6/20/14 Episode 133: Designing Commons

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 design. Specifically, about designing commons. So when you start a design, one of the things that I always do and encourage all my other designers to do is you always want to start with commons. Why is that?

A couple reasons. First off, when someone opens up your set, they’re going to open up the booster pack. And of the fifteen cards in a pack, one card’s a land, one card’s a rare—these are all on average obviously. And three cards are uncommon. The remaining ten cards are common. That means 2/3 of every booster pack are common cards. So when you talk about the experience that people get, whether it’s through Limited or even through casual Constructed, 2/3 of all the cards they see are your commons.

Well, if your set is going to work, 2/3 of it has to be conveying the message of what you’re wanting to do. So one of the things about doing commons first is, they really are the basis of what your set’s about. And that one of my dictums I always say is, “if your theme’s not at common, then it’s not your theme.” And what I mean by that is that commons make up such a large portion of what the set is, that if your major themes aren’t there, then they’re not going to be publicly seen as themes elsewhere.

And so for example, in Champions of Kamigawa, we did this thing where we made all the legendary creatures rare. Or sorry—all the rare creatures legendary. But how many packs do you have to open before you could figure this out? A lot. I want you, for example, let’s say we’re doing Theros. Theros is the Greek mythology set. Or Innistrad. It’s the Gothic horror set. I want you to open one pack, and you get the theme of the set. You go, “Ohh, Gothic horror. Ohh, Greek mythology.” You get it in one pack. Now, that doesn’t mean all you get is one pack, obviously people open more, but it’s really, really important that you get that across.

So the reason you start with commons is to see, “Can I take my themes and do them very simply?” Now, remember, New World Order says that there’s limits of how much complexity you can have at common. And I feel like those restrictions are important, because if you combine restrictions of New World Order, along with the dictum of “Your theme needs to be at common,” well, it says, “Okay, there’s an overlap here. What can I do through New World Order that is conveying what I need to convey.”

Or another way to think of it is, I have this restriction I have to deal with. And as those people who listen to me for a long time know, restrictions breed creativity. That having some restrictions are good. And what I think New World Order does for us, which I like a lot, it says, “You need a clarity of your message. Your message needs to exist in a simple enough form that people can understand and get it.”

Now, it doesn’t mean that commons can’t have any complexity. The way New World Order works is, 80% it has to be sort of “toe the line,” and 20% gets to sort of buck the line, if you will. But it has to buck it in a cohesive way. Meaning the exception is not every single card in the 20% is its own exception, the 20% as a group tend to be a singular exception.

So for example, in Zendikar, normally you don’t care about land drops. That’s not something you have to reference or care about. In Zendikar we’re like, “Okay, you have to care about them. But that’s the thing you have to care about.” So the thing that—the 20%, where it’s not a normal thing to care about, we concentrate it.

Okay. So the first thing to remember when doing common cards is… I’ll use a metaphor. I’ll use my packing metaphor. Let’s say you need to pack. You have a suitcase and you want to put things in it. Or you have a car and you’re trying to move. Maybe the car and the moving thing is better. I have my car, I have objects I have to get into my car because I’m going to move.

Well, what do you do? What is the correct strategy to packing? Well, number one, get the biggest, hardest-to-fit item and put it in first. Why is that? Well, let’s say for example I’m moving a chair. In my first move, I’m moving a chair. I have many drives to do. But on my first drive I’m going to move my chair.

Well, the chair is big. It might only fit in the car a couple ways. And that if I put other things in first, by the time I go to put the chair in, it just might not fit. So in Magic, it’s the same basic philosophy, which is you’ve got to figure out what your biggest, hardest thing is, and you’ve got to do that first.

And the reason is, my parallel with packing, is that the empty set has room for lots of things. But every time you put something in, it becomes harder, because now you’ve filled up space. And when I say “fill up space,” I mean it in two ways. Physically, there’s only so many cards in the file. But the second thing is, you only get to do certain things so many times.

For example, you only get so many direct damage spells. Well, if you really, really want to have your new mechanic interact with direct damage, well you’d better do that early, while there’s space to do that. Because eventually you might have too many direct damage spells, you’re like, “Oh, I can’t make any more direct damage spells.”

