I’m pulling out of the parking lot! We all know what that
means! Actually, you probably don’t all know what that means. It means I
dropped my daughter off at school today. But it still is time for Drive to
Work!
So today, well yesterday, last
podcast I started talking about lenticular design. Which is a concept that
we’ve been working on a couple different years, based out of our work on New
World Order. And last time I talked about sort of what lenticular design was.
But I hadn’t finished, and so today, I’m going to talk about sort of the rules
for using lenticular design. What does it mean to actually… how do you use it? And
there are six rules. This is based
on an article that I had written. Very shortly ago published, to me, but
since this is many weeks later, over a month ago for you.
Okay. So let’s start with the very first rule. Rule number
one is, some complexities are invisible to inexperienced players. So the thing
I explained last time was that there are three types of complexity. There’s
comprehension complexity—can you read the card and understand what it does?
There’s board complexity—can you understand how the card on the battlefield
interacts with other cards on the battlefield? And there is strategic
complexity. Do you understand how best to optimize this card to win?
So what we find is that comprehension complexity is more
important to the beginning players than board complexity, which is more
important than strategic complexity. So the way I like to describe this is,
imagine a new player has a sphere of awareness. And when they first start
playing, it’s really, really focused. In fact, when a beginner plays, most of
their attention goes on their hand. Because the question they are asking is,
“Can I play a card?” When you first start learning Magic, that’s the first thing you tend to be focused on. It’s like,
“Okay, it’s my turn… okay, do I have a land? I have to play a land. Okay, can I
play a card?”
And in fact, we do what we call focus testing, which is we
take players and we put them in a room and we watch them behind a two-way
mirror or sometimes we’re interacting with them. Sometimes they have never
played Magic and they’re learning
for the first time. Sometimes they’ve played but they’re beginners. And anyway,
we learn from them by watching and see what they do. It’s very educational.
So one of the things beginning players do is they’re very
focused on “What can I do? What can I play out of my hand?” Eventually they
start thinking about, “Oh, what do I have in play? Can I attack with the things
I have in play? Should I be blocking?” They start sort of becoming aware of the
battlefield. But then, it’s mostly their side of the battlefield.
Eventually, they start thinking of all the battlefield. And
after that, the start thinking about the opponent. The opponent really is a
second thought until they get comfortable with their own hand and their own
play, what’s going on on the battlefield.
So what happens is, the first thing they care about is
comprehension. Can I understand what cards are doing? When I’m focused on cards
in my hand, I read them and go, “What does that do?” Now, note, they’re not
really saying, “Why would I do this?” It’s just, “What does it do?”
So one of the things, by the way, that we learn about
beginning players is, they overvalue life, and the reason is, the goal of the
game is to get your opponent from twenty to zero. So at first blush, it first
seems like every time I’m lowering my opponent’s life total, I’m advancing the
game and getting to the point where I’ll be winning, and every time my life
total goes down, oh, well that’s a problem because if I get to zero I lose.
And so the key we found for beginners is, they just
overvalue life. We take advantage of that sometimes. Sometimes we’re making
cards for beginners. We play into the fact they really value getting life. Both
gaining life and taking life away from the opponent. But the point though is
that players early on will do whatever it is, like “Can I play this card? Yes,
I can play it,” and do it. Even if what they’re doing is not beneficial. Or
not… I guess not beneficial is the wrong word. But even if what they’re doing
might not be strategically the best move, they’re not thinking about that. What
they’re thinking about is, do I understand? Can I play this game? Do I
understand what the card does?
Now at some point they advance beyond that, and they start
thinking about the board. About the battlefield. And at that point, they start
going, “Oh, well what do I have in play, what does that mean?” And early on,
what we also find is beginners tend to be very hesitant to attack. In fact,
they are very scared of taking any kind of damage, and they are very afraid of
losing creatures by attacking. So what we tend to find is, if your opponent has
blockers, a lot of beginners will not attack. And if your opponent attacks you,
they tend to get in the way because they don’t want to take damage. Pretty much
what they’ve learned is going down is bad, and so they do what they can to
avoid it.
