a little bit of time that I can hop on my Tumblr. I don’t blog too much at work but I will blog during my lunch hour. And so usually, I’ll blog while I eat my lunch. Because heaven forbid I’m not multitasking.

And then after lunch, we have some afternoon meetings. There’s different meetings during the week. Like the R&D managers have a meeting on Mondays that we meet. Tuesday afternoons there is the Magic meeting. Oh, I forgot something! I forgot an important morning meeting. Thursday morning—so Thursday morning we have two meetings that are very important called Card Crafting and World Crafting.

So Card Crafting is a meeting between all the designers and the developers in which we talk about kind of nuts and bolts, hands on design/development issues. For example, if we’re not sure where something goes color-pie-wise, we talk about it there, or Development wants to shift something, we talk about it there, or anything that sort of is something that affects Magic but is not general enough that it would go to the Magic meeting, which I’ll explain in a second. And so Card Crafting is usually a technical meeting, sometimes we’ll talk through rules changes, and trying to decide like—Matt Tabak will bring things up on the screen, and walk through the different cards, and as we talk about cards, we pull the cards in question so we can see them, and we try to examine like “Well, if we change this rule, what will happen?”

And it’s also a place where if Aaron has issues or anybody has issues we can bring them up, sometimes I’ll have issues. We’ve used the meeting (???) for carving out color pie issues, we’ve used the meeting to talk about mechanical choices. Sometimes we use the meeting to talk about bridging between different sets, and like how to prioritize things. Usually if there’s an issue bigger than one set, that’s where it comes. If it’s just a one-set issue, that team will figure it out, but if it impacts all of Magic then we talk about it.

World Crafting, which is the meeting right after Card Crafting, is the same basic idea but it’s for creative issues. It’s another meeting that I go to every week. And so the meeting is about talking about the story and implications of the story and how it will affect things. The reason I’m there is often there’s a big impact on Design. Story things can have a big impact on Design works. And so World Crafting is a weekly meeting where the different relevant people can get together and talk about issues having to do with creative things.

Now, every third week on Thursday morning, we don’t have World Crafting—one of the two is cancelled, it varies which one is cancelled. And then we have a review with Bill Rose, who is the VP. Bill likes to keep abreast of what’s going on, and so every three weeks we have a meeting. It rotates what the topics are, but essentially Bill wants to see everything that’s going on in R&D. The person that’s running it has to write up a little write-up for Bill, we give a little presentation. We sort of walk through what’s going on. Bill asks questions. And it just allows Bill to keep his fingers on what’s going on in R&D.

And it’s a good opportunity for everybody, that a lot of R&D comes to these meetings, so they can—not everybody knows what’s going on with everybody else, and so the meeting is a good chance for people to sort of get a general sense of what’s going on. There’s so many things going on that we have to break up the meetings into different sub-groupings because we can’t fit everything in a single meeting.

Okay. Now we can get to afternoons. Go back to Tuesday. So Tuesday afternoon, we have a meeting called the Magic meeting, which is the general meeting for anybody who is interested in Magic. It’s not just R&D. Although all of R&D, all of Magic R&D attends. But people from Organized Play and the web team and some Electronics and Digital and just other parts of the company that are people who are impacted by Magic or work on Magic can come to this.

And it’s a general thing. Sometimes we fill people in on what’s going on. Sometimes we have presentations from different parts of the company talking about what they’re doing in relation to a certain thing. Sometimes it’s just updating everybody on kind of what’s going on and where something stands. There’s a lot of moving pieces, and so the meeting—sometimes we talk topics if we have issues to discuss, but usually if we’re discussing an issue in that meeting, it’s a broader issue. If it’s a more technical issue, Card Crafting is where we’ll have that meeting. So anyway, that’s the Magic meeting.

Then, in the afternoon, we often will have design meetings. Most of the design meetings are in the afternoon. What we’ve done is, because we were having problems with scheduling, there’s so much going on, we hard-locked the key sets so that the fall set had the locked time that it meets, because the fall set meets all year round, and so there’s just a preset time that we’re going to get together so other people can’t overschedule us. We know it’s locked in the schedule. And most of the locked-in design meetings, most of them are in the afternoon.

