All podcast content by Mark Rosewater
Okay, I’m pulling out of the parking lot! You know what that
means! It means there’s another Drive to Work!
So my kids had Market Day today, where they have to sell
things. So I had to help bring in all the stuff for them to sell. But anyway,
I’ve still got to drive to work, and school is right by home, so you’ll have
pretty much the same length podcast today.
So, for today, I was going to answer a question that I get
all the time. And that question is, “Where do your ideas come from?” And the
answer is, “There’s no one single answer.” Thank you very much. That’s been my
podcast. No. Um, it’s actually a very complex answer, which is why I feel like
I can spend an entire podcast talking about where ideas come from.
Okay, so I think I can divide into a couple categories. So
the two major categories, what I will call the [Vorthosian] categories and the
Melvinian categories. So Vorthos
and Melvin are two different aesthetic attributes. Vorthos is all about
flavor, and Melvin is all about mechanics. And so there really is some flavor
approaches and there’s some mechanical approaches. And then there’s few other types we’ll get to.
Okay. So let’s start with the flavor. Because we’ve recently
done a bunch of top-down sets. So sometimes we start from a place that is
just—we’re trying to capture something. Innistrad
was Gothic horror. Theros was Greek
mythology. That sometimes you’re just trying to capture a thing that’s a
pre-existing thing.
So those ideas are like, “Okay, I want to capture this real
thing.” So for example, double-faced cards started in Innistrad because we were like, “How do we capture a werewolf? What
would a werewolf have to do?” And it became clear pretty fast, like, “Well,
werewolves have two states. They have a human state and they have a werewolf
state.” And their human state, ehh, not particularly scary. But in their
werewolf state they’re pretty scary.
And that one of the things that made werewolves interesting
is, sometimes they’re a human in which they’re kind of weak. And sometimes
they’re a werewolf in which they’re very strong. And so we literally started
our design saying we want to do top-down werewolves, we know this to be true
about werewolves, how would we do that?
And we tried a bunch of different things. It wasn’t like
double-faced cards were our only attempt. We had a day/night mechanic we tried,
we tried a bunch of different things. But in the end, the reason we got to
double-faced cards was, it ended up being the cleanest, best execution that
captured what we wanted.
So sometimes, when you’re making cards, flavor is a very
interesting place to start. And when I say flavor, there’s a couple different
meanings. The flavor is not one giant bucket. It actually has a lot of little
elements to it.
So sometimes, you’re trying to capture a specific thing. For
example, werewolves, okay. There’s a quality to werewolves, we wanted to
capture that quality, it had a mechanical ramification. For example, humans
were smaller, werewolves were bigger. Okay, well this card is going to have
dual states. One state, the power and toughness is lower, one state the power
and toughness is higher.
So that has a very mechanical resonance. Like, clearly
something about it has to be portrayed, and there’s a mechanical way you would
portray it. But we were coming from a flavor perspective of how to do that.
So another way sometimes with flavor has to do with mood and
tone. So for example, the morbid mechanic in Innistrad came about because I was really trying a way to make
things dying scary. That one of the things we wanted in the Innistrad set is we were trying to set a
certain mood to the set. And the mood was one of suspense. And so what I wanted
to do is say, things that naturally happen in the game, that I normally don’t
worry about, all of a sudden I have to worry about.
For example, let’s say I attack with a creature that I know
you can block. Now in normal Magic,
maybe you’re hinting you have a Giant Growth or you’re pretending you have a
Giant Growth. There’s one or two
spells I might have to enhance the creature. But in Innistrad, if I attack with a 2/2 and you have a 2/2 that can block
it, there’s a whole other layer.
It’s like, “Oh, well maybe he wants it to die. Because he
has morbid. And if I kill this creature, we can trade, but then he’ll get a
giant creature that normally wouldn’t be that big, but because I chose to kill
his creature, now he’s getting a bigger creature.” And so all of a sudden, morbid started
saying, “Oh, am I willing to make trades? Do I want to kill things?” And made
you have to think about it in a different way, which added some suspense.
Because normally, whether to block or not to block is not quite as suspenseful
as that.
So sometimes, you get cards because you’re trying to match
tone or mood. That’s another way that you can capture flavor. Sometimes, like
the Un-sets definitely do this, where
sometimes I’m inspired by I’m just trying to do something that’s fun and silly,
and like for example, Carnivorous Death Parrot. It’s a card from Unhinged.
So what the card does is, it makes you say something every
turn. Now, it just so happens, the things it makes you say, one word in the
sentence you have to say, I think it’s “Save one kill spell to deal with this
guy.” I think is what it says. And it turns out there’s five gotcha cards, if you say a particular word, you get the card back. Well, this
sentence says one word from each of the five cards in the cycle.
