11/14/14 Episode 175: Exploratory Design

All podcast content by Mark Rosewater

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

Okay. So today, I’m going to talk about part of design that—I wrote an article about this, but I haven’t talked about it in my podcast. Or not too much. Is what we call “exploratory design.” Aka “pre-design,” aka “advanced design.”

So today I’m going to talk about how it came to be. And what it means. It’s actually evolved. And how we use it. So okay. So in the beginning, so we had had, way way back when, my boss was Randy Buehler at the time. He was the equivalent of what Aaron Forsythe is now. Director of Magic R&D. And Randy came to me and said, “Mark, I have budged for you to have a design intern.”

And I was like, “Oh… okay. How do I get a design intern?” And that’s when I said to him, “Can I get it any way I want,” and he said, “Uhh, how do you want to get it?” And I said, “Have you ever watched The Apprentice?”

And that’s how the Great Designer Search came to be, is me trying to find a design intern. So we had this big contest, essentially. I mean, it was actually a hiring thing. But it was kind of part hiring, part reality show. Called the Great Designer Search, and we ended up, the winner got an internship, a design internship, that was the prize.

Alexis Janson won the first one, Ken Nagle came in second and also got an internship. Graeme Hopkins came in third and got a different internships at Wizards that would turn into a full-time job. Mark Globus came in fourth, he would also get a job out of this. So a bunch of people ended up getting jobs at Wizards. Actually, the top four all ended up getting jobs. Long-term.

So, four years later we did a second Great Designer Search. The winner of that was a guy named Ethan Fleischer. The guy who came in second is a guy named Shawn Main. The guy who came in third is a guy named Scott Van Essen. All three, by the way, currently work at Wizards. But from that—actually, Scott got the job later. Ethan won a design internship, and Shawn won another internship. His internship was in R&D Digital. Magic Digital. But anyway, both of them ended up becoming full-time designers and are on my design team now.

So what happened was, the first day they walked through the door, I knew I had six months to sort of evaluate them. And there’s normal things we’re going to do. We put them on design teams, and we put them through their paces, and definitely get a chance to see what they’re capable of. But I was interested in something a little more.

So what happened was, when we ran the first Great Designer Search, I was just looking for a kind of generic—people with good design skills. We looked at a lot of card designing skills. And there was mechanic designing, and we did a lot of nuts and bolts in the first Great Designer Search.

The second Great Designer Search, I was looking for something a little bit different. I was looking to try to find a few more people that are what I call sort of “big picture vision.” And that’s why the second Great Designer Search, we had them build a world.

In fact, for those that never watched the second Great Designer Search, the way it worked was, once you got into the finals, you had to submit a world. So you had to do essays, and then if you got past the essays you had to do multiple choice, if you got past multiple choice then you got to the next phase was a design thing where you had to turn in a design.

And 101 people or so made it to that thing. You had to turn in a design, and you had to explain what your world was. And during the course of the whole Great Designer Search, you were building in your world. And each person had their own world.

So one of the things, the reason we did that was, I was very much testing the idea of big-picture vision. Of trying to hire some people that I thought had it. It was something that we wanted a little more of, and so, when Ethan and Shawn started the first day, I knew that I had six months to figure out, did they have the skills we wanted.

And one of the skills I really wanted to test was big-picture vision. So what we did was, at the time we were just about to start Theros. Which was the Greek mythology set, obviously. So the block that followed it was what you guys now know as Khans of Tarkir, back then was Huey, Dewey, and Louie.

We decided that I was going to explain to them the structure of the Huey block, and we had a year, or six months at this point since their internship was six months. We had six months with them to sort of see, what would they do with it? Because I knew that we were going to start with the structure, which was large-small-large, in which the middle set pivoted, and would draft with both sets. I said, okay, that’s a jumping-off point. I want to talk to the guys and see if they can come up with how to structure this block. That the only going-in point was large-small-large, middle set’s going to draft with both sets. Let’s make sure that we do something that makes sense with that.

That the draft was just a jumping off point. That we needed to come up with a design and a concept of design that we would then built around. But I was eager to see what they would come up with. So what we did was, we started early with this little project.