And once again, the afternoon design meetings are a lot like the morning design meetings. Most of the ones I lead tend to be the afternoon because I do the fall set, the fall set just happens to be in the afternoon, so it’s Monday and Wednesday, 2:00-4:00.

And so, I mean the big thing for me, one of the things that I like to do is I like—iteration’s very, very important, so I like to bounce back and forth between making corrections and playtesting. As we get closer to the end, I do more and more playtesting, the iterations get shorter, but it’s really important that I do not like talking too long. I like to talk about stuff, I like to make changes, and then I like to play. And I feel like one of the problems sometimes I see with the design teams is they spend too much time what we call “theory-crafting,” which means they think about it and try to come to conclusions based on past performance of other mechanics. But it’s like, “Just play it.” I’m a big believer of “You want to figure out how something’s working? Play it.”

And sometimes we’ll do multiple playtests. It’s very common, for example, especially later on, to have like a sealed playtest followed by draft playtest. So that we can see both. Also in the afternoon, like on Tuesday afternoons—so I have a couple what I call “one-on-ones,” which means that… the way a one-on-one works, if you are a manager you have a one-on-one with each employee. And so now I used to have one-on-ones with all of the designers because I used to be the manager for the designers. But a couple years back we made a very hard decision of—I have a lot to do, and management was not my forte, so it’s like, “Why don’t we let Mark do more design and less management?”

And so Mark Gottlieb got brought in, and Mark is the manager for the design team, so he and I have a one-on-one, because the way it works is, all the designers report both to Mark and me, but Mark’s in charge of their day-to-day scheduling and he’s the direct manager. I’m in charge of all their technical stuff, of making sure that they’re figuring out where they go and where they get placed, and do I think that they’re advancing, and I’m in charge of kind of their technical leadership, and Mark’s in charge of the managerial leadership. So he and I meet once a week so we can walk through all the employees and talk about them. He does all the one-on-ones with them as the manager. I mean, I will meet with them on case-by-case if I need to, but the weekly one-on-ones are done with Mark.

Also, my boss, Aaron Forsythe, he and I have a one-on-one during the week, so we can talk about just relative issues of what’s going on. So those are my two one-on-ones, with the design team manager and with my boss. Aaron, who’s the director of Magic.

Also once a week, we have a design team meeting, which is not a particular design, but rather all the designers get together. So I have a team of designers, like I said. Mark and I together have the team. So the design team now is Ethan Fleischer, Ethan won the second Great Designer Search, Ken Nagle, Ken came in second in the first Great Designer Search, Shawn Main, Shawn came in second in the second Great Designer Search, Dan Emmons, Dan was involved in the second Great Designer Search but wasn’t one of the finalists, but did a lot of work behind the scenes. Dan actually got a job in customer service, he came to us, we started having him do hole-filling, eventually he did such a good job I stuck him on a design team, he did a good job, he ended up getting brought into the design team. So a perfect example, by the way, of somebody who got their foot in the door and used that opportunity to prove what they could do, and ended up getting on a design team.

The last person on the design team is Gavin Verhey. Gavin works very closely with Dave Guskin, who does “branded play,” we call it, which is if you remember the Helvault or the guild boxes or Hero’s Path, all the sort of—we’re doing more and more experience around the game itself, and Dave’s (???) that and Gavin works with Dave. But Gavin is on the design team and so reports to Mark.

So anyway, we have a meeting every Tuesday in which the seven of us get together. It varies. Sometimes it’s meeting to catch us up on design things. Sometimes there’s a presentation, we’ll bring different people in that are relevant to design things. Yesterday we had a design meeting where Ethan did a research project where he sort of did it, and then he gave us a PowerPoint presentation where he explained all the stuff he had learned, and rather than all of us doing the research, he did the research and explained it to us.

 Sometimes we play games just to see other games and sort of learn what’s going on in the market. Sometimes we will walk through a particular set to see what one designer’s doing, to sort of just make sure everyone’s aware of what’s happening. Sometimes a designer will have a problem, they bring it to the team. So the team can help them solve the problem. We often design the holiday card in the design meeting. We get different issues. It’s a chance for the design (???).

