1. 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 last night, I got a text message from Matt Cavotta. And he asked if I could give him a ride today. It turns out that I’d already done my podcast for this week, so I wasn’t planning to do a podcast today. But I haven’t had a chance to do a podcast with Matt for quite a while. So I thought I’d leap on the opportunity.

    So, in honor of Matt Cavotta, I’ve chosen—so whenever Matt’s in the car, I try to pick a topic that I think Matt would add a lot to. And so in the past we’ve talked about planeswalkers since he was the impetus in creating, we talked about flavor text and names, both of which he oversaw at one point. So today I’m going to talk about another aspect that Matt has had a lot to do with, the art.

     I spend a lot of time talking about design, so I spend a lot of time in this podcast talking about the stuff in the rules text. But there’s a whole—a card has many more facets to it. And one of the most compelling facets is the art box. So today, we’re going to talk all about what it takes to make art.

    So for those that aren’t aware, before… I’m on my way to get Matt, obviously, let me remind you of a few things. So our arts are freelance. All of our art are—the vast, vast, vast majority of our artists don’t work at Wizards. And so what happens is, we use them all freelance to do the work. And so when Matt gets here, we’re going to walk through what the process is and how one becomes an artist, and I’ll talk all about the process.

    But be aware that all of the artists that we use are freelance artists. And that Matt, as you’ll see, started as a freelance artist. In fact, that’s—the way I first got to meet Matt was Matt was an artist and they flew him to the Worlds in Sydney, Australia. I think that’s where I met Matt for the first time. And he was there signing autographs and stuff.

    And anyway, he and I got a chance to talk, it turns out that we went to the same high school. And were from the same city obviously. We both went to Orange High School and both from the lovely state of Ohio, in the relative suburbs of Cleveland. Anyway. So if… Matt should be out here. So like I said, Matt lives very close to me. So we get Matt any second now. Hopefully he’s just waiting for me. Like I said. So today’s topic. All about art.

    Let’s see. Do I see Matt? Aha, I see Matt. There he is. Okay. Let’s pick up Matt and start talking art. Okay.

    MR: Good morning, Matt! So the topic today…

    MC: Good morning.

    MR: Is art. I figured you’d have something to contribute to this.

    MC: I might have a little bit of something around this.

    MR: So I did a little bit of research, and between the two of us, we’ve created 179 pieces of art.

    MC: Wow! What’s the breakdown there?

    MR: I think 178 are yours. So anyway, I was explaining that our artists are freelance, pretty much are freelance. [MC: Yes.] So I wanted to walk through sort of how—what exactly, how an artist becomes an artist, and like from the artists’ side, what does it mean to be an artist for Magic?

    MC: Okay, we’re going to assume first that the person was already an artist.

    MR: Yes. Other than me, most people were actually artists before they get to draw Magic cards.

    MC: There is an official process for artists to submit their work to us. All of the Wizards of the Coast brands. And art directors can look at that collection of artwork that is sort of curated and maintained by a select few folks at the office. And there have been people who have popped into sort of the roster of go-to guys through that route. But mostly the way we find artists is by seeing work done in the industry, whether it’s games or books or movies or what have you, and an artist, their work will shine, and it will be recognized by one of us that, “Hey, we don’t currently use this guy and we should.” So we go out and find people that way. People who have already made a mark in some facet of the visual entertainment industry. We sort of have this wonderful position of having a really strong and robust set of artists that we can rely on, and it gives us the ability to cherry-pick the heavy hitters out of there.

    MR: So I do know, so Jeremy Jarvis is the current art director. And I know something that Jeremy loves to do is as we go world to world, he changes which artists we use because he tries to match the artist to the world. [MC: Right.] That this year we’re doing Greek mythology, that requires a different feel than say Innistrad did, with a Gothic horror look, that he tries to play to the artists’ strengths. To make sure that our mix of artists really can do whatever world we’re doing that, play to what they do well.

    MC: For the sports fans out there, I’m going to use a football analogy…

    MR: The first football analogy ever on this program!

    MC: Bam! I love it. If you are fielding a team, and you have some serious badasses on your team, you’re not going to take them off the field no matter what situation you’re in. But there are some guys who are specialists for certain roles that you’ll bring in when you’re trying to defend on the goal line or whatever. But you don’t take your mainstay dudes off the field ever. [MR: Sure.] Magic art is kind of the same way, where there are some guys who are so close to the heart of what Magic looks like that they can swim in all of those different pools. But then Jeremy or Dawn will find artists that really—it’s in their wheelhouse, whatever the flavor of the month is. And they’ll add them to that group of usual suspects to create a look that is, while still totally Magic, it leans the way—towards Greek mythology or towards Gothic horror or whatever.

    MR: By the way, you mentioned Dawn real quickly. Dawn is another Magic—we have more than one art director now for Magic. [MC: Yes.] Jeremy is the main guy. Dawn is another art director.

    MC: We just added Mark Winters also.

    MR: Yes. Magic is getting bigger and bigger. [MC: Growing!] Yeah, every time we create new products, we need more art. Like, we need more art, because one of the things people don’t realize is, we create—we produce a lot of art in a year. [MC: Right.] And that while we have a lot of artists, we definitely are always scratching for more artists because we produce so much material.

    MC: Right. And the other thing that—for the listener who are laser-focused on the cards, they might not be aware that we are doing art on all kinds of things that aren’t cards right now. Or at least preparing to do things that are not cards. And that spreads that go-to pool of artists a little bit more thinly. So we’re always looking for more. We’re always looking for more people who can express the brand and the sort of nuances that it has. And also maintain a level of skill and quality that is hard to come by.

    MR: And remember, we used to do one large set, two small sets, and every other year do a core set. That used to be our staple.

    MC: And we didn’t do new art in those core sets.

    MR: Right, we didn’t do new art in the core sets. Now, we do three sets a year, sometimes more than one are large, the core set has all sorts of cards and new art…

    MC: At least half new art.

    MR: Half new art. And we do duel decks that have new art. We do From the Vault and Commander and Conspiracy.

    MC: Promo cards.

    MR: Right. Just tons and tons and tons of things. [MC: Yeah.] Like, the amount of art which we’re producing new vs. even like ten years ago…

    MC: And there’s things like the branded play. Like there’s a series of cards for the Hero’s Path. That’s all stuff over and above what we had been doing before.

    MR: Okay, so. We’ll take you as the perfect example. So you are an artist. Like, how did you get to the attention of Wizards?

    MC: I’ll tell the story, but it’s generally not something that I think would work anymore. The industry just doesn’t function the way that it used to. [MR: Okay.] That just tells you how old I am. I used the good old-fashioned persistence and elbow grease method, where I would put together a small portfolio of what my best work at the time was, and I’d bundle it up in a really conspicuous folder, like a pink or a purple folder, and then I’d mail it to the art director directly. And call like three weeks later and say, “Hey, is there a purple folder on your desk we can talk about?” And I had built up a sort of working relationship with the then-art-director Jesper Myrfors. He was kind enough to say, “No, you’re not good enough to do the work, but this is what you can work on.” He didn’t just blow me off or whatever, and I really, really appreciated that.

    MR: Jesper Myrfors, really quickly, is the original Magic art director. He’s the person [MC: Right.] who picked the Magic font on the back of the card, and did the original frame layout.

    MC: Right. And at one point he said, “Hey, Matt, you are really close. Like, really close.” And I felt like I was one submission away from making it happen. And I sent in my pink folder and I called back, and it turned out that he was fired. He was either fired or he left or something, and I was crushed. I was so, so upset. So they gave the stack of artwork that was on his desk to the new guy.

    MR: Who was the new guy at the time?

    MC: That was Dana Knutson.

    MR: Oh, Dana Knutson, right.

    MC: And I called him, and I was the first new artist that he hired. I think he wanted to exercise his new power [MR: Yes.] as the art director, so he hired me, but I have reason to believe it’s not because of my artwork entirely. I came to find out years later, after Dana and I had become friends, that I sound, on the phone, exactly like his best friend. So he couldn’t help but have positive feelings for me when we talked on the phone.

    MR: So the key is, find out who the current art director is, track down his best friend, listen to him, and try to copy the voice.

    MC: That’s right.

    MR: Advice here. Career advice from Matt Cavotta.

    MC: Career advice. Like I said, I don’t think this technique is going to work for…

    MR: Okay, so, now you get to do… so what was your very first piece of Magic art?

    Subterranean HangarMC: The Subterranean Hangar. 

    MR: What set was that from?

    MC: That was Mercadian Masques. [MR: Okay.] MC: It was one of the bad storage counter lands. [MR: Okay.] Yeah.

    MR: Oh, let’s real quickly, something for people to understand. One of the bane of artists is that the artist obviously, they consider the best piece of work whatever their best piece of work is. But the audience, their favorites have to do with the card. Meaning if they really love a card, they love the art that’s on the card, and so what artists have come to realize is, their most popular pieces are very, very tied not to what the best piece was, but what the most popular card it was on.

    PhelddagrifMC: Right. It’s a real slam dunk if you can do two of those things at the same time. One of the things that I always appreciated quite a bit is when a collector of a fan would have a binder page filled with a particular bad card. And you know that in that instance, there was something about the art or the connection of the art to the card concept or the card name that really speaks to them. And that’s aside from, yeah, this is a broken rare or whatever. That’s a good time.

    MR: Yeah, one of the things—so  you were unique, or somewhat unique, in that when you started doing Magic, you actually played Magic, right? [MC: Yeah.] Most of our artists do not play Magic. And that one of the problems we often had is that what the art director does is, they figure out the card concept and convey the card concept to the artist.

    Questing PhelddagrifMC: So that’s another funny thing that happened with art director Dana Knutson way back when I first started. He had called me—I became a bit of a, like, last-ditch man for him. Like, whenever he needed something done in three days or whatever, he would call me and cut me loose on that assignment. And he had one for me, and when he told me what the name of the card was, I immediately—I can’t remember exactly what it was at the time, but I recognized it immediately as an anagram of Garfield, Ph.D.

    MR: Oh, right, right, right! Phelddagrif. 

    MC: Right. I knew immediately it was a Phelddagrif variant, and I stopped him before he continued the description, I was like “Don’t tell me. It’s a flying purple hippo.” And that blew his mind. He was like, “How could you possibly know this?”

    MR: Yeah, it’s Questing Phelddagrif, right? 

    MC: Yes. So yes, at times it pays to know what’s going on in the game.

    MiseMR: One of the things I remember is, we were doing Unhinged, and we were having trouble getting an image for the booster. Oh, no, there was a card with Mise. We were having trouble getting somebody to draw Mise because Mise is this Magic slang, and like we just couldn’t describe to the artist what it meant. So we finally said, like, “Okay, let’s give it to Matt,” and like “Matt, its Mise.”

    MC: Right. Right. That was fun. The Un-sets were a nice breath of fresh air as far as the—I don't know, the air, like the air around a Magic set is we’re taking this seriously. We are immersing ourselves in this world. And the Un-sets sort of pop the cap off of that and let the air out a bit.

