8/1/14 Episode 144: Redflagging

All podcast content by Mark Rosewater

I’m pulling out of my driveway! We all know what that means! It’s time for another Drive to Work.

Okay. So today, I want to have—it’s a podcast that follows up on another podcast, although while related, it’s its own podcast. So had done a podcast on New World Order. And during that, I talked about a concept called redflagging. And I’m going to talk all about what red flags mean today, and how we use them in design.

Okay. So, when you redflag something, what it means is, when we created New World Order, the goal was, we wanted to create a certain level of complexity and toe the line of that complexity at common. And the idea was that there’s different things we care about. I talked about the different types of complexity.

There is  comprehension complexity, can you read the cards and understand them, there is board complexity, do you understand how things interact when they’re all in play together, and then there is strategic complexity, do you understand the ramifications of what this means.

Strategic complexity tends to be somewhat invisible to beginning players, who are less worried about that. Commons are allowed to have strategic complexity, but they—we have to be careful about the comprehension complexity and the board complexity.

So the idea of a red flag is as such. Is we have a bunch of rules for things that in general cause problems at common. And if you break one of these rules, you are what’s called “redflagged.” What redflagged means is, it doesn’t mean you can’t go at common, it just means that we’re supposed to take a look at you. If anything is redflagged, in order for you to stay in the file, you need to get approval, first from design, and then from development.

And mostly what it is is, it’s a process by which to help make sure that things that might cause trouble are looked at. And the purpose of redflagging is mostly to be cautionary, to make sure that we are paying attention to stuff.

And that once we do that, we can override a red flag, a red flag doesn’t mean it can’t be done, it just means it can’t be done—okay, it just means it can’t be done—sorry, I was just dropping off my coat—my son forgot his coat, so that was my wife saying thank you for dropping off the coat. See, you get to experience my actual drive to work every day.  Sorry.

So what I was trying to say is, redflagging means that we have to look at it and make sure that it’s okay, and that we can override the red flag. A red flag doesn’t mean it can’t be done. So when I give you the rules today for redflagging, all that means is, these are things we know can be a problem, and so we have to sign off on them to make sure that if we’re going to do them, we mean to do them, and that they’re okay.

The other big thing about a red flag is, rules are—you don’t want to design—you want to be careful when you make rules, that it’s okay to have rules, but you have to understand that sometimes there can be exceptions to your rules.

You have to understand—so the story I always give is, when I was in college, I lived in a dorm. And one day—so it was at Boston University, it was in the middle of Boston, so there was security. They just didn’t want anybody coming into the dorm. And so in order to get in, you had to show your ID card.

And then, if you lived there, you were allowed to sign people in. So if someone came to the door, either they had to live there, they showed you they lived there, or they had to get signed in by somebody who did live there.

So there was a guard there, I think his name was Tony. So Tony and I became friends. I would chit-chat with him all the time, and we would come in, I would always stop a little bit and I’d talk with Tony. So one day, I come in and Tony’s there, and I realize I forgot my card. It was up in my room. My ID card. And so I’m like, “Hey Tony, I left my ID card up in my room.” And so Tony’s like, “Oh, I can’t let you in.” And I was like, “But… I live here. You know I live here.” And he goes, “Yeah, yeah, but the rules are I can’t let you in.”

And I was very frustrated, because what was the point of the rule? The point of the rule was to keep people who didn’t live there from getting in the building. Clearly, Tony knew I lived there. So it’s one of my pet peeves. That you want to understand the reasoning behind the rule. And so, the point of redflagging is, we have some basic rules to follow. But, sometimes this won’t—like even though, normally this causes board complexity, in this particular case it doesn’t cause board complexity.

And the case in question, so just to finish the story real quick is, so Tony would not let me in. And so I finally talked him through the rules, and I said, “Well, in order for somebody to sign somebody else in, what are the rules for that? You just have to know they live here.” And he goes, “Yeah. Well, to sign someone in, I just have to know that they’re…” “They don’t have to show you an ID.” “No, no, as long as I know they live here, they’re allowed to sign people in.”