In fact, it’s funny, because Ethan and Shawn, day one, when they walked in the building, day one we started this project. And because it was advanced of normal design, so I started a year earlier, it was way, way ahead. So it took them three years to be able to talk about what they did on their first day. I remember when we finally announced Khans of Tarkir, and Shawn was like, “Finally I can talk about my first day!”

So, what happened was, I said to them, okay. Here are the rules of the team. Two of you, I’m going to give you kind of assignments to crack. The big assignment is, figure out this block plan. But we will talk, and as we figure things, I’ll go, “I like that, let’s explore that idea.” And that the two of them would come together and get ideas, and come back to me and pitch me the ideas. I would give some input, and that would sort of determine the next thing they worked on.

And the rule was, if they wanted to get others to help them, they could, but the two of them were responsible for presenting it to me. And they, on their own accord, went and got some other designers to help them.

So, early on, the initial process very much was just we were figuring things out, they would go, “Hmm,” and they would pitch me ideas. And they had a whole bunch of ideas. One of the ideas was, characters are traveling from World A to World B. And World A would be the first set, and the thing they travel on would be the middle set, and where they end up would be the [third] set. So it’s a ship. They travel on a ship.

So it’s like, they’re in port, and there’s a ship, and then the ship travels and now it’s in the new port. Oh, well see? That way, the ship makes sense played with the first port, but the ship makes sense with the second port. But the two ports were never played together. They’re separate worlds.

We talked about worlds at war with each other in which you saw the world, then you saw the conflict, then you saw the world. We talked about all sorts of different things. Lots of different things got bandied about.

One of the ideas, which I think was Ethan’s, was the idea of a time-travel set. Now once again, you guys have not seen it all come out yet. So I’ll be a little vague on it. But the idea of Ethan had a like, “Here is a time travel story that perfectly explains why this structure would work.” And I really liked it. So what happened was, once we adopted a structure, it was like, “Okay, I think that structure works.” I go, well, let’s spend some time figuring out, if we did this structure, what kind of mechanics would we use?

And one of the things that definitely played into this was, when we were talking about what we wanted to use, once we understood the structure, because the structure of time travel is a structure of change.  I won’t give away the details. But time travel stories, in their general nature, are about change.

Like I said, I think I’ve talked about this before. There’s two different types of time travel stories. One is in which you mess with time, and the other is in which you kind of visit in time. And so the second is more like, we modern day people go to the past and get to observe things in the past. And it’s not that we do anything that changes things, it’s more that we get to observe it.

But we’re not doing an “observe,” we’re doing a “change history” sort of story. One in which things are going to change. And so we knew we needed a mechanic that would reflect that. We worked very hard. We talked about a bunch of different things.

And once I came up with the idea of maybe it was morph, we bandied about, well what could you do with morph? How do you mess with morph such that it worked with the block plan? And once we got the general gist of what we were trying to do, the exploratory design team worked with a bunch of different ideas there.

So anyway, six months goes by, and… so the way it worked was, it was an internship. They had a six-month internship . At the end of six months… in fact, the way, if you ever want to get hired in R&D, I’ll explain to you how the process works, is pretty much nowadays, it’s infrequent that we just hire somebody. There’s a lot of moving pieces, it’s a difficult job, and kind of what we do is, when we think someone is a good fit we offer them a six-month internship. I mean, it’s paid. It’s a paid internship.

And at the end of the six months, we kind of evaluate. Are we happy with them? Are they happy with us? Is it something we think is going to be worthwhile going forward? And if it is, then it turns into a full-time job.

And pretty much everybody on my team and almost everybody in the development team with a few exceptions started as an intern. And so anyway, six months go by, and I actually had one slot. And so Ethan was the person who had won the Great Designer Search, and I was a big fan of Shawn, but I was like, “Well, Ethan was the one that I really put through his paces in design…”

Really, Shawn had been doing other things because he wasn’t a design intern, he was doing more broad stuff. And so I had some sense of Shawn’s, and I like Shawn. But I was told that I got to pick one person. And so I picked Ethan. So Ethan got a full-time job in design.

But meanwhile, I really liked Shawn. So I went to Aaron and I said, if we could find a place for Shawn, I think Shawn is awesome. The six month internship showed me he’s a great, great fit, we should find a place for Shawn.