    Zombie FanboyMR: Yeah, when I was searching to figure out how many art you had done, so there was like 176 pieces of art done by Matt Cavotta, there’s one piece of art done by Matt Cavotta and Richard Whitters [MC: Yeah.], and there’s one piece of art done by Matt “I’m Your Boy” Cavotta. Because in Unhinged, there was an artist theme, like “artist matters,” and so we gave nicknames to all the artists. So trivia question, what card was that?

    MC: That was Zombie Fanboy.

    MR: Zombie Fanboy. Very good.

    MC: I’m your boy. [MR: Yep.] They let me make my own name.

    MR: Yeah, we asked all the artists if they wanted to pick their own nickname. And some cared and some did not.

    MC: So speaking of Mise, that particular piece of art, if I remember correctly, the original art resides somewhere near and dear to you.

    MR: It does, it does. So I own four pieces of Magic art. I bought the original Maro. I bought the original Jester’s Sombrero, which was the art on the Unglued pack, and then I own Look at Me, I’m the DCI, I guess I didn’t buy it, but I didn’t give it to anybody else. I kept it. Along with my dollar check for doing it. And by the way, the way, I was probably overpaid. And then, Matt, for my birthday, gave me Mise. Mise was the cover packet of Unhinged.

    MC: I figured that you could start a pattern then. With the Un-set packaging art.

    MR: Yes. So I own four pieces of art, those are my four pieces of art. So. And not only do I have the art, Matt also framed with it, it’s the back of a Magic card, signed “Happy birthday, Matt.”

    Fat AssMC: So it’s funny, because I own one piece of Magic art that isn’t my own. [MR: Oh, what do you own?] It happens to be from Unhinged as well. Art director Jeremy Jarvis, the kind soul that he is, gave me Fat Ass.

    MR: Oh, Fat Ass! Didn’t that win an award? That was in—I remember there was some book that had, like—I forget the name of it, but there was some—

    MC: It might have been a society (???)

    MR: Yeah, there’s a bunch of things where you can get into a special book and it’s like an honor thing, and Magic art shows up there quite a bit. So I heard, “Oh, there’s a piece of Magic art from a recent set.” And I open it up and it’s Fat Ass. Well, that’s an awesome piece of art though.

    MC: Speaking of places where art wins awards, the Spectrum fantasy art annual every year has, I would say conseratively, fifteen to twenty pieces of Magic art in it. [MR: Yeah.] And that just shows you how talented the artists who work on our game are and how the game provides an opportunity for artists to express themselves in ways that are compelling to people even outside—the people judging those pieces of art don’t know or care [MR: Right, where it comes from] about cards at all. And yet they’re still finding some like eternal value in those images. I think that’s pretty awesome.

    MR: Okay, so let’s walk through. You get assigned a piece of art. [MC: Yes.] Tell me the process, what happens.

    MC: Me, or…

    MR: From the artist, from the artist.

    MC: Or one gets assigned?

    MR: An artist.

    MC: Well, the first thing that the art director does is he or she will gauge how many pieces an artist can handle and still pump out their best work. But let’s just say that they’ve determined that this person will get one.

    MR: And most art, by the way, behind the scenes, has two waves. Meaning there’s two different periods of I think seven weeks? [MC: Yeah.] That artists have to do their art.

    MC: Right. Although that has been changing. Sometimes we’re squeezing an entire 200+ card set into one wave because… [MR: ???] Just to get it all done.

    MR: Right. We never want to do that. [MC: No!] Sometimes we have to do that.

    MC: Okay. So the first thing that you’ll get is what we call the art description, and it is a rundown of certain, like one-liners, like here’s the tone that we’re looking for, and here’s the color of the card that this is attached to. Here’s the placeholder name of the card, just to give it an initial opportunity for inspiration on what that can be. And it resolves with a description of what that art could look like. And I say could, because quite often the art description comes as a strong suggestion, like, “This card represents a wizard’s fire power destroying a wall.” Or whatever. “It could look like Chandra casting wrecking ball made out of flame.” Or whatever. But if the artist feels like they have an image in their mind that is as cool or even cooler than what they did in the descriptions, they can propose an alternative.

    MR: Right. So the first thing you do is you turn in…

    MC: You turn in sketches of usually both the idea that you were asked for, and if you have ideas of your own. You can provide options. Some folks just like to jump in and do whatever it is that’s described. I was a bit of a pain in the ass for art directors because I almost always tried to find something. I don't know. A little bit deeper. But yeah. You’ll turn in sketches, those sketches are reviewed by the art directors and the writers who are attached to that particular set to check for continuity. In general, the art director manages the feedback that has to do with making this look good, and the others provide feedback on what is correct or incorrect.

    MR: Right, so I’ll give an example. So let’s say we did a piece from Theros. Someone like Jeremy’s going to talk about how the art looks, right? Whether it’s positioned right or whatever. Where someone like Jenna will come in and say, “Oh, that weapon you were showing is not in Theros. Here’s a collection of weapons you can choose from, but you chose a weapon that isn’t from this place.”

    MC: Oh, I lied! [MR: You lied?] I skipped an important step. [MR: Okay.] Let’s just use Theros as an example. Before an artist even starts imagining a picture in his or her mind, and even in some cases before they get the art description, they’ll get the world guide [MR: Oh, right right] for Theros. And that is usually 80 to 110 pages of art and written materials that gives that artist very deep understanding of what that world is all about.

    MR: And we make one of these every year.

    MC: At least one.

    MR: And it is crazy the amount of energy, it’s like a little phone book of just like, “Here’s everything you wanted to know about Theros, Ravnica, Innistrad, whatever the world is.

    MC: The funny thing, though, regarding that amount of energy, is if we didn’t do a world guide, [MR: Yeah.] The amount of energy it would take to art direct individual pieces into being cohesive [MR: Yeah.] It would be impossible actually. As much work as it is to put together the world guide, it allows those artists to express themselves without having to be corralled at every turn by the art director. “No, they don’t wear those kind of helmets. No no no, that’s the wrong color for this group.”

    MR: So as an artist, I’m sure you really appreciated the world guide, because it really gave you a sense of what the world was, right?

    MC: Yeah. Absolutely. And in the case of that illustration where Jenna pointed out that’s not the weapon, at times it can be as simple as, “Use weapon D on page 87.” [MR: Right.] And it just clears everything up right there.

    MR: Yeah, there are all sorts of funny stories, I think this happens a lot less than it used to, where we would say something, and the artist doesn’t understand the fantasy reference, and so they go to a real-world reference. Like for example, multiple times this has happened, where we’ve asked for a drake and we got a duck back.

    MC: Ahh, yeah.

    RootwallaMR: And then there’s a couple classic ones, where like the Rootwalla was originally a chuckwalla, which is an actual kind of lizard, and the artist who drew it didn’t realize—he thought we had made it up, it’s a fictional thing, so he had made a lizard, but he made his own thing. And so we changed the name, we’re like “Well, it’s not a chuckwalla, so I guess it’s a rootwalla?”

    MC: Some kind of walla.

    MR: Some kind of walla.

    MC: Clearly it’s a walla.

    MR: Okay. So you have your sketches, you turn them in, you get notes on the sketches, what next?

    MC: And I’d say that more often than not, well from my experience, more often than not, the sketches are pretty much either very close to approvable or approvable as-is.

    MR: It varies. I… yeah.

    MC: But now that we’re getting much more immersive with the worlds that we are depicting, it matters more that all of the nuances are on point. So I haven’t been involved in Magic art in five years, so it’s possible  that I was just lucky enough to miss that trend and not have to deal with that level of detail and scrutiny.

    MR: The other thing that will vary is, some artists are very, very familiar, have done a lot of Magic art, and some artists I know the first time they start working with us, that there’s little tiny details tat you might not think matter, that just they don’t realize. And as soon as it’s pointed out, they’ll go, “Ohh, ohh, I didn’t realize,” they’ll…

    MC: It also takes a little time and it might take a few cards of back and  forth with the art directors for them to provide feedback on the nuances that make Magic fantasy Magic fantasy art. As opposed to something like Lord of the Rings or whatever. For example, if someone puts a—if an illustration calls for a wizard shooting a flaming wrecking ball into a wall, [MR: Yeah.] if that wizard is an old man with a beard, it’s probably not going to work out. [MR: Yeah.] That’s just not part of what we do. Magic, a Magic wizard is young and energetic and—

    MR: We also avoid certain stereotypes, [MC: Right.] Like we avoid the long white beard and pointy hat with stars on it. [MC: Absolutely. Right.] Okay, so, they turn their sketch in, they get approval on the sketch, what’s next?

    MC: Next, they take the rest of the time between that moment and the due date to polish, to finish out the painted piece. I would say most of the time that painted piece comes in and it’s just like, the team oohs and ahhs. And says how awesome it is. Because you know what you’re getting into with the sketch. But sometimes in that finished stage, the art is in applying color, or applying detail to a suit of armor or whatever might get a little off-track, and it has to be reworked some.

    MR: Also, there’s a few very quirky Magic things that is easy—like, one of the most famous is, if a creature flies, it has to clearly look like it’s flying. And if it doesn’t fly, it can’t look like it’s flying. And I know…

    MC: I think that second one is more important, because you do have images of dragons and sometimes demons. [MR: Well…] If their wings are unfurled, we get it.

    MR: Well, right. I mean, it has to look like it flies. First of all, almost all the dragons fly. So if you see a dragon, you assume it flies [MC: Yeah.] from a Magic standpoint. [MC: Yeah.] But for example, a lot of times there’s like ghostly things, that are spirits that aren’t supposed to fly, so it’s tricky, because if they’re hanging and not touching the ground [MC: Right] there’s this expectation that maybe they’re flying. [MC: Right.] I know that’s a very common thing that—anyway…

    MC: That gets caught at sketch stage though. But at the point where you turn in your final piece, in essence that’s the end of the line as far as the work is concerned. Unless there’s color adjustment or “Hey dude, you painted two left hands on this guy by accident” or something like that. Which has happened.

    MR: Okay, so you get the art, the art gets approved, so what happens after, for an artist, what happens after the art is approved?

    MC: Afterward, for an artist that isn’t aware of the pace of Magic releases, it pretty much goes a little bit dark. You submit your invoice and you get paid, which is awesome. And at some point soon after the prerelease, you will get your product. You’ll get your…

    MR: Artist proofs.

    MC: You get artist proofs. And in some cases you’ll get a box of booster packs. So the artist can see what their work is like in its natural habitat.

    MR: So artist proofs, for people who don’t know, on the front it’s their card, and on the back is white. [MC: Right.] There’s no Magic back.

    MC: Right. It’s not a Magic card officially, as far as being able to be played in games and whatnot. But it gives them a very clear picture of how their art is being expressed.

    MR: And it’s something that’s very common for artists to sign, and…

    MC: Right. They’ve become a collectible thing in their own right. And that white back has become popular for sketches and signatures and whatnot.

    MR: So I know a lot—and clearly you did this, but so some number of artists we take to events. Want to talk a little bit about that?

    MC: Sure. The higher-profile events, the ones that draw a crowd beyond just the competitors, those are the ones where we like to have artists on hand to—I would say to help foster the environment of Magic appreciation even beyond playing the game. Appreciation for the art is, I believe, one of the more powerful draws to our game. It’s possible for someone to look at a pile of Magic cards and not be able to grok a single word on the bottom half and still be engaged with what they’re seeing. That’s power. I think that’s super important to us. So having artists on hand to hobnob and answer questions and in some cases sell larger printed pieces or even original art to people, it fosters that appreciation community within our fan base.

