9/5/14 Episode 154: Design 101

All podcast content by Mark Rosewater

I’m pulling out of the parking lot! We all know what that means! It means Mark dropped off his daughter at camp! But it also means it’s time for Drive to Work.

So, today, one of the things—I wrote an article a while back called “Design 101.” And what the article was about was, there are a lot—I have a chance to work with a lot of designers, and I noticed that beginning designers tend to have similar mistakes they make. And so Design 101 was, “Well let’s talk about the most common mistakes that I see with beginning designers.” And walk through the mistakes. So if you want to design cards, well, here’s a good thing to realize are the common early pitfalls.

And so what I did in the article is I broke up my lessons into five lessons, although there are a lot of sublessons. But today I was going to walk through those.

Okay. So number one—and in fact, this is probably the number one mistake I see. People make cards too complicated. So what does that mean? Well, it means a couple things. First off, it means there’s just too much going on in the card. There’s too many abilities.

I think what happens is, when you first start designing, you are just bristling with ideas. And you’re like, “Okay, this is a cool idea, and this is a cool idea, and this is a cool idea! Let’s put them all on one card!” And the answer is—a couple things to understand. One, when you are designing, what you want to do is come up with a cool idea. And then get everything else out of the way so your cool idea can shine through.

And what happens is, people think like they have—let’s say you come up with three cool ideas. If you put all three cool ideas on one card, they’re just fighting for space and fighting for attention. And in the end, none of them get the attention they deserve or need.

Where if you put each cool idea on its own card, then each card has a chance to shine. And that’s a very, very important idea when you’re talking about design is, the goal of design is to do the least amount you can do that gets the job done you’re trying to do. I talked a lot about elegance, and a lot about cleanliness.

A lot of that comes from the basic idea of—for example, I talk a lot about writing. In writing, the thing they keep drumming into you is, tell your story. Anything that isn’t needed to tell your story, take it out. If your story works without it, take it out. If your card works without the other ability, take it out. The goal is not to show how clever you are all on one card.

And once again, there’s another mistake that a lot of beginners make, which is they’re so excited that they just want to show everything off all at once. “Look-at-all-the-cool-things-I-can-do-and-I-can-do-all-these-amazing-things-and-it’s-all-on-this-card!” And that’s a mistake. A card that stands out is a card that has a purpose, and does its purpose, and does it well, and that’s what it’s about.

A lot of things—one of the big lessons I’ve learned over the years is to enjoy the simplicity and the elegance of a card. That if I can make a card do just one thing, and that one thing is interesting, that is amazing. Don’t throw other things in. Let it do the one thing.

 

So first and foremost, people make things too complicated because they’re just doing too much. As a general rule of thumb, when you are making a card, for example, if you are doing a common card, pretty much common cards should do one thing. Even uncommon cards often should do one thing. Sometimes they do two things. And you get to rare and mythic, every once in a while they do three things, that should be rare. And obviously there’s a few exceptions, Morphling whatever, but you have to be careful. And here’s another thing. Actually I’ll get to that in a second.

Okay, so number one: too much stuff. Cut out the stuff.               Cut out the clutter. Figure out what matters about your card and keep that thing. Design is about focus, and it’s about figuring out what you want your card to be. I’ll talk about focus in a little bit.

Okay. The second reason the card can be too complicated is you add a lot of what I call flavor flourishes. The example might be, I’m making a knight. Oh, a wonderful knight, and he has his lance. And so I give him protection from dragons. Ha ha! Get it? He’s a knight. He has protection from dragons.

Okay, now let’s actually walk through—I mean, that’s cute, but let’s walk through a little bit what that means, okay? So every single dragon we have is a flying creature. Dragons fly. That’s one of the rules. Okay, barring a green dragon in Mirage that jumps. [NLH--Sad dragons] But dragons fly. All dragons fly.

Okay. So if a dragon is attacking, and your knight doesn’t fly, without some aid to make it fly, it’s going to be really hard to stop dragons. Okay. When it attacks, the dragon can’t block it, but normally when you have a giant dragon, you’re attacking with the dragon. You don’t tend to keep it back that much. So the circumstances—now, the dragon could have some activated ability that can do damage to creatures, some fire breath sort of analogy thing. And there’s a few ones that have that. But not a lot.