And in fact, Shawn’s internship ended and Shawn… everybody believed that Shawn was going home, including Shawn. Shawn had started making arrangements, and at the last possible minute, Aaron convinced Bill that we should keep Shawn on a little while longer. They extended his internship so that we could… anyway, everybody finally came to the conclusion that I had been pushing all along, that Shawn’s awesome, that we should keep Shawn. And eventually we did find a spot for Shawn. Shawn came on full-time. And luckily, he came on full-time on my design team. So.

It is funny, because the way design teams are structured is, because it was getting bigger, they decided to give it a manager, so Mark Gottlieb is my manager. So I don’t manage the people, I manage the process and the sets. But Mark manages the people. And so I think I was Shawn’s boss for like four days or something before Mark officially took over.

But anyway, so they both got extended. So we said, “You know what, this is going well. Let’s keep this going.” And then I said, “You know what? Huey block is in such good shape, I’m going to use this team and turn our attention to Theros.” Which at the time, neither Born of the Gods or Journey into Nyx had started yet. We were still in Theros. And we were having some issues with Theros. I said, “Well, let me use this team. This team seems to be good.” So we started doing some work on Theros.

During this team, that team came up with bestow, Billy Moreno at the time was working on the exploratory design team. Sorry, back then I think we called it pre-design is what we called it. And so Billy Moreno, working with our team came up with bestow, and we just came up with a bunch of things that were working. Tribute came out of that team. And so anyway, it was going really well.

And so I went to Aaron, and I said, “Aaron, this is…” like I had started it because I wanted to really just test Ethan and Shawn. But as I sort of started like… what happened was,  they worked on Huey, I’m like, “We’ve nailed Huey. And I’m going to start Huey design next year, and I have a huge leg up.”

In fact, by the way, so normally the way things used to work is, when I would start a set, I would know the general gist of where I was going, but I didn’t know any of the details to it. I knew, “Okay, we’re doing Horror World,” or you know. And so when we started, normally, so it’s twelve months. Design is about between eleven and twelve months of a large set.

It used to be that it would take two, three months to get to the first playtest. The first playtest is all commons. Because we have to find our feet and figure out what we’re doing, you know. It would take a little while to get there. We did our first all-common playtest on Huey like two and a half, three weeks in. Like, we just hit the ground running.

And the reason why was the exploratory design team had done so much work that I knew exactly what we wanted to do. That when we started, it’s like, “Oh, oh, we want to do blah blah blah.” And we knew we were doing morph, raid  had come out of exploratory design, we had a general gist of what we wanted. And so we really, really hit the ground running.

And so I had gone to Aaron and said, “Aaron, this is an amazing tool. I want to make use of this tool.” And Aaron said, “Oh, that sounds great.” And I got Aaron’s blessing. And then we made it official.

And so once we made it official, I started structuring it a little more. I mean, one of the things about this in general was that it didn’t start… it kind of started accidentally. Like, I was just, like I said. I started it not to change the process of how design was done, I started it as a safe means to sort of test out my designers to see what they were capable of.

And what I discovered was that working on a set before you were tied to cards and mechanics did a really amazing thing. And this is one of the things about exploratory design that I’ve come to really love is, that part of what I realized is, when we get in design, we’re beholden to cards. That when we start designing a set, I’ve got to start making cards. And that when you are making cards, it skews a lot of what you’re doing because you’re trying hard to make the cards.

And so one of the things exploratory design said to me was, wow. It’s suddenly very liberating not to have to tie yourself down to cards. Now, real quickly. The way exploratory design works, by the way, is… people are like, “No cards?” There are cards involved, but it’s a little bit different.

So the way it’ll work is, there’ll be something I’m interested in. Depending on what the set is. And I’ll say to them, “Okay, let’s explore this aspect.” They go off, usually what happens is they have one or two meetings without me, and then they meet with me once a week. And during that meeting, they then show off what they’ve worked on that they like.

Normally what they do is they’ll mock up cards. Meaning they’ll make decks to play with. And usually they’ll bring two decks, I’ll play one, one of them will play the other. One deck will show off one thing, the other deck will show off the other thing. Usually. Every once in a while both decks will show off the same thing sometimes, depending on the mechanic.