    MR: Yeah, and there’s always long lines, I mean the people get real excited. So people usually bring cards to sign. [MC: Yeah.] That’s obviously one of those standard things. So what is the most number of cards anyone at one time tried to get you to sign?

    MC: I was at Gen Con probably ten years ago or so, and this guy came by with a folding chair. And when he had his own chair to sit down, I knew I was going to be in trouble. And he dropped down a stack, honestly about eight inches high. I don’t know how many cards that is, but it’s way more than the recommended fifteen to twenty. I mean, it was probably like… I don't know, could that be a thousand cards?

    MR: Maybe. Hundreds and hundreds of cards.

    MC: Hundreds of cards. I was not thrilled about that. But there wasn’t a lot going on, so… [MR: So you signed it?] I took my time. Yeah, that was not great.

    MR: Yeah, so I was talking about, I think the first time I met you, my memory is when you were the artist at Worlds in Australia.

    MC: That was awesome.

    MR: So that has to be fun, I mean one of the perks of being a Magic artist…

    MC: Oh, one of the greatest perks.

    MR: Getting to travel around the world and…

    MC: Yeah, I have done a lot of continent-hopping, and it’s all because of Magic. That was a wonderful, wonderful opportunity.

    MR: Yeah, Magic’s actually gotten me to every continent but Antarctica. Africa’s a tricky one. We had an Invitational in Capetown. [MC: Right.] But that was a… so anyway, we’re almost to work. Anything other things you want to say about artists that most people might not realize, when they think about the art of Magic? A final thought?

    MC: A final thought. It’s awesome?

    MR: The depth of the…

    MC: Oh yeah, here’s a final thought. This one will add a nice little note of finality in more ways than one. One of the ways that I know that Magic art has really elevated its game, and Jeremy Jarvis and I both agree on this because we feel the same way, the way that we know that it has grown and it has gotten better is that we both think of ourselves as now obsolete. Because we could not do art and cut the mustard anymore.

    MR: You don’t think you could?

    MC: I would say that more than half of the art that I have done has no business anymore. [MR: Yes.] Now that doesn’t mean that some of them, some of my finer moments wouldn’t still [MR: Ehh…] like hang with the big boys. [MR: Yeah.] But for the most part, we’re both totally happy to see that the art has grown beyond us. I think that just says that we are old and has-beens, or it’s really gotten pretty darn cool.

    MR: Well anyway, thank you, Matt, we had a little extra trip in today, so you got a little extra time with Matt. So thank you for joining me.

    MC: Awesome.

    MR: So I told them, it wasn’t even a podcast day, but it’s like, “Matt’s coming, we’re going to podcast.”

    MC: I’m a gamer!

    MR: Anyway, thanks for joining me, and so guys, as always, I love talking about Magic and Magic art, but even more, I like making Magic. So it’s time to go. See you next time.

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  2. 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 is another in my mega-series about the two-color pairs. So let’s see. I’ve done white/blue. I’ve done blue/black. I’ve done black/red. I’ve done red/green. That means it’s time for green/white. The final of the allied color pairs. And then, I’ll be getting on to the enemy pairs in future podcasts.

    Okay. So, let’s start by talking about what does green and white want? So green. So green’s the one color that believes that things are the way they’re supposed to be. That nature is this thing of beauty, and that the key to life is not changing anything, it’s not trying to turn it into something else, it’s just acknowledging and accepting it for what it is. That’s why green, green wants acceptance. That’s what green ultimately—just accept the world the way it is.

    And the way it does that, I say, is through harmony. And what that means is, that you have to be able to sort of stop and realize what you have. That what green feels is that not enough people take into account what they have. They’re always searching for something else, not realizing that what they already have is plenty.

    Meanwhile, we have white. White is seeking out peace. White believes that everybody can be happy. That everybody can have what they need. That we have the resources that everybody can have their needs met. But in order to do that, it requires us taking steps to make sure that we all get—that everybody gets what they need.

    And in order to do that, white is very big on structure. White believes that people inherently will do things that are counter to their own well-being, but if you sort of set up rules, whether the rules be civil rules like laws or more spiritual rules like religion, that you can guide people. Like, people need guidance. That people have lots of impulses and instincts, more impulses I guess, more impulses and selfishness is the issue. Is that I just want to do things for me. Me me me me me. And white’s like, “You have to think about not yourself but everybody else.”

    Okay, so the obvious overlap between white and green is, their shared enemy is black. Black is the color of selfishness. Black is, I take care of me first. Well, let’s go look at the opposites of black, which are white and green. White clearly has an entire sense of the value of the community in that we need to do what’s better for the group. If the decision is bad for an individual, even if the individual is the person making the decision, but it benefited the group, the correct answer is doing what’s right for the group.

    And green, now green cares about the community in a different context than white. White is very much about the needs of the group outweigh the needs of the individual. Green believes that there is an ecosystem set up. That everything fits in balance. That everything is connected to one another. And that part of what you—one of the things you need to realize, part of the harmony that you need to reach is understanding the role that you have in the world, the interconnectivity that you have with everything else.

    So green’s big issue is, I have to care about everything else because I’m connected to everything else. That when I do something, it impacts other things. And that you have to be careful what actions you take because of the repercussions of those actions.

    One of the big problems green has with black is, black cares about nobody but itself, and does things that have horrible ramifications. That if you kill something, that there’s not a role for it being killed. Green’s not against killing things if there’s a point, if I need to eat, I mean there’s some function for the killing green understands.

    But killing for just to gain advantage, like black wants to do, okay, you’re disrupting the web of life. You’re disrupting the natural order. That you start killing off creatures, maybe those creatures are predators, and if they don’t eat their prey then things get out of balance. That green’s a big believer that there’s a harmony that needs to be reached.

    So, where green and white overlap is definitely the needs of the larger group as a whole. That both green and white, in their own way, believe that what’s most important is what you’re able to do. You need to think about the larger picture. You need to think not just about you yourself, but extend out and think about the larger role that you play.

    Okay. So, the first place that you see that is that green and white definitely have a flavor of building. That they are colors that are very supportive colors. So for example, we’ll start with creature buffing. That green and white are the two colors that do +N/+N, meaning that they boost creatures, usually at instant speed, to sort of make you bigger.

    And so, now, the way we separate white from green is, white tends to do the smaller boost, white is +1/+1 or +2/+2. Normally what it does is white then also, you gain an ability. So it’s +1/+1 and flying or +2/+2 and lifelink, or +1/+1 and first strike. Sometimes white occasionally will do +1/+0. Like, +1/+0 and first strike is something it will do from time to time. But white definitely does the small bursts, and usually adds utility to it.

    RootwallaGiant GrowthGreen does the bigger bursts. Green gets Giant Growth. Green gets +3/+3. Green doesn’t tend to add as much as white does. It does add trample every once in a while. But green usually is more about size.

    And you will see that, that green both has the Giant Growth-like effects, and it also has the Rootwalla effects, where built into the creature it can Giant Growth itself. White sometimes will have a little bit of buffing. Sometimes you’ll see with knights or something that they’ll pump themselves up. But white doesn’t do that nearly as much as green.

    Okay, also there is the community buffing, where you’re buffing all your creatures. So white tends to do +1/+1 or +2/+2 to the whole team. To all your creatures. You don’t buff your opponent’s creatures, you just buff your own creatures. And so white tends to do smaller buffs. White gets +1/+1 to the whole team, usually at common, often as an instant, sometimes as an enter the battlefield or an activated ability. Although usually if it’s activated it’s higher than common.

    Overrun Green tends to get the larger boosts. The Overruns if you will. +3/+3 to the team. Now, that happens at higher rarities. So white’s team boosting happens a little lower. White is the army color, right? White is the color that has lots of little creatures that work together. And so one of the things that works really well with a small weenie strategy is something that boosts everything.

    Now, white and green are also the colors that mess around the most often with +1/+1 counters. Green is more primary in it, and white is secondary. But it’s something that both of them do. Also, they are the number one and number two creature colors. In fact, white is number one in volume of creatures, white has the highest percentage, usually between 55 and 60% creatures. Green is number two in the number of creatures it has.

    Now, green is the biggest creatures, so green is the creature color in the sense that it gets the highest. Like at common, it’s going to have a 6/6 or 7/7. And usually at the higher rarities, usually it has the biggest creature. Every once in a while, one or two colors will get a singular big creature. Blue sometimes gets leviathans and things. But green on average, if you just added up all the power/toughness and divide it by the number of creatures you have, just on average has the biggest creatures. And it has the best utility for paying for its creatures. Now what happens is, white is very, very good at getting cheap creatures. And it has the best cost to size equity at the low size. And then green has the best cost equity at the big size. So those are the creature colors.

    They also overlap in two abilities, speaking of creatures. One is, white is primary in vigilance and green is secondary. Not tapping to attack. And then also, white and green are the two colors that most often will get indestructible. Which is, it used to not be a keyword, but has recently become—or not recently, but in the last, I don't know, year or so, became a keyword.

    Anyway, so white and green, vigilance is good for both attacking and defending. White and green have some of that quality to them. Indestructible is a good defense mechanism. White and green can be very protective. Like I said, we already talked about the boost, that they can boost creatures, that’s one means by which to protect themselves. Another is like, indestructible.

    And one of the reasons, by the way, that vigilance is in both colors is that both colors have this sort of quality of wanting to look out. And white is more defensive than green, now one of the ways that white and green both a have a defensive quality is they are the two life gaining colors. That they’re the two colors that both gain life.

    Usually the way we tend to separate life gain is white tends to get smaller bursts at instant speed, and green gets larger bursts at sorcery speed. There’s a few exceptions to that. That’s the general rule though. The idea is, white’s life gain is a little more, ha-ha, you don’t know that was going to happen. You thought you’ve defeated me, you have a clock going, you think you’re going to defeat me, and all of a sudden I mess up your clock. Where green, it’s sort of like, you know it’s coming, it’s not a surprise, but it’s get larger bursts.  Now, white has a little more ways to get life. White also has lifelink, something green does not have. So white’s able to get life through creatures as well. So white has a few other ways to get life.

    NaturalizeOkay, now let’s talk destruction! Okay, so white and green both have the ability to destroy enchantments. White is—so the way it works is, white destroys enchantments and red destroys artifacts, and green--at common, white destroys enchantments, red destroys artifacts, and green destroys artifacts or enchantments. Sort of the Naturalizes if you will.

    White is allowed at higher rarities to have spells that can destroy both artifacts and enchantments, doesn’t tend to do it as efficiently as green. Either it does it at sorcery speed or it does it more expensive. Sometimes it will exile them but at a higher cost. It will cost four or something rather than two like Naturalize.

    Now, white has the ability to destroy more things than green. White has more answers than green. White, for example—white’s big thing is, white either only destroys things that are messing with it, or its answers tend to have answers, or they tend to be more expensive in the solutions.

