11/2/12 Episode 6: Gold

All podcast content by Mark Rosewater

Okay, pulling out of my garage! So we all know what that means, it’s another episode of Drive to Work.

Okay. So I have been thinking a little bit about the future of Drive to Work, and I’ve realized that I’ve worked on a lot of projects. Somewhere fifty or so. So I have a lot of things to talk about. And I have other things beyond sets that I could talk about. But I do not have an infinite number of things I’ve worked on. And I’m trying to make this a weekly podcast. So I’m going to experiment a little bit.

So today I’m going to talk about design, but rather than a particular set, or a particular thing, I’m going to talk about a kind of design. And apropos with the fall set [NLH—Return to Ravnica], I’m going to talk about multicolor design.

Now, I wrote an article about this a while back called the Midas Touch. And so I’m going to use some terminology that came from that article. One of the things I think I’m going to do with this podcast is I’m going to use different topics to jump off of. So one of the things I think I also will do at some point is use articles as reference, and I might have a couple podcasts that are really about going in-depth on some of the articles that have been very popular.

It’s kind of funny (???) with Midas Touch because that is not one of my highlight columns. But it is the one where I talk about the design of multicolor. And I do think that is an interesting topic. For my drive to work today.

So let me start with a little bit of a history. I consider myself one of the historians of Magic, and there’s kind of a lot of us, so my podcast will have some history in it. If you don’t like history, maybe not the podcast for you.

So let me talk a little bit about where multicolor came from. So when Richard Garfield first made Magic, he was aware of the concept. It is not a giant leap to get to the point of, “Oh, well what if this requires not one color but two colors?” But it wasn’t in Alpha.

And so what happened was, I talked about how he had different people working on sets. And there was a guy named Barry Wright who made a set called Spectral Chaos that was really the first set to experiment with the idea of color.

Now, that would later go on to be part of Invasion, I talked about that in my Invasion podcast. But the first person to actually get there, (???) behind the scenes, the first person to make a set to come out with it is a guy named Steve Conard, and he was the head designer for Legends.

Now, I talked about how when Magic started doing well, Richard went to a lot of his playtesters to have them start designing sets. But Peter Adkison, the president of Wizards of the Coast at the time, also went to some of his friends to get them to design sets.

And Steve Conard and Peter were long-time role-playing friends. They did a lot of role-playing together. And so Steve and Robin [NLH—Robin Herbert] I think was on his team. I don’t know his old team. Steve and Robin were the two main people. They decided to make a set based up on the role-playing that they had done with their group. Which Peter was part of. And so one of the things they really wanted to do was introduce the idea of these legendary characters. And so to do that, they came up with a couple things. Two big things, obviously.

One is the concept of legendary. At the time it was a subtype, it was “Legends.” But the idea of “These are these special things.” And legend rules, originally, I think you were only allowed to have one in your deck was how it worked originally. And then later on it’s like, “Okay, you can have four, but you can only have one in play at a time.” But in the beginning it was like, “Oh, you can only have one in your deck. These are so special, there’s one of them, you can have one in your deck.”

And beside being legendary, he also made all of these legendary creatures gold. And note today, when I’m talking about the design of multicolor, I mean traditional gold multicolor. Obviously hybrid cards are multicolor. Split cards are multicolor. I will talk about some of those things in a later podcast. But today I’m talking about traditional gold design. So he made a bunch of legendary creatures that were gold. Now these were the first gold cards to ever appear in Magic.

Now the interesting thing about them, first of all, most of them sucked.  I don't know for those that weren’t around during legends. All the uncommons barring one was basically I think a vanilla or maybe a French vanilla. There were a few interesting ones at rare. But most of them were pretty mundane. And they didn’t particularly have much to do with their color. That’s another interesting thing when you go look is, “Well, why is it these combination of colors?”

I think what he did is, he made all his legendary creatures—a lot of them were three-color, I think he had a few two-color. But he was really trying to make something exciting. And he did. I mean, when Legends first came out, be aware that it’s the first time legendary ever appeared, it’s the first time gold ever appeared.

And they both went over like gangbusters. In fact, the legendary creatures were hugely popular even though they were janky. To use modern technology. They weren’t anything special. And in a lot of cases, like I remember there’s one that was essentially the same as a Craw Wurm, except it just cost three colors of mana rather than one. And it cost the same amount. It was like six. [NLH—He may be thinking of Sivitri Scarzam or Jerrard of the Closed Fist.]

