10/3/14 Episode 161: Design Space

All podcast content by Mark Rosewater

We’re pulling out of the parking lot! You know what that means! It’s time for another Drive to Work.

So I had to drop my daughter off today at dance camp. But I’ve still got to go to work. So you guys get a podcast!

Okay. So today, I thought I would talk about the topic—so recently, which was a long time ago probably for you guys, but this last weekend I asked on social media, topics you guys would like to hear about. And I made a long list of things you listed, and so today I’m going to do a topic that was a very common requested topic. Which was design space.

So I talk a lot about as Head Designer, so one of my roles is monitoring design space. So what is design space and how do I do that? What is design space, and how does oen figure out how much there is in a mechanic?

So today I’m going to talk all about that. And it’s a very important concept, especially as my job as Head Designer, but also my job as a lead designer in any set I am doing.

So let me first by defining what that means. So when I talk about design space—okay. So let’s say you take a mechanic. And you make every  card you can. Every card you can come up with, you write down. When I say every card, let me be clear, I don’t mean every physical card you can make, what I mean is, every card that you think would have value that would be good.

There’s lots of bad cards you can make. There’s an infinite number of bad cards with the mechanic. The question when I talk about design space, I’m not looking at total cards possible, but total cards probable. Meaning I want to make a mechanic, I want the mechanic to be good, what kind of space do I have to make the mechanic good? That’s the big question.

And so pretty much, when you are working on a mechanic, it’s important to try to figure out the scope of the mechanic. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to divide the mechanics into three large buckets for you today.

Bucket number one is, design space—giant. Like, there’s lots of design space. So for example, cycling is a good example of a card with lots of design space. Cycling says, “I could take this card, and for two mana I can trade it for another card.” 

Now, cycling—so when you’re looking at mechanics, and looking at design space, the issue is a couple things. One is, how many cards can you put it on? So cycling is a good example of something where—you can put it on a lot of cards.

Now, it shines best on certain kinds of cards, that if you have a card that you want to play all the time that you put cycling on, it’s not quite as interesting a thing, where if you have a card that sometimes ou want, sometimes you want to cycle, so I mean—there’s ways to optimize cycling.

But the general gist of it is, there’s lots and lots of things cycling can go on. Normally when you’re looking at design space, one of the things you have to look at is, what’s my limitation?

So one of the limitations is card types. Right? So, what card types can I put this on? Well, certain things, like let’s say it’s a creature mechanic, well for starters it can only go on a creature or an instant or sorcery that grants it to a creature.

Now, something like cycling can literally go on any card type. It can go on lands, it can go on instants, sorceries. It can’t go on planeswalkers, I guess. But other than planeswalkers, it can go on just about any card type. It even in theory could go on planeswalkers, although there’s space issues. We probably wouldn’t put it on planeswalkers.

So when looking for it, you want to figure out how many different kinds of things I could put it on. And then, there’s also the look of the depth of the kind of things you can do with it. So cycling is an interesting case, it’s why I start with the giant bin. Cycling does  a couple different things.

One is it just goes on a lot of different cards. The second is, it has—one of the other things we look at is what we call knobs. This is something we’ve talked about for development. Which is, “How many things do you have to play around with? How many components do you have the ability to…”

Because the more you can play around with, the more you can do. So for example, cycling, you can change the costs. You can not only draw a card, you can generate an effect in addition to drawing the card. There’s a couple different things you can do. So it has a bunch of knobs on it.

The knobbier a mechanic is, A. the happier Development is, usually, because it means there’s more tools for Development to fine-tune it. Meaning the knobbier a mechanic is, the easier it is to develop.

Second is, the more knobs there are, the more potential there is to do things. So a really knobby mechanic also is good for Design because it means there’s a lot of different possibilities of how you could manipulate things.

A big thing to remember when you’re doing design is, the default for costs is always mana. You assume you can spend mana. But there are other kinds of costs you can do. And as you’re looking at how to expand a mechanic, that’s usually areas we expand into.