So when I talk about having space, I don’t just mean physically in the card slot, but also sometimes you only get so much of something, and so you want to make sure that the things that are most important—maybe “most important” aren’t even the correct words. The things that are the hardest to fit in.

Now, as a corollary, you also want to make sure that the things that are hard to fit in are worth fitting in. For example, I’m going to move, let’s say I have a very hard-to-fit chair. I have to ask myself when I’m moving, “Do I really want this chair? Is this chair worth moving? Is it worth fitting in my car?”

Now, the answer might be, “This is the best chair ever. I love this chair.” Then yes, it is. But if the answer is, “Ehh, I’m not too crazy about it,” well, it’s going to be hard to move and I’m not crazy about it, maybe I just want to sell it. And so when you’re filling your commons, you have to figure out whether something is worth it. Whether something makes sense.

Now remember, when you are making a card file, the key to making sets is what we call “iteration,” which means that you basically make things, play them, change them, play them, change things, play them. And you do that for the duration of your design. And then at some point you’re like, “Okay, I’m happy,” and you turn it over to Development. I mean, it’s a preset time, obviously.

So when you’re making your commons, you have the ability to take some flexibility. Usually the first pass at commons is not about it being exactly what it’s going to be at the end. The first pass at common is trying to make sure that you are sampling what you need to sample.

And so when you first start making commons, like I said, you are trying to figure out whether you can fit the things in you need to fit. You’re trying to figure out whether you can get the things simple enough that you need to be simple enough, and you are trying to sort of experiment a little bit and see how things feel.

So normally when I first make a set, the very, very first thing I’ll do is I figure out what is the essence of the set. So let’s take—I’m going to take Zendikar because Zendikar is a clean example. First thing I did is I said, “Okay. I want to do a set that’s about land mechanics.”

So the first thing I did is I sat down with my team, and I said, “Okay team, let’s make land mechanics.” In Innistrad, I sat down with my team and I said, “I want to make horror. Let’s figure out what conveys Gothic horror.” Theros, obviously I sat down and I said, “I want to do Greek mythology. What has to feel like Greek mythology?” When I sat down for Gatecrash, because I led Gatecrash, it was like, “Here are five guilds. How do we play up our five guilds?” You always start from some vantage point. And then those things go first.

For example, in a multicolor set, multicolor card designs are tough. And the reason is that you have to make something that takes two different elements and pushes them together, but in a way that feels right. And I had a whole podcast on designing—I think I had a podcast on designing gold cards. [NLH—Yes. I have not transcribed it yet. Audio is here.] I believe I did. I wrote an article on it, I know. (sirens) Ooh, and there’s… get out of the way of the fire truck.

So, go back to Zendikar. So the first thing we did is we figured out, “Okay, it’s a set about land.” Well, we did experimentation figuring out what we wanted for land. So once we found some different land mechanics, I made some commons with those land mechanics. Then, once that was in the file, I figured out what else we needed.

Pretty early on we realized we needed something to do with mana. And so kicker went into the file pretty early, just as a way to spend mana. The funny thing is, when I put kicker in, it wasn’t necessarily that I thought kicker was going to stay, it’s that kicker accomplished the job and was a known quantity, and I really wanted to test my land mechanic. So sometimes early on, you’re just putting things in that fill the space that you need.

That’s another important concept to understand, which is when you are testing early on, you kind of want to put the things in you don’t know, and then surround it with things you do know. So you have a better sense of the things you don’t know. And that’s a very important concept. Which is, if I put too many things in that are completely foreign, it’s very hard for me to tell what is working and what’s not working.

I mean, I can play it, if I get lucky and everything works, okay, it works. But if it isn’t working, sometimes it’s very hard to tell why it’s not working, if you have too many unknown variables. So what often happens early in playtesting is, you pick the variable you want to mess around with. In Zendikar that was land mechanics. So I put a bunch of different land mechanics in. More than I knew I was going to use, and at a lower amount.

So let’s say for example I know in the end I want one major land mechanic. In early design, what you’ll do is, you’ll make a bunch of different versions of it, put them all in at a lower level, so that you have a chance to experience them.