But it opened up the door. And once that opened up the door, the next set to follow was The Dark. A set made by Jesper Myrfors, who by the way, a little trivia for you, he was the art director at the time. So actually, there was a set in which the standing art director was the lead designer. For those trivia buffs out there.

And Jesper was very much into flavor. He was really trying to create a set… and the point of The Dark, and I’ll get to this in my The Dark podcast, is he would try to get tone, and try to really say, “Ooh, let’s look at the dark side of all the colors.”

But anyway, he made a little bit of use of gold. And he was the first one who I feel like the gold cards really made sense. Like they were in the colors that made sense. Those were gold cards that weren’t just the creatures, he had an enchantment, and I mean, he did some other stuff. I mean, Dark Heart of the Wood is probably one of my favorite early cards.

So, then the next time I think gold showed up was in Ice Age.  And Ice Age really went to the bank with it. Really, like there was a lot. I mean, The Dark had a little tiny bit of it. Ice Age had a lot of gold cards. And for a while, Ice Age, Mirage, it was kind of like, well every set had a handful of gold cards in it. And then eventually we figured out we wanted to sort of save it up for Invasion, and it became something that we use from time to time, but not quite as often as we did in the early days.

So anyway, mostly what I want to talk about today is, how do you design a multicolor card? So there’s a couple different ways we do it. First off, let me explain the major goal. Like, philosophically, what is a multicolor card trying to do? Or a gold card.

Well, what it’s trying to do is, it is trying to be—I’ll just pick two colors. Red and green. It is trying to be a red card and a green card. I’m just using red and green as an example, by the way, because it’s easier to pick two colors. So for people that love the other colors, I don’t mean to offend you. I just felt a little Gruul-ish today.

Okay. So, a gold card is supposed to say, hey, a red card has a philosophy of red. It embodies what red embodies. Well, a green card embodies the philosophy of green. It embodies what green represents. So when you get a red and green card, it’s supposed to both represent red and represent green.

Now, that gets tricky from a design standpoint, because the fact that you have to represent both colors adds a lot to making your card work. So, how do you do that? Well, in my article I said that there were five basic ways that we can do that. So let me walk through those five basic ways. And I’m using the terminology from the article. A lot of these are slang R&D uses.

So the first is what we in R&D call a “Chinese menu” card. And what that means is, you take one thing from column A, and one thing from column B, and put them together. So the idea is, oh, okay, I’m making a red/green card, I have a red effect and I have a green effect. And I put them on the same card. Now I have a red/green card.

So it’s important. When I talk about design, I talk about this a lot in my—I do some articles like Design 101. One of the most important things to understand about designing a card is it’s a holistic experience. Which means is, people don’t look at the elements of the card separately, they look at it as one unit. It’s all together. So if you have more than one thing going on in your card, there has to be some correlation between the things.

And, if not, the problem is, the audience will assume there’s a correlation. One of the things about designing cards is that, the reason for example it’s very bad to make cards in which the two abilities of the card aren’t synergistic is the audience will assume synergy. Because, well why else would you put them on the card together?

So for example, one of the worst-case scenarios in designing cards is making two abilities that don’t work together, because the assumption is they will work together, and then people play the card wrong. And so when you are putting things together, you have to be very conscious of the relationship of all the elements together.

Now, there’s a bunch of ways to do that. Sometimes they have mechanical synergy. Sometimes they combine together to create a flavor synergy that just holds the card together. I mean, Innistrad did a bunch of that.

So when we talk about gold cards, so on a Chinese menu card, I have to have color A and color B. Now, those two have to have some relation to each other. And like I said, the major way we do it is they mechanically have a connection to each other. They mean something.

 

So let me go to my favorite of all time. My absolute favorite gold card I’ve ever designed is Recoil from Invasion. So Recoil, for those that don’t know it, you Unsummon a permanent, that’s the blue effect, and then you make your opponent discard a card. That’s the black effect.