So I said, “Okay. If I don’t need to prove ID, and you know I live here, then I’m allowed to sign someone in.” He goes, “Yes.” I go, “Okay. I sign me in.” And that’s how I got in. Because I followed the rules that were really weirdly set.

But (???), I do not like rules that are set up in such a way that you kind of make a rule and then you break the essence of what the point of the rule is. And that redflagging doesn’t mean that we just stop things, it means, on average, this causes this problem and it’s something to be aware of. But it doesn’t mean that we are supposed to just automatically reject it. It means look at it.

Okay. Let’s walk through the redflagging we have. So number one. Does it affect other permanents? And this is the one we started with when we first talked about board complexity. So the culprit I will talk about is Samite Healer. I might have talked about Samite Healer in New World Order. But it sets the perfect example. So Samite Healer is from Alpha, it’s the card that you tap to prevent one damage to target creature.

Now, that might seem pretty innocent. The problem is, that one card changes a lot of math. And that now, any possible combination that I have—let’s say I attack with a couple creatures, and you have a bunch of creatures you can block with. You now have to do permutations where you figure out, “Oh, any one of these creatures might do one less damage than they normally do.” And it creates a lot of extra math.

I know—and one of the things that’s hard is, one of the ways Magic works is, you start playing, you learn something, you absorb it, and then it becomes so second-nature once you’ve learned the rules of it that you forget how much complication it creates.

And Samite Healer’s a really good example, which is once you know how to do the mental shortcutting to figuring out, “Oh, well there’s Samite Healer,” you can figure it out. But when you’re first learning, it’s a lot of extra math.

And once again, the point here is not that we don’t want to do Samite Healer, the point of New World Order is, we don’t want to do Samite Healer at common. We don’t want it showing up at the frequency that they show up in common. Because that also means—common means you might get multiples. So now not only is there one Samite Healer in play, there might be multiple Samite Healers in play. Which makes things even more complicated. And two Samite Healers is much more complicated than one Samite Healer.

Let’s get off Samite Healer. Let’s move to a different thing. Let’s say I had a creature that said, “I activate or tap to give target creature first strike.” Well, that also is very complicated, because now I have to act as if every creature you have could have first strike. And that is much more complex.

Now, if a creature gets to pump itself, that’s much less complex. Because what that says is, okay, let’s say I have a creature that activates to give itself first strike. Well, you the opponent—if you need a shorthand, you can go, “I’m just going to assume he has first strike.”

And if you act like that, it’s a pretty—the more experienced player understands that maybe you will or won’t give first strike, or maybe I want you to spend the mana to give him first strike because I don’t want you casting other spells. Whatever. But the beginning player can just go, “Okay, that guy kind of has first strike. I can act like he has first strike.” That’s a lot easier than “anything could have first strike.”

 So, first red flag is, “Does it affect other permanents?” Now, here’s a good example of where we redflagged it originally, and then we learned that this was okay. The example is, a tapper. So a tapper is a white creature usually, that you spend some mana and you tap it to tap a creature.  

And what we found is, okay, let’s explain the two scenarios by which you would use a tapper. Number one is, I’m attacking. So before you could declare blockers I would want to tap. Because I don’t want you to declare it as a blocker. If you declare something as a blocker and then I tap it, it doesn’t do anything. So I want to tap before you declare blockers.

Now, if that is true, all I have done is just said, “Hey, that one guy that before, you had to decide whether or not he could block? Now you don’t have to decide. I’ll decide for you, he or she can’t block. He, she, or they can’t block.”

So, if you’re on defense, before you can attack I tap a creature. What have I done? I have once again removed a decision. You had some choices of what to attack with? I now removed your choice, it can’t attack.