So what happens is, eventually they start realizing the
importance of what’s going on on the board, and the interactions between the
things on the board. It takes a little bit of while. And understanding whether
you can attack or not… I think I told the story once before, but it’s worth
repeating. And yes, I like repeating stories if you haven’t figured that out.
Is when you play, when I used to teach people Portal, it gave me a
chance to play with really, really simple creatures. Portal was an intro version of Magic
we made long ago. The creatures pretty much were vanilla. A few of them had
enter the battlefield effects. And there were a few basic, basic keywords like
flying. But pretty much it’s like, “Oh, I just have vanilla creatures.”
And in-between teaching sessions, we’d go to music festivals
and different places where we’d teach people. The teachers would play each
other. And we just had Portal decks
to play with. And it was very intriguing how much decisions there were to make
on the most basic of basic cards. I have a couple vanilla creatures to play,
you have a couple vanilla creatures. What’s the right thing to do?
And it was interesting watching how just making those kinds
of decisions. Forget any complications, there’s no instants, no enchantments,
no artifacts. No activated abilities. Just really nuts and bolts how much
stuff’s going on there.
And sometimes, one of the things that’s very easy to forget
when you are an advanced player is how you’ve incorporated all the lessons you
have. And things that at one point were a struggle, you’ve just learned how to
do. I talked about this last podcast. So anyway, the reason this first lesson’s
important is, the comprehension complexity is much more important to the
beginning player than board complexity, which is much more important than
strategic complexity.
So the beautiful part of this is, pretty much for a long
time—in fact, I’ll say almost as long as they are beginners, in fact, one of
the signs that you start to see strategic complexity is you’re not longer a
beginner. So if we’re trying to make sure that we don’t make the game complex for
beginners, strategic complexity is awesome, because strategic complexity is
mostly hidden. It’s invisible to beginning players. That they’re not even
thinking of those terms. And so that is very, very valuable when you talk about
lenticular design, is well if I want to stick stuff that is for the advanced
player but unseen by the beginning players, oh, well there’s an entire realm,
strategic complexity, that is pretty much invisible.
Okay, rule number two. Cards have to have a surface value.
Okay, so the way to think about this is, imagine if you will, in the far-flung
future, we eventually… technology exists such that you can have an item that
looks like a Magic card and feels
like a Magic card, but in fact the
face of it is, you can think of it like a computer screen. But something in
which it has the ability like a computer screen to change.
So you can imagine, in the far-flung future, that there are Magic cards that look and feel like Magic cards, but you have the ability
to program so that any physical card can become any Magic card. Now imagine, because it’s the far-flung future and we
can, that there is something in the card that is able to sense who is holding
it. And it knows, for whatever reason, how experienced you are as a Magic player.
So imagine, if a beginner picks up a card, and it shows the
beginner a card that makes sense to them. That is something the beginner wants.
And then, when an intermediate player picks up the card, it shows something
that makes sense for them. That’s a little more testing than the beginner card.
But not so advanced. And when the advanced player picks it up, it’s a very
advanced card.
Lenticular design, the basic premise is you’re doing that,
except you don’t have the luxury of the far-flung future and cards that just
can change. And what that means is, each person when they look at a card looks
through their own lens. How they see it. And one of the things that I‘m trying
to explain about lenticular design is that different players will look and see
cards differently. They don’t see it as the same thing.
But the advanced player gets the card and they notice it’s
an instant. They notice that there’s a lot of combat shenanigans and things
they can do. They realize that not only can they take advantage of what card’s
going away, and what card’s coming back, but they can tie them together so that
the two of them creates an effect larger than the sum of any one card. And even
build their deck taking advantage of the fact that those combos exist.
And the beauty of it is, every player, when they look at it,
is seeing something that makes sense to them. So the lesson of lesson number
two is, if a beginner player doesn’t understand what the card is doing—and like
I said last time, it’s not just a matter of strategically understanding.