Now remember, I’ve talked about this before. When you do design, you do what’s called a flat power level. Which means we price every card so that it’s playable. Or mostly every card. I mean, no matter what you do, some cards are going to be more playable than others in context. But we do as flat a power level as we can.

And the reason is, I want my playtesters, my designers to play everything they can to see whether it is fun to play or not. So this begs the question, “Hey, if you do that in design, why don’t you do that in the real set? Wouldn’t Magic be wonderful if everything was playable?” And the answer is, you can’t do that.

One is, there are power issues of one of the things you have to be careful of is what we call “power creep,” which is if I make my cards—you only get so much power to put into your set. If you increase the amount of power you put in, then it’s fighting with the power of the previous sets. And the only way then to make cards that people want to play is to make cards with the power a little higher. And over time, your game spirals out of control. We don’t want to do that.

Also, the game is much more fun if there’s a variance of power. You don’t want every card to be of equal power. And one of the ways I try to explain it is, let’s say we do a draft. You want the better player to do better in the draft. And if all the cards are of the same power, well the worse player can’t go that much wrong. I mean, the better player will have a little bit more synergy. But the worse player’s going to have decent cards. Where if you put a little more of a spectrum, knowing what the right cards is becomes a skill that you need to understand in drafting.

Now, we try to make it so that which card’s more powerful is contextual, meaning that once upon a time there was a period where like, “This card’s just the best card in red, no matter what.” And we try to get to the world where, “This card’s the best in red if you’re playing this deck. But if you’re playing this deck, maybe this card’s the best in red.” That it’s not so clear cut.

Anyway, in design we do a flat power level because once again, we are not yet testing the environment in early design. We are trying to get a sense of all the different cards. We are trying to play with different facets.

And one of the things about doing design is understanding what Development is going to do, and I as a designer do not need to do Development’s work. Development will do Development’s work. Development’s going to figure out what to push, where to price things. There’s a lot of energy to balancing the environment. Design is constantly changing cards. It’s a lot of lost work trying to balance the environment when every time you make a change you have to rebalance it.

Now, one of the things we do do is we do curve. And what I mean by that is, we make sure that with our creatures especially, that there is a range of spells from one-drop up to, you know, at common, six, maybe seven-drop in certain colors. So the idea is, we want to make sure that when you play, there’s a range of things to play. And so we do curve. That’s important in design. Just to make sure that when people play, there’s a flow to the play.

Okay. So I’m making my commons, I have to figure out what is the thing I care most about. So for example, Zendikar, I care about land. So I make a bunch of land mechanics, I put the land in. Next, I go, “Okay. What else do I need?” And I realized pretty early on that since we had more land mechanics, and we were encouraging you to play land, we needed some way to spend the extra mana. And I put kicker in.

And like I said, oftentimes when you are doing early design, you put in a mechanic that’s a known quantity rather than an unknown quantity. Now, we also have a dictum in R&D, we try to make sure that every block has at least one returning mechanic.

Now, sometimes there’s more than one, that’s fine, it doesn’t have to be solely one, but there has to be at least one. And there are exceptions. For example, I guess you could say technically Return to Ravnica block, we brought hybrid back. But the ten mechanics were new mechanics because we didn’t want to give one guild a returning mechanic and the other nine a brand new mechanic. Maybe as time goes on we’ll feel less about that with Ravnica, especially as we start getting to a third return to Ravnica, the first Ravnica, the mechanics start to be something that people haven’t seen for a while.

Okay. So we figured out we needed the land. We put the land in. And like I said, in early commons, you put a bunch of different things in because you’re trying to sample it. That’s another big thing about early design is you are trying to sample. You’re trying to figure out what is fun. How do you figure out what is fun? By playing it.

So one of the rules that I do in early design is, with a few exceptions, if a set needs it, I have a two-of rule. And the rule is, if you get more than two of any one card, you can turn them in for other cards in the same color, random cards. But you are not allowed to play more than two copies of a card.

Why is that? Because I want you to experience a lot of different interactions. I want you to experience a lot of different cards. And it’s not just playing the card itself, I want you to experience the playing of the card, I want you to experience the interaction of the cards. “Oh, well it’s neat when this and this come together.”