So, that’s an example of a card that affects other permanents, but when you examine how it played, it actually decreases decisions, not increases decisions. So this is a good example where just because something is redflagged, doesn’t mean necessarily that it breaks the spirit of what the rule is. And that’s why we have to examine it case-by-case. I want to get in the dorm, you don’t have a card, oh wait, oh wait! I know you live here, it doesn’t break the underlying rule. The underlying rule says, “I don’t want strangers coming in here, I know you’re not a stranger.”

And so once again. The point of this is so we can examine on a case-by-case—now, something like tapping, we’ve learned, “Oh, tapping’s okay.” So we don’t need to redflag tapping every single time. We’ve learned, “Oh, well here are some exceptions.” We do make some exceptions where once we learn they’re okay, that there are certain things like, okay, we’ve examined it where it’s okay, tapping is something we’re comfortable doing at common.

Now, there’s other—by the way, I’m talking more about board complexity issues and stuff like that. It is possible, by the way, that development might figure out that tapping, from a power-level thing, might be an issue, and they might remove things from common.

So some of the things that I’m going to talk about today are design-related, some are development-related, but development also can always say, “This is not a New World Order thing, this is a power-level thing.” And there’s some things where they go, “You know what, the power level, we’re going to move it up to uncommon or higher.”

So one of the things to keep in mind, by the way, is that the red flags here are—there’s a variety of different reasons we redflag things. Some of them are more design-oriented, some of them have a development underlying cause to them, so as I walk through them, be aware there’s different causes for why we redflag things.

Okay, number two. Do you have four or more lines of rules text? So that is an interesting one. Why that? And the answer is, we’ve learned that there’s a point at which the text just intimidates the reader. And that one of the things we want to be careful about is—I mean, textiness is a sign of multiple things.

One of the things development does is—one of the metrics they look at is words per card. Especially at common. Or words per as-fan is also very common. And the idea is, well, the wordier you are, usually—not always, but usually means the more complicated you are.

And as a nice metric, just like redflagging, the point to having metrics is not to be dictatorial, the point of having metrics is so that you can understand—it’s a guideline that tends to show you if you need to give a further look at it. If your text is a little above average, that doesn’t mean it’s not okay, it means you have to look and figure out why the text is above average. What is going on?

Now, it turns out there are longer texts that are easier to process. So one of the things about this red flag is it goes, “Okay. Are you wordy?” And I’m defining wordy as being four or more lines of rules text. If you are wordy, it means, okay, let’s take a look at you. Maybe that means there’s just too many words on you. Maybe that means you’re doing too much. Maybe it means let’s just see how it easy it is to grok what you’re doing.

And sometimes it’s like, “Okay, okay, this is not too bad.” When we say four lines of text, usually I’mnot talking about reminder text. Because sometimes you get reminder text that’s three lines long. And so the mere act of having this ability with reminder text makes it four lines.  That’s not really—I mean, we have to be aware of reminder text, and the existence of reminder text can be intimidating.

So it’s not that we’re not—I have to be clear that if something with reminder text is over four lines, we want to be aware of that. But usually, the reason it will—reminder text, in expert expansions, tend to be on new things. So normally we’re vetting the new abilities and saying, “Is this an ability we think people won’t understand.” One of the things in general about New World Order, when you look at mechanics, is how hard is the mechanic to sort of understand in a vacuum, and how much does it add to the complexity of the board?

We are allowed—so one of the things about redflagging is what we call the twenty percent. Which is, we want eighty percent of our commons to follow all the rules we normally set up. And about twenty percent can break those rules. Meaning, when I talk about you have redflagging exceptions, we allow ourselves a certain number of exceptions. Like twenty percent.

So one of the rules about New World Order is, you are allowed to make the player think about something they don’t normally think about, but focus that thing. Usually one thing, at most two things. But for example, let’s take landfall in Zendikar. Normally you don’t track when lands come into play. It’s not something where I go, “Ooh, did a land come into play this turn?”