Sometimes it’s just like, “I don’t know why you would use this.” One with
Nothing is an example from my last podcast. Which is, yes they could
read the words and understand the words, but they don’t understand what it
means.
Whenever the player doesn’t get what function the card has,
what you have to do when you’re designing a card, you have to make sure that
the sheen on that card, that the beginning player goes, “Ahh, I get it, it’s
such-and-such.” They look at Rescue from the Underworld, they go, “Ohh, I get
it! I’m getting a creature back from the graveyard.” Everything else just seems
like flavor to them.
And they don’t realize, “Oh, well hidden in that mechanic,
there’s a lot of interesting space.” But they don’t realize that yet, and
that’s fine. Because the thing is, as long as the beginner can look at a card
and come up with some reason why you’d play that card, they’re happy.
So here’s the parallel that I’m going to give. Imagine you
were a spy. See, you’re going to the far-flung future today, you get to be a
spy. There’s so much role-playing you get to do in this podcast. Okay, so
imagine you’re a spy. And you need to have a little hidden camera that you want
to carry with you. Now, if you just make a small miniature object and carry it
around with you, people are going to go, “Ooh, what’s that object?” And maybe
they’re going to go, “Hmm, is that a camera?”
But if you make that little miniature object look like
something, let’s say you make it look like a book. No one’s going to question
whether the book is a camera. Because they see a book. “Oh, it’s a book.”
They’re happy. And that this is the same way, which is if you want to have your
card be something greater, it still has to have some appearance for the low-end
players so they go, “Oh, I get it, it’s this.” And if not, then they start
looking to figure out what it is. And that’s when problems happen.
Now, I’m not saying, by the way, that we don’t make cards
just for advanced players. We do. We don’t do it at common. That we make
cards—for example, there are rare
cards with lines and lines and lines of text that the beginning player
picks up, looks at it, and goes, “Not for me!” and puts down.
But at common, and this is where lenticular design shines,
is as much as we can, we want to make sure that cards that have value to the
advanced player are also useful and not shunned by the beginning player.
Because I don’t want beginning players to pick up a card and go, “Oh, not for
me” when it’s a common. The commons need to be for them.
And so the lesson here is, you have to make sure. When you
are designing complexity and trying to hide it, that the thing that the card is
doing that’s not the complex part has a function, and the person playing it
gets it and sees it and understands what it is. Because beginning players are
not seeking out the complexity. It is not like they want complexity. In fact,
the last thing they want is complexity. When they get simple answers, they will
latch on to the simple answers. They desperately crave simple answers.
One of the hardest things about learning to play Magic is, there’s this feeling early on
of, “Do I understand what’s going on? Do I get it?” And that one of the things
we want to make sure is, as much as possible that the player goes, “Oh yeah, I
got it. Oh, I got it. Oh yeah yeah, I get it, I get it.” And that that makes
them continue. Every time they hit something they don’t understand it, that’s
another exit where they can go, “Eh, that game’s not for me. That game is too
hard.”
Okay. Let’s get to rule number three. So rule number three
is experience is connected to how far ahead a player thinks. Okay, so I talked
about the sphere of awareness. Which is when you play, how much you’re aware.
So before I talked about sort of the distance. Like, my hand. My battlefield.
Your battlefield. My opponent’s hand. And even farther than that, by the way,
is my opponent.
One of the things you’ll find about really good players is
that the best players, it’s not even about what the cards are or what the play
is, it’s about who the opponent is. Mike Turian, hall of famer who I work with,
used to be in R&D, now in Organized Play, or sorry, Digital Media.
One of the things that he talks about is that it’s not just
enough to know what the cards are, you have to look at your opponent and think
about what did he think about? “Oh, he paused before he did something. Well,
why would he pause? What cards would make him have to think at that point?” And
that helps to pinpoint what he has and what he’s thinking about.
Now, that’s very, very high-end play. Now, the other way
that this sphere of awareness expands is through time. So for example, a
beginning player is thinking about now.
Now. Not later in the turn, not the end of the turn, not next turn, now.