    PacifismLureGreen, on the other hand, has very efficient ways to destroy artifacts and enchantments, always has a common Naturalize or Naturalize variant. And then the way green deals with creatures is green has fight. So green has to fight them, or it can Lure them, but green’s creature removal always is revolving around its creatures. Where white, if you mess with white, white has spells that can—once you attack or block, if you attack white or block white, white can interact with you. And then white also has the Pacifism thing (???) where I can sort of lock you down, although there might be answers to that.

    As far as beefing creatures up, white and green also have—they are the two colors that most often do buffing auras. So that’s auras that go on your creatures that tend to make them bigger. All the colors have the ability to do it a little bit. So all the colors have some ability to do auras. White and green tend to do them more frequently.

    Green for example usually is the color that has the biggest, at common or low rarity, the +3/+3-type enchantments. White usually has less than that. Just like we do Giant Growths, white gets to have more +1/+2, but with added bonus to it. An added keyword. Where green just sometimes gets more size. You’ll notice that theme between them.

    So one of the things I should point out is that white and green, when you ask us, “What two colors have the most overlap mechanically?” the two ones we always bring up are either white and green or black and red. And white and green, like I said, as I’m going through this, there’s just a lot of areas where it lines up. Like, when you’re making hybrid cards, white/green hybrid cards are one of the easiest to make. Because it was just a lot of overlap between what white and green do.

    Mesa EnchantressOkay. Also, not only do they have auras for pumping, they also are the two colors that care about auras. They tend to have the positive aura interaction. I mean, outside of an enchantment block. That they’re the ones that have stuff like enchantresses, they’re the ones that net you gain when you play auras or affect auras in a positive way.

    Also, white and green—well, green is number one at land fetching, which is going into your deck and getting basic lands and putting them into play. White is allowed to go get plains. I guess all the colors are allowed to get their own basic land type. White tends to do it a little more than some, I guess black is probably second as far as getting its own lands out. But white is probably third. As far as seeking out of your deck.

    Usually white getting plains has been tied to like are you behind in some way, it’s done kind of a catch-up thing. Where white says, “Oh, you’re in some means, let me help you. Let me help you.” It goes all the way back to like Land Tax, which was pretty broken. Usually that’s the idea, that white’s land fetching usually is trying to help you out.
    Fog 
    Okay. So now, let’s talk about some of the defensive—I already talked about Giant Growth and indestructible. The other thing is, white and green are the two colors that do damage prevention. So white does damage prevention, sort of spot damage prevention, which is like you try to do something, I prevent damage from that source or to that creature. Green’s damage prevention is just Fog, which is nobody does damage. So green is much more widespread. Sometimes green will do Fogs where not everybody gets fogged, that’s green getting closer to sort of how white functions, sometimes it will be like “Everybody but the werewolves and the wolves deal damage.”
    Darkness 
    DisenchantSo one of the funny stories about Fog real quickly was, Fog began the game in green, and then there was some early weird examples of like black having a Fog and stuff. But eventually we talked about, we had a big period where we said, “You know, we’re going to change around some stuff.” The first real sit-down we had on the color pie. And we decided to make some major movements. When Naturalize moved from white in Disenchant into green, a bunch of things that happened at that point.

    So one of the things we decided to do there was that Fog seemed like an odd fit for green, and it had been tied to kind of weather manipulation, which green does, so we said, “You know what? White’s really the damage prevention color, let’s put it in white.” So we put Fog in white. So for a couple years, Fog was in white.

    The problem we ran into is, Fog isn’t—white doesn’t need Fog. It just—there’s so many other ways for white to prevent damage that Fog is kind of irrelevant to white. And white had more spot prevention, so it definitely was more like, “We get in a fight, and I harm you but you don’t harm me.” So white just had better than Fog.

    And what we found was, green really needed Fog. Green really needed the “I’m going to do some sort of alpha strike, and then I have protection in case you strike back.” So we moved it back. So what happened was—it’s one of the good examples where we saw something, it seemed to make sense logically, so we made the move, we tried it, and then as we actually started doing it, we realized that we hadn’t seen a lot of the ramifications of it.

    It’s one of the reasons I always talk about how important playtesting is in general, where you need to sort of understand the ramifications, and there’s really no way to understand ramifications without actually playing it. That theorycrafting, as we call it, talking through what you think will happen, only gets you so far.

    Another thing I want to point out, real quickly, since I brought up this story, is that the color pie, the philosophies do not change. What white represents, what green represents, those are not things that—those are constant. And they’ve been the constant since Alpha.  But our execution of the color pie, how we execute it and what we do with it, that does change.

    Okay. I’m sitting in some traffic. This is one of those topics where I have a decent amount to talk about, but it is a more finite topic. It’s not like I can just talk forever about it. So I’m hoping this traffic will clear up a little bit because I have a decent amount of material, I have half an hour of material. I don’t know if I have forty, fifty minutes of material.

    Okay, so we talked about damage prevention. Okay. Let’s now talk about bounce. Both green and white both have bouncing as a cost. And what I mean by that is that you can play a creature—so they work a little bit differently. What white will do is white often has creatures that say, “When I play this creature, I have to bounce a creature.” One time. One time when I play it. Green tends to have bigger creatures, there’s a cost of bouncing it every turn.

    Neither of these we do tons, we do this every once in a while. Usually what happens is, if the set has a theme where bouncing your own stuff is synergistic, we’re more likely to put it in. So let’s say there’s a set where the main mechanic, for example, is something that has to do with casting, or has some sort of trigger when things enter the battlefield. That having things that bounce lets you reset things, and so we tend to add those in when it’ll help the environment. So they’re the kind of things that white and green get, but they don’t get super often, and…

    One of the things that’s interesting is that I put things in three buckets as far as colors go. There’s your everyday stuff, that is, when I talk about something like vigilance in white. Every set’s going to have vigilance in white. Every, every time. So the first bucket is just things colors do and always do. The second is things sometimes do, in the sense that it’s something the color’s capable of, and every once in a while we’ll do it. And then the third bucket are things that are like special occasion, which are really only when we do a particular theme.

    Like for example, when we do a graveyard theme, we need to make sure we have things for all the colors to do. And red and blue don’t have tons of graveyard interaction in a normal thing, and so we’ve given them a little bit. And the funny thing is, the stuff we’ve given them, when we need it we’ll put in other sets, occasionally red will return an instant or sorcery or something. But the three buckets essentially are things we always use, things we sometimes use, things we rarely use, but we use judiciously to help flesh out particular themes. Okay. Can you tell when I’m padding? Traffic’s picking up.

    Okay. Next. Untapping. So for a long time, white was the color of—well, blue taps or untaps. Blue has the puppet-mastery-type things where it taps or untaps. And then for a while, we had white tapping and then white also untapping. Not like blue, not at the same time. Usually when white was untapping, it either untapped all your creatures as a spell, or it untapped one creature as a means to surprise something for blocking.

    And so what we decided is, we shifted off the latter to green, and we did that recently. I mean, not so recently that you haven’t seen the sets. But so the idea is, green now has the “I untap a creature and I can use that defensively.” And the idea is, we want green to get in fights. We want green to use its creatures to have answers for other creatures. So one of the things might be, “Oh, I attack with my big creature, now I see the coast is clear and you attack, so now I untap my big creature and block.” White still gets to untap all its creatures. White has that general utility. But it no longer does—infrequently does the untap to block thing. We’re letting green do more of that recently.  

    Okay. Next, token-making. So they’re the two creature colors, so being the two creature colors, they are the most likely to make creatures. So not only do they have the highest as-fan of creatures, the highest percentage of creatures, but they also are the most common in making tokens.

    So one of the things, it used to be that green was king of 1/1 tokens because green’s all about swarming you. And we’ve shifted a little bit to white. We decided that we liked the idea—there was a period of time where green had both the most creatures and the biggest creatures, and we’re like, “You know what? We’re kind of wasting it.” Like, it’s neater if we can spread that out.

    So we decided that white would have the most creatures, and green had the biggest creatures. It plays into white’s army theme. That white doesn’t have big creatures, there’s lots and lots of little creatures. But it has more of them.

    And so we decided to give white small token-making. So 1/1 creature tokens is in white’s domain. Not that other colors can’t do it, red does it from time to time, other colors can make 1/1s, but white’s is the thing where almost every single set there will be a common white card making 1/1 tokens. Sometimes you’ll see it in other colors, but it’s almost always in white.

    Then green, we decided that green, most of the time, and once again, like it can make 1/1s, but more of the time it will make bigger ones. It will make 2/2s and 3/3s. And so the idea is, if you see a 1/1 counter, the most likely thing is white made it, and if you see a 2/2 or 3/3 counter, well most likely green made it. Green makes the bigger counters. I keep calling them counters. Tokens. Creature tokens.

    It’s also that white and green are the colors most likely to make multiples. Not only make them but also make them in multiples. Because they are the creature colors. The only other color that really does them at lower rarities in multiples is we give red “make two 1/1s” every once in a while. Usually goblins, to fill out some theme.

    Okay. Next, returning from the grave. So interaction with the graveyard. So white has more interaction. Well, white and green each have interaction. Green’s interaction is, it can get back anything. It ties into kind of its thematic connection with the past. We talk about blue is about the future and green’s about the past, blue looks for what can be and green looks for what has been.

    So green through that is able to return anything. It can regrow anything from the graveyard. White is a little more restrictive about what it can get back from the graveyard. White is allowed to get small creatures as a means to sort of not run out of small creatures. White has a card advantage issue, one of the things we let white do is to sort of keep a flow of small creatures, to get back its small creatures.

    White is also the color that gets back artifacts or enchantments when we have sets that we care. That’s the kind of thing that white doesn’t do all the time, but does in a set where it matters. Oh, there’s an enchantment theme? Okay, white can get back enchantments from the graveyard. Oh, there’s an artifact theme? Okay white gets back artifacts from the graveyard. White also has a little bit of an ability to get things from the graveyard into play. Usually that’s also on smaller things. Green does not do that, that’s—white and black are the two that tend to get it into play.

    LhurgoyfKeldon WarlordOkay. The other thing that green and white tend to do is green and white care about creatures, and has effects that specifically care. So for a long time, green—so originally there was a card called Keldon Warlord, that was in Alpha. And it was */*, where * was the number of creatures you had in play. It might have been */*+1, only because they loved */*+1s in the early days.

    But the idea essentially was, its power and toughness are equal to the number of creatures you have in play. Oh no, it was */* because it itself is a creature. So it always, stuff Lhurgoyf had to be plus one so it didn’t die when you played it. But Keldon Warlord was always a 1/1. So it was a */*.

    Anyway, we made Keldon Warlord. Then we figured out that Keldon Warlord didn’t make a lot of sense in red. Red wasn’t really the color that cared about creatures. In fact, it has the second fewest. Only blue has fewer creatures than red. So we moved it into green. And green started doing it.

    And then, after we made the split to decide that white was the number color, we came back, and there’s a big split, because one of green’s big flavors is growing. That it has things that grow over time. Variable power/toughness. Not that the other colors all don’t dip their toe in it, but green’s the major variable power/toughness color.

    And so—and green is a creature color, so being stars equal to creatures made a lot of sense. It grows over time, green has a swarming concept. But the argument for white was, well white is the army color, white has lots of little creatures. Oh, well this thing is a reward for having lots of little creatures.