So that’s another big thing to think about is, when you’re making a mechanic, how much evolution the mechanic has built into it. How many things can you do with the mechanic where you can do different things.

Because normally, what we try to do, is when we first introduce a mechanic, we just try to do the least we can do. I mean, once upon a time, we used to think of mechanics as being disposable. So the goal was, use it up. I don’t want to throw away this thing and not have used up as much as possible. So they talked about like the Eskimos using every part of the whale. That used to be how we used to deal with it. Like, we’d put it in a block, and then we tried before the block was over to try to make use of everything we could think of.

But eventually, we came to the conclusion that mechanics were a tool. Not a disposable resource. And so our attitude kind of flipped from there. So the attitude now is not, “How much can we use up?” It’s, “How little could we use and get what we need out of it?”

So my metaphor for this is, it’s your little tube of toothpaste. It’s like, you’re trying to get all the toothpaste out of your tube. So you’re crinkling the bottom, and you’re slowly rolling it, like you want to—if you really want to get all of the toothpaste out of the tube, you’re careful from the start. You don’t want to be wasteful and then later on not (???) any of the toothpaste out, you want to sort of from the beginning sort of maximize what you’re doing. And a lot of that, a lot of allocation of design resource is figuring out where things like. So I’ll give—well, I’ll get to it. Let me start with the giant thing.

So a giant mechanic is a mechanic in which you look at, and you’re like, “Okay. There’s lots of space here. This is going to be a cornerstone mechanic that we can come back to again and again.” Cycling is a very good example. Another good example is flashback. Well, flashback can go—flashback’s more limited than cycling, cycling can go on any card type, flashback can only go on instants and sorceries. But instants and sorceries is a pretty big space.

And in some ways, I mean, creatures have flexibility in that there’s size to them. Meaning when I come up with a neat creature mechanic, I have different size options. But creatures in some ways are more design type than sorceries and instants. Only because there’s just more uniquely different things you can do with sorceries and instants.

Meaning if I come with a new creature type, I’m sorry, not creature type, a new creature keyword, I can put it on a 1/1. And technically I can put it on a 1/2, but is a 1/2 much different than a 1/1? That in order to make them feel different, you have to start changing the stats and the sizes. And so it turns out that a creature mechanic has less space in the sense that—I mean, it depends, the evergreen ones obviously have more space, that’s why they’re evergreen. But usually, if you just go on creatures, and you just deal with combat, there’s more restrictions on how it can be relevant.

Now, obviously there’s ones that have a lot of space. I’m not saying creature mechanics can’t have more space than others. But for example, flashback can go on instants and sorceries. Pretty much can go on any instant and sorcery you want. You can make token cards with it, which is kind of a way to put it on creatures. I mean, tokens may be a little more simplistic, so it doesn’t go on all creatures, but you definitely can sort of add it to things that make creatures.

So anyway, the giant bucket means, okay. You have a lot of space. If I know I have a giant space, a mechanic in the giant bucket, it’s like I got some room to breathe. I’m not worried about it. In fact, more what I’m thinking about long-term is, how can I consolidate what I have to do? So when you have mechanics in the giant space, you are making sure to use as little as you need to get the job done.

Okay. Now I’m going to jump to the other end, to talk about the tiny bucket. The tiny bucket says, there is just enough mechanics probably for one set. Now, it could be—when I say it’s tiny, there’s actually a range in the tiny bucket. The tiny bucket could be, “This could be a small mechanic in a set.” A small mechanic in one set.

Or actually, it could be tighter than that. “This is a cycle. This mechanic’s a cycle.” For example, we did epic. Epic was a mechanic in… what [set] was epic in? Was it in Scourge? [NLH—Saviors of Kamigawa.] It was a mechanic where you cast it, and then you never got to cast any spells for the rest of the [game], all you could do was cast this [spell.]

And the mechanic’s slightly bigger than one cycle. But not that much bigger. Wishes were another good examplewhere, there’s not tons of space beyond the wishes, a little bit, but sometimes we do flashy things in which hey it’s cool, and the reason we do it as a cycle is, you’re just not getting that much out of it. That a tiny cycle means there’s a limited amount of space. Maybe it’s a cycle.