“Here’s my hand, what can I do right now?”
And for example, what we find with beginners is they really
like to have the turn sequence, which they put right next to them and go,
“Okay, I’m doing this.” And they do that. Then they consult again. “Okay, now
I’m doing this.” And they do that. They’re very in the now.
Now, really good players… so, I’m going to tell a story.
About Mark Justice. So for those that might not know who Mark Justice is, early
on, if you had asked players, right about the time when Pro Tour began, if you
asked players… in fact, I did this. So I did an interview at the very first Pro
Tour where I said to people, “If you could end up in the finals, who would you
want to play in the finals?”
And what I found was, people wanted to play the person they
thought of as being the best Magic player.
The most awesome finals would be them vs. the best Magic player. And the interview, I believe eighty to ninety percent
of the people all named the same one person. Because, at that time, at that
moment, that person was considered by the vast majority of Magic players to be the best Magic
player on the planet. A man named Mark Justice.
Now previously, Mark had won the Southwest Regionals. Had
gone and won the U.S. Nationals. And then had come in third at Worlds that
year. He would later go on to Top 8 the very first Pro Tour, he would later
that year come in second at Worlds… sorry, he had done Top 3 at Worlds two
times in a row, so before the Pro Tour started, he had won a Regionals, won a
U.S. Nationals, and then Top 3 Worlds twice in a row. And then, he came to the
very first Pro Tour and Top 8ed. And then, the very next Worlds, he came in
second. Almost won.
In fact, it’s funny. If you ask people, if you told them at
the time, one day there was going to be a Hall of Fame, but Mark Justice
wouldn’t be in the Hall of Fame, people would say, “Well, why are you having a
Hall of Fame?”
Anyway. So Mark Justice, one of the best people to ever play
the game. One of the things that I was fascinated by is Mark had a natural
flair for the game. That he had intuition. Now, what we find is that if you
take players, the really good players and divide them up, some of them just
have a natural intuition for what’s the right play to do. Jon Finkel’s a good
example of that.
And some are good because they just work so hard that they
learn every possible thing and they playtest every possible thing. Randy
Buehler was this way. That Randy would test like nobody’s business. The reason
he was so good is, he didn’t get into a situation he wasn’t familiar with.
Because he did so much prep work that he knew everything.
So anyway, Mark Justice was one of the intuitive ones. And
so one of the things that I loved about Mark and watching him play was, and
this is something in general about really good players is, he would make a move
on turn four that would win him the game on turn fourteen. That he would do
something that you have no idea what he’s doing.
So here’s what I remember. He came down, there was some big
event down in California, I used to live in L.A., and so he’s playing and he’s
in the finals. And I’m looking at his hand. And he has a few things in play. A
wall. But not much. Very little. Not much land in play at all. And in his hand
is a bunch of land and a bunch of spells. And he’s discarding spells. Drawing,
getting up to eight, discarding a spell. And he’s very frustrated.
And I have no idea what’s going on. Because he could use the
land. He has land his hand. There’s spells he could cast. I don’t understand
what’s going on. And as the game progresses, little by little he’s discarding
the spells. And finally, at like turn fourteen, he draws a land, drops the last
spell he has in his hand, which I think was Land’s Edge , which is a red
Enchant World from Legends. That
allows players to discard a land from their hand to do damage to the opponent.
So he plays Land’s Edge, has a land of seven cards, throws
them, fourteen damage, defeats the opponent. And like I was talking to him
after, and basically what happened was, his opponent had answers for all his
threats. And the only route to victory he had in his deck was a thing where he
hit them all at once with Land’s Edge for fourteen. So he nibbled them down to
fourteen exactly, and then played this game where he looked like he was stalled
on land, so that his opponent didn’t understand what he was doing, and got to
the point where he could at one burst just kill his opponent.
And anyway, beginning players are very focused on the now.
Advanced players are very focused on the future. And so one of the things when
making lenticular cards is that the function that is the now function is
something that the beginning player has to care about. But the fact that the
card has potential for long-term function means you can hide that kind of
complexity in the card.