And so it’s kind of like, “Okay. I put this on, most games it’s not going to matter. I’m not going to be able to block the dragon anyway, I’m not going to get by the dragon because odds are it’s not going to be there blocking me, most of them don’t have breath weapons that are going to hit me as a creature.” And so it’s cute, but does it do anything?” And that’s one of the important things is, make sure that if you spend the time and the energy to add something, that you think that it will matter some of the time.

Now, I’m not saying you never get to do protection from dragons. We do trinket text from time to time. But it’s very common with beginning cards to just overrun with trinket text. And also, I should note, we don’t tend to do trinket text at common. We tend to do trinket text at rare. Rare is the place where like, “We’re doing something—we’re doing a card and we want to give it a little extra flair. Okay, we’ll give it this ability you don’t normally see.”

And the card at rare is kind of doing what it needs to do. But trinket text is a little extra flair. At common it just adds complication. Because even though it might not actually do something, you have to think about what it does.

Okay, the third thing that makes cards too complicated is people just—one of the things about complexity in general is, common is supposed to be the simplest card. If you look at your card, for example at common, and you have too many lines of text, odds are you’re saying something complex.

A very common thing also that happens for beginning designers is they make a card, and they know what the card does. They get it. But when they write it out, other people don’t get it. And that one of the things I always say is, early on, write out your cards as real as you can write them out. I’m not saying they have to be perfectly templated. But at least in a way that makes people understand what the intent is.

And then see if people get that intent. Does it make sense to them? And I’ve talked about this a lot in my column and a little bit in my podcast. About how important intuition is, meaning does your mechanic work the way people think it works? And if you make something and every time someone tries to use it, their first inclination is wrong, well that’s not the problem of the people, it’s the problem of the mechanic. Meaning if you’re trying to do something, and everybody’s sort of intuition, everybody’s gut sense is to do it differently than what you want, you have to rethink what you’re doing.

And one of the classic examples is when we made suspend in Time Spiral—sorry, I have the hiccups. Everybody, as soon as the creature was un-suspended, would attack with it. Because like, “I’ve waited four turns, I’m attacking with my creature.” And so finally we just said, “Okay, we’re just going to give it haste, because everybody thinks they can attack with it.”

And the reality was, “Oh, well it comes into play. Creatures that come into play have summoning sickness so it can’t attack.” But everybody just like… “I’m waiting for it, I’m waiting for it, I’m waiting for it, ooh, I got it! Okay, I’m going to attack.” And what we realized is, enough people did that that like, “Okay, I guess we’ll just make that the rule, because everybody’s doing that.”

And that’s important to make sure that when you’re designing, you have to make sure that the essence of what you’re doing makes sense. And so another way that beginners can make things really complicated is they make cards that don’t quite make sense. Sometimes because that’s just—there’s a lot going on, sometimes because it just the rules they’re using are sort of complex. Sometimes they’re just being anti-intuitive, meaning they’re kind of doing things that’s not what you would expect to do.

So anyway, to recap, cards are too complicated because they have too many abilities, they have too much flavor flourishes, or they are too hard to understand because they’re not working within the system to make things easy to understand. And sometimes  just  plain complexity of the rules, sometimes it’s just fighting intuition, but anyway. Those are why cards tend to be too complicated.

Okay. Problem number two. Abilities do not have synergy. Okay, so I talked about before how more novice designers love putting lots of things on their cards. “It does this! And it does this! And it does this! It slices! It dices! It makes julienne fries!” I just dated myself there. It’s an old, old commercial. For the Ginsu knife! [NLH--Actually the Veg-o-matic.] Because in Japan, the hand can be used like a knife. But it can’t slice a tomato.

Anyway, so one of the things when you’re making your card, that if you have more than one ability, those abilities have to make some interconnective sense with each other. And there’s a couple ways that they go about that. One is mechanically being relevant. So if I have firebreathing, and I have first strike, I go, “Well, what do those have to do with each other?” I go, “Oh, well firebreathing increases my power, first strike cares about power, oh, they are synergistic abilities. By firebreathing, I make my first strike more effective.”

Okay, the second way that you can make it work is if there is a flavor connection. So for example, on Olivia Voldaren in Innistrad, she’s a vampire. Queen of the vampires. And she can kill things, or she can make them into vampires and then control them. Well, what does doing damage to things and turning them into vampires or controlling them—oh, I get it, she’s the lord of the vampires.