And then we play. And then I absorb it, and I sort of give feedback, and then either they scrap it if I really think it’s not working, or more often than not I go, “Oh, I like it, but here’s things that need tweaking.” Or, “I don’t like it, but with these tweaks, maybe I would like it.” And then they go and they work on that. So it’s an iterative process. So one of the neat things about it, and I’ll talk about this today, is kind of what the role of exploratory design is has changed over time.  

By the way, let me explain the name real quick. So when we first started it we called it pre-design, and then we called it advanced design. And when I wrote my article I think in the article it’s called advanced design. [NLH—Yes.] And we’ve since changed to exploratory design. So let me explain why the name change.

So what happened was, when Huey was going to have its credits, I said, “You know, Aaron, the advanced design team…” at the time, “…had done a lot of work on this set. I really want to give them credit. They did a lot of work and a lot of what the set became came from their work.” And so Aaron goes, “Oh, well do you want to just list them with design?” I go, “Well, not really. I feel like…” I mean, it turns out that Shawn was on the design team. Ethan was not. And I said, “Well, I really think it’s a different thing. I feel like it’s a different group, and I’d like to list it differently.”

And so first we tried “advanced design,” but it didn’t quite convey what we want. And really what we were trying to say is that this is the team that sort of explored things before the design team started. And so we bandied around a bunch of different names, and exploratory design sounded good. Especially in the credits now, the team is listed under exploratory design. And so we now officially call them that. So no longer pre-design, no longer advanced design, it’s exploratory design. Because that’s what the credits say.

And the reason, by the way, if you ever look at the credits… actually, in the official credits, it is not design and development. In the official credits, it is like initial idea, or… something in initial design. It’s initial design and final design.  [NLH—“Initial Concept and Game Design” and “Final Game Design and Development.”] So it’s something and initial design, and like final design and development.

And the reason we changed it is, outside… design and development is something very unique to the way Wizards structures. But outside of our building, later on, if you want to get a different job, what you do, what development does is considered by the outside world to be design.

And by not giving them design in their credit, it made them harder if they later wanted to get another job, to explain to people that no, they were doing what is outside the walls of Wizards called design. And so we changed the credit. And so internally we call it design and development. But externally, it’s initial design and final design. Anyway, and so to match those, we now have exploratory design.

So, we worked on Huey. And then it came time to do the new set. So the set after Huey is Lock. Lock and Stock. So real quickly, because we need—one of my rules is, as soon as I start working on a set, I want the code name public, so that I can talk about it and not go, “Oh, that set I’m working on.”

So we knew we needed to give the names of some upcoming sets before we would reveal the two-block paradigm where we were shifting. So we had Lock, Stock, and Barrel, and we had Blood, Sweat, and Tears. And so what happened was, once we converted to a two-set model, we said, okay. They already know the names of three of these sets.

Let’s just, we’ll give the fourth set a name that makes sense, so what happened was, Lock, Stock, and Barrel became Lock and Stock, and became Barrel and Monkeys. And Blood, Sweat, and Tears became Blood and Sweat, and became Tears and Fears.

After that, and I haven’t revealed these names yet, but pretty soon I’ll start working on them. And then I’ll reveal the name. The new names are two set names! (Angelic chorus) They’re much easier to get to two set names.

Anyway, when we started working on Lock design, sorry, Lock exploratory design, I decided that I wanted to revamp the process. Oh, no no, not Lock. I’m sorry. Blood, Sweat, and Tears comes before Lock. So we were working on Blood advanced design.

So Blood, Sweat, and Tears is the 2000… sometimes you get mixed up with names. So Huey, Khans of Tarkir is the 2015 fall set, Blood is the 2016 fall set, Lock is the 2017 fall set. Okay. So now I’m talking about Blood advanced design.

So when we started Blood advanced design, I wanted to revamp a little bit how we were doing things. And so the idea was, I wanted to be a little bit more structured. And so the way it worked was, we decided that it worked best if the exploratory design team had four members plus me. I was not counting me. I was the overseer of the team.

But the team, other than me, there were four people. And what we wanted was, we wanted a system by which there was some continuity, but also a lot of flux. Because part of what you’re trying to do when you’re trying to get different ideas is, you want a lot of different people shuffling through.

So what we decided was, there was going to be four slots. Slot number one was the lead. And the idea was, we wanted the lead of the project to be consistent for the run. And so we wanted someone to be in charge of doing the Blood advanced design.