So we knew it’s this fun card that said, “Okay. We’re going
to make you have to say something.” And so it’s like, “Okay, well what…” That
card came from the flavor of saying, “Well, I want you to have to say
something,” and then we figured out that, “Oh, well it’s some kind of parrot.”
And that’s when we got to the idea that it mimics things that you say, that it
keeps saying the same thing.
In general, when you are trying to design something, like I
said, the inspiration for cards usually comes from having some nugget of
something that you want. On the flavor side, usually there’s some flavor that
you’re going for. I’m trying to match perceptions of a werewolf. I’m trying to
create suspense. I’m trying to be silly. That each of these examples is, well,
I started out knowing something about what I wanted.
Let’s dig into this a little bit. Which is, I talked about
this in my creativity
one, but it’s an important point, which is having a truly blank canvas is
daunting. It’s very daunting. When I say to you, “You may do absolutely
anything,” your brain just kind of freezes up. It’s like, “I’m not sure what I
want to do.” But the second you say to your brain, “Okay, here is a parameter…”
So for example, we have what we call hole-filling. Which is,
we go out to people, there’s an email we send out to people who have
volunteered within the company, and say, “Oh, here’s some holes we’ve made. We
need our help.”
And what we’ve discovered is, if I just say, “blue rare,” I
don’t get as good of cards as if I say, “blue rare enchantment.” Maybe if I
say, “I want a blue rare Johnny enchantment,” I will get much better results
than if I just say, “blue rare.”
And the reason is, if I just say “blue rare,” people don’t
know what to do. They’re not sure where to go from. But if I sort of just
pinpoint something, if I give you something to start with, it makes it much
easier. And that when you’re doing card creation, that is very, very important.
That you need to kind of lay the groundwork to get something for people to get
some tread off of.
My metaphor of the day is you get stuck, and you’re trying
to get your wheel out of mud or snow or whatever it’s stuck in. The thing you
always do is you put down something to get traction. So you can get out of it.
In a lot of ways you’re spinning your wheels—for a lot of people, the blank
page is spinning your wheels.
And that just putting a little down there, something to
focus on, will help immensely. And so when I’m making something, one of the
things that’s very important, and one of my jobs as both Head Designer and as
lead designer of a set, is to make a bullseye for my team so that they know
what we’re aiming for. What are we going for.
That for example, Day One, when I have a design team, I will
sit down, and I will say to the team, “This is my grand vision for what I
want.” Now, I might not know the details on Day One, but I have some general
sense of what direction I want to go in.
For example, Day One of Zendikar,
I sat down and I said, ”Guys,
this is a land block. We are going to explore all… I believe that there’s a lot
of space in land mechanics that we haven’t messed with. That’s where we’re
going to start.”
Now, over time we found landfall, and we found some
other land things, and we eventually realized that we needed a world, and we
came to adventure world, and we started building adventure world. So what I
said on Day One was not necessarily… we evolved during the course of the
design. But I gave my team a direction. And that—to be honest, being the lead
of a design, that your number one job as the lead designer is giving your team
a direction. Of telling them what to aim for.
And it’s not to say that people don’t occasionally come up
with fun blue sky things and just, “Here’s a neat idea” out of the blue. But
when you’re trying to get results and you’re trying to make cards, and Magic is daunting, I always talk about Magic being a hungry monster. It—it’s
very, very funny because one of the things—back when I used to work in
Hollywood many, many years ago, there was a comic. I don’t remember the name of
the comic.
But there was a—one comic was, it was called “New in Town.”
And the comic showed this person who goes, “Oh no, what if Paramount and Warner
Brothers and Columbia all want to hire me!” And it’s this idea like comes this
world of possibilities, and it seems like that the problem you’re going to have is like, embarrassment of
riches, that everybody will want to work with you.
And then the reality of Hollywood, or of any career sort of
thing, is “Hey, you’ve got to earn our spot.” And it’s hard. And it’s very hard
to get your opening break. Magic
cards have the same sort of quality, that when people start designing Magic cards, the worries they have are
really funny worries. Of like, “What if I can’t get all my ideas onto cards?”
And I’m like, “Magic is… trust me,
you will have the ability to spill out all your ideas. And Magic will soak them up and then go, “Give me some more ideas.”
It is not—one of the things about designing Magic cards is, I mean, I don't know
the right ratio. I always talk about doing like 99 to 1. Or—you make a lot of
cards vs. cards that see print. A lot of cards. Because you make a whole bunch
of cards, and of the cards you make, only a tiny portion get into the file. And
then cards that are in the file are constantly being changed, and being kicked
out or upgraded or tweaked. And so the idea that you make a card, and then the
finished product has that card, that’s a tiny, tiny portion of what you make.