But like, okay, in this environment, this is important enough that you have to track land entering play.  That’s an important thing. But in Zendikar, that was the thing you had to care about. In Innistrad, you had to care about things dying. But that was the thing you had to care about. We pick one thing, usually, sometimes two, but usually one thing that each set—okay, in this environment, this is a thing that matters. This is something you need to care about. And we make people care about that.

I guess Innistrad did have--Innistrad also made you care about not playing spells and playing two spells. Now, that was only when you had werewolves in play, but still. That happens enough that it’s something that you have to track.

Okay. So if you have four or more lines of text, it just means you have to understand, are you confusing? And sometimes, the four lines aren’t necessarily confusing. Being four lines of text doesn’t by definition make you confusing. But it does mean on average, you are going to be confusing, or you have the potential to be confusing.

The other thing that we have to look at is, and this is related, is what we call things that are hard to parse. And literally the best way to explain this is, if you have to read a common, and then you have to read it a second time, that is what we call hard to parse.

And that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily wordy, although the wordier you are, the greater your chance of being hard to parse. What it means is, there’s just something about your wording that people are like, “What? What is it doing?”

And if you’re hard to parse, there’s a couple things—one thing that can mean is, okay, we need to go back to templating. Like, for example, Conspiracy was a good example where late in—we actually had our slideshow, this is much, much later than normal, but Conspiracy was a very weird set.

We were doing our slideshow where we were looking at cards. So before the set gets handed off, R&D has a slideshow where we look at the cards. And some of the templating was just hard to grok. And so we said, you know what? Sometimes when you’re in the weeds, as they say, when you’re trying to make something make sense, and there is a lot of fine-tuning, and Magic templating is a language, essentially.

I call it Magic-ese. That it is a language. That when you say “when” or “whenever” or “if,” those all mean things. They are not insignificant. And so one of the things that happens when you’re trying to technically make something work is you sometimes lose what I call sort of the big picture look at it. That you’re so sort of in the minutiae that you don’t have the ability to step back and see it. And sometimes other people that are less involved can go, “Okay, that makes no sense. Yeah, I know what you’re going for, that makes no sense.”

And there’s a couple classic things. Like, one of the things that we have—this is a good example, where one of the templates is, when you play this card, when this card comes into play, if it came into play—like, “What do you mean when it came into play, if it came into play? It just came into play.”

You’re like—that is there to sort of prevent something, where you can’t do something and then destroy it and have things happen. But it’s hard to parse. Because you’re like, “Huh? I don’t understand.” And so we have to be careful on stuff like that. We have to be careful when we do something where the person reading it doesn’t quite understand what’s happening.

And as a general rule of thumb, if something’s hard to parse we tend to get it out of common. And once again, let me explain the philosophy behind New World Order, this aspect of it. Which is the following. Which is that we want Magic to have some complication. We want Magic to be something that the player goes, “Ooh, there’s some really meaty things to have to think about.”

The point here is volume. Is how often are your running across the more complex thing? And what we want is, the beginner just has less packs. Most of the cards in the pack are common. If we just take out the more complicated stuff from common, it just means the beginning player has less confusing things when they’re starting.

And as you get better, you’re going to get more cards, and you’re just going to start caring about all the cards. Rather than just the cards you own. And that you’ll start being exposed to higher rarities and more cards, and you’ll have the opportunity… once you’re the most experienced player, you’re just going to build your deck. If you want to pick the complicated things, you’ll put them in your deck.

But the beginning player, who’s more building what they have to start with, it makes things a little easier just to pull that out. So a lot of this redflagging is about numbers. It’s about how often you want to see something. I don’t mind having some cards that are harder to parse if they do cool things. But I don’t want you getting lots of them.

A lot of this is, a lot about New World Order is how many copies do you want to get? I’m okay if players get a couple single copies of cards they might have to think through. But having multiples of them, especially if the multiples become harder to play and make more board complexity, that causes problems.