She bites them, either she drains all their blood and she kills them, or she doesn’t and she turns them into a vampire. When [they’re a] vampire, she can control them, because she’s queen of the vampires. Those abilities, without that flavor, might not make sense. But with the flavor, you go, “Oh, I see what that is.” 

There’s a classic example, Auriok Siege Sled. So the card in design was like, “Magnet Master!” And what it does is it forces artifact creatures to block or keeps them from blocking. And the idea was that it had this magnetic feel. When that card actually got made, they took off the flavor, and it made a little less sense what was going on.

But in general, if you have more than one ability, the abilities have to connect together. Now, a common—there’s one more trick. So it could mechanically have synergy, it could flavor-wise have synergy. The one other thing you can do is, if you do something in which the two things feel connected. So for example, there’s a card, I forget the name of it. But you unsummon one of your creatures and one of your opponent’s creatures. Now, you’re really doing two things. The reason it doesn’t feel [disconnected] is, “Oh, well what I’m doing on my side, I’m doing on your side.” There’s a parallel to what’s happening.

And so if your mechanics have some connective parallel, even if they’re different things, the fact that they’re connected will also make it feel cohesive. But the lesson here is, you have to make sure that the things you’re putting on your creature work together and make some sense.

And the reason that’s important is, if they don’t—A, It’s a little muddy, it’s a little hard to understand. Because the way people understand cards is the cards feel like a cohesive whole. I talked earlier about focus. Let me bring focus up.

One of the things you want to do when you’re making a card for a new player is, you want to create something that pulls them in and intrigues them and makes them want to know more. That when you see a card, they want to go, “Oh, neat!” Meaning right away they get a sense of what it is. And then they go, “Ooh, what do I do with that?” or “How do I use it?” Or you know. You want to pull people in with your card.

If your card doesn’t make logical sense, if the pieces don’t go together, if it seems to do something that—you know, you’ve created a “What?” moment out of your audience. Now, a little of that is fine. We definitely do moments where we make cards and you’re like, “What?!” But you don’t want a lot of that, okay? You want a little bit of it. You want the “What?!” to be a spice. Just a little tiny bit.

And I think people overestimate the idea of disorienting the audience as being a positive thing. A little bit of disorientation is fun. Getting a little bit dizzy’s okay. But you don’t want to make people too dizzy, then they get sick. That you want to make sure people understand what your card is and can enjoy the card. And so when I talk about making it less complicated and making synergy, you want to create a focus for your audience. That when they come together, they see it and they get it. It comes together.

Because what happens is, one of two things happens when someone reads the card. They go, “Huh…” or they go, “Huh?” And when they go, “Huh?” you are making strain. You are keeping them from enjoying themselves.

Now, like I said, a little of that is okay, but you don’t want too much of that. That you have too much of that, and they go, “Ahh, I don’t get this.” And they just want to give up. You want to entice. When you design, you want to pull people in, and do things that make them want to do more.

Remember, I talked about this in my Ten Things podcast. The goal of good game design is you want to—each piece should make the audience want to do more. And then you end before that sensation goes away. “Oh, that’s cool. Oh, that’s cool. Oh, that’s cool. Oh, it’s over.” And then they go, “Ooh, that was awesome, I want to play again.”

But if they go, “What? What am I doing? What’s this? Okay, what am I doing? Okay, I’m bored. How much more do I have to do this?” Then they’re never playing your game again. And that cards are the same thing, which is one of the things I talked about is to see cards in the microcosm of your game. That your game—you want to think of it as sort of… take a microscope, how you look at something and then you can notch it and go in, and notch it and go in. That there’s different rungs, if you will, a lot of metaphors here, of your game design.

And that you want to go down to the smallest piece. For Magic that’s a card. And you want the card to sort of in a vacuum stand on its own. I’m not saying you can’t have cards that interact with other cards. Obviously you can. But I want the card, that if it does something, it gives that hint that there’s other things that it’s going to do something with.

And that you want people—because we don’t know what the first card is. We never know the order you’re going to see the cards. So I want to make every card—I want to assume that every card is the first card you see in the set, and that goes, “Oh, I want to see more cards. This is awesome.” That I want every card to pull you in and entrance you and make you want to see more cards.

Okay. Next mistake. Is they ignore the basic rules of Magic. I’m not talking about the actual rules, we’ll get to that in a second. What I mean is, there’s certain things—Magic does certain things. There’s a structure set up to Magic.