Now the neat thing about this card is, if they have an empty hand, you can Boomerang an artifact or an enchantment. Now notice, blue cannot destroy things. Blue has no destruction effects. Black can destroy creatures and lands, but cannot destroy enchantments and artifacts. So if they have an empty hand, Recoil allows you to essentially destroy an enchantment or an artifact. Now, black or blue can’t do that. And that’s the beauty of Recoil, is that together it’s greater than the sum of their parts. It’s a very blue ability with a very black ability, but together they do something neither black or blue can do.

Now, I’ll admit. One of the problems we (???) is, and Recoil is a perfect example of this, where early on you make a card. And it’s a thing of beauty. You’re just, “Oh my God, awesome card.” And then you’re like, “Oh my God I’ve got to do more of this.” Like I remember with Recoil, I was so excited, I’m like, “Oh, I’ve got to make a whole cycle of this. This is awesome. We’ve got to…” And then I’m like, oh, after weeks and weeks of trying to recreate the magic of Recoil, I’m like, “Oh, this is really hard to do. There’s not that many effects where A plus B equals C.”

And when we find them, we rejoice them, that is hard to do. And in design it is very easy to kind of get pulled away and sort of tricked, if you will, into thinking that something’s easier than it is. There’s a lot of cycles out there where like, we made an awesome card, and we… ehh, the second one wasn’t quite as good as the first, and by the fifth card in the cycle it’s like, “Ehh, maybe this shouldn’t have been a cycle.” In the early days we were especially bad about pushing cycles where there wasn’t a cycle’s worth of design.

So, you have your abilities. Your red ability, your green ability. And so first and foremost, you want some synergy mechanically. That’s most often what happens. Usually it’s like, “Oh, well the first effect and the second effect help each other in some way.” I mean, Recoil’s the perfect example where they grant each other abilities they don’t have, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be that magical.

A lot of times it could just be a matter of “Red can grant first strike. Green can Giant Growth. Oh, well maybe there’s a nice connection between Giant Growth…” well, see, I gave an example off the top of my head, and not the perfect example because both of them allow your creature to survive, so that would add actually a little anti-synergy. You can tell I’m doing a live podcast because I’m actually doing these off the top of my head. But another example might be haste-granting with Giant Growth, where I make the creature able to attack and I make it bigger. That’s slightly better.

So here’s the thing you don’t get to see. Because you guys get to see the finished product. But I come up with ideas all the time. And all my bad ideas, well, they get killed. And the good ideas, you don’t get to see. So you’re like, “Oh, these are all good ideas.” But often the first ideas don’t always work.

Okay. So the other way to do it is a flavor-based way, which is sometimes you’re like, “Oh, I’m trying to capture this flavor, well this thing’s a very red thing to make the flavor make sense. And this thing’s a very green thing.”

So this brings another interesting point, something that comes a lot in Magic. Which is, there’s this belief, if you come up with an ability, either mechanically or flavorfully, that there’s a place for it in Magic. Now, it is true if you include gold cards. But once you get gold cards out of the mix, when you do mono-colored cards, not every ability, not every mechanical ability will fit in with what the cards can do. And so I’ll talk about that later. It’s important to carve out space for gold. I’m getting a little ahead of myself but I’ll talk about that in a second.

So Chinese menu, take A, take B, blend them together, have A and B make some sense on the same card. It could be mechanically, it could be flavorfully, but in a sense you want something where the two pieces hold up, and you go, “Oh, I get why it’s red, I get why it’s green, I see those pieces.”

Okay. The next ability is what I call the Venn diagram ability. And this ability says, okay, well if I take the abilities of the two colors, red and green for my examples, where do they overlap? And you’re like, “Oh, well both of them do power boosting. Both do trample. Both do artifact destruction.” There’s certain areas where red and green do stuff that’s similar.

And so one of the things you can do is you’re allowed to take gold cards and say, “Okay, we’ll do something that both colors do and we’ll ramp it up.” A very famous example of this was a card called Heroes’ Reunion… Heroes’ Union? Reunion? [NLH—Heroes’ Reunion.] See, naming’s not best point. I’m sure people who will now… it’s white and green, you cast it to get seven life. And it was the second most popular card in Invasion godbook study.

And the idea was, oh, well the two life-gaining colors are green and white, stick them together and oh, well you get a boost that you don’t normally get. Let me explain, this brings me to a good point. One of the reasons I think gold cards are so exciting is that on any card, you have an effect and you have a cost. And that the idea is, the cost and the effect have to balance out.