For example, cards that affect other cards. If I have one card that affects other cards, okay, okay, I can focus on that one thing. I got an uncommon creature that grants any creature first strike. Okay, well now we have to look at the board and figure out what that means. But I have one creature that does that, and a different creature that grants this, and a different creature that—like, in volume it is the problem.

And that a lot of these things about board complexity is that having one thing or two things that you have to think about is fine. Having five is hard. Having ten is really hard. Having fifteen is—like, this all came about, New World Order came about from Lorwyn/Morningtide Limited.

Where Lorwyn cared about these eight races, and then Morningtide cared about these five classes, and every card tended to have at least one of the races and some of the classes, and it just—the latticework that you had to figure out, what you could do with what was in play, just becomes mind-boggling for people who weren’t really adept at it.

And the goal is that we don’t want to make that a regular occurrence. Especially in Limited. I mean, if you and your friends want to sort of make the lattice happen, we give you the cards to make it happen, it’s just something that’s going to happen because you and your friends choose to make it happen and volunteer for that, not because you’re just walking into it.

Okay. Next, and this is a big one, cards that get card advantage are redflagged. Let me explain card advantage. So what card advantage says is, if at the end of the day, if I do something, and the number of cards I lose is less than than… I do something, and the end state is, there’s a change in cards, how many cards we have. If I either end up with more cards than you in the gain, or we both lose things, but I lose less than you, that is considered card advantage.

So for example, you have a creature in play, I have a Terror in my hand. I have a Dark Banishing. Or… a kill spell. I kill your creature. Well, I spent one card, you’ve lost one card, there’s a one-for-one parity.

Now, let’s say for example, that creature you have has an aura on it. Now when I kill your creature, you’ve lost the creature and the aura, and I played the spell. So that is an example where there’s card disadvantage. It’s kind of built into auras.

Now, we understand that some of that’s going to happen. Auras happen at common. But what we don’t want to happen is I have a card that says, “Destroy two target creatures.” Or a card that says, “Destroy target creature and then its opponent discards a card.” You want to be careful—once again, it doesn’t mean we don’t do them, it just means they get redflagged. That whenever you’re going to be a card that’s going to cause card disadvantage.

And the same is true for card drawing, which is if I spend one card to draw two cards, I gain card advantage. Now, that is a much less problematic card advantage exchange, and so that’s something we’re more likely to do at common. Because it’s having a little bit less impact on the board. But anyway, it’s something we want to be careful of is, how often are you creating card advantage?

And correlated to that is, are you capable of killing more than one creature? So if you have a card that can kill multiple creatures, we want to be careful. You’re redflagged. We tend not to make cards that kill multiple things at common.

Now, I’m not saying we never do, we make Tremors and things like that once in a while. And as part of the card disadvantage, we tend not to make permanents that as an ETB effect, as an enter-the-battlefield effect, kill a creature.

 

So for example, Flametongue Kavu was a famous—it was a 4/2 creature that did four damage when it entered the battlefield. To a creature. So those tend to go at uncommon, because they kill something, but they’re still there. I’ve lost no cards, you’ve lost one.

Or, things that repeatable kill. Things like Prodigal Pyromancer. Which is a 1/1 that taps to do one damage to a creature or player. That—I mean, that also has an effect on the creature problems, that’s redflagged for a different reason, but it’s also redflagged for repeatable kill causes problems at common.

And so we also—if you’re capable of killing more than one thing, either because off the bat you kill more than one thing, a sweeper of some kind, or if you have repeatable kill, meaning every turn I can kill something, or every once in a while I can kill something, both of those things we redflag.

Now, like I said, Tremor, which is something that does one damage to all creatures, not something we tend to do at common. That has the capability of killing more than one creature. But it most often doesn’t, so we on a case-by-case basis look at things and figure out whether they’re allowed. But as a general rule of thumb, we like to hold back on things that create the card advantage or things that kill multiple creatures.