So what we do, by the way, is the development team has the exact same meeting, and it’s at the exact same time, since there’s not really a lot of overlap between the design team and the development team. So to sort of save schedule space, we meet at the exact same time.

What else can happen? Let’s see. Another thing that’s very popular is that there will be playtests that aren’t for your set but are for somebody else’s set. So one of the things that happens is, when you’re a designer, when you’re a lead designer, you are responsible for keeping tabs on the set you did even after you finished. So for example, right now I’m working on Blood. Blood is the fall 2015 set. The 2014 fall set is Huey.

Huey was the set I worked on last year. And right now, it’s in Development. Erik Lauer is in charge of it. He’s doing it. But even though I’m working on Blood, I’m still keeping my eye on Huey because I need to make sure that I understand what’s going on. So in fact, one of the things I have to do today is I’ve got to do a file pass on it to see what changes have been made. Erik—(???) the [lead] developer is, fall sets these days usually it’s Erik, he’ll come to me and whenever he makes any substantial changes, not card-by-card changes, but like “Oh, I’m shifting something of some more major thing,” Erik will come to me and talk through with me and make sure that I agree with him on the decision. There’s a lot of collaboration between the Head Designer and Head Developer, as well as the lead designer and lead developer. Which Erik and I are both. And so there’s a lot of give and take.

So what will happen is, I will get invited to playtests, for example I might get invited to a Huey playtest. Or a Dewey or a Louie, whatever… I’ll get invited to playtest some other sets. Sometimes it’s just very common that the lead developer of a set or lead designer of a set—I mean, [Head] Designer, I’m on most design teams, I’m already playing those. But like lead developer might want my take on something.

Having been there for a long, long time, it’s very, very common for people to want to have me look at the set or play the set, and just give my two cents. I’m very good at getting feedback pretty quickly off a single playtest, just like I playtest it enough that I can pick things up pretty fast.

Also, something else I haven’t talked about, is our advanced planning meetings. So this happens for me once a week, but advanced planning meets multiple times a week. So advanced planning is something I’ve talked about. Have I done a podcast on advanced planning? I don't know if I have. Maybe I should.  I did an article on it. Maybe I’ll do a podcast on advanced planning. It’s a good topic.

So advanced planning, what will happen is, I’ll meet once a week with my advanced planning team, the advanced planning team is a constantly shifting team. For each set there’s one person responsible for the set. Usually it’s Ethan or Shawn. And then they’ll always have another designer and we’ll have a developer, and we’ll have a rotating fourth person. Sometimes a creative person, sometimes other people. You know. And what will happen is, they meet during the week to work on projects that I’ve given them, and then once a week they meet, and they sit me down, and they show me what they’ve done. And then I give feedback on it, and I give them new sort of, a new assignment to work on.

So then a lot of advanced planning is kind of like, “Okay, we’re working in this new space, with this new thing.” I go, “Oh, I like A, not B, C. D looks interesting but I would make this change. Okay, for next week, why don’t you try Thing D but with the changes I suggested? And I wouldn’t mind you looking for this other thing that incorporates this thing.” Like, I give them assignments. And then they come to a couple meetings in which they meet to try to experiment with it.

As I explained in my article, which I guess I’ll explain when I do my advanced design podcast, advanced design is about mapping out the future and figuring out what issues we’ll have to deal with. I like to explain that it’s more about figuring out what the problems are than solving the problems. A lot of times solving the problems will be the design team’s job, but the advanced planning team is trying to figure out what the problems are so the design team understands—they go in with open eyes to figure out what exactly they’re doing.

Sometimes they’ll get a mechanic or two, sometimes we’ll get a structure. I mean, we definitely walk out of advanced planning with tangible stuff that we can give to the design team. But it’s not always—what the advanced planning team comes up with and what the design team does is not complete overlap. Usually it’s mapping out ideas and giving ideas as a jumping-off point for the design team.