And so a lot of the way it works is, the newer player will
take the immediate effect. And the ramifications… so one of the big things we
learned, for example, is enter-the-battlefield effects are really, really
lenticular. And the reason is, really what an enter-the-battlefield effect is, well
on a creature, it’s a spell stapled to a creature.
So the card is, it’s a 2/2 for a 2W, you gain two life. Most
of the time you want the body. It’s a 2/2. Right? And so look, if you can get
it out early enough, just it can help you attack, and life gain’s a nice little
bonus but really it’s just a body.
But what happens is, sometimes in a game, what can happen
is, the ground gets gummed up. That the board is all about your basic
creatures, and when you play, there’s this concept called the clock. Which says
that I have to be aware of how many turns before I can defeat my opponent, and
how many turns until my opponent beats me? Well, if my clock is faster than my
opponent’s clock, well then I’m going to win.
So then what happens is, people are watching the clock. As
they get close to winning, they start making moves they would never make early
on because they know that the win is in sight. So what will happen is, late in
the game, if the ground’s gummed up, the “gain two life” is much more important
than the 2/2.
And so an experienced player will hold onto that. They won’t
play it. Because what they want to do is wait for the opponent to make a
decision based on life totals, not knowing that you have the ability to go up
two life. And at the last possible moment, you change the clock on them, so
that they have made a mistake because they were counting on something that
wasn’t true.
And in general, that is true of almost all ETB creatures.
Enter-the-battlefield creatures. Is that you have to understand what’s more
important at the time. The spell or the creature. And that makes a very
lenticular card because the beginning player, they don’t think about that
separation. They just play the creature when they’re capable of playing the
creature. “Do I have two and a white? Okay, I’m playing Venerable Monk. Ooh,
what happens? Surprise! I get a little life.” They’re not thinking of the ramifications
of that. They’re just thinking like, ooh, they get a little surprise.
And the reason is that much as the sphere of awareness,
they’re not aware of time, they’re not aware of space. They’re not also aware
of causality early on. That they don’t think of, “Oh, well this death trigger…”
Death trigger’s another good example of lenticular design. That a beginning
player’s just like, “I have a death trigger,” it’s like a little surprise. When
it dies, I don't know when that happens. When it dies I’ll get something.
Where an experienced player says, no no no. The fact that its
death does something, and I can manipulate that information. I can manipulate
it because I can make it die when I want it to. I might manipulate information because
I know my opponent doesn’t want it to happen, so maybe I attack with the creature
knowing that it’s a disincentive from blocking it. But anyway, novices don’t
think of that causality. And so when you are building stuff in in lenticular design,
you can take advantage of that.
That’s why we, for example, are doing a lot more
enter-the-battlefield and death triggers in common, because for the most time,
they’re nice simple vanilla creatures to the beginning player. And that to
the advanced player, they have a lot
more depth than that.
So the Venerable Monk, they look at the card, they see the
two life, they go, “Okay, whatever. I like life.” And they play the card. The problem
with Aven Cloudchaser is they look at it and go, “Oh, it destroys an enchantment.
Ooh, destruction, that’s important. Oh, I better wait for an enchantment.”
Now, the good player says, “Oh, well sometimes I care about
the enchantment removal. But sometimes, you know what? The 2/2 flyer is way
more important than enchantment removal.” And you go, (???) good, it’s
decisions that the advanced player would see that the beginning player wouldn’t.
The reason this card isn’t good is that the beginning player understands the
value of destroying things, and so they see that as so important, they won’t
play it until they’re able to destroy something. So they might sit with this
2/2 flyer in their hand when it can be helping them winning the game, because the
thing they feel they need to do to play it isn’t there.
And so you have to be careful. Once again, when I talk about
surface value, what does the player think this card does? Destruction is so
important, they look at a 2/2 flyer with “destroy enchantment” and they think
like, “Ohh, it’s a destroy enchantment card with a little bonus, I get a 2/2
flyer.” Rather than, oh, a 2/2 flyer a lot of times is the most important part.