And so it is definitely interesting that when people start
doing design, they’re really, really worried that they’ll come up with a great
idea, and like, “We gotta do it now.” And that one of the things you learn is,
that you have to put the cards where they belong. That you might have an
awesome, awesome card, but if it doesn’t make sense in this set, then you’ve
got to save it. You’ve got to save it for another set. Save it for the place
where it makes sense.
Which segues into the Melvinian side. So one of the things
that happens is, when you are making cards, that you have to hit a bulls-eye.
The set wants to do specific things. And so what tends to happen is, when you
make cards that don’t fit the set but do something interesting, sometimes they
fit. But usually, if it’s not gelling with what the set is doing, the correct
answer is, “Remember it, put it aside, and then wait until you find a place to
use it.” And a lot of Magic designs
have come about because like, “Oh. Well, this is not the right place for it,
but let’s find the right place for it.”
For example, suspend. The suspend mechanic in Time Spiral was originally designed for
I think Saviors of Kamigawa. Like, it didn’t make sense in a third set, it
needed more space to breathe, it felt more like a major mechanic than a minor
mechanic. So we saved it.
And that when we were starting Time Spiral, we’re like, “Okay, here’s a mechanic that we like that
maybe will make sense here.” And we were toying about with maybe doing
time-based mechanics. And here suspend was part—like, “Oh, that fits really well
in a set about time-based mechanics.”
And so one of the things that you learn, and this is an
important lesson, it takes time, is that you need to save things for where they
make the most sense. And it’s really, really hard to make something that you
think is awesome, and then hold onto it. And not do it right away.
Because there’s this fear, like, “I’m working on this set
right now. And so right now I want to do this card, because I want people to
see this card seems possible.” I made an awesome card. I want the public to see
this card as soon as they humanly can see this card, because this card’s so
awesome I want them to see it! And the answer is, well, you are doing a
disservice to the set if you are putting a [card] in because the card is
awesome in a vacuum and not because the card is awesome in this set.
And that is a really hard lesson, something that takes
people a while to get to. To realize that, “Look, Magic is going to constantly require stuff of you, if you have good
cards, good cards will see the light of da. Good ideas will see the light of
day.” And the reason is because Magic
is so hungry for new content.
But you have to sort of save things for where they go. So
another big place where we get cards sometimes is we go, “Oh, I have a neat
idea…” Like, I talked about Zendikar
earlier. We had a neat idea for a bunch of different land mechanics. Now, the
funny thing is, a lot of the places I thought we were going to go, I knew that
we had a lot of neat land ideas, so I’m like, “Oh, maybe we’ll do this. Maybe
we’ll do that.”
And it turns out, landfall was not where I started, but as
we explored and figured out where land shined, landfall came out. And so it’s
not always that you end up where you start. But one way you come up with your
ideas is just saying, “Here is a neat space.”
So one of my jobs, as Head Designer, is the way we think of
this is, to use my mining metaphor. Imagine we are the seven dwarfs mining for
jewels from the mine. Well, if you always go to the same part of the mine, well
at some point you’re going to find all the things that are there. And so part
of design is finding other rich design space. Other veins of design, we call
it.
And so what happens is, part of Head Designer is, when I see
something interesting, I might go, “Oh, that’s cool. Okay, we’re going to save
that and use it somewhere.” And sometimes, like Zendikar’s the perfect example, it’s the jumping-off point for
where we start. Other times, it’s like, “Oh, well we want to do Thing X.”
So like for example, one of the things that happened in Scars of Mirrodin, New Phyrexia to be technical, is that I
knew I wanted the Phyrexians as they slowly changed over the [Mirrans], to have
an artifactness to them. That at some point, you’d see that the—I wanted to
convey that the Phyrexians are starting to turn the [Mirrans] into artifacts.
And so when we started New
Phyrexia, I thought we were going to use what I call twobrid, which are
hybrid things that it’s a two colorless mana or one colored mana. We
did a cycle of them in Shadowmoor.
And I’m like, “Okay, this might convey some artifactness in
that here’s something that could be colored, but oh, it could be colorless.”
And in the end, that didn’t work out, but we ended up with Phyrexian mana, and one of the things I like about Phyrexian mana is, Phyrexian mana
has that quality of artifactness in that you can play it in a deck that’s not
that color. Which is a very strong artifact quality. And then, we took the
permanents that had Phyrexian mana and made them colored artifacts. So that we
further conveyed that.