Let’s see. Any other meetings that I have during the week? Oh yes, I forgot. So the other thing that happens is there are some meetings in which all—they call it “cross-departmental.” Which means, let’s say here’s a meeting I did last week, where Blood is—Blood is starting up—Blood is halfway through design, but the other parts of the company have to start gearing up for what they need to do. So there’s a lot of pieces that come together when you’re putting together a set. There’s a marketing campaign and there is branded play and there’s just all sorts of things that come around it. And so what we’ve started doing is, to give ourselves plenty of time for the other parts of the company to do things they need to do, we meet. And it’s called “cross-functional” because a member of each of the different relevant teams or sometimes more than one are there. So that we can talk through with them and say, “Oh, okay, here’s what’s going on.”

For example, these first couple meetings, we walked through what Blood design was doing so the rest of the company knew. So like, I might be working on a set, but Brand might know very little about the set. I mean, they know the top line, but they don’t know exactly what the details are, or the mechanics, and so we come in and we explain something.

So for example, the first Blood meeting, I and Jenna and Dave came in, and I explained the mechanics of Blood, and Jenna explained the Creative of Blood, and Dave explained the branded play of Blood, and so we sort of came in to give that experience, and then you’re working with different people in the company to sort of make that happen and work through it.

I do less cross-departmental than most because Design kind of exists in a bubble. We work with Creative during design, but other than Creative, nobody’s ready for us. Until we finish a design, nobody’s ready. It’s not usually until development. Oh, I take that back. I’m in middle design and I have this cross-functional meeting. So there’s some. But Development has a lot more cross-functional meetings because the set’s much, much farther along. I’m working with Creative on story stuff, but art’s not happening yet, card concepting’s not happening yet. Just the very, very beginning of marketing happens. So I don’t do tons of cross-functional. Other people in the company, sorry, other people in R&D do a lot more cross-functional. I don’t do all that much.

The other thing that will happen sometimes is there’ll be meetings in which it’s not a standing meeting, but there’s a topic that people care about. And I often get called in this, where it’s cross-departmental to discuss a topic. And as one of the senior R&D people, usually Brand likes pulling me in to get my two cents on stuff. So sometimes we’ll have one-of meetings in which I get pulled in there.

Oh, another common thing that will happen is I often get called upon to do interviews. And that’s done during work. Sometimes they’re online, like chats online, sometimes I might be interviewed by a reporter. Which is usually done over the phone. Every once in a while somebody will come to Wizards and we’ll do a videotape thing. We videotape stuff for the Pro Tour, if you ever see like “behind the scenes in R&D,” that stuff gets done. So another thing that often happens is just having to—part of my job as spokesperson is just talking to people and explaining what’s going on and doing media and stuff like that.

I’m trying to think what else. I’m almost to work. I’m trying to think—other things my day might encounter. Or entail. I mean, there’s lots of one-of meetings. There’s brainstorming meetings, I guess is another thing I can mention, where somebody really cares about a topic, and needs to brainstorm, I often get called into brainstorming meetings. I’m decent at brainstorming. And so that’s just sort of us really just experimenting and writing things down, and those are more one-of to happen every once in a while.

Anyway, I think that is most of the different—so my day essentially is I come in, I have some correspondence, I have some meetings, I have some projects I have to work on on my own, that I do on my own time. Sometimes I’ll have some one-on-ones. It’s very common—and the other thing is, there’s some get-togethers. Like for example, the web team, the website. Like, once a month we get together, me and the other columnists and Trick get together, the internal columnists, and we just talk about what’s going on, and do we have any concerns, and what’s coming up? There’s a bunch of check-in meetings like that, where it’s stuff, where I’m involved but it doesn’t happen constantly. Or we don’t talk constantly, but every once in a while we get together.

But anyway, that hopefully was not too boring, that is my Day in the Life! That is what I do. I get to work, I go to meetings, I have some individual projects, and I usually exercise at lunch. That’s what I do.

So anyway, I hope this was interesting for you, this is a little different vantage point, give you an idea of what we do. One thing I find when people actually come to see Wizards, that we’re a little more corporate than people like to think we are. Like we have cubicles, and I mean our cubicles have a little more fun stuff on them than the average place maybe, but we do go to meetings, I mean there’s a lot of corporate-ness to what we do. But it is a lot of fun, and I get to play a lot of games, and in the meetings I’m in, we’re talking about making Magic, which is pretty fun to do.

So anyway, as much as I like talking about Magic, even more, I like making Magic. It’s time for me to go. So thank you very much, and I’ll talk to you next time.