Cipher’s a good example in Gatecrash. In fact, most of the mechanics—not all, but a lot of the mechanics we use in Ravnica blocks, because it’s a much more confined space, that we only need like ten-ish cards with the mechanic. Some of those have smaller mechanics. Cipher’s a good example where there’s just not a lot of things you can do with cipher.

Cipher’s really restrictive, it only goes on instants and sorceries. In fact, it mostly went on sorceries. [NLH—It only went on sorceries.] And it only went on a certain kind of effect. It was much, much more limited in what you could do. Because it had to be something that could go on a sorcery or instant. And be a good creature-combat—when I deal damage to you in creature combat, that it has an effect.

And there’s a lot of effects that don’t mean anything. Giant Growthing doesn’t mean anything. In fact, it’s kind of confusing. So Cipher’s a good example of—there wasn’t a lot. Pretty much, that was the set we were blowing it out in.

Now, if you figure out that you’re tiny, that’s when you want to use up what you have. Now, a lot of times if you’re tiny enough, you’re stretching to even make it happen. A lot of times, when we have a tiny mechanic, it’s like, we are stretching to get every little nuance we can out of the mechanic.

Usually a tiny mechanic is one and done. You’re going to use the mechanic, and then you’re probably not going to see that mechanic again. Maybe, maybe, maybe, if it’s a beloved mechanic, maybe you bring it back and redo some cards, and maybe—what happens is, when you come back, Magic is constantly evolving. And what I mean is, we’re constantly coming up with new things that we do.

So if we do a mechanic and completely tap out the mechanic, ten years later, we might be able to get a few cards out of it, only because there’s a few things we do now, or things have shifted colors, so you could do the same card but in a different color.

So if it’s a tiny mechanic that’s beloved, maybe you could come back, but it would take a long time before it came back. And then we would mostly do reprints, and then do just a few new ones to give it a little bit of flavor to new things, but usually the new stuff would be, oh, things we couldn’t have done last time it existed, because of shifts in color pie or just new effects we’ve come up with.

But in general, you use up tiny stuff, and there’s a long gap between using it. The giant bucket, I mean there’s a gap between using any mechanic, but pretty much you can come back. Scry is another good example of a giant bucket. Scry just—look, you can add scry to a lot of different things. 

And so scry and cycling—you’ll notice they come back more often. You just see them more often. There’s just more you can do with them. So the giant bucket, you can revisit a lot. The tiny bucket you can’t. You see it, maybe, maybe, maybe it’s a beloved mechanic or just perfectly fits, ten years later something maybe we could reuse it. But it’s much less likely to be reused.

Now, I left this bucket for last, because it’s the most confusing of the buckets, which is the middle bucket. It’s not huge, it’s not a giant mechanic, it’s not tiny. And what that means is, okay. There’s some use to it, it can do some things, but if you want to make use of it, you have to sort of be careful.

So I’m going to talk about planewalkers. So this is a little different—I mean, we talk about design space, I’m mostly today talking about mechanics. But design space also is true for card types. Like for example, one of my big concerns as Head Designer is—so the way I think of it is, my job is to make Magic not just good this year, but to make Magic as good as many years as possible.

That part of my job as Head Designer is to say, “Look. We need enough resources to make things good, but no more.” That—imagine there’s a line. And you reach that line, Magic is awesome. And you go over that line, still awesome, but you’ve just wasted resources.

And my example is that—let’s say I want to excite my kids by taking them to the candy store. There’s a certain amount of candy I need to let them have, and they’re excited. And that if I give them—beyond that, if I went to the candy store and I go, “Pick out any three pieces of candy,” they might be really, really excited. If I say, “Pick out eight pieces of candy,” they’re just as excited. I’m not sure they’re any more excited than to pick out three pieces of candy.

But I definitely have made coming to the candy store a little less special next time, because there’s candy that they would have been excited because they never had before, but I let them have. And could they enjoy all pieces of candy? Not as much as—you know, if I just gave them three to focus on, they’d probably enjoy it more. That’s my candy metaphor.