Because one of the other things you’re doing early on when you’re doing commons is you’re trying start to figure out synergies. One of these days I’ll do a whole podcast on synergy. I’m a huge synergy fan. In fact, people have asked me what my biggest design weakness is, and I think it is my love of synergy.

Synergy’s good and a set should have synergy, but I sometimes put in a little too much synergy. Development sometimes has to take out synergy because I really enjoy putting synergy in my sets. Some is good. A lot can be okay. Too much of anything can be bad. Remember, your greatest weakness is your greatest strength pushed too far.

Okay. So you put in the thing that you want to test, have some variants of it. You put in the supporting thing, often that’s a known quantity so you could test it. Then a lot of what you want to do is you want to fill out your set with cards that either have basic effects, put in your Cancel, put in your Naturalize, or sometimes you put things in that just are simple cards that match what you’re trying to do.

So one of the jokes I have is, I always ask my designers early on to design common cards. And my joke is, I usually fill up my uncommons before I get done asking for commons. What that means is, it is very, very common when you design a common card—and I’m talking about professional Magic designers—that a lot of the stuff that you turn in isn’t actually common. It’s uncommon. Every once in a while you turn in a common that’s actually a rare.

And what happens is, you get good ideas, and you get inspired and you make things, but one of the keys to common, and this is what they call K.I.S.S., Keep It Simple, Stupid, you really want your commons to be doing one central thing. And a simple thing. Not a complex thing.

Now, it’s fine if that one simple thing has a lot of ramifications. For example, when we were doing Zendikar, we did the reprint of Harrow. Which was a card from Tempest. Which we called Crop Rotation, by the way. Which technically, by the way, is a better name for this card. We would later use Crop Rotation on a Rampant Growth-y card.

So what Harrow does is, you sac a land, and then you go get two basic lands out of your library. Well, in a world with landfall, Harrow is very interesting. Now, it also fixes your mana, everything that Harrow did in Tempest it did in Zendikar, but all of a sudden land takes on a different meaning, and this card that’s very simple has a lot more interesting value to it.

Same with Mulch, which also—didn’t Mulch end up in Zendikar? It was for a long time. But it’s another thing that helps you get your land. Oh no, I’m sorry, we put Mulch in Innistrad to help you get cards in your graveyard. Because that was a neat way. Normally what you care about is getting the land, but Mulch also helps you get things in your graveyard, and in Innistrad, green cared about things in the graveyard.

Anyway, so you want to fill out your commons with things that are very simple, they do one thing. And here’s another thing, which is another very good thing to remember is, you need some very simple things. Why? Magic is a complex game. Why do I need to have a vanilla creature?

And the answer has to do with board complexity. There is a lot going on. A lot going on. And I think sometimes that people—it’s very easy when you look at things in a vacuum, like for example let’s say I said to you, “I need you to hold some stuff.” And then I showed you one thing and I go, “Can you hold this?” You’d probably look at it and go, “Yeah, okay.” Let’s say I give you a can of Coke. And you’re going to go—“Can you hold this?” You go, “Yeah, okay, yeah, I can hold that can of Coke.”

And then I say to you, “Okay. Can you hold this carton of cream cheese?” “Yeah, I can hold this carton of cream cheese.” “Can you hold these ten hangers?” “Yeah, I can…” You know. And at some point, that all these little things add up, that in a vacuum aren’t that bad, but once you’re holding 20 of them, a lot of the problem that comes with Magic is, you can take a lot of simple things and add them together and it makes it complex. And that part of what you need to do is we want you to focus where… we want to put the complexity where it’s fun.

And then what we want to do is—so here’s a very important concept to understand, which is you only get so much complexity in the game. We want to limit the complexity. And it’s not because there’s not complexity in Magic. There is tons and tons of complexity. It is not like I’m trying to make this into Tic-Tac-Toe. Magic is probably the most complex game that is currently sold that’s been around for 5+ years. Magic is a very complex game. Our goal here is to minimize just how complex it is. Not to make it not complex. It is impossible to make Magic not complex. It’s complex.

And part of doing that is, you need some breathers. That you need to concentrate your complexity where it matters. And the way I like to think about it is, imagine that you have points for your complexity. And you had a limit. You only get so many complexity points. Well, every time you make a common card you have to add, you have to say, “How many complexity points are on this card, and is it worth it? Do I need this to be?”