In general, by the way, this leads us to the next one, which is in general we redflag things that do repeatable effects. Now, there’s some repeatable effects we’re fine with at common. But if every turn you’re able to do something, we have to figure out are you complicating the board state.

And pretty much one of the rules is, if I do this, does my opponent have to take into account that I am doing it? Now, some things like milling, taking cards from the top of the library and putting it in the graveyard, or lifegain, there’s some things that it can—your opponent sometimes has to think about it, but most of the time they don’t.

If I have a creature that is milling you, it’s not until you get low enough in your library that that mill is a threat to win the game that you really have to think about it. In the early game, whatever. It’s not going to change how I’m blocking or doing things.

Life gain is similar. It could matter later in the game that you’re gaining life, but early on, when I say, “Okay, I gain a life,” everyone’s like, okay, I have to mark it on my sheet, to mark my score, your life total, but it’s not affecting decisions about blocking or the board—it can late game, it’s not in the beginning of the game.

And so the repeatable effects, we just have to be careful that they for the most of the game, like if I have a repeatable effect that makes my opponent have to constantly think about that effect and how it affects each turn, oh, well, we tend not to do that at common.

A lot of those cards affect other things, so they trigger a different flag. A lot of those generate card advantage. That one of the things you’ll notice is, a lot of times when things get redflagged, it gets multiply redflagged because it’s breaking a bunch of different rules.

And usually that’s a sign, by the way, when you get multiple red flags, I’m not saying some of the multiple red flags don’t make it through, but usually that’s a sign that you’re not supposed to be a common.

Next thing is do you create a loop? So the classic example here is Gravediggers. So Gravedigger is a black creature that when it enters the battlefield, you get to take a—you Raise Dead. You get to take a creature from your graveyard and put it into your hand.

And the problem with Gravediggers is, they create a loop. Meaning if I can get two Gravediggers, I play one Gravedigger, and I get back the other Gravedigger. And then what happens is, I create this loop that every time one of my Gravedigger dies, I’m able to get back the other Gravedigger.

Now. It’s not that we don’t want loops. Loops are cool. But especially in Limited, and for casual players who are beginning, we don’t want a lot of loops. And so one of the ways to avoid loops is getting them out of common. Once again, this is about just numbers. Which is, this is something we want to happen less frequently.

Well, if they’re at common, it’s just going to happen more frequently. We’ll get them out of common, okay, it can still happen, you can get two of the same uncommon, especially if you’re drafting. But it’s going to happen not as often. Not as frequent. And so in general, we see loops, we tend to redflag them. We do redflag them. I mean, sometimes we keep them, I’m not saying we get rid of every loop.

Okay. Related to that are cards that are more powerful in number. So if I have a card that I have multiples of them, it goes up in power. Now, sometimes we want that at common. We are making something like a Kindle. So, Kindle was a spell from Tempest. So it did two damage, plus it did an extra damage for every Kindle in your graveyard.

So, well kind of what makes that card interesting is, I want to have a bunch of Kindles. The idea that my first Kindle does two damage. But my second Kindle does three damage. Pretty cool. But it doesn’t mean as much unless you have access to Kindles.

So whenever something is needed in number, we redflag it because it essentially is, “Do we want it to be…” Sometimes, like Kindle, we want that. That’s a positive thing. We want you to collect a bunch of them. So we like particularly put it at common.

But sometimes, like, oh, well that’s kind of problematic if you get too many of them, especially in Limited. You know what we’re going to do? We’re not going to put that at common. We’re going to put it at a higher rarity. And that there are definitely cards that—I mean, like I said, it’s a balance of figuring out how much we want you to have access to that, both for the Limited player and for the casual beginner.