Where I think you get exciting cards is where the cost is misunderstood, so people get the effect is good, but don’t get that the cost equals the effect. And gold cards do this very well. Because it is much harder to play a spell of two colors. Especially if the spell is cheaper.

For example, we’ll take Watchwolf. So Watchwolf is from the original Ravnica, green and a white, 3/3 creature. So in green, for 1G, I mean you can get a 2/2. I think you can get 3/2 maybe. [NLH—Not without a drawback.] I know you can get 2/3. [NLH—I think he’s thinking GG.] In white, you can get a 2/2, maybe do slightly better than that, but the point is, neither green or white at two mana gets a 3/3 without a drawback. They can’t just get a vanilla 3/3.

But once you do green and white, all of a sudden, oh, you can do that without a drawback, because that cost actually has a little more value than you realize. And a lot of excitement of gold comes from people don’t really understand the true cost of having to do gold.

And the funny thing is, one of the things about doing gold, that’s not really—a little off topic, but one of the things about doing gold when you’re designing is, the environment has a lot more needs. There’s a lot more things you have to make to make it work. Because gold has this weird quality that it’s very popular with players, but it’s very hard to play. It’s very disorienting. You have to make a lot of piles. You have to make a lot of decisions.

And that normally in Magic, when you’re building your deck, it’s a little easier. And that gold, like just the number of piles you make when you’re building a gold Sealed, for example, it’s just a little more intimidating. That’s why we have the guild prerelease boxes and why we’re trying to make it a little easier. To help people. Because gold is very popular and very sexy, but it also is a little more complicated. Especially in Limited. Especially in Sealed.

So, the Venn diagram says okay, if you take two things that overlap, you can take it, you can push it a little bit. And you can make a sexy card. Now, the creation—since I wrote this article, the creation of hybrid has definitely taken the sails out of this category a little bit. Not that you can’t do it some. But hybrid has less design space than traditional multicolor. And the Venn diagram area is the heart of the hybrid design space.

Because hybrid’s all about, well what does… in fact, it only casts red mana or green mana, well, I need an effect that I could do in red, and I could do in green. So while we still use the Venn diagram method for multicolor, we use it less than we used to, because hybrid is a space now that we have to be aware of.

And that’s an interesting thing, by the way. Something that I don’t think—it’s something that I’m very conscious of, which is, Magic keeps changing its parameters of what we can and can’t do in design. So once upon a time, here’s this rich area for gold design. Then we come up with something, else, and like, oh, it kind of steals away that space. And now it’s a little harder to do traditional gold cards because we have this different set of hybrid cards. And that design has a lot of those, where we’ll do something, but then as technology advances, it changes what we have available to us.

Like one of the things, on October will be my seventeenth anniversary with Wizards, and people always ask, like, “Don’t you get tired? You’ve been doing the same thing for seventeen years?” And what I say to them is, it’s not really the same job. It’s a similar job, but I’m constantly making new games, really, under the Magic umbrella, and my tools and resources and the puzzle I have to solve is an ever-shifting puzzle.

Just like you guys are always trying to crack the metagame, so too I’m trying to crack I guess the game and making the game. And so kind of the fun for me is, my parameters keep changing. What I have available keeps changing. What I have to watch out for keeps changing. And so it definitely keeps it interesting for me.

Okay. Number three. On the methods of doing multicolor design is what I call the “roll call” method. So this is the bluntest method. The idea of the roll call method is, if I have a red and green card, and I on the card call out red and call out green, it feels like a red and green card. And so what happens is, I don’t necessarily need to have effects from both colors. I can actually steal an effect from one of the colors, but if I have it affect both colors, it feels naturally in that color.

So for example, let’s say I wanted to do some boost. I wanted to grant… what’s a good example here? I wanted to grant double strike to red and green creatures. Now, double strike is not a green ability. Green doesn’t get double strike. Red gets double strike. Now, if I granted double strike to red creatures, okay. That’s a red card.

But the second I say “green creatures,” and I now put it on a red and green card, you’re like, “Oh, I see. It’s a red and green card that helps red and green creatures.” And so that’s a way for you to sort of take one of the two effects. It doesn’t have to have both sides. It doesn’t need to be Chinese menu. But it feels right. And we do that time to time.