So Ethan and Shawn are two people that run the exploratory design team. So they take turns. What will happen is, Ethan will take a block, then Shawn will take a block. Then Ethan will take a block, then Shawn will take a block. Is the nature of how it works.

So Shawn took the reins of… we knew that Shawn was going to be the strong second on Blood. And so… is that right? (???) Let me think about this. No, Ethan did Sweat. Ethan ran the advanced design team. The exploratory design team. Sorry.

So the idea was, there’s one person who’s leading it. That’s either Ethan or Shawn, it’s a six-month gig, because now that we have two blocks a year, each one is six months long. Okay. So then, the second spot is another designer, usually somebody from my design team. If not, just somebody that we know is what we call a heavy hitter, meaning somebody that’s very capable of pumping out a lot of designs.

Like I said, traditionally it’s someone from my team, not always though. And that person usually is there for about three months. So the idea is, during the course of one six-month set of design, you’ll have two different designers in that slot.

Next you have the developer. Every exploratory design team—originally we just had designers, and they would sort of talk to developers. And finally we said, “You know what? Developers…” Actually, I think developers asked us, could they just have somebody on the exploratory design team. Because that would be more helpful. And so we said yes.

So the third slot is a developer. That slot usually has a two-month rotation. So the idea is, there’s three of them during the course of the six-month period. And the last one could be anybody you want, and usually when you start it tends to be a creative person. But that’s a rolling slot that can be for anybody. And that’s a one-month slot.

So the idea is, during the course of your six months, the fourth slot, the rotating slot, six different people have a chance to be in. The development slot there’s three different people, the designer slot there’s two different people, and the lead there’s one person. So one plus two plus three plus six is twelve. So there’s twelve people on exploratory design teams.

It is possible, by the way, that’s a general guideline. Somebody who—sometimes a slot might stay a little bit longer if there’s a need for it. Somebody who stayed might come back, like one of the fourth slot position people might be the first slot and the fourth slot, that’s possible. But in general the idea is we have a whole bunch of people working on that.

And the other big thing we’ve been trying to figure out in exploratory design is the best way to use the team. For a while, we were trying to figure out the overall structure. And we were trying to say, “The set’s going to do this.” And we’ve done some exploratory design teams where they spent a lot of time figuring out mechanics. Like working really hard at one particular mechanic.

But what we’ve come to realize is, the actual best thing for the exploratory design team to do is not propose one mechanic, but propose a whole bunch of mechanics. So basically what we do is, we explore areas, they figure out what areas work and don’t work, and then they will come up with ideas and then we mark sort of mechanics that worked, that kind of worked, and that didn’t work.

And the idea is, what they’re trying to do is provide the design team with a list of tools. The reason that things that work are important is, maybe they’re actual things the team will use. Things that kind of work are important because it says to them, “We’ve been down this path, there’s something there, we haven’t cracked it yet.”

And things that don’t work are important because it says, “Hey, we tried this, it failed, and here’s why it failed.” And not that the design team couldn’t explore something again, but at least there already are lessons learned from that. So if we’re going to try it, we’re going to try something different.

So what happens now is, once the exploratory team is done, they do a presentation, either Shawn or Ethan does, the lead does the presentation, to all of R&D, usually at a Tuesday Magic meeting, to say, “Okay, we have finished  exploratory design,  here’s the kind of things we were playing around with.” And that way everybody has a chance to see it. There’s a document they produce. Development usually will… exploratory design ends a month before design begins, so everybody, development especially, and creative as well, can absorb the information.

And the development and creative will come back to us. Like development might say, “Oh, well, Mechanic X that you’re playing around with, we are scared of Mechanic X and here’s why.” If you think of either A., maybe we don’t use that mechanic, or B. if you’re going to use it, here’s the problems. Walk in with your eyes open of what the problems are.

Creative team might come to us and go, “Oh, we like where you’re going. Well, based on stuff you’ve been working on, let’s give you a little of what we’re thinking of.” Because let’s say we lay out mechanics A through N. They might go, “Oh, well mechanics L, M, and N are closer to what we were thinking maybe we’d do.” And we can have a discussion about them.