    So we had a—there’s a meeting we have once a week called cardcrafting, where we get the designers and developers in a room, and we really argue over like nuts and bolts mechanical things. Such as, okay, who’s supposed to get the Keldon Warlord? Is it supposed to be white or is it supposed to be green?

    And this was a pretty—by the way, this was a pretty heavy debate. It wasn’t like, sometimes we have discussions and like, 90% of the room agrees one way, and that’s just what we do. This was a case where we were pretty split. In the end it was like 60/40 leaning white, so we ended up going with white, so white now became the color that’s */* equals the number of creatures.

    Savage PunchDragon WhispererGreen, the place now is green will do effects where it cares about creatures, it both cares about creature size with like formidable and ferocious and stuff we recently did in Khans. So will sometimes care about size, but also sometimes it just cares about number of creatures. For example, drawing cards equal to the number of creatures, that’s a green card. So white and green are the two colors that definitely like say, “I have a group, I care about the group, in fact, I will count that group.” Okay. So that is most of the mechanical connections. You can tell I have a little longer trip today. How am I doing on my time?

    Okay, so let’s talk a little bit about philosophically where white and green—where they play around with. So one of the things that—so let’s talk about the conflict between white and green. I’ve talked about what they have in common, looking at their enemy, black, so let’s talk about where they differ.

    So the way to do this is if there’s an ally color, you look at the other allies they have that are enemies. So white’s other ally other than green is blue, and green’s other ally other than white is red. So blue and red are enemies.

    Okay. So the conflict between blue and red is one of emotion vs. intellect. So the idea there is, blue believes that you should think things carefully through, and that you shouldn’t—blue is all about thought, where red is all about action. That blue believes that it’s important before you do anything, you think of all the consequences. Red is like about action. Red is follow your heart, do what you believe. Don’t get caught up in your mind, just act. Think about things.

    And when we look at white/green, this is where they tend to spread a little bit, white leans towards blue’s side. White agrees with the idea that look, you’ve got to be careful, that people just doing things causes chaos, and chaos is dangerous to society. So white very much agrees with blue. White, like blue, is a planning color. White wants to think ahead. White wants to use its structure constructively to make sure that everything stays safe. And so the reason that white and red are enemies is white does not like red’s recklessness. That red does not think about things. And that to white, it’s important. White wants order, not chaos.

    Meanwhile, green, green is the color of instinct. Green understands the impulsivity of red. Green looks and says, “Look, you are who you are, you feel what you feel, you do what you need to do.” Animals aren’t thinking. It’s not like—if I see my prey, do I think about if it’s the right thing? No, I chase my prey. It’s what I do. And green is very instinctual in nature. So one of the conflicts between white and green is green definitely leans towards the red side of act before you think, and white leans towards the blue side of think before you act.

    Now, both of them very much, like I said, they center on the care of the community, but the means by which how they do that. The other thing that’s very different is, white is literally trying to protect every member of its group. White wants to make sure that nothing can harm any member. Its laws, its rules, its religion, everything is about protecting every single individual.

    Green is more about protecting the overall, the web of life. Green is not protecting the individual. If a cheetah has to eat a gazelle, well hey, gazelle, the cheetah’s got to eat. Green does not say, “Oh no no no, we need to protect the gazelle.” Where white is very much—white in fact wants to support the meek. White wants to look at the weakest members and make sure those are protected.

    And green, green definitely has a quality of survival of the fittest. That if the weak aren’t able to survive, then they don’t survive. And that green does not do anything, like green believes that the natural order will weed things out that need to get weeded out. If you’re weak and need to be weeded out then you will.

    That’s where another big issue—green and white, while they overlap, and they have a lot of shared beliefs, definitely how they see the larger community is a very different thing. That white is trying to protect everybody, and green is trying to protect the overall system. But not the individuals in the system.

    Okay, so what happens when white and green gets together? A couple different things. First and foremost, white and green banding together will be very group-focused. That white very much will care about the welfare of everybody, and green will care about the combination of everybody.

    And so one of the examples, obviously, in Ravnica is Selesnya. So Selesnya definitely—for those that know Divergent, for example, there’s five factions in Divergent. One of them is called Amity, and for those that don’t know Divergent, it’s a futuristic—it’s a teen novel, and the idea is, there was a horrible, I don't know, world war or something, and there’s five factions that each believe that something different is what they need to embrace. And Amity’s very much about (???) peace and belonging and that connectivity. And so Amity’s another green/white example just like Selesnya.

    And the thing that both of them overlap, you’ll notice, is the idea that the group as a whole is in charge. That it’s not any one individual making decisions, it’s the group making decisions. That the idea of a true democracy, where if you’re going to take action, every single member of the group will weigh in. I know in Divergent, for example, whenever they make a decision they literally vote. Everybody votes. And if the majority doesn’t agree with them, whatever the majority wants is what the group does. And they’re very much about giving voice to the group as a whole.

    I think white/green is, of the ten two-color combinations, the most group-focused. It is the most caring about the welfare of the group as a whole. And when you get white and green together, that’s the kind of thing that happens.

    Now, in gameplay, what happens is, white and green are the two creature colors, they’re the colors that both have the most creatures, can make the most creature tokens, have the ability to protect their creatures, so white and green’s strategy, if you look at sort of whenever white and green get together, it’s all about—it’s very creature-focused. We talk about green and black might be graveyard-focused, and blue and black might be library-focused. Green and white is the most creature-focused.

    Wayfaring TempleAutochthon WurmAnd the strength in numbers. White and green is all about strength in numbers. If you look at the mechanics that we did so far for Selesnya, one was convoke, which is use your creatures as a resource to help get more things out, play more spells and play more creatures, and populate, which was the idea of just making more creatures. Of getting tokens out and then duplicating them and making more.
    And so white/green is the most creature-focused. And it’s not just individually creature-focused, it’s group creature focused. It’s going to beat you by overrunning you with a large group of creatures. That is how white/green is going to win. It’s going to win with creatures, and it’s going to win by having more creatures than you can deal with.
    And like I said, if you really look at all the different mechanics that weave into that, I think green is about overwhelming and overrunning, and white is about banding together and joining as a group. So when you sort of take those two qualities and mix them together, that when you take—like, for example, what green believes is, nature is plentiful. And that one of the advantages that nature has over everybody else is, we just have more things. And that if you give us time to sort of pool all the resource of nature, we’re going to overwhelm you. White says, hey, we have the individuals, we have the numbers, we’re going to band together, and if we work as a group, we will be more powerful than any individual.

    Now, take those two philosophies, meld them together, and you see, okay, these are people that are going to create a lot of creatures, band them all together, and work as one very unified unit to take you down. And they’re just going to overwhelm you. Because that is the nature. That they’re going to make more creatures and they’re going to overwhelm you with those creatures. That is what green is about.

    So what is white/green’s negative qualities? So I talked some about the positive qualities. I think white and green, on some level, their groupness is their greatest negative, which is they are so focused on the group they can’t see the rights of individuals. That like if you want to sort of take a white/green group, and the problem there is, they just don’t care about the rights of the individuals. That whatever’s good for the group supercedes that.

    And that, I mean, while there’s definitely a lot of value of seeing things for the group, there is some value of being able to see the rights of individuals. And that individual rights kind of get trampled in a white/green world. That if it’s good for the larger group, doesn’t matter if it’s not good for everybody. And there are individual freedoms that don’t exist.

    Like in a white/green world, there’s not a lot of property. Everybody owns everything. And there’s not a lot of self-achievement because whatever you do is for the greater good of the group. And so there’s individuality lost in white/green. That sort of, it has the strength of the group, but it doesn’t give any strength to the individual. And that a lot of the things, especially (???) some of the other colors that play into that, that is really important.

    So anyway, I see Wizards. So just remember that we’re halfway through. This was the last of the allied two-color combinations, but coming up—not immediately, I’m trying to do them about once a month maybe. I’m going to be getting to the other five. The next one I’ll be doing, I’m going in order, the next one will be white/black, which is Orzhov.

    But anyway, I hope you guys are enjoying these two-color pairings. I am fascinated by the color pie, for those that somehow can’t tell or haven’t heard the 18,000 different things I’ve written about the color pie. I find the color pie fascinating, I think it’s a really neat—it is the foundation of Magic, it is the secret sauce if you will, if you dig down deep, it’s a thing that really sets Magic apart. And so I love swimming in the mana pool near the color pie and seeing all the cool sort of stuff that you can do.

    Anyway, I love sharing with you guys, and it is fun to sort of talk color pie and talk color pairs. But I am now parking my car. So you know what that means? It means it’s the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking Magic, it’s time for me to be making Magic. I’ll see you guys next time.
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  3. 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’s topic, about a month or maybe two months ago, I had asked the audience for topics they would like to see on Drive to Work. And today’s was one of those. So the topic suggested was a card from beginning to finish.

    But instead of talking about a specific card, I want to walk you through—we want to make a card made. I don’t think the average player understands all the different things that go into getting a card made. So I was going to talk today about taking a card and then walking you through all the processes the card has to go through in order, from it being a blank page to being in your hand. What does that entail? So today, I’m going to kind of walk you through the process of how it gets made.

    Hopefully I will remember everything. It’s funny because I deal, and I talk about one aspect of the process, which is at one end. But there’s actually a lot of people come after me. After me and my team are done designing a card, there’s a lot that has to get done. So I’m going to try to walk through that today. Like I said, hopefully I’ll hit it all.

    Okay. So we start. There’s a set. That has needs. It wants things. So the design team will make a card. Sometimes the card is made to fill a void, sometimes it’s top-down, sometimes it’s just mechanically something that’s interesting. Sometimes it’s just a neat idea you had for a card that you think maybe will fit. Sometimes it’s something synergistically had to be made. But anyway, all cards start because the design team—or there’s cards that are actually created after design hands off. But we’re going to walk you through cards that start from the beginning all the way through the end.

    So the design team decides to make a card to fill some void. How does that happen? There’s a bunch of different ways. Usually the way it will work is either the lead designer will give homework, and then everybody will have to do the homework assigned and bring it in, or sometimes we do cards in meetings where we design them sort of all together.

    I do both, when I lead my teams, although I really, really enjoy making cards in meetings, it is a very organic process. Some of my favorite cards from a lot of my sets come from there. Like one of my favorite cards from Theros was [Rescue from] theUnderworld. That came from—and Chained to the Rocks! My two favorite cards both came from meetings. And in Innistrad, one of my favorite cards was Evil Twin, that came from a meeting. Army of the Damned came from a meeting. There’s something fun about sort of figuring out how to make it.

    Now, when we make it in meetings, there’s two different ways we tend to do it. One is, we’re trying to hit a specific goal, like we’re making a certain cycle or we’re filling out a certain mechanic. Other times, we’ll do a more top-down-ish stuff, like both Innistrad and Theros, I had the creative team liaison bring in a list of names that would make sense in the set and we would design to the names. Like, Evil Twin started as “There should be a card called Evil Twin. Well, what would an evil twin do?” And then we just design the card to match what we think is a good top-down with the name.

    So anyway, design will make a card and put it in a file. And we will playtest, and what happens is, I’ve talked about this before, a lot of design, or most of design is iteration. Which means you spend some time making cards, you playtest those cards, you learn about it, usually you talk about it, then you make changes, and then you play the changes and that keeps happening.