And one of the jobs is, “Look. Figure out what we need. Get it there. Let people enjoy it. Don’t give them too much.” That if you start to flood it,  you kind of waste resources.

And I do believe that when you come back to a mechanic, that you get a lot of value of doing stuff we’ve done before, having fun reprinted mechanics, doing simple versions—that we hadn’t done before, but are not changing things. You get a lot of value out of that.

But when you bring back mechanics, usually it’s something. You’ve gotta do something with them you haven’t done before. It could be minor, it could be major. But every time you bring a mechanic back, there’s a little bit of exploration you want to have. And if you do too much exploration previously, then you just make it harder when you bring it back to just do more exploration.

So one of the things that’s definitely true is, that when you’re bringing back something in the giant category, you’ve got to be careful, because you’re like, “Look. I know cycling’s going to come back again.” And one of the problems we’ve had in the past is that there is this pressure when you do something and you see possibility, is to do the possibility.

That it is—I had a podcast on restraint. This is where restraint becomes important. Just because you see an awesome thing doesn’t mean you have to do it right away. And that’s part of my long-term view of looking at Magic design, which is, if we have awesome, Magic is a hungry, hungry monster. We will get to awesome.

Once upon a time, it’s like “We better do it now! It’s awesome! We gotta do it now! Who knows if it will happen later?” And now the attitude is, “No no no no  no. Later will come. Magic’s successful. I have no doubt Magic will be here in 20 years. I believe Magic will be here in 50 years. I believe I will die, have my funeral, and after my funeral, at the wake, people will play Magic.

Magic’s going to last a long time, as far as I’m concerned. And for what it’s worth, if you’re at my wake, for sure play Magic! Do not feel bad. You can play Magic at my wake. But I mean—if you could cry a little bit, that’d be fine.

Okay, so one of the things that’s important is, when you make stuff, you need to make sure that you figure out what you are saving. Planeswalkers are a real good example. There are a lot of really wacky cool things we could do with planeswalkers.

Here’s the problem. It’s not that deep. The planeswalker, the card type of planeswalkers is one of the shallowest card types we have. There’s a lot of restraints you want to do on it, there’s a lot of limitations.

It is just not something that—and, so one of the reasons that we don’t do many planeswalkers a year is, A., development reasons, there’s only so many planeswalkers an environment can take, and 2., design reasons, look.

I need to have a—slow-roll design as slow as we can. Because planeswalkers have become a major part of Magic design. Every set has to have a planeswalker in it. People expect it, it’s exciting. So every set has to have a planeswalker in it. But of all the mechanics I have, it has the least amount of design space in it. And so that’s a dangerous thing.

So what I’ve done is, I said, okay. We are crinkling the bottom of this toothpaste. We are getting every little tiny bit of ounce out of it. And what I mean by that is, when you show people innovations, the expectation is, okay, awesome. Let me see innovation. I don’t want to see old stuff, that’s boring.

So you have to be careful when you introduce innovations. That if you upgrade too quickly, you make the old stuff not as exciting. And so you want to make sure you use up the old stuff before you get to the new stuff.

Dual lands is another area, for example. That is a limited space. That there’s not an infinite amount of clean, elegant dual lands. And so what you’ll notice is, we’ve started reusing dual lands a lot more. We said, you know what? We don’t need to constantly reinvent dual lands. From time to time we will. We’re not saying that we’re done making dual lands. But dual lands is not something there’s just an infinite number of. Especially of nice elegant ones. And so it’s a resource we’re being more careful about reusing.

So let’s get to the middle bucket. So there’s the middle bucket, there’s the tiny bucket. The middle bucket, you’ve got to be careful. The middle bucket is, look. This mechanic can come back. This mechanic maybe can come back multiple times. But… but… you’ve got to be careful.

So for example, devotion is a good example of a middle mechanic. It’s not tiny, but it’s a mechanic, it’s what we call a counting mechanic. And what a counting mechanic means is, I have to put it on an effect that’s countable. And there’s a bunch of Magic mechanics that care about countable things.