Now, be aware, when I say “reference colors,” there’s a couple different ways to reference color. The most obvious is like just verbatim saying, “I affect red and green creatures.” But you also could have things that trigger off of red and green spells. You could reference the basic lands that make them. So you could talk about mountains and forests.

There’s a lot of different ways to do it. It just—when you read the card, what you have to do is say, “Oh, well if I want to maximize this, I need to play this kind of deck.” And then it says, “Oh, well it’s a red and green card, it needs to go in a red and green deck, I have red and green things. Oh, it affects red and green things.” It all feels right.

Now, roll call is interesting in that it’s very forced. We’re sort of—it’s what we call heavy-handed design in the sense that it’s not subtle. And one of the things about design, let me talk about this for a second, is there’s a spectrum of design. From what I call the subtle end to the blunt end.

And the idea is, subtle is, I’m helping you, but I’m not hitting you over the face with what I’m doing. Like a subtle card is the kind of card that people have to learn works. One of the funny things is, we always put subtle cards in sets. And it’s hilarious that when players find them, they’re always like, “Wow, did R&D know this was there?” And I’m like, “Does it fit perfectly with what you’re doing?”

And we work really hard to put a lot of subtle stuff in. I mean, I’m a big advocate of synewargies. I like to work into my designs to make sure that, “Oh, well here’s elements that we’re working on, here’s cards that care about those elements in different ways, oh, when people start matching them together, they’ll find their synergies.” And so I think that subtle designs are fun.

But I think that people overvalue subtle and undervalue blunt. Because one of the stories I’ll tell is, this is during Odyssey design, and we were making a threshold card. So for those that don’t remember, threshold, if you have seven or more cards in your graveyard, it clicks on and has an additional ability.

And so we were trying to make a basilisk. And I said, “Okay, well when it clicks on, it gets Lure.” Because Lure and basilisk, going back to Alpha, was a popular combo. And they’re like, “Well, isn’t that to obvious?” And I’m like, “No, no! No! It’s not too obvious!” Because a lot of people go, “Ooh, basilisk! Ooh, I get this and I get Lure! You know what’s good? Basilisk and Lure!” And that I think it is fine to be subtle, and I definitely make sure each design has lots of subtleties to it, but it’s also fine to be blunt.

That part of design… Like I talk about this a lot is, design is—the ultimate end of design is you are trying to create fun. You are trying to create enjoyment for the person playing it. So when you think of it that way, saying, “Okay. I’m trying to get an emotional response out of somebody. Well how do I do that?” Well, I play to the things that create emotional responses.

Now, the reason that subtlety plays to that is, when you have things that you discover, you’re very proud of yourself. It’s a good feeling. “Oh my God, I learned this. I did this. I found this connection.” And whether or not R&D plans that connection to be there or not, you feel good. You found it. You found this connection. You feel good.

But blunt is also nice because it’s fine to just see something and instantly recognize it as something good. There’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, humans like that. It’s something our brains are wired to do. Which is, you can see something and go, “Oh, I instantly know I like that thing! I want that thing." We make a lot of what we call “Timmy rares,” and that’s fine! “Oh, look! A giant creature! That will just wreck the board when you get it into play! I want that giant creature.”

And that’s fine. That is perfect. I mean, like I said, a lot of design is understanding the spectrum that you are working with. And that it’s fine to be subtle, it is fine to be blunt. In fact, I think when you’re trying to do the best work as a designer, you use the whole spectrum. You try to both—because different players respond to different things.

And that, by the way, that’s a meta-ongoing-message for this podcast. Magic’s not one game, really. It doesn’t have one player type. It has many different player types. And that part of being a good designer is designing a lot of different experiences.

Let’s say I’m talking about gold cards. Well, different people like different kinds of gold cards. Some people love Chinese menu cards. Some people think they’re hacky and don’t like them. And like roll call cards, some people are like, “Oh my God, could you be a little more blunt?” And like, well, these are blunt cards. These aren’t the subtle ones. Okay. So let’s get to the subtle ones. Well, a little more subtle.

The next one’s what we call “shared hobby.” And this method is about helping to define things based on color. So for example—not on color, on combination of colors. So Ravnica’s an easy example. Which is, if we define something as being Selesnya, I mean we have a mechanic for example, convoke in the original Ravnica, and populate in Return to Ravnica, once you define that as being a Selesnya thing, well, you can just put it on a card. A card just can have it. Like, no one questions a white/green card that has populate on it. Why? Because that’s a Selesnyan thing.