So the idea of exploratory design is, well, it does a bunch of things. First off, for me, or actually, to be clear. It’s from a lead designer. I’m often lead designer. But mostly of the fall set. And now we have two blocks a year. So there’s other lead designers. For the lead designer, what I’m doing is creating a list of tools.

Also, for a Head Designer, I’m getting a better understanding of the block structure. Because one of my jobs as Head Designer is to understand walking in what the block structure’s about. What is it going to be doing? How is the first set and the second set? Where’s the shift between them? What are we doing to give definition to each of the two sets?

One of the things that happened under the three-block paradigm was the second set had to stay much, much closer to the first set to give room for the third set to be something different. But now that we don’t have a third set, we are free of that, and the second set can be as similar or as different as it needs to be.

If we feel like the set is doing a lot a lot of stuff that we haven’t finished exploring yet, hey, the second set can lean toward the first set. But if we feel like we’ve really done a lot of stuff and we want to make more of a stark difference, we can lean the second set more away from the first set. And so part of my job is to figure out, are we sort of leaning in our leaning out? What’s the second set doing, how is the block going to work?

And exploratory design really lets me start to understand the issues. So one of the things, a slide we usually put up at the beginning of whenever we do exploratory design is the following quote that I made, which is, “Exploratory design isn’t about finding answers, it’s about figuring out the questions.”

And what that means is that in exploratory design, I don’t need to solve the problem. I need to understand the problem. That part of what the exploratory part is, is figuring out what are the parameters of what we are doing.

And what I want to do is, I want to make that when we start the design, that I as Head Designer and my lead designer, if it’s not also me, both understand the parameters of the set. What is the set trying to do? What is the goal of the set? And the exploratory design allows me to create a framework to understand what we are looking for.

And a lot of times, to be clear, exploratory design sometimes finds mechanics that could be used. But that’s not our goal. The goal of exploratory design is more to sort of figure out what areas there is to play with.

It allows us to do—like I said. Being free of being tied to cards and the schedule—one of the things to understand about design is, design is twelve months, it’s broken into three different sections. There are certain things that have to get done. There’s just… things are chugging along. And there’s just no time to rest on some level. That you’re constantly trying to improve the file, playtest, iterate.

And that what exploratory design now lets us do is, it kind of lets us have some thinking time where we’re not rushed on a schedule. And it is super, super freeing. I really, really like what exploratory design has done for us.

It also lets me—so one of the things that’s important for me is that I like to have an idea of what I call “seep,” which is I really believe that your brain has elements that are very conscious and elements that are very subconscious. Meaning there’s things that you can do, and you can make your brain do, and you can consciously force a certain kind of thinking.

But there’s another element of thinking that is subconscious. Your brain can do really interesting work that isn’t always apparent to you. And that what is important to me sometimes is I want to get my brain… I want to sort of let the idea soak in my brain, if you will. That I know my brain’s going to do neat things if I kind of just give it some time. It’s like, “Here’s some ideas,” and if you let things kind of simmer for a little bit, lots of metaphors here, if you really can give yourself some time that your brain can kind of play around in the space, that I find you come up with very interesting ideas.

And that when you are on a deadline, when you’re just constantly having to get things done, you don’t always have the ability to simmer. That because you’re constantly trying to sort of evolve and iterate, you use a certain part of your brain. And that I like having a chance to sort of holistically approach and… my brain works in strange and mysterious ways, and so I like giving it a chance to sort of thin k about something, and that one of the neat things is, and this happens a lot in exploratory design is, that I can say to my team, “You know, I’m interested in Thing X. Let’s take a week or two and just explore Thing X.” And they’re like, “Why? Why Thing X?” And I’m like, “Oh, I got no idea. I don’t know. I literally don’t know. Just, my brain seemed interested in Thing X. Can we explore Thing X?”

And one of the things that I do, for people that understand my thought process is, I’m a very intuitive thinker. And what that means is, I believe intuition, if you’ve heard my theory, is muscle memory for the brain. [NLH—This is called “inferential intuition.”]

What that means is, if you do something, or you perform an act, driving I know is a very similar one. People always ask me, “How can you record a podcast on your way to work?” It’s like, well, I drive to work all the time. My body kind of knows what it’s doing. And muscle memory’s like, if you handle something, if you’re used to handling a particular tool or a weapon or something that you handle all the time, that your brain kind of… the muscles learn how to manipulate it.