    So what happen is, you’ll make a card. Most cards do not make it through the process. For example, if you have how many cards get introduced early in design, that get printed, it’s a tiny, tiny number. We make way, way, way more cards than actually get produced. And on top of that, things just get tweaked a lot. I’m not saying we’ve never had—there’s been cards that come in the file early and then they just last the distance, they never get changed, that does happen. But more often than not, things either get replaced or get tweaked, but there’s a lot of changes that happen in a card.

    And that will happen for one of two reasons. Number one is, the card just isn’t working. That’s the most common reason for a card to leave the file. Maybe we got rid of the mechanic that has it. Maybe we changed something about the set, where that thing is no longer needed. Maybe the card itself isn’t fun or isn’t playing well.

    The other reason that we’ll change cards is we need to make changes, and then changes will result in other changes. A real common thing is, let’s say we need to change a card from 2R 3/2 to 1R 2/1. Oh, well elsewhere in the file we had a 1R 2/1. But that 1R 2/1 is not as important as the one we just changed, so we’ll change the other 1R 2/1. We want to make sure that it’s not too many cards that are too close to each other and that you fill out your curve.

    So sometimes cards change not because that card is a problem, but there’s  another card that is too close to it and it’s harder to change the other card. For example, vanilllas are a good example where the vanilla—we want to have a certain number of vanillas, but no one vanilla usually, barring exceptions, is crucial. And so oh, if this gets too close to vanilla, the vanilla could easily change. In general, the vanillas, the French vanillas, the simpler cards are much, much easier to change. They’re in there more to be simple than necessarily a specific combination of numbers with an ability.

    Okay. So a card gets made, goes into design, design iterates. It somehow survives the design process, which is quite impressive. Okay, so next it goes to development. Now be aware, in design, the name in design is made up by design, it’s a made-up name. We usually put them in brackets, which says that it’s not a real name.

    The creature type, the card type is defined, and any creature type—the way it works is creature types are normally the domain of the creative team, but if mechanically we need a particular creature type, “Oh no, this card has to be a goblin,” we put an exclamation point after it, and that means to the creative people, “No, we mean this. It needs to be this.”

    Creature types are this weird hybrid between concerns of design and development and concerns of creative. And so the default is, it’s a creative decision, but unless there’s mechanical ramifications, and then if creative has an issue with the mechanical stuff, like you want to have a 4/4 goblin, and they go “Ughh, 4/4 goblin, that’s not really a goblin,” they’ll come and talk to you. But the exclamation point says, mechanically we need this. Don’t change it without discussing it with us.

    Okay, so it gets to development. Now, while cards are in design, we do what we call a flat power level. Which means the goal in design is not about determining the environment, meaning cards aren’t balanced yet. They haven’t got to development. So we’re not worrying about what’s the set’s top power level cards.

    Everything is priced by the development representative on the design team, so that it’s playable. When you are playing in a design playtest, the goal is not to play the best cards. In development, you are trying to figure out, “Ooh, what’s the best thing I can play?” because you’re stress-testing the system. In design we’re not doing that yet. We’re just trying to see what are the fun cards, what’s interesting? And if we had made—normally in Magic, they have what they call A, B, and Cs of development, of, As are more powerful, Bs are less, Cs are weaker. And you most always play your As, you usually play Bs, sometimes you fill out with Cs.

    If the cards were A, B, C, that just means some number of the cards wouldn’t get playtested. Or would get playtested with much less frequency. So we even all the power levels out so we can play with them all. That doesn’t actually lead to good Magic, but it leads to a good testing environment so we can figure out what is working and what is not.

    Okay. Once it gets to development, development then has to start giving realistic numbers to things. So they have to figure out—I mean, they’ll play with our file, the design file for a while, but at some point they’re like, Okay, do we like this card? Not like this card? Should it be strong? Should it be weak? Is this a Constructed card? Is it just a Limited card? So they start balancing the cards and trying to make them fit what they need to fit. So that’s when creature stats and creature mana costs and activation costs, all that gets seriously looked at, and it gets adjusted to figure out where development wants to fit it.

    Now, development also goes through an iterative process, which is they are playtesting with the cards. And the early part of development is mostly about figuring out the set. Usually they tackle Limited first because Limited has—just more cards are affected, it more affects the commons and uncommons. It just, as I’ve talked about before, whenever you’re trying to fix something, you always want to put your attention on the thing that’s hardest to do first. Because any fix will limit what other cards can do, so you want to work on your hardest problem first. Limited in draft is pretty complex and requires a lot of the common cards, so usually the early part of development is spent sometimes figuring out that.

    Now, at the same time they want to figure out Constructed and are thinking about it, and they’re definitely pushing cards. And what will happen is, at some point during development they will start doing playtesting, and usually early playtesting is either Limited playtesting or it’s where you build decks within just the set you’re playing with. You’re just kind of testing those cards out.

    At some point they then bring it in to what we call the Future Future League. So real quickly, for those that have never heard of the Future Future League, development needs to test cards ahead of time to get a sense of what Standard is going to be like.

    So originally, development made what was called the “Future League,” which was six months ahead. The problem was, it was enough time to figure out there were problems, but not enough time to change anything to stop the problems. So it was kind of the absolute worst place.

    So they then decided to move it forward by six months, so it would be a year ahead, and so they changed it from the Future League to the Future Future League. So it is called the FFL for short, that name has just stuck, so we—no one really calls it the Future Future League, it’s just called the FFL. But that is what is referred to. And there are teams dedicated to different seasons of the FFL. So there’s people that are specifically working on making sure they understand that environment.

    Now, be aware that if we are able to completely understand the environment with the small pool of people we have, the millions of Magic players would crack it in a day. So what development is trying to do is create something that’s bigger than what they can solve, but they try to get a handle on places they think players will go.

    Now, the hard part is, they don’t want it to be a solvable format, so they’re taking their best stab at where they think things will be. It is very, very hard to predict the future in a way where it’s not prescriptive. I mean, obviously you can make it so it can only go one way, but that’s not how development wants to make sets because the players will just figure it out too easily. So development makes a dynamic system that can go multiple ways, they playtest to get a sense of where they think it’s going, but there is room for error built into the system.

    Okay. So meanwhile, a little bit into development, not that far into development, the creative team has to start getting the art ready for the cards. So in order to do that, they have to make what’s called a “card concept.” And what a card concept is, is they have to tell the artist what they’re drawing. What is this card? What is it?

    Let’s say for example it’s a card that does four damage to a creature or player. Okay, it’ a direct damage card, but what is it? Is it lightning? Is it fire? Is it earth? Are you throwing rocks at them and it’s some sonic attack? What is it? Are you throwing lava at them? What are you doing? There’s a lot of different ways.

    So someone on the creative team has to make what’s called a creative concept, which is, “What is the card? What does it represent?” And then, they write an art description for the artists. So what will happen is, a member of the creative team—now the creative team is broken up into two different sections.  There is the story team and there is the art team. The story team does the words, the art team does the pictures.

    Normally the story team is the one that will do card concepting, and the reason is, the story ones are the ones that make all the background in figuring out like, let’s say we’re building a new world. Oh, well who’s on this world? What kind of people, and what are the cities? And what are… and they figure out the world. So the reason they do the card concepts is, they’re the ones that do all the different things that represent the world. And then, once the card concepter is done, he then shows it to the art director.

    Now, we have a bunch of art directors right now, so different sets will have different art directors, but whoever the art director is for that project, they are shown the art descriptions. They might tweak them some. Usually when they tweak them it’s to try to make sure they get a stronger visual image. Because what happens sometimes is, the card concepter has a neat idea for what the card represents, but maybe isn’t presenting it in a way that ends up with the best picture.

    Now, the goal of card concepting is not to tie the hands of the illustrator. In fact, just the opposite. What the card concepter wants to do is say to the artist, “Here’s the thing, here’s what you need to know.” Now, there is a thing made called a world guide.

    Whenever we do a new block, the creative team has some freelance people come from outside, artists, and they spend three to four weeks figuring out what everything looks like. They then make what’s called a world guide, which is a sample of, what do the different inhabitants look like? And the clothing? And the weapons? And the locations? And the maybe artifacts if artifacts matter. So that when you go to artists, they send the artists this world guide, and they might say, “Oh, well he’s holding a spear. Look at page 72. One of those spears.”

    And so what the card concepter wants to do is wants to present for the artist everything the artist needs to know without giving them anymore than they have to, to give artists freedom to try to make the coolest image they can.

    So what happens is, in order for development to make sure that the card concepting can be done, we tend to do art in two waves. So I’m not sure the percentage, it may not quite be a half, but the developer, the lead developer on the set has to early on figure out the first half of their set that they can start having card concepted.

    So what they need to do is figure out what are the stuff that we are pretty sure is going to stay, and/or things we know we’re going to have a card representing even if the card changes some. For example, basic lands tend to get done in the first wave. Legendary creatures tend to get done in the first wave. Things in which we just know we’re going to have that thing. Usually story-related things that we know we’re going to do. Sometimes even there’s a little bit of work done where we’re not quite sure where the picture’s going to end up, but we know we’re going to have a card with that picture on it.

    For example let’s say in Khans of Tarkir we knew that the bones of Ugin were going to be important, and that we were going to make a card to represent that. Ehh, what exactly it did mechanically is still being worked out, but we knew that image was going to be there so we did that early.

    Okay. So the card concepting gets handed over to the art director. Art director sends it out. So the way art works is, we have freelance artists. And so in order to have something done, the art director will get freelance artists, assign them some number of paintings, and then send them the art descriptions. And the artists will draw them.

    So the way it works for the artist is, they have roughly seven weeks, something around there, and what happens is, at some point, not doing art, I don't know what the timetable is, but at some point they turn in a sketch. And the sketch is a check-in to make sure that everybody’s happy on the creative team, everybody’s happy with what’s going on.

    So normally what happens is, both the art director and the card concepter will take a look at the sketch to make sure that the sketch is A. looking like it will lead to a good picture, and B., representing the things it’s supposed to represent.

    And this is the point where we’ll get notes. So people ask all the time, does the artist see the card mechanic? The answer is no. Mostly because most artists don’t even play the game of Magic, but also because the mechanics itself could change. So there are some key things that matter, for example, one of the rules we have is if you are a flying creature, you must look like you fly in the art. And so we will always say to the artist whether or not a thing’s supposed to be flying.

    And there also will be some instruction based on—there’s some general instruction for doing Magic, when you first learn to be a Magic artist, and then there’s the world instructions depending on that world.

    But anyway, the sketch will come in, if they like the sketch, then they’ll go ahead and they’ll make the painting. If there’s a problem, they give them notes, then the artist might correct the notes and send another sketch in to show the correction. And then once that gets signed off on, then the artist (???) finish their painting.

    So a lot of people ask these days, once upon a time, almost all art was done on canvas or on some physical medium where you would literally mail in the picture. And we used to have a wall where all the pictures would be up, or actually they’d rotate through.

    So once the art comes in, by the way, the art has to get scanned in. So we have a whole team that has to get art and that once you scan it in, there is just an art processing you have to do to it. Oftentimes you have to figure out the crop because the dimensions that is drawn by the artist is not always 100% the dimensions of the card. So sometimes there’s cropping that goes on. Every once in a while there’s some color correcting that happens. But anyway, there is a whole imaging team that has to take the art in.