And that one of the—for example, take Innistrad. Well, we defined vampires as being black and red. Well, if we make a really vampire-ish card, and it’s black and red, that helps make it just feel, “Oh. Oh, it’s a vampire thing. Well, vampires are black and red. Okay, it makes sense in black and red.”

So that’s another big trick you can use is, if you get definition to the colors, then you can design stuff that fits because it fits the larger context of the flavor you’re wrapping the things in.

Like one of the things you’ll notice is, colors tend to lead to what we call factioning. Which is, Shards of Alara did it, Ravnica did it. Once we say to you, “Here’s a reason to play something,” and then give you some sort of flavor justification, then you start seeing those colors as a combined entity.

Now obviously, in Ravnica it’s a guild, and in Shards of Alara they’re shards. But Innistrad, hey, they’re monsters, right? Blue and black make zombies. Red and black make vampires. And that part of what we try to do from year to year is give context, so… we are trying to make the players have an appreciation. And so every year we have to redefine their…

Because one of the things is, we’ll make the same game every year. Magic is the game it is. But every year we want a new experience. We want you to sort of come at it fresh. And so what we do is we take a certain number of tools that we have, and we redress them so that you can see it as something different.

Because Innistrad, red/black was vampires, in Return to Ravnica its Rakdos. And there’s some overlap. Both of them feel black/red. But they’re not the same thing. What you expect to do with vampires vs. what you expect to do with Rakdos are different animals, and that part of making this experience that’s different each year is play into that. That’s a huge part of doing design is kind of reskinning, not just flavorwise, but also mechanically reskinning the different groups that you have each year. And we change around what the groups are. It’s not always color-based. But it is color-based a lot. That’s the number one definer of Magic. But anyway, that is shared hobby.

Now we get to the fifth and final method of making gold cards, it’s what I call the “shiny and new” method. So one of the tricks is, how do I make a card that feels certain colors? Well, do something I’ve never done before, and then just define it as that.

For example, let’s talk about “destroy target permanent.” Now, I will argue that particular effect was done on Desert Twister, but it never really fit. Green’s not supposed to destroy creatures. At least not that simply and that directly. And when we made Vindicate in it’s like, “Oh, wow, that is a nice clean…” Destroy target permanent is an awesome thing, the game should have it, but it doesn’t easily fit into one color.

And I’ve talked about this earlier. That one of the great traps is, you come up with something as a designer, or developer or whatever, and you’re like, “Oh, this is awesome. This is awesome. This is resonant. This is awesome. We should do this.”

But the trick is, not everything fits neatly into Magic’s color pie. At least mono-color color pie. And a lot of times we kind of fit things in and I think to the detriment… and one of my pet peeves of the core set is, it has the tendency to try to go resonant, so it forces the mechanics, and we kind of get things in which this isn’t really in the color pie, except one time in the core set.

And that’s something that I’m—I mean, I’m the most color-pie purist of the R&D folks. I look at something like Choking Vines and I’m like, “Oh, not really what green does. I get it, they’re vines, vines are green…” But that’s where I really believe that multicolor—by the way, whenever I see something, one of my jobs as one of the color pie gurus is I will go through sets and make notes like, “Okay, guys, this isn’t blue.” Or “This isn’t red.” Or “Ehh, this could be white, but here’s (???) of things you can do to help make it feel more white.”

And often what I do is I tag something and I go, “This isn’t this color.” And they’ll come back to me, they’ll go, “Well, what color is it?” And I’ll go, “Oh, well it’s not a monocolor.” Or “Oh, it’s white/green.” Or “Oh, it’s red/green.” I say, “Oh, it can be done, but it’s not a monocolor card.”

And I’m excited to do that, because we are going to be doing gold cards until the end of time. People like gold cards, they’re exciting. But gold cards do not have the depth that monocolor cards have. Today I’m walking through, like, “Okay, there’s like five methods to make them.” It is a limited space. And as a designer, one of my main jobs as Head Designer is recognizing what are our limited spaces, and making sure we preserve those.