One of the problems I find in general when I get new designers, like I’ve had a bunch of really good designers, but they come to Magic and don’t know Magic. And the first thing they run into is there’s a lot of internal rules. There’s a lot of craftsmanship to Magic. If you want to be a good Magic designer, you have to learn the craft.

And the craft is 21 years old. There’s a lot going on. So number one. What do you gotta learn? The color pie. You need to know what the colors do. You need to make your cards. Because one of the things you do is if you make a card, and it’s like a blue ability that’s on a red card, that’s not a red ability, the first thing R&D says is, “Huh?” Right. I mean, you don’t want “Huh?” You want “Yeah!”  Right? So, you want to be careful. Like one of the rules—I mean, there are rules to Magic design. You need to know those rules.

Now. That doesn’t mean you can’t ever break the rules. Magic does break its own rules. But you need to break them because you understand them. So for example, take Picasso. Picasso is known for Cubism. If you know your art. And Cubism is the idea that I can represent something not so realistic. Literally he’s using cubes of color. Right? That I’m symbolically showing you something, but I’m not showing you in a realistic way.

Now, Picasso went to art school. Learned to draw a bowl of fruit, I assume. It wasn’t that he was incapable of drawing realistic paintings. It was that he understood it, and then chose to break the rules. You want to break the rules? Well, understand the rules first. And when you’re a beginning designer, don’t break the rules. Okay? When you’re first designing, start by designing within the rules.

There’s this great temptation to design your first Magic card and go, “I want to do something that’s never been done before!” Like, “Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa. Let’s start with doing something that’s been done before.” That you’re trying to learn the ropes.

If I’m trying to learn something, I don’t want to do the thing that’s never done. That’s not going to help me learn. Do the thing that has been done. Make an awesome red card that really is a red card. Don’t make an awesome red card that’s debatably a red card. That’s not where you start. Once again. Magic does break its own rules. But that’s not where you start.

Next. Card types. There are rules about what card types are and what they do. A very common thing, for example, I’ll see people that will make an instant or sorcery that creates a permanent effect. And it’s like, ”Well, you probably want that to be an enchantment. You’re going to create an effect that’s affecting the board state, will give a reminder to the audience of what that state is. And give them the means to deal with it if they need to deal with it.” And it’s just a lot of things. Understanding card type rules. Understanding the rules of card types.

Next, rarity. If you’re designing sets and building rarity into it, understand rarity. One of the most common things—when I see beginners’ commons, one of the most common things—I’m using “common” a lot. One of the very common… it’s hard not to say “common.”

When I’m looking at a new designer’s commons, a very frequent occurrence is that their commons are uncommon. So understand the rarities. Understand what they do. I did a whole podcast on rarities. [NLH—I have not transcribed this yet.]

Finally, just general flavor. Like, understand that certain colors just do certain things. And that if you try to take something out of red and have it be really fire-based, it’s going to feel weird. Because fire’s kind of done in red. And so why are you making a black fire card? And now, once again. I’m not saying there aren’t exceptions that will work, but you have to be really careful of the flavor.

Okay, next rule. So one of (???)… ignore basic rules. Don’t ignore basic rules. Number one problem is ignoring basic rules, understand the craft. My point there is, understand what colors mean. What card types mean. What rarities mean. Even like what creature types mean. There are things elves do and things elves don’t do. And a lot of it’s tied to green. But understand that.

And part of being good at the game, being good at design is being a historian and studying what the game has done. Like one of the number one problems I find, and like even like I said, experienced designers, that if they don’t know Magic, a lot of the problems we have early on is just them rediscovering what Magic has already figured out. And so you want to be good, study it. Study Magic history.

By the way, one of the best ways to become a designer in Magic and get good at it, go read Gatherer. Literally. A great, great assignment is, start from Alpha, just go chronologically through Magic. You will learn a lot. You will go, “Oh, wow, they did this, they did that…” You will learn a lot. It is very interesting to see kind of how Magic evolved, and what we have done and haven’t done.

Okay. Number four. The card doesn’t follow the rules. And by that I mean the rule rules! The rules of the game of Magic. So another common thing—I can now say “common” because I’m not talking about commons. Is the beginners don’t either understand the rules of Magic, or feel that they are above as designers the rules of Magic. That is not the case. Your cards need to work within the rules. That is important. For multiple reasons.