And the destroy enchantment is secondary. So that’s an example where the
Venerable Monk makes a good card, where the Aven Cloudchaser is not quite as
good card. Because the beginning player is using it incorrectly. What they
think it does does not lead them in the
right direction.
And once again, that’s very important. What the beginning
player thinks it does is very important, because they need to have a plan. That
every card has to have a function for every player. When players look through
their own lens, the card has to have meaning for them.
Okay. So rule number six is let the players play the game
they want to play. This is a fine general lesson in game design. The key here
is that each player has in their mind what they think the game is about. And
how a beginner sees a game of Magic
is much, much different than how an advanced player sees it. To the beginner, Magic has much—there’s much fewer
things going on. And the reason it has to be that way. That they could not
handle—like the number of decisions that an advanced player makes, a beginner
couldn’t handle. And once again, remember this is important to understand. It’s
not that the beginning player is incapable of decisions more so than the
advanced player, it’s that the advanced player has incorporated a lot of
decision-making.
Both the beginning player and the advanced player are only
capable of thinking so much. The human brain can do so much. The difference is,
when you do something multiple times, you learn how to do it, and you shortcut
it in your brain mentally so that you don’t have to think about it as much.
And here’s a good example of keywords. A lot of people, when
you’re an advanced player you look a keywords and you go, “Why don’t you keyword
everything? Keywording just makes it easier.” Because you’re like, “I understand
the idea that putting a card from the top of your library into your graveyard
is the concept known as milling. So if you just say ‘mill 1,’ I get it. Much
easier. I don’t have to read all those words.”
But the problem is, for a beginning player, the vocabulary
isn’t a known thing yet. So when they come and they encounter it, if they see “mill
1,” they say, “What? That’s not English. What does that mean?” Now they have to
learn what that means. And yes, eventually they can learn what that means, but
the point is, there’s only so much they’re capable of learning.
When you’re introducing a game to an audience, they are
invested in some learning, but there’s a barrier. That if you make them learn
too much, they opt out. They check out. Like, “Ooh… too hard for me.”
And Magic already
has a rep of being a hard game. Because it is. And that we’re trying to do as
much as we can to… one of the things I try to explain to beginners is, the
basic game of Magic, the basic game
is actually not that complex. Now, we layer lots of things on top of that basic
game, but the basic game itself is not that complex. And I’m like, “Just learn
the basic game. And with time you can learn the other stuff. Not important
right now. As long as you have the basic game, that’s what you need.”
And when you’re teaching someone to play, by the way, you
want to strip out every possible thing you can. And that’s why Portal was just mostly vanilla creatures
and sorceries. Cut out as much as you can. And the key to lenticular design is
an idea I talked about before, which was that each player has to look at the
card, and to them, they have to see the card that they want it to be. And it
has to make them smile. So using my far-flung computer cards, each player, when
they look at it, if the card has something that they want it to be, they’re
happy.
And lenticular design is trying to take this far-flung
technology and bring it to today, which is can we make cards that different
players look… that’s why it’s called lenticular. That each player looks at it
and they see something different.
And the reason I use Rescue from the Underworld in my article
was, it’s a really, really good example of something that—and this is one of
the advantages of flavor, by the way. A lot of what’s going on in Rescue from
the Underworld, to the beginning player is flavor. That as long as there’s a
reason for the text to be on the cards, they’re happy. Flavor is a reason. So
that’s another very good way that we can hide stuff. I didn’t mention this before.
Which is, if the player looks at it and they justify why it’s
there, like for example, a lot of times we’ll put what we call trinket text,
which is flavorful text. Well, sometimes that trinket text can hide interesting
gameplay. But as long as to the beginning player it just looks like it’s
flavorful, they’re happy. And that’s a big, big part of lenticular design, is
you want each layer of player that you’re trying to make happy see what they
want to see, have it be something they want it to be, and then they go happy
walk away.