For example, I talked about how planeswalker design space is very limited. So I’m very much trying to make sure that we slowly use planeswalker design space and not eat it up faster than we’re supposed to. Gold cards are similar in that whenever I find an effect that needs to be on a multicolor card, I’m like, hallelujah. Wait. Save it. This is a multicolor card. Wait ‘til we do it in—don’t force it in monocolor, wait until we have the freedom to do multicolor. Because multicolor needs it, and it is need to have things that look. You want to do this effect? You need to go multicolor. And so this last category really is that.

Now, sometimes it has to do with doing something where you’re kind of combining things in a way that we can’t normally do. Other times, it’s literally a brand new effect. Like one of my favorite type of gold cards is to come up with something never done. This game has never done before. And then put it in gold and people go, “Oh, that thing. Well, that’s a red/black thing. Or a green/black thing.” Or whatever. I love doing that. I love giving definitions to things. And the more we give definitions to multicolor, color combinations, I think the stronger the game is and the better the design will be long time.

So, as you can see, those are the five basic methods of designing multicolor cards. Some of them are wider than others. And the other thing is, certain ones of them require a deft touch. I mean, a lot of thekey of making a multicolor design work is trying to come together in such a way that the card feels like one entity. One thing.

This is why Chinese menu cards are very tricky is, you don’t want to feel like some weird combination. And Magic has done this. Whenever I talk about rules, we’ve broken every rule I’m talking about. But that doesn’t necessarily mean we should. I’m not a giant fan of “random red effect and random green effect.” “It’s a Bolt and a Rampant Growth.” Yeah, but why is it a Bolt and a Rampant Growth? [NLH—Not a real thing.]

 Now, one of the tricks, by the way, I’ll let you in on a little secret is, if you want to take two things that don’t connect and make them feel like they connect, then what you need to do is find a way to correlate them. So for example. Let’s say what I really want to do is a direct damage spell and a Rampant Growth.

Well, on the surface they have nothing to do with each other, right? One goes and gets land, one does damage. But all you have to do is take one and make it the context of the other. For example, go get a basic land and put it into play tapped. Okay, take Rampant Growth. Then, CARDNAME deals X damage to target creature, where X is the number of that basic land you have in play.

Now all of a sudden, see what I did? Is I made the land itself relevant to the second effect. Because, well, by getting this land, I at least made one damage possible. And obviously if I’m using the spell correctly, maybe I’m upping the amount of damage to do more. But then, the card I get with Rampant Growth is relevant to the direct damage. All of a sudden, the card makes sense together.

So a lot of the gold cards, a lot of doing this, I mean, it makes it sound like I’m just running through these categories. There’s a lot of careful craftsmanship. It is not something that just—it’s just like, “Oh, put A and B together.” A really well-made Chinese menu card, for example, A and B are there, but they’re woven in such a way that A and B seem correlated to each other. And sometimes they’re directly correlated, as my example.

Like I said. Gold cards, they’re tricky. They are a very tricky animal. And as a designer, I like them. I say “restrictions breed creativity.” I enjoy having limitations. I definitely—I mean, one of the reasons I think gold cards are fun is, I’ve done a lot of gold design. I’ve made, I don't know a thousand, but hudnreds of gold cards. Maybe a thousand gold cards. I’ve been the lead on a number of gold sets and I was on a lot of other gold sets, so I’ve made a lot of gold cards.

But I still enjoy making gold. I still think they’re fun. They’re a challenge. There’s a real artistry to making a wonderful gold card. It is hard to do. And it’s easy to do a kind of ham-fisted version. It’s not hard to make a kind of clunky gold card. That is not that hard to do. And some of those need to get made.

But what I love is I love making a gold card where it just hangs together. It feels like one spell, one effect, even though you are able to sort of capture multiple colors in the essence of it. But when you do that, when it all comes together, when you make a gold card where you’re like, “Man, this thing just sort of holds together,” that is… I don't know. It’s a thing of beauty. And one of my favorite things to do.

So anyway, I am now at work, so that means it is time for me to wrap this up. I had fun talking about gold cards today. Like I said, it is something that’s difficult to do, but as a designer I don’t shy away from difficulties. I actually, in some ways, I’m glad that Magic has things that are difficult. I mean, I wouldn’t be here for seventeen years if it were kind of rote. And I love having the challenges. So I’m glad the cards like gold cards exist, and anyway, I want to thank you guys all for joining me today, and I guess it’s time to go make the Magic cards.