    So art used to be done in physical form. It has changed a lot over time. A lot of art now is done digitally, which means—digital art, by the way, for people who think that someone somehow sits at a computer, the way that a lot of digital art works is, you have the same tools that you have to paint a picture, except it’s being tracked digitally rather than being tracked using actual paint. They’re using brushes and things on a… usually it’s a big board that can represent the stuff. So you can paint, and it can feel the brushstrokes and things. So digital stuff is a lot closer than you think to original, as far as how it’s done.

    Anyway, a lot of—not all of it, there’s a few that still gets sent in. But a lot more these days are digital. That means our wall doesn’t have as many things sitting up on it. Sometimes if they really want to see something they’ll print it out so that we can see some stuff. Like, there’s a set coming up, I can’t tell you which set or what’s going on, but a very important part of an upcoming set, and so they put all the pictures of the key elements up so we could see them, and it was really breathtaking. Like, you guys, I can’t even talk about what it’s for, but I’ll talk about it in the future, you’ll be really excited about something that’s visually stunning.

    So anyway. So meanwhile, the development is still plugging along. Figuring out what they need to do. So lots of change happens during development. Whole cards come out, sometimes mechanics come out. Things will change. So development is plugging away at that. They start doing their FFL testing.

    So at some point, once the cards get closer to their finalized form, then it’s time for names and flavor text to start getting involved. And names and flavor text aren’t just in charge of doing names and flavor text. They’re in charge of all naming in general. Which also means they have to name the keywords as well. The keywords are named by the same people that do naming and flavor text.

    So what happens is, they have a team of freelance writers that do names and flavor text. They’ll send out cards. Those writers actually see the cards, because when you’re trying to name cards and do flavor text, it’s important to understand the mechanics. So they will break people into groups, not every group sees every card.

    And then multiple people see every card, though different people see a different mix. So any one writer is seeing a unique mix of cards, although every card is seen by more than one writer. And then people turn in a whole bunch of suggestions. So “Here’s a card,” and you go, “Oh, here’s five possible names for that card. Here’s three possible flavor texts for that card.”

    And then the person in charge of names and flavor text—just as the card concepter will rotate, so will the name and flavor text person rotate. And that person will look through and figure out what’s working, and name conventions, and you have to make sure that like cycles get connected, and there’s lots of work that has to get done. That gets done pretty late in the process.

    By the way, as development starts doing its thing, and art starts coming in, development gets its hands tied more, because it has to do with—for example, once an art is commissioned, that’s the art. So if they want to change a card now, they’re married to a certain art that they have to not contradict. That might dictate the size. It’ll dictate things about it.

    Now, sometimes we can swap art around. Sometimes, like, oh, well, how about we put art on this card, that will make sense, and then we haven’t commissioned this yet, and you can do that. So there’s a bunch of different things they’ll do. But development gets their hands tied more and more as the set goes along, because more exterior things are happening.

    Okay. Meanwhile, while development is going on, or usually during design, we have a check-in with the rules manager to make sure that we are doing things that will work. Then during development, templating starts to happen.

    So what templating is, is there’s a lead editor for every set. There’s a whole editing team in R&D. Each set has a lead editor. The lead editor, the rules manager, which sometimes is the lead editor. And the lead development get together. And try to figure out how the cards have to read.

    Now, some cards use existing templates, because they’re doing things we already do, those cards are very easy to template. But every set, we always have new mechanics. And we just do new things we’ve never done before. And so the templating team has to spend a lot of time and energy making sure that the cards read correctly and that players will understand them.

    It also involves writing reminder text. Reminder text is not as technically tight, so sometimes we can use the reminder text to help people get the gist of what’s going on without having to get sort of super, super specific technically.

    So development is going along, at some point art comes in, at some point names and flavor text get done. At some point templating gets done. And then development hands off the file. Actually, development hands off the file before art is done, before names and flavor text is done, and before templating’s usually done.

    So they hand in the file. Now, development has some amount of time after the file’s handed in to do playtesting, where they’re allowed to change minor things. Minor things could be numbers, which for development is very important. Numbers are the easiest thing to change because it doesn’t change any of the creative—you have to make sure it doesn’t change any creative elements, but assuming you’re not changing creative elements.

    Especially mana costs is the easiest thing to change. So if the card costs four and a red or five and a red, there’s no real difference to the rest of the card. It doesn’t take any more space up. If you’re trying to change it to more colored mana, that could matter, depending on the title, remember that the title and the mana costs have to stay on the same line. If the title’s really long, the mana cost has to be shorter. If the mana cost is really long, the mana cost may have to be shorter. Also, the title cares about the rules text because sometimes the rules text is really busy, it needs a shorter name to fit in the rules text box.

    So anyway, development gets their hands off and it goes to editing. Now, it’s editing’s job to make sure the art comes in and the names and flavor text get done. They might give notes on various things. They might give notes back on templating, they might give notes back to development. But at some point, all the cards have to finally get settled.

    So once that is done, once all the components are in, then editing sends the cards off to get laid out by CAPS. Matt and I talked about CAPS not too long ago. Creative and Professional Services, I think? They are the ones that physically lay out the cards.

    Now, be aware, all the way back in design or early development, if we believe there’s going to be a new card frame, that’s something that CAPS has to know about and that the creative team has to know about. Oftentimes we’ll do something that requires a new frame. Or if it requires a watermark or some kind of symbol. All that has to be figured out early, so that once we get to this point those things are done.

    So editing gets all the component pieces, gets it off to CAPS, CAPS has to physically lay out the card. And then editing checks the card to make sure all the components are put together correctly. Including the frame, which is why CAPS is laying it out. Because a card might have the wrong watermark or have the wrong frame. Something about it might be wrong, so editing is the final thing that has to make sure that everything is correct.

    And the editing team, just so you’re aware, the editing team is constantly monitoring the file as it goes along. They start editing it usually at some point during development. And even in design sometimes they’ll take light notes on getting general wordings just so we’re playing with something that’s representative of—you want to know how wordy the mechanics are, so sometimes they’ll do passes on it early, so we get a sense of what it will realistically look like.

    Okay. So CAPS lays it out, editing does the checks. So once CAPS is done with the layout, and editing signs off on it, now it has to physically get made into a card. So once they’re signed off—now, be aware that I talk about before, CAPS is doing imaging to get the pictures. They have to lay out the card.

    They have to—if there’s color adjustment, sometimes there’s print tests. If we’re trying to do something we haven’t done before. Or let’s say we’re doing a supplemental product that has a new type of foiling or something. They have to do tests and make sure that’s all right.

    So once it all comes together, and everything is signed off on the R&D thing, now CAPS has to put it all together. Now, there’s something called collation, which R&D helps with, is figuring out what cards go where on the sheet. And so there often is—once CAPS will put together cards, after they put individual cards, that’s one by one, editing looks at them like one at a time on a sheet. Then they have to make actual sheets. And the sheets are, okay, there’s 121, or 110, or whatever, different printing presses print in different numbers. You have to get them on the sheet and then you have to make sure that they’re organized correctly.

    So collation, what collation does, and this is often done by a member of R&D, is all the cards are evaluated for how good they are, and in collation you want to make sure there’s a good mix so that every booster pack, roughly in the ballpark, there’s a range, but we don’t want cards that are completely oh my God amazing bonkers, and cards that are completely worthless. We don’t want them too far apart.

    Now obviously, there are packs that are better than other packs. The uncommons and the rares and the mythic rares are disconnected, meaning we don’t control which—commons are on a sheet, so certain commons have possibilities of being with other commons at some rate. There’s different sheets and we cut from different places to mix it up to make it very hard to tell. And so there’s a lot of variety of how commons come together. Commons will clump near other commons more often than other rarities because how uncommons are dropped, the common sheets are not connected. So certain uncommons don’t come with certain commons.

    Anyway, collation has to be done, and then CAPS has to physically make the sheet. So once the sheet is made, then it used to be there were actual files made. Because it was done with cameras. Now it’s all done digitally. So now they have to get the correct digital files and get them off to the printers.

    Once upon a time, all our cards were printed at Cartamundi in Belgium. But since way back then, we are now—I don't know how many we’re at, four, five, six, we made a lot of cards so we have a lot of printers all around the world. And different printers have different requirements, so one of the job of CAPS is making sure that all—we need to print all Magic cards to a singular standard. That if you open up a Magic card, it doesn’t matter where it got printed, it should seem the same.  And we have dealt with a number of different places that like weren’t able to actually meet our standards and so we weren’t able to use them. We have very high standards when it comes to our printing.

    And so anyway, so what happens is, CAPS will get the file to the printer. The printer will print them. Then we get logistics. Then somebody has to make sure that the finished printed cards get to—the printer will print the card and then get them into booster wrap.

    Sometimes, if things are complex, every once in a while a card has to be made at one printer and then shipped to another printer, and then packaged at that other printer. If we’re doing something special. That’s not normal expansions, but supplemental products sometimes have special things we’re doing. But anyway, that has to get made in a booster pack, or into products, whatever we’re making. And then logistics has to come in and logistics has to get them to where they need to go.

    Meanwhile, we have a sales team, and the sales team is making sure that people want to buy the card. We sell to distributors. And the distributors sell to different stores. So there’s a whole sales team that’s working with them to make sure that everybody gets the allocation that they need, and there’s all sorts of stuff that goes on with sales.

    Meanwhile, logistics is makings sure that the cards get done, that they get delivered where they need to be at the right time, there’s warehouses and we have to make sure that we have the product, and at the right time it’s shipped so that all the distributors get stuff so they get it into the stores.

    Meanwhile, I didn’t even get into Brand. So Brand is in charge of overviewing everything. They’re the ones that have to figure out print sizes, which happens much much earlier in the process, so they’re figuring out how many we’re going to make of something, they’re figuring out when we reprint things.

    They’re also in charge of marketing. Which is, if the set’s going to come out, well, we want people to buy that set, so we have to make sure people know about it. And there’s a lot of different marketing we do. We do marketing through the website. We do marketing through—we do a lot of web marketing. The Pro Tour is considered marketing. It’s paid through our marketing budget.

    And I’m not even going to get into OP. There’s all sorts of things. When we have a new product, Organized Play has to take a look at it, because they have to make things that tie into it. Magic Online and Duels of the Planeswalkers has to look at it because the product we’re doing is affecting stuff they’re doing. R&D has an entire digital team to integrate. So I didn’t even talk about that, that like early on in the process, digital’s going to take a look at it because they have to incorporate it for the digital thing.

    As you can see, when we’re making a card, it’s not just design and development, it’s the creative team, it’s the editing team, it is the CAPS team, it’s logistics, it’s marketing, it’s sales. And there’s lots of other teams that support the stuff we’re doing. I’m not even getting into the HR team, the human resources team, or the legal team, or even the people who clean the office so every day we come in and it’s nice. There’s a lot of different people all working together to make that happen.

    A Magic card, or a Magic set, goes through many, many, many hands and lots and lots of people touch it. I know I talk a lot about design and development just because that’s where I work, but I’m hoping what today can make you realize is, there are so many different people that go into making a Magic card. That it is not like, oh, I design something, and development looks at it and we’re done. Design and development are just part of a much, much larger process.