And the reality is, I need some creatures. Common creatures. I mean, I’m not saying that all of them are vanilla or French vanilla, vanilla meaning they have power and toughness but no rules text, French vanilla meaning they have power and toughness but they have creature keywords, first strike, flying and such. You need to have a lot of simple stuff like that, only because you need to allow your brain to be able to focus.

Because what happens is, if you give your brain too much, instead of being able to focus, it kind of just blurs things out. And what will happen is, when we do focus testing and watch people playing Magic, and even more experienced players, watching Magic, that if you get past the overload point, once your brain can’t handle it all, your brain just like dulls out and goes, “Okay…” and you kind of don’t think about things. And what we want to do is we want people to be able to spend the time and energy to think about things, so it’s a matter of focusing your complexity.

And once again, a big part of design is saying, “There’s a cost that comes with making what I’m making, do I want to spend that cost?” And one of which is complexity. That’s a big one, which is, “This is complex. How complex?”

And the way I think of it, I always use the term “complexity points,” and people think we have a system, where we have actual points. We don’t. It’s just easier to think of it this way, which is if I’m looking at a file, and I have three cards at common let’s say, that I know are all sort of causing a certain amount of mental strain on my player. I might have to say to myself, “Where do I want the mental strain?” It’s not that I don’t want to have some mentally taxing cards, but I want to be careful that the mentally taxing cards are what contribute to making it fun.

So here’s another thing to remember, which is… I learned this in my writing class. You as a writer, or as a designer, as a creative person, you have the ability—so this was actually from film school, not from writing, but from I had to take a cinematography class.

And so what the class was teaching is, and this was true of writing too, when you are making—one of the things you’re doing, and this is true in photography, cinematography is just photography that moves, essentially, is a lot of what photography and cinematography are about is, “Where are you making the eye go?” You, the person crafting the picture, will control where the eye of the person is.

And if you have contrasting things… so let’s say for example I have a picture which is pretty muted with a red object. Your eye is going to go to the bright red object. Why? It’s just the brightest thing. Your eye will go there. Now, let’s say I have two bright objects. What happens? Well, I start to give up control of where your eye is going to go. Because your eye is going to go to one of the bright objects, but I don’t know which one. Because it could go to either object.

So as a cinematographer, you learn conservation of your resources, which meant if you want to control where the eye of your viewer’s going to go, you can’t put two things at the same time that are going to draw their eye. If I want them to focus on a certain portion of the screen, then I only get to have one eye-grabbing thing.

And this philosophy carries right over in design, which is if I want my players to focus on something, if I pull them in too many directions, I don’t control what their focus is. And so I have to think about what I’m trying to do.

Now, that doesn’t mean that in a game there can’t be different focuses. It’s a little bit different than in cinematography, where they’re looking at things on the screen at one moment. But you do have to think in the same sense, which is if I put too much stuff in, then I don’t have the ability to control what my audience is supposed to appreciate and where they’re supposed to look. If I overload my set and I put too many things in, that my audience doesn’t know what’s important. And I want them—I as an artist want to lead and direct my audience in a certain direction.

I, for example as a game designer, I’m going to create an experience for you. I want you to have fun gameplay. Now I’ve talked about this all the time, which is the players will go where you lead them. But if where you lead them isn’t fun, they blame you, the game designer. Because it’s your job to lead them to fun. It’s their job to go where they’re led.

And that the role of a game player—more experienced game players actually do some self-editing, but most game players just say, “What is the game telling me to do? Well, I’m going to do that. And if the thing the game tells me to do isn’t fun,” well… they get mad at the game.

And rightfully so they get mad at the game! It’s the job of the game to lead the game players to the fun. To do that, listen up game designers, to do that you have to make clear messaging. In order to make clear messaging, you can’t muddy your message. What that means is, you’ve got to pick and choose what your messages are. You’ve got to pick and choose your themes. You’ve got to pick and choose your complexity.