Having done Magic for a long time, I’m very, very aware of what the countable mechanics are. There’s enough mechanics that care. There’s a certain kind of mechanics that have to go on variables, things that are countable, that I know what those are. It is not a giant amount of mechanics.

And in certain colors, like blue for example, it’s tricky. There’s definitely stuff I could do at higher rarities, but at common? What can I do at common? I can mill you, that’s the most common one. But okay, what else can I do? I’m like, well, maybe I could Impulse for a certain number and keep a card. I mean, there’s a couple I could do at common, and then you kind of run out. And in general, it is a limited space. So when I look at devotion, devotion has to have a countable mechanic.

Now, devotion is flexible. I can put it on spells, I can put it on creatures as, you know, ETB effect or maybe a death trigger. I have a little bit of flexibility where I can put it. But the number of effects I can do with it is not infinite.

Now, devotion—we did chroma in Eventide, I don’t think we executed it quite right. We executed it better in Theros. Much beloved. I mean, very strong. And it’s like, okay, I want to do devotion again. But I’ve got to be careful. Devotion is—I mean, it’s not tiny. I can make more than 10 cards with it. It’s not giant. I have to go on countable effects.

I mean, there’s other constraints, it has to go in certain kinds of environments. And it definitely requires some upkeep mechanically I have to worry about, so it’s a mechanic that’s in the medium bucket. And what that means is, I’ve got to be really careful how I use it. And I’ve got to be careful of its innovation.

Because each time I use it, I’m not going to use tons of it, and so if I innovate it, I maybe innovate it once, and that’s the thing you’ve got to be careful with is understanding, with the middle bucket, of how much space that you have.

I mean, that is very, very important to sort of keep in mind when you’re monitoring your buckets is—so let me talk about this. Let me talk about the different kinds of things to worry about. So number one is just how many different cards can I make. Meaning, well, how many effects can I do with it? That’s the first one. Which is, “Okay. I have this thing…”

So, there are different kinds of mechanics. Let me run through that. So the first is, the mechanic is the effect. So an example of this would be proliferate or populate, where the mechanic is the effect. That’s what it is. That the mechanic does this effect.

Now, some mechanics, when you’re gauging that, it’s how much can you—how much can this effect be done? Proliferate is interesting, it’s pretty generic, it ties to other things, which just says, “Okay. Do I have other things in my environment that use counters or tokens?” Sorry, counters. Not tokens. Populate would be tokens.

And so I have to sort of look. Now, proliferate’s a good example of the middle bucket, where it’s not tiny, I can tack it onto things, so there’s a lot of different kinds of spells I can make with it, but it’s not giant in that it’s limited in the kind of space it can be done. I can’t just put proliferate anywhere, I need to put proliferate in a set that cares.

So that’s a different vector than what I talked about before, which is, sometimes a design space isn’t just how many cards can I make, but how easy is it to fit in? So if a mechanic can just fit in anywhere, cycling’s a great example, cycling can go anywhere. It doesn’t have a lot of flavor tied to it, it can go on a lot of different mechanics, it’s very flexible in the kind of mechanics. I can almost take any set and go, “I need a mechanic. Eh, cycling, whatever.” I can put cycling anywhere.

Proliferate, no. Proliferate has a—it requires a certain environment to make sense. So if I look at my environment and go, “Let’s put proliferate in,” I go, “Well, I don’t have enough counters to make that make sense.” Without enough counters, I can’t use proliferate. So proliferate’s design space is not just a matter of how many cards I can make. That’s the first area I talked about. But how often I think I can find the space to make it fit.

Now, proliferate is something in which we use counters a lot. Especially me. I love using counters. And so it’s not like I can’t imagine environments where I have a lot of counter use. It’s definitely someplace that I will go to. So—but, there’s lots and lots of things I could think of and go, “Okay, I’m not going to be able to use that.”