And like I said, when I drive, it’s like, I remember when I first learned to drive, it’s like, “Okay…” I had to learn on a clutch. But like, I got the gas, and the clutch, and I’ve got to do this, and the wheel, and there’s all these things to think about, and the idea that I could think about something else while I was driving seemed crazy. I was lucky to stay on the road.

But now I’m doing a podcast while I’m driving, and the reality is I’m just not thinking about it. I do this drive all the time, my brain knows where it’s going. I’m somewhat on autopilot. I know how to get to work and I know how to drive.

And I think the same is true for intuition. I think intuition is your brain’s muscle memory. Which is, if you just do something enough, your brain starts to learn how to do it, and that your conscious brain doesn’t necessarily—sort of like, I feel like your conscious brain goes, “Okay, subconscious brain, you got this. I’m good.”

And that one of the things that happens is, because I’ve been doing creative things all my life, and I’ve been doing creative design, Magic design nineteen years, that my brain will go places that I don’t know what it’s doing. It’s just sort of like, “What are you doing, brain?”

And I’m fascinated sometimes. Because my brain will go places, and I’m like, “What in the world are you doing?” And then finally, like when I finally figure out what it’s up to, like, “Ohh!” Like, I always feel stupid that the conscious mind took so long to figure out what my subconscious mind was doing.

So anyway, I’ve learned to trust my subconscious mind. So one of the things I like about exploratory… a little side trip there. What I enjoy about exploratory design is it allows my subconscious mind time to fiddle around and do things, and that I have the luxury of letting my subconscious mind do some stuff, and going, “I don’t know what he’s up to, but let’s see. He’s up to something. Let’s see what he’s up to.”

So the other thing that’s become very interesting about this is, it’s ended up being really good training for my designers. I’m not too far from work, but I’ll talk about this, one last big, big boon to exploratory design, which is, one of the problems that I’ve always had is, it is very hard to teach… like, I can teach people individual card design. You design some cards, I’ll give you notes on your designs. You can see mistakes you make. And over time you just slowly learn how to be better at designing a card. That’s just a skill you can improve over time.

But a lot of the vision stuff is tough, because like one of the problems we used to have is, I’ll start it with Ken Nagle, which is… Ken comes in second in the Great Designer Search, gets an internship, eventually gets a full-time job. So Ken was my strong second on a set. And he’d be watching me. And like I would do things. And Ken would be like, “Why are you doing that? Why did you make that change?!”

And like, I would then have to stop and think and try to explain why I did things. But I would make changes and Ken’s like, “That’s an awesome change. How did you make that… how did you know…” Like one of the things I would do that would baffle Ken is, I would say, “We’re missing something.” And I’d go, “Uh… We’re missing this.” And he’s like, “How did you know that?” And I go, “Uh…”

I’ll give a similar story. When I lived in college, I would… my process for my laundry was, I bought a lot of clothes. Growing up, I never ever bought clothes. My mom would like have to drag me to the store to buy clothes. And finally going to college, I’m like, “Let’s go clothes shopping.” My mom’s like, “Let’s go clothes shopping? Okay. What is going on here?” And I just bought tons and tons of clothes.

Later what she figured out, or I figured out obviously, was I just didn’t want to do the wash a lot. So my plan was, I was just going to buy a lot of clothes and so hey, I had like a month’s worth of clothes. Underwear, by the way. Underwear and socks are the key.

Anyway, and then late night one night I would do like eight loads of laundry or something at three in the morning. But—so I had this giant pile of clothes that were my dirty clothes. And every once in a while, my best friend visited me one time, and I needed something. And this his memory of the story. He goes, “You needed something, all I saw is you reach your hand into this pile of laundry and you pulled out the thing you needed. As if you knew exactly where that thing was.” And I go, “Yeah, I think I did.”

That I had this weird method of…  to the outside world I seem like I have no organization. Until I do things that imply that I have a lot of organization, and people are always going, “Where did that come from?” This is a similar thing, where I think Ken was looking at my set and it just looked like a pile of laundry, that when I reached in and would go, “Oh, I need this,” like, “How did you do that? How did you know that?”