And all this shows up at common. All this matters at common. The reason that a vanilla creature is a wonderful thing is, I don’t want people to focus on the vanilla creature. It does its job. It will be fun. If the spices in your set is in the right places, sometimes I talk about my cake metaphor, which is that icing is fun, and icing is sweet, and ooh, icing is tasty. But you know what? A cake full of icing isn’t that good. You need the cake. In fact, you need a lot more cake than you need icing.

But the icing is what people—it’s the sweet thing. And so you need your design to have a lot of cake. If you want people to appreciate the icing, you also need to make sure you give them good cake to go with the icing. And some of that is basic effects, which is—and for example, one of the things that’s really important is, the idea that a vanilla creature doesn’t require design is actually wrong.

That there’s a very different animal between a 1/4 and a 3/3 and a 5/2. What are you trying to do? What toughness matters in your set? What power matters in your set? Where’s the threshold? Are you trying to make more stally? Are you trying to make more aggressive? Like, just literally how you design a vanilla creature matters. That this idea that “Oh, I have a slot, it’s a vanilla creature, whatever,” no. We take long time and energy trying to figure out the right mix of that vanilla creature.

That a very easy trap to get into is to assume that things that are simple don’t require a lot of thought. And the funny thing is, the reverse is true. Usually, the less going on on a  card, the more thought that’s required to figure out how best to use it. Just because something is simple does not mean it plays a simple role. And that’s an important thing to remember. That sometimes, the most important aspects of your set are not the wordy cards but the simple cards.

In fact, one of the signs that you are doing your job as a designer is that the cards that matter most are the most elegant cards. That is when you have aced your design. When you’re like, “This thing is a thing of beauty, and this thing that’s a thing of beauty is very central to what I’m doing.”

So when you’re making common cards, you have to—I mean, the way I always think of it is, I’ll use a lot of metaphors today, Michelangelo used to explain—he was a sculptor, for those that don’t know, and a painter. That when he sculpted, that he felt that the finished product was already in the marble slab, that he was freeing it. That what he was doing was knocking away all the things that weren’t it.

And in some ways, you can think of designing commons that way, which is when you start with a common, make your common, and then start figuring out what the common has that it doesn’t need. One of the most common mistakes people make on their common cards is they make them—there’s too much. They do too much, they have too much focus, there’s too much complexity, there’s too much words, there’s just too much going on. That part of a good design is that each card has a very simple role it’s supposed to play.

And I know, I know, I know, I know it’s hard. I mean, trust me, I get complexity creep, I get wanting to do lots of things in your set that—one of the things that’s really hard is, there is this desire to try to fit as much as you can fit in. But the goal of design is not—you’re not measured by how much you get in the set. You’re measured by what is there, how it plays.

And oftentimes, less is more. That just because you can cram as much stuff—like, cramming things in does not make for a better—and to jump back to my cinematography example, I want to make a beautiful picture. A beautiful photo, a beautiful movie shot. I could stick beautiful things in it. But at some point, if I stick enough beautiful things in it, it stops being that beautiful.

That part of what makes something beautiful is the crispness of a single image. “Oh, look at that beautiful flower.” Well, you know what? That beautiful flower and that beautiful baby, they’re each really beautiful. But you know what? If you put the beautiful baby with the beautiful flower, well, either people are going to look less at the baby or less at the flower. Something’s going to suffer. Maybe they’ll look less at both of them.

And that if you want people to appreciate the simple flower, show the simple flower. If you want them to appreciate the beautiful baby, show the beautiful baby. But show them the baby and the flower means you pull focus. And that’s a big, big lesson in making commons is “Don’t pull your focus.” Figure out what you want, make sure that each card does the least amount that it can do. Carve away everything that doesn’t need to be there, and leave what needs to be there.

Anyway, as you can see—see, you’d think something as common as common cards should be simple! In fact no, it’s a very complex situation. In some ways, I talked about how when you fit your car you put the hardest thing in first, another reason you do commons is commons actually are the hardest thing.

I know people think like because they’re so simple, that they’re the easiest thing, and what you learn as you do a lot of design is “Easy is hard. Simple is difficult.” And that, my friends, is the lessons of the day.

So thank you very much for listening to me. As always, I love talking about Magic design. But even more, I like making Magic. So it’s time for me to go. Thanks for joining me today, guys, and I hope you appreciate my little peek into making commons. Ciao.