Populate, for example, is a little bit more restrictive, only because there are more different ways to use counters than there are ways to use tokens. More sets have tokens, which is true. But populate requires—so populate is interesting in that it’s much more restrictive of the kind of spell I can make.

And here’s why. That I don’t like to—so one of the things when you make mechanics is, what we call… I don’t have a name for this. Sometimes when you make a mechanic, you make a mechanic that only—I guess parasitic. That let’s say for example, I made a card that said, “proliferate.” And that’s all it did. Okay, well that mechanic has to live in an environment where that means something.

And so we do a little of that, but more of what we want to do is say, here’s a mechanic that has proliferate on it, that means something with proliferate. But means something more if you have other cards. And populate’s the same way, where we’re trying not to make too many cards that just populate without themselves generating a token, because we wanted it to have relevance unto itself.

And so if you look at proliferate, it’s a little bit easier to make something that generates a counter and then proliferate, then make a token and then proliferate, because counters are much—there’s a lot more things you can do with them than you can do with tokens.

Tokens are like, “I’m going to make a token, it’s probably going to be a vanilla token, maybe a flying token, and how big am I going to make it?” Tokens tend not to be super big, so there’s just less populate cards you can make. So it’s a little bit smaller.

Another thing you’ve got to keep in mind is like I said. Some mechanics are basically effects. Some are—some are direct effects like proliferate, some are effects like cycling, which are alternate uses. And then some mechanics are things that impact how things are done.

Like replicate is a good example of—replicate says, “Okay, I’m going to allow you to do this spell as much as you want.” Multikicker kind of does this. One could argue replicate is kind of multikicker. And kicker’s another thing where I can do a spell, and then I could upgrade it with kicker. I could do a spell, I could buy it back with buyback. Those are mechanics that kind of manipulate around—like, it affects the kind of spell it is. All spells with this mechanic do this thing.

So if you are an effect, you tend to be a little narrower. Depending on what the effect is. If your effect is something that is very synergistic, you get to be a little bit bigger. But if it’s not, then it gets to be smaller. If you’re something that adds on or affects things, that limits the kind of effects you can do,  but it gives you a little broader base in the number of spells you can put it on.

For example, kicker is a mechanic that’s pretty broad, because there are a lot of different effects that you could make a larger effect of. Buyback, for example—I mean, barring developmental things, but design-wise, look. A lot of spells you could get back. Pretty much any instant or sorcery, assuming there’s a cost that would make sense, you could get back.

And that—so when you’re looking at a mechanic to figure out design space, so you’ve got to figure out if it’s an effect, it’s how many things can use that effect. If it’s something that affects the kind of things you do, it’s “how usable is this, and how many effects can it go on?”

And then sometimes a mechanic does something in which the effect varies from card to card. That the mechanic says, “Oh, I do this thing, but…” So for example… what’s a good example of this? Like, I think kicker does this, where I have a little bit of flexibility with kicker. Kicker says, “Okay, I’m going to do something bigger.” I have to thematically tie to the spell, but I have a little bit of flexibility.

What’s another… kicker’s not the best example here. An example where… let me think. Spellshapers is a fine example. Spellshapers just say, “Look, I’m going to turn a card in your hand into a spell. I’m going to tap to essentially rewrite a card in your hand and make it a spell.” Okay, well the breadth there for design space is, “How many spells do I have? How many different effects can I use?”

And when you look at spell effects, like I said earlier, it’s a matter of, does that go on all of them? Does that go on some of them? I mean, a big way of determining design space is just say—I mean, this is a good mental exercise.

Okay. I want to start making cards. Let me just start making as many cards as I can. I’m just going to start writing down on a piece of paper as many of this effect as I could make as possible. Do that for 10 minutes. Here’s what you will find.

At the end of ten minutes, if you have just been writing nonstop, if like you’re like, “Wow, 10 minutes are up already?” You’ve got a giant bucket. You are golden. I mean, understand what it is. But you have a giant bucket. If at the end of 10 minutes you’ve filled up your page, you’re like, “Okay, wow, I don’t know I could… the next 10 minutes would be nowhere near as fruitful as the first 10 minutes.”