And one of my problems has always been, because I’m so intuitive, because my subconscious mind’s doing a lot of work for me, I don’t know what I’m up to. And so when someone says, “Well, how do you do that,” like, my job is to teach, right? I’m the Head Designer here. I’ve got to teach my designers how to do things. And I understand how to teach them individual skills. But some of this big-picture stuff was hard, because like, I do it so… it’s intuition.

So one of the things exploratory design has done, which has been very interesting for me is, it allows me to kind of walk through a process where it’s not so card-based. And explain what I’m up to. And also, because it’s not rushed, because we have some time, it allows me to do a lot more of explaining why things are working or why they aren’t working or talk about what we need, and trying to sort of walk through.

The other big thing I’ve been doing now is I finally have my strong second… I came the conclusion that the biggest way to have them understand what I’m doing is give them control of the file. So they actually input everything. So that as they put things in, they can start to see how things are forming together.

For those that don’t know what I’m talking about, go read an article I wrote called Nuts and Bolts, the second Nuts and Bolts is called Design Skeleton, basically it’s a structure by which you can put together a set. And it’s a way to create a structure that helps you understand what you need. And it’s a very, very good tool when you’re first starting out doing design.

And anyway, one of the things that happens as you more work on sets is you start understanding structure, and by having my strong second being in charge of actually overseeing the file, it allows them to have a better sense of watching how things are coming together.

Anyway, today’s a day of tangents. I mean, it’s all about exploratory design, but I can tell as I’m talking, like I’m just jumping around. See, I don’t know—my assumption is you guys like the tangents. I don't know. That’s how my brain works. I always wonder, by the way, sometimes, when I—because what happens is, I always record these in the morning, and then on the way home I listen to them.

And I’m often entertained because like I don’t quite remember what I said, and I’m like, “Oh yeah, I told them about my dirty laundry at college story.” Which I never necessarily thought I would tell on there. But you guys, you get to learn my secrets of college laundry.

Okay. I’m almost to work. So kind of the wrap-up is, exploratory design was this thing which has definitely evolved over time. It’s got more structure, there’s people involved. There’s credits. It’s something that really has become an ingrained part of how design works.

And like I said, it both makes design easier and it allows us… there’s just some luxury to it that allows me to do some things that really needed to be done, but I was kind of doing them at the same time. I  think what used to happen was, when I was doing design, I essentially was doing what is now exploratory design at the same time I was doing design. And just, there was a lot of cylinders firing in my brain. And this allows me to compartmentalize a little better. I could think about the exploratory part first, get it figured out, so when I get to design I hit the ground running.

And like I said, right now I’m working on Lock, which is the 2016 fall set. And like I said, I was so happy that when I started the design, the exploratory design team did such a good job of mapping out the kind of things we want to think about. That like, I walked into this set going, “Okay, I know what we want.” Which is often not the case. Like, I don’t always start doing designs, getting  the essence of what I want.

And the fact that I could walk in the very first day and go, “Okay, I think I know what we want,” like is a super boon of what exploratory design does. And so I really want to applaud Ethan and Shawn. All my designers, because they all work on it. Gottlieb and Ken and Gavin and Drew and… I mean, everybody on my team spends some time doing it. All the developers rotate in. A lot of the creative team. A lot of people at this point now. In fact, there’s few people in R&D that probably haven’t been on an exploratory design team yet. And we’ll get them on one soon.

But anyway, exploratory design. Something new. One of the things about design, I want you guys to understand is, we’re constantly evolving. In that it’s not that we’ve figured out how to design Magic sets and we stopped. We are constantly trying to figure out how to make them better.

And so I’m quite excited that we were able to find something so revolutionary so far in. When you’re like, 16, 17 years in, you’re like, “Wow, what… there’s no more revolutionary stuff we could find,” and then like bam, no, there’s a completely different way to think about how we build sets, and then this whole new process, which like I said, didn’t even start as something I meant to be something. It just kind of fell into it. But it’s a happy accident. And it’s become an integral part of design.

So that, my friends, is everything there is to know about exploratory design. Oh, we had some traffic today. So you guys got an extra-long episode. I felt like I was… I always can tell when I go off on tangents that I have some extra time.

But anyway, I am now at work, and I have just parked in the parking spot. So that means, guys, it is the end of my Drive to Work. I’ll talk to you next time.