But the place we started from was trying to figure out how
to get across—like I wanted to use twobrid mana somewhere. I wanted to use it.
I liked it from Shadowmoor. And I
thought that was the spot. So it’s funny, we didn’t end up there, but that’s
where we started.
And that’s another sort of theme of today’s podcast, which
is where we end up and where we start are not the same thing. The important
thing we make a card is to give you something to go on. The fact that it
changes is fine. The reason you want the idea, the germ of something, is to get
your mind spinning.
And once again, remember that the way that the human brain
works is that your neural pathways, you will go down the most common pathway,
meaning your brain has figured out how to make things happen. And it’s not that
it’s lazy, it’s just—it’s efficient.
And so when you approach something, you tend to come to the
same solutions, because you just use the same neural pathways. And what you’ll
notice a lot of times is, when you’re trying to solve a problem, you just keep
coming up with the same answer. “I keep getting the same answer.”
So one of the tricks to do that is, if you want to get a
different answer, you’ve got to put different input into your brain. That one
of the important things is, that you need to—if you want a different output,
you need a different input.
And so sometimes, when I’m stuck on a problem, what I will
do is I will throw some artificial thing in just to make me think differently.
Like, I will say, “Okay, okay. I need to do this—I want to do a creature, I’m
stuck. I want to do a black creature. What’s a black character…” I mean black
as in color pie black. “What’s a black character, or what’s a red character?”
Whatever, you know, “What’s a character that embodies that?”
So maybe I’m… let’s say for example I’m doing black/blue.
And I go, “What’s a black/blue creature?” I might go, “Lex Luthor! Archnemesis of
Superman.” And I go, “Okay. I am going to make a black/blue creature inspired
by Lex Luthor. Even though Lex Luthor’s got nothing to do with anything, I just
want to give me a pathway to go down.” Of something to just jump-start me.
And by the way. Sometimes it’s less direct than that.
Sometimes, “I need to make a green common. I’m going to be inspired by…a leaf. Think about a leaf. Or think about a
koala bear.” Or just something. I will just pick almost at random. I talked
about this in my creativity podcast, which is there is a great power to
randomness in helping you be creative. In that sometimes, by forcing you to
make connections you’ve never made, you just find new space.
I talked about this, that a lot of what I believe creativity
is, is finding a way to take A and B and find connections between them that
normally aren’t there. Or normally you don’t think about. And one of the neat
exercises is, when you do that, you say, “I’m going to take two disparate
things. Twizzlers and the Joker. What do they have in common? Oh, they’re both
twisted. They both have some red in them. They both make people smile.” (laughs) For different reasons.
So the thing that is fun is just trying to—when you’re
creating cards, sometimes you’re jumpstarting yourself by giving you something
to jumpstart off of. And that’s another place that I’ll get ideas from is I’ll
just say, “Okay…”
Okay. Well, maybe I’ll look up and see what otherNaturalizes we’ve done. And then I’ll think of, “Oh, what are the ways we could
do Naturalize?” Have we ever done a cantrip Naturalize? Oh yeah, we’ve done a
cantrip Naturalize. Have we ever done a Naturalize that’s a sorcery? Yes, we’ve
done it. And I can start running through things and I can look, and then at
some point I’ll stumble on something that I haven’t done, I’m like, “Have we
ever done a Naturalize where…”
Everything I’ll come up with off the top of my head, we
probably have done because we’ve done a lot of Naturalizes. But that’s another
good vantage point of starting with is sometimes saying, “Here’s the hole I’m
trying to fill.” A literal hole from the design skeleton.
So another place I sometimes get ideas is—this one’s a
little less structured, is sometimes—I mean, I have
dreamed up cards. I mean, the story I’ve told, I think I’ve told this
story, but the entwine mechanic literally came to me in a dream. Came
to me in a dream, I’d been thinking about it nonstop, Bill felt like we needed
one more mechanic, I was racking my brain to come up with it, I literally was
asleep, I dreamed it up, I remember in the dream I’m like, “I think I’m
dreaming, and this is a good mechanic,” and I woke myself up and then wrote it
down. Because I knew I might forget it.
And so where do cards come from? All sorts of places.
Sometimes I have actually made cards based on art. So one of the things that
happens with the art is, normally we make cards before art happens. But
sometimes, cards get scrapped after art comes in. And what that means is, “Well,
we’re committed to this piece of art because it’s already been done. So hey, we’ve
got to make a new card, but we have to make it to this piece of art.”
For example, there’s a couple pieces in Unglued—Gus and Temp of the Damned were both what we call
slush art. Were art, they were made for a card, the card never got made, but we
owned the art, so we put it in a file, saying, “Okay, someday, if somebody finds
a reason to use this, we can use it.”