And when I say 10 minutes, maybe it’s 5 minutes. Maybe 10 minutes is a little too long. But let’s say 5 minutes. If at the end of five minutes you’re like, “The next 5 minutes are going to be harder. The next 5 minutes are not going to be as easy as the first 5 minutes.” Probably a middle bucket. But like you know you could do another 5 minutes.

If you do 5 minutes, you’re like, “I think I’ve written everything down I could write.” That’s a tiny bucket. That’s like, maybe with 5 more  minutes (???) a few things. But… 5 minutes is actually better than 10 minutes. We’ll call it the 5 minute test. Which is, is it easy? Does time go by and you’re like, “Oops, 5 minutes flew by?” Giant bucket.

If you finish and you’re like, “I could do more, but wow, the next 5 minutes would not be as easy,” that’s the middle bucket. If you do 5 minutes and you’re like, “I’ve done everything there is to do,” that is the tiny bucket. So that, for people that are messing around with mechanics, that’s a mini-test. You could take.  

So anyway, let me see if I can give a final… I’m actually, I got here a smidgen early because I didn’t leave from my house. But I want to give you a full half hour, so I’m going to finish this up.

Okay. The biggest takeaway from, if you want to be designing stuff, the biggest takeaway from design space is that if you are designing something, so I’ll use my—I’m making whatever I’m making. I’m making a lamp. I’m making a house. That you have to figure out what tools you have available to you.

And design space is part of your tools. That when you’re trying to figure out what to do, you kind of need to figure out how you can use your tools. How useful are your tools? And so let’s say I was trying to… I don't know, build a house. And I have my trusty saw. I’ve used my saw many, many times. I have my hammer, I’ve used it many times. I know what those are capable of. Those are big-bucket things.

But how do I figure out whether those are big-bucket things? Well, I start using the hammer. And I go, whoa, I can do this. And I can pry nails. I can pound this. And like, “Oh, that’s pretty useful.” And when you get a new tool, what you would first want to do is go, “What can I do with this tool?” Well, I can cut wood with this. Or I could hammer nails with this. What can I do with it?

And that a big idea of design space is, part of what you need to do early, before you get too far into your design skeleton, is you want to get some sense of how big you think something will be. Now, that doesn’t mean you can’t proceed not knowing. You can start putting cards in.

What I’ll say is, you’ll get a sense as you start building cards and playing with it, how much space you have. My little test is to give you a thumbnail idea. But the best way to tell is just start making cards. A lot of times, by the way, when you write down on paper, you think you’ve made cards, and when you play them you’re like, “This is awful. This is not fun.”

And what you’ll find sometimes is,  what might seem at first blush to be a big mechanic isn’t, because what actually is fun—cipher was this way—which was, we thought it was a bigger mechanic, but once we realized all the limitations we had, and what worked, it just shrunk and shrunk and shrunk. To the point at which we were stretching to try to get enough mechanics to make it work. I didn’t think when we made the mechanic we’d have trouble filling up stuff in Dragon's Maze. But it was pulling teeth in Dragon's Maze. Like, we’d filled up Gatecrash and we said, “Okay, we have some space left,” and well, there really wasn’t that much space left. It was tinier than we thought.

And that wasn’t from looking at it, that was from playing it. And I say this all the time, which is, thinking about things is great, but if you really want to make something, if you want to be a game designer, nothing will test your things like playing. That you want to figure out what something can do, you’ve got to actually make cards, you’ve got to actually play with them. And playtesting will teach you a lot. If you want to learn what will and won’t work, try to make it work. That will tell you what will and won’t work.

Anyway, guys, that is a full drive all about the design space and how to figure out design space and what design space is. I hope you can apply this and learn it, and for those out there that want to understand it better and understand how we make Magic, knowing design space is a pretty important concept. And for those that want to make your own cards, maybe understanding how you use design space will help you.

But anyway, I am now parked in my parking space, which means this is the end of my drive to work. So I’ll talk to you guys next time.