Okay. Next category is what we call “causes confusing interaction.” So one of the things in general is, there is certain things we’ve learned that—there’s certain rules that we know are hard for people. Now, that’s not to say that we don’t want those rules to never happen, those interactions to never happen. But when we know there’s a problem, when we know that the average person gets it wrong, we want to limit how often people are going to run into that.

And especially, you kind of don’t want beginners to run into it. So one of the perfect examples there is, a lot of players don’t necessarily understand how trample and deathtouch interact. And so we’re kind of careful to make sure that those two abilities don’t easily get together. Most of the time.

Now,  it’s not to say you can’t (???) them. I’m not saying you can’t ever make things do that. But we’re very cautious of that. That we’re very cautious to say, “Okay, when this is going to happen, we want to make sure that we limit how often that interaction happens.”

And let me stress. None of this, none of New World Order, none of redflagging, none of this is to prevent cool things from happening in Magic. We want cool things to happen. The issue is, if something’s going to cause problems and confuse people, we just want to lessen how often it happens.

And remember, in Constructed, where you pick your cards, you get to dictate how often something happens. When we pick something for common, the two things we are affecting is how it impacts in Limited, and how it impacts for the casual player that has less cards.

And note, by the way, when I say “casual player,” one of the problems of using the term “casual player” is there’s two different types of casual player. What I kind of mean is really the less-enfranchised newer player, not “likes to play casual formats.” So maybe I probably should get a better word for that.

So what I’m talking about is the newer player. The player that is less enfranchised. And that a lot of what New World Order is about, and this redflagging, is percentages. Is just how often do we want you to see something?

And the idea is, if something’s going to cause problems for the newer player, we say, “You know what? Let’s lessen how often they see that.” And on the flip side, something we really want people to experience—like, the other thing, for example, is when you build a set, you’re like, “Here are what my set’s about.”

And some of the stuff that your set’s about, like every year, we make Magic, and we want Magic to do some new things. So the way we do that is, we go, “Okay. We’re going to new worlds, there’s new mechanics, this is what we’re doing.”

Well, part of the fun of the new world is you have to care about things. It was neat that in Zendikar, I have to care about when I play my land. It was neat that in Innistrad, I have to care when things die. It is neat that in Theros, I had to care about which of my cards targeted my own creatures.

And that that happened in building, that happened in play, and it is fun that each environment cares about things that other environments don’t care about. So it’s not that we don’t—when you’re trying to figure out percentages, it’s like, I want people to experience this.  Oh, is this something very cool that I think having a higher visibility will increase happiness? Is this a neat thing the set is doing? Okay, then there, I’m trying to get things in common.

My whole thing about if your theme’s not in common it’s not your theme, it’s just me saying, if you want your players to experience something, you have to put it in the numbers that they can experience it. And a big, big thing about understanding trading card games and rarity is, you don’t control the minutiae, but you control the granularity.

I can’t control what you see, but I can control about how often you see it. That I can take the different things that are in my set, and I can say, okay. I want you to experience this at this rate. I want you to experience this at this rate. This is why as-fan is so important. The concept of how often we literally open it in your pack. How you get this concept.

And we literally sit and go, okay.  This ability, we want this as-fan. This ability, we want this as-fan. We want this showing up at this percentages. This showing up at that percentages. And what redflagging is really about is just us saying, “These are the things that are problematic at too high a percentage. If they show up at too high a percentage, it’s a problem.” And that really is what we’re doing. The redflagging is us just saying, hey hey hey. Do we want this showing up at the frequency that it would show up by showing up in common?

And when the answer is no, well, then we take it out of common. But once again, and I’ll stress, redflagging is not hard and fast rules. Good creative work does not function under hard and fast rules. It functions well under rules, but then you need the ability to make exceptions. And a lot of what design is there for is to figure out when’s the right call. When should you make the exception?

Okay, well thanks for joining me today. So I’m now parked, and it’s time for me to be making Magic. Talk to you guys next time.