Once again. Let me tell a little story. So I, in my freelance days, I did a lot of freelance work where I would go to TV shows and I would do what’s called a pitch. Where they would give me a rough outline of what they wanted, and then I would go in and I’d go, “Here’s some ideas for stories.” And I usually pitched anywhere between five and ten ideas. Like, “Here’s an episode, here’s an episode.” And I would write the whole episode, plot it all out, and put it in a pitch to them.

So one of the shows I had an opportunity to pitch for, multiple times, I never sold anything, but I did pitch a bunch, was to Star Trek: The Next Generation. Which was awesome. I love Star Trek.

So I remember one day, I’m sitting down, and I say to them, “Okay. I got a time travel story for you.” The guy goes, “Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa. Stop. We don’t take time travel pitches.” And I’m like, “What?!” And what he said is, “Look. Obviously the show does time travel, but it’s very complicated and it requires a very deft hand. You know what? We’re going to do the time travel stuff, hey, people from the outside who are going to pitch, let’s not pitch the super complicated stuff. Pitch us some more straightforward stuff.”

And it’s the same basic thing I will say to you as a beginning designer, which is: Magic can do all sorts of crazy things. It can break its own rules, it can—there’s lots of nutty things Magic can do. But when you’re first starting, color within the lines. Figure out the rules that can be done. When you first are starting to get your legs as a Magic designer, stay within the rules that exist. Make cards that will work.

And Magic rules are pretty flexible. There’s lots going on. That’s not limiting you that much. Now, that doesn’t say that we as professionals don’t do this all the time. Yes, I make cards that the rules don’t work for, and I have to go to the Rules Manager and say, “Okay, okay, if I do this, what happens?” When I make split cards, well, it made all sorts of rules about “What’s the converted mana cost of a split card?” Yes, that had to be figured out.  But on some level, that’s not where to start. I know there’s this tendency to go, “Here’s this amazing thing and I’ve just never done it and let me do that thing!” And like I’m not saying you can’t get there.

But if you’re trying to learn the ropes, learn how to design, the first thing I recommend doing is--you want to have a great assignment, is pick some fun flavor. Pick a real-world source for inspiration. You can even pick a story for inspiration. Pick something in which you have something to guide you. And then try to figure out how within the constraints of the color pie and the Magic rules and all the pieces, make cards that work. Make them simple, make them clean, make them clear, but prove that you can make nice Magic cards.

The most important thing is not to show how crazy you can be, but to show how consistent you can be. And with time, yes, you’ll get to the point where you make crazy things. Part of the fun of making Magic design is making crazy things. But—and this takes some constraint, but I believe that if you want to sort of get better at being a—let me say this. If you’re just having fun and you don’t care, and it’s not about improving yourself, it’s just like, “Here’s crazy cards! Woohoo!” Have fun. Go to town. I’m not trying to stop you in the least.

If your goal in designing Magic cards is you kind of want to learn the craft, well then what I’m saying to you is, start small. Start well, well within—color within the lines. Work within something that’s a known understood thing. Because when you’re trying to learn something, it is much, much harder to learn something when you don’t have a basis to lean on.

If I’m going to play a musical instrument, I want to play musical instruments where it’s like, one note, another note. Probably not far away from the first note. I want to go nice simple sequential order. Are there musical things where there’s multiple notes at the same time and this hand’s doing that and that hand’s… yeah, there is. That’s not for beginners. That’s not what you’re going to learn.

I’m not going to sit down on piano and play a piece where each hand is working independently. I’m never going to learn that. I’m just going to give up. I’m not going to learn. But if I sit down and I go, “Okay, I’m learning ‘Chopsticks,” hey, it’s simple, but you need simple. And I think in card design that’s important.

Okay, number five, I put this in my article. Number five I would argue almost is a development thing and not a design thing. But it has enough rolled into design that I’m going to talk about it. Which is your card is too powerful. Everybody seems to want to make their card crazy powerful. Because, and here’s the important thing, in Magic, cards that are more powerful are more popular. Because power makes things popular. Why? Because people like winning the game of Magic.

And so when you’re making your own cards, there’s a tendency to go, “I’m just going to push my cards. I’m going to make it really good. Why would I bother making weak cards?” And the answer is, if you’re truly trying to make a Magic set, you need to have some balance to your cards. If every card is just optimized, it’s really warping what your set is and how it will play, and you’re not learning a lot.