And what’s great about Magic
is, and this is why lenticular designs are really good is, there is a moment
that happens in Magic, it happens
multiple times in Magic, but the
first time it happens is the one time you remember the most. Where you see a
card that you’ve played before, but one day you notice some functionality you
hadn’t noticed before. And you go, “Oh my goodness! Normally I do thing A. Ooh,
but I could do Thing B. Thing B will help me win!”
And then you feel really clever, and just it’s one of the
things that grabs people about Magic
is that Magic has this quality where
cards can do multiple functions. That you can learn about something and you can
feel real clever and have neat interactions, and there’s a lot of opportunity
for cleverness in Magic. Players
like feeling good about themselves. Players like feeling like they’ve found something.
Even if the thing they’ve found has been found by thousands
and thousands of people before, it doesn’t matter. They found it. And it feels
great. Like, one of the reasons people play games is, they want the mental
stimulation, and when you find something where you get a positive thing, it
just… endorphins get released and you’re happy and you’re excited, and it’s a
great moment because you found something. And you discovered something. And you
managed to twist the game to your means, to do what you want it to do. It’s one
thing Magic does really, really
well.
So anyway, that, my friends, is all I have to say, or more
of what I had to say on lenticular design. The thing that’s really exciting to
me about lenticular design, and I talked about this in the first podcast, is
one of the things that I love doing, and one of the things I love about design is
that I feel like the reason I’ve been at this close to twenty years is that I
keep finding new things. Just like the players get excited when they discover
new things, I get excited when I discover new things.
And that New World Order was a very interesting thing, and
out of New World Order came lenticular design. And like I said, I’m fascinated because
lenticular design isn’t just for complexity. It started as a tool for
complexity, but imagine the same idea of I have a card that’s seen different
ways by different players, maybe psychographically. Maybe Vorthos and Melvin
scale, or not scale, but the Vorthos/Melvin aesthetics. Maybe… there’s
different ways for me to make different cards for different players. In which
the same card meets the needs of different players.
And that one of the things that Magic—one of the big problems Magic
has always had is space. That we are trying to make many games for many different
players, but we only have one card set, so a lot of times I’m really tight on
space. And the idea that I can make a singular card and make it be multiple
cards for multiple players is very exciting.
And now here’s a good way to think about this, which is the
example I’m trying to say of how what lenticular design does is a little bit
different than how we’ve done things before. In the past, we’ve made cards that
were a Timmy and Johnny card. Or a Spike and Timmy card. That they were “and.” And
lenticular design says that we could try to do “or.” That we could make a card
for Timmy or for Johnny.
And my parallel to this is kind of like in a mana cost, the
difference between traditional multicolored cards and hybrid cards. A red/green
card is red and green card. But a red/green hybrid card is red or green. And the
difference between those, it’s subtle, but it’s very important.
And so lenticular design is this awesome thing, and I’m very
excited, because it allows me to look at Magic
and how we make Magic in a
completely different light. And I’ve been thinking about Magic for almost nineteen years, okay? The fact that I can think
about cards in a different way than I’ve ever thought about them is mind-blowing
and awesome. And so the reason I want to
share lenticular design with you is it’s the cutting edge of where we’re going
and how we’re thinking of Magic.
And the next awesome thing is, New World Order is a great
thing. From New World Order came lenticular design. I don't know where lenticular
design will lead. I mean, clearly there’s a lot more things to do with lenticular
design. But it’s going to lead to other awesome places. And that this discovery,
much like you guys love finding neat things to do with the cards, I love
finding neat things… well, to do with the cards. On the other side.
And so anyway, if you can’t tell, I’m excited, and I’m
passionate about lenticular design and just making Magic, because guys, I love talking about making Magic. I love talking about making Magic! But even more, I like making Magic! So this has been awesome talking with you guys. Hopefully you can see my
passion in lenticular design. I really, really think it’s something interesting
and a very exciting portal in where we’re going. It’s had a lot of impact on
the last three years of design. But it’ll have even more on the next three and
the three after that.
So anyway, thanks for joining me today guys. As always, it’s
awesome to talk with you. I’ll see you next time.
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