And so when I was doing Unglued,
I said, “Okay, let me look at the slush pile,” and there were two cards, and I’m
like, “Okay, I can make cards for these two cards.” And I have no idea what Gus
was originally, but I made it Gus.
So sometimes you can come from art. I have actually on a few
occasions done design based on flavor text. Un-sets
also mess around with that a little bit more. Un-sets are also a very very good example where sometimes I have a
concept for the art or a concept for the name, or… oh, designing to names. For example,
one of the things we did in Innistrad,
and I started doing it in all my design teams now, is I had the creative team
person, who was Jenna Helland for Innistrad, come up with awesome names. “We’re
doing Gothic horror? Give me awesome names.”
And she would say, “Okay… Evil Twin.” And in the meeting, we
came up with Evil Twin. Jar of Eyeballs. In the meeting, we
come up with Jar of Eyeballs. That was Dark
Ascension. But Jenna came up with names for both Innistrad and Dark Ascension,
and we would just design to the name. Top-down from the name. That’s what the
concept is.
Sometimes, you just have a weird mechanic you want to build
around. Sometimes it’s just like, “I have a neat idea. I don't know what to do with
this, but it’s a neat idea.” For example, we knew at one point we wanted to do
a zero-toughness creature. And it’s like, “Okay, is it vanilla? Is there something
more to it?” That sometimes you’ll start with a germ of something. And then you
figure out where to put it.
But the common bond of today’s podcast is, it always comes
from somewhere, meaning that if you want to make something, you need to jump-start
from somewhere. And so there’s many, many ways to do that. Like I said. You can
look at flavor. You can look at part of cards. You can look at mood and tone. I
mean, it’s just what do you want. And like I said, I have literally, literally designed
cards because I’m making
a card based on a donut. Just to jump into the white space. Just like, “Okay,
I’m going to try to make something.”
And when you do something from a place you’ve never done before,
it is a great thing, because you will get new neural pathways, you’ll go to new
places you never thought of. And that one of the things that’s real fun for me,
like when I was doing Theros is, I’d
never made a set based on Greek mythology. That was never my inspiration. So
all of a sudden, I was inspired to do all sorts of things, because I had this
neat inspiration. And it’s like, “Okay. How do I capture Icarus? How do I capture Hercules?” How do I capture
each of these different things (???) that I wanted to do.
And, for example, my favorite card from Theros is Rescue from the Underworld. Now, that card—there’s
no way in a million years I would ever make that card cold. The only reason
that card exists is, I was trying to do the tale of Orpheus, or I was trying to—you
send someone down to rescue a person who has died. And like, “Oh, well, that’s really
Greek, and it’s pretty neat.”
And I stretched a little bit. Black doesn’t—it kind of let black
flicker a little bit, although black can sacrifice things, black can reanimate
things. All the pieces of it were black, although it kind of came together to
do something that black doesn’t normally do. But it was super, super flavorful.
But like I said, I only got there because I just took a different vantage point
for inspiration.
So anyway, that’s—for people listening today, I know people listen
to my podcast for reasons beyond just to hear me talk, that my goal today as I’m
talking about inspiration is that you have to start from somewhere. But you can
start from anywhere.
So the question is, “What inspires you?” The answer is, “Everything.
But not nothing.” Or maybe everything’s the wrong word. Anything
inspires me. Not everything, I guess that’s technically incorrect. Anything inspires
me. But nothing can’t. And that when I sit down to make a card, or make a set,
or make a mechanic, or whatever, I—the biggest trick that I have is, I just
define a space for me. And I try to define the space that it’s something I haven’t
defined before, so that I’m looking at it with a fresh set of eyes. With a fresh
set of neural pathways, if you will.
So anyway, that, my friends, is what I have to say about
inspiration and where inspiration comes from. So I hope you enjoyed it. Like I
said, today—funny thing is like, “Where did today’s podcast come from?” Today’s
podcast, I literally—here’s how it happened. I actually got in the car, and I
said, “Okay. I want to do a podcast today, I’m not sure what to do.” I said, “Okay.
What’s a question that I get all the time?” And I said, “What do you do at
work?” And I’m like, “All right, I already did that podcast.” “Where do your
ideas come from?” “Oh, I’ve never done that.” So today’s inspiration, today’s
podcast literally was just, “Okay, I’m going to take a question I get all the
time and make a podcast about it.” And that’s where it came from.
So anyway, I’m now in the parking lot, in my parking space.
So it’s time for me to be making Magic.
Talk to you guys next time.
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