I’m not saying—for example, like when I cost cards in design, I cost them so that they’re equally costed. Right? I cost them so that any card could see play in Limited. Which is a little different from how we do it in normal constructed printed cards, but I am not making—if one card is overcosted, then you play that card and you learn nothing.

Like in playtesting, one single card that is over the line can ruin an entire playtest. Because people just play that card and like, “Well, we’ve learned that that card’s broken. Well great. I’m glad we had a whole playtest to learn that that one card is broken.”

That’s why I have my development representative on my design team, my dev rep, always go through the set before each playtest. Just cost cards to make sure the cards are costed fair. I know—one of the things that will skew you when you make your own cards is to go, “What do I enjoy when  I see cards?”

But be aware that it’s very easy to fall into the trap of—what I will call “the sparkly trap.” Which is you go, “Ooh, you know what’s fun? Powerful cards are fun, and things that break color pie are fun…” There’s things that are exciting, but the reason they’re exciting—so I’ll use my metaphor here, which is if you show cake to a little kid. Or anybody, really. Icing gets a lot—icing is sweet and it definitely is something that sort of grabs your attention.

But you need cake for the icing. If I just gave you an entire cake’s worth, an entire cake-size bit of icing, that would not be very satisfying. What makes icing icing is, there’s a lot of cake. Most of it’s cake. And the cake is sweet, but it’s not as sweet as the icing, and the point is, the icing is nice—it adds something when it’s in the right amount. And you want your set to have some splash, and you want to do cool things, and you want that there. But that’s not the main gist of what you’re doing.

Like one of the things that’s funny is when people ask me to talk about design, they’re really excited to hear about the crazy things. And I’ve talked about the crazy things. People want to hear those stories.

But most of design is not making the crazy mechanic that does something we’ve never done before. It’s making another vanilla. Making a French vanilla. Making a simple spell. A lot of Magic  is going, “I need to do something simple, what works here? What’s a vanilla creature that would work here? What’s a simple spell that would work here?”

And that a lot of making Magic design is trying to figure out how to do what is necessary—once again. Making the simplest way possible. So if you are trying to improve yourself a game designer, Magic designer, game designer, whatever, you need to find it within yourself not to make the thing that excites your player. And you need a little of that. But the thing that will satisfy your player.

And what I mean by that is, let’s say—to use a different metaphor. Let’s say I’m making a meal. And maybe in my meal, at the end I will have a dessert, and the dessert will excite them. But I want to make the whole meal. I want to make—the thing that make it work is—oh, here’s a different metaphor for you. I love my metaphors. Never metaphor I didn’t like.

Imagine you’re cooking something. You’re making a recipe. Now, one way to make a recipe is to go, “You know what people really like? People love sugar. Sugar’s awesome. You know what they also really like? They love salt. Salt is awesome. You know what else they really like? They really like cinnamon. And they really like…” And you can just start naming all these different things. “People love ketchup. People love ice cream. People love…” And then, “I’m just going to throw all these things people love into my recipe.”

Is  it going to be any good? No. No, it’s not. The way a recipe works is, there’s one or two things that are your focal point, and then you surround it with flour. With egg. You—part of what makes  a recipe a recipe is, there’s a lot of necessary ingredients you need to make it work.

Now, there’s the panache, there’s the special thing. There’s the thing that might bring focus to what you’re doing. When people eat it, they take for granted that there’s flour and there’s egg and there’s butter. But—and maybe their focus is on the chocolate or whatever.

But it’s the whole of it that brings it together. That when you’re designing something, you as the designer aren’t just making the one exciting part, you’re making all of it. And what makes it exciting is because you’re doing all the base work to make it happen.

And so anyway, sort of my wrap-up today is, if you’re making new cards, keep focus. Understand what you’re trying to do. Understand what the cards are trying to do. Keep simplicity. Do the least amount you have to do to accomplish what you want.

And also when I say simplicity, keep in mind that you need the basic things that you want. So my third thing—so focus, simplicity, and be aware that you are—be holistic. Think about the fact that when you’re designing stuff, all of it goes together. They’re not just individual pieces, but you’re trying to bring something that together will create something.

The way I like to think of it when I make a set is, cards are pieces to the larger puzzle that I’m building. And be very careful what each piece does. And make sure that the piece adds to the thing as a whole.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed that, I hope it was a good lesson for you. For all the beginners out there. But I parked my car. Which means it’s time for me to be making Magic. Talk to you next time.