    And I didn’t—like, editing for example has to worry about collector number and the legal text line, and there’s all sorts of stuff that goes on. I didn’t even get into the nooks and crannies. But hopefully I gave you a slight overview of just the number of things that have to happen in order for a card to go from something you go, “Ooh, I have an idea” to you open it up and it’s printed in your pack.


    But, I have now just parked my car. So we all know what that means, it means this is the end of my drive to work. And it’s time for me to be making Magic. Talk to you guys next time.
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  4. 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. Today is a podcast all about mistakes! So I’ve talked about wanting to do the podcast, and I felt it was finally time to do it. So I’m going to explain today why mistakes aren’t as bad you think they are. I’m going to talk a little bit about mistakes as part of the creative process.

    Okay. So first and foremost, let’s begin with the most important lesson here, which is, the fear of making a mistake is far greater than mistakes. That I think a lot of people are so worried about making a mistake that what they do is far more dangerous than the mistakes themselves.

    And what that is is, when you are being creative, if you limit yourself because you want to make sure that you never make a mistake, you end up being so cautious that you never push any boundaries. That you never try to stretch yourself, because part of making sure that you are within your boundaries of never making a mistake is staying away from the edges.

    And the edges, my friend, are where a lot of the awesome things happen. So part of what I wanted today, is I want to walk you through what mistakes are, what they can do for you, and why you as a creative person need not be quite as afraid of them as maybe you are.

    Okay. So here’s the first thing. Mistakes are the best teachers. Success does not teach well. What success does is success says, “Do it again.” Success breeds repetition. That when something succeeds, you go, “Oh, that worked. I better do that again.” And in fact, one of the most common mistakes that is made is people will do something, it’s successful, and because they don’t know what made it successful, they just do everything again.

    And what they don’t realize is, the success was not all the individual choices, but the combination of the choices. And that—sometimes they’ll call this a Seymour… a sophomore—Seymour. A sophomore slump. See, I make mistakes during my mistakes podcast. A sophomore slump. Which is, you do something, and you kind of keep doing that thing, and you  get trapped inside what you think the thing is.

    So what happens is, people will do something creative, people like it, and then they continue doing the same thing because they want to not deviate too much from what they think people liked. But usually what they like in the first place was that it was doing something different.

    For example. Richard made Magic. We could have just said, “Okay, well that’s what it is. Let’s not deviate too much from what Richard’s vision was.” And we said, “No no no! Richard’s vision was, it’s a game that keeps reinventing itself.” So we did things along the way that the game did not do originally. We’ve done things where people are like, you can’t do that! You can’t print on the back of a Magic card. You can’t make it so you can cast a spell if you don’t have any mana open! You can’t have two cards printed on one card! Like, we’ll do things where people are like, “You just can’t do that! That breaks a fundamental rule of how the game works.”

    And the answer is that Magic is a game all about taking risks. And that if we had stopped taking risks—I guess one of my favorite quotes is, “The greatest risk to Magic is not taking risks.” And you can actually—instead of Magic, you could put in “creative works.” The greatest risk to any creative work is not taking risks.

    And the reason for that is, risks are where the discoveries are found. And like I said, mistakes are the best teacher. Because when you do something correct, you just go, “Okay, how do I do this thing again?” But when you do something wrong, when you taste failure, that is a good teacher. That when something doesn’t work, when something fails, when people don’t like what you’ve done, it makes you have to look at yourself and figure out, “What did I do? What did I do wrong?”

    And one of the things is, after every creative endeavor, whenever it comes out, something that we do at R&D is, you should always creatively look at whatever you’ve done and explain what are your successes and what are your failures. On everything.

    The problem is, when you’re successful, you just have less impetus to do so. You’re like, “Well, people like it. Good.” And the reality is, what you need to do every time is you need to figure out what was good and what was bad about everything you do.

    And I’ll give you a secret here, everything you do has good things and bad things. Take the best Magic set we’ve ever done, it had bad things. Take the worst Magic set we’ve ever done, it had good things. There’s no such thing as something that’s totally all bad or all good.

    The difference is, when you make a mistake, you kind of are forced to look at it. You can’t sort of turn away from it. Because a mistake sort of says, “Uh-oh, something went wrong.” And then you look inward to figure out what happened.

    And a lot of mistakes, a lot of mistakes lead to—like, for example, just using Magic’s history, a lot of I think the biggest jumps we’ve made in Magic evolution have come as a result of doing something wrong.

    For example, as a personal—as a designer myself, Odyssey was one of the early sets I led. And I tried something really different with it, which is I decided to take the idea of card advantage and turn it on its ear. That usually in Magic, you want to be up on cards. The idea of throwing away card advantage, you would never do that. That’s not how it worked.

    And I said, you know what? I want to shake things up. What if we had a block where card advantage was turned on its ear? That you would throw away card advantage for a reason, and that you would do this thing that you would never normally do.

    And what I learned from that was, I learned that you have to make people do things because they’re interested in doing them. That if you try to sort of against their will force them to do something they don’t want to do, it just leads to a lot of frustration. And a lot of my growth as a designer came from doing something, committing to it, and then realizing, oh, I had done something that was a mistake.

    But had I not made that mistake, had I not sort of went against the grain, I would not have learned the lesson, and I think it was a very important lesson of design, is understanding how you’re not trying to fight your players. The goal is not to force them to do something they inherently don’t want to do. That’s where I learned my big lesson about “Don’ fight human nature.” That’s really where I learned that lesson from.

    Or another example is, during Time Spiral we got really into just going to town, and we burrowed deep. But we burrowed so deep that we confused people, and we made a schism in Magic we’d never seen before. Where normally we could track people playing in tournaments and how well the sales were doing. They went one for one. And all of a sudden, we made a set where tournaments were doing really well, but sales were not, and we’re like, “Oh, what is going on?”

    And we realized that there was a whole segment of the audience that we were just unaware of. Because we had just been following the thing. And because they had been tracking together, we’re like, “Oh, I guess that’s how it works.” And all of a sudden we’re like, “Wait a minute, this data is showing us something we do not understand.” And it forced us to understand it.

    And Time Spiral plus the mistakes we made in Lorwyn led us to New World Order. Led us to go, “Oh, we have to make sure we make an entry point for new players.” That we can’t make the—if we make the game too difficult, if the barrier to entry is too high, well then people stop learning how to play, and then Magic long-term is in trouble. And so it’s the existence of the mistakes that are the great discoveries.

    So lesson number one is, don’t be afraid of mistakes. That doesn’t mean your goal is to make mistakes, but don’t be afraid of them. Be able to take risks knowing that mistakes might happen. Because it’s in the risks that a lot of amazing things will happen. And if you’re not willing to take the risks, you will miss—like, the opportunity lost of not taking risks is way more dangerous than any mistake could be.

    That playing it safe is not the way to awesome creative endeavors. That what makes creative things work is that you push boundaries. And Magic in particular, we’re a game all about breaking our own rules, that if we were never willing to break a rule, we’re never willing to do something we haven’t done before.

    And one of the things I do all the time in design is, I make things that I don’t know if they’ll work. For example, in Innistrad, we were trying to figure out how to do werewolves. And Tom had suggested something that Duel Masters had done with double-faced cards. And if you had asked me at the end of the day whether I thought it would work, I probably wouldn’t have thought it would work. I was dubious.

    But you know what I said? “Let’s try it. Let’s push the boundary and try it.” I wasn’t willing—I didn’t want to write it off right away, go, “Ohh, we can’t do that.” I’m like, “Well, let’s see if it’s fun.” If it’s fun—that’s one of my biggest things in design is I’ll say, during exploratory design and normal                 design, I say to my team, let’s see if something is fun. Let’s not worry about if we can do it yet. Let’s not worry about if we can do it until after we know it’s fun. Because if we know it’s fun, we’ll try to figure out how to make it happen. And if it’s not fun, then we don’t have to worry about it.

    But the first thing I try to do is find cool and fun things. I don’t worry about the logistics right off the bat. I mean, eventually I do. I have to worry about it eventually. Once I like something I have to see if we can make it work. And sometimes you can’t make it work. But before I even get there, I’m like, “Let’s try to see if we can find the fun in it.” Because the fun is what you’re trying—I mean in games, it’s what you’re trying to get. You’re trying to make awesome moments and cool things.

    Okay. Now. The other important thing about mistakes is mistakes will take you to places that you might not normally have gotten to. And like I said in my examples here, that I don't know, without Odyssey, that I would get to my sort of—like I said, don’t fight human nature has become my mantra as a designer. Of understand what your players want to do, and make your game to play into what they want to do, not fight what they want to do. And I would not have got there had it not been for the mistake.

    And sometimes, by the way, sometimes you make a mistake, and the mistake you make won’t work, but it teaches you something and gives you a peek into some other area. You know, mistakes are often stepping stones for great ideas. And so another reason not to fear mistakes is sometimes mistakes take you to places that you wouldn’t have gotten to had you not had a mistake in the first place.

    That one of the things that’s really important about willing to push boundaries in design or in any sort of creative area is that you want to discover the areas that you haven’t been to yet. You want to find new patches, new veins of design. And part of that is you’ve got to look at places you haven’t looked before. And that the safe and narrow path is to do what you’ve always done.

    That is the safe and narrow path. Because only by doing things you’ve already done do you assure yourself that you won’t have a mistake. But, if you’re willing to brave the mistakes, you tend to go out in new areas. And the other thing is, mistakes are not always mistakes. Mistakes can lead you new places.

    For example. The chocolate chip cookie. The Post-It Note. penicillin. The discovery of America. None of those were planned! None of those were on purpose. The chocolate chip cookie, they were trying to make a chocolate cookie. And the pieces didn’t melt. Post-It Notes, they were making some kind of glue and it ended up being too weak to work. Penicillin, I’m not sure what he was doing. He was trying to do something different. And accidentally made penicillin. America, they were trying to find India. They were trying to find a route to the Far East. They weren’t trying to find new land.

    In each case, though, these are amazing things that happened, because sometimes when you’re exploring, when you make a mistake, you get to stand back and go, “Wait a minute, wait a minute, that is not bad. This isn’t that bad a mistake.”

    So another reason not to fear mistakes is sometimes mistakes aren’t always mistakes. Sometimes mistakes turn out to be—can lead you to paths that you just don’t go. That mistakes sometimes—because one of the things in general about the creative process, I talk about this all the time. Your brain wants to follow your normal neural pathway. So your brain will keep doing what it’s done before. And I talk about the way to not do that, to not have your brain go down the same path, is to shake it up a little bit. To make it do something it’s not used to doing.

    Well you know what? If you’re doing things you’ve never done before, you are more prone to mistakes.  And so the reason, when I say to you, “Hey, do different neural pathways” or “try different things,” why don’t people do that all the time? Because that is the way to mistakes.

    Doing something new, and let’s be clear. Mistakes come out of, most of the time, doing something you haven’t done before. Now, you can make mistakes with things you’ve done before. They’re not mistake-free. But you’re more prone to make mistakes when you’re dealing with areas you’re not familiar with.

    But the funny thing is, dealing with areas you’re not familiar with is a very important part of the creative process. And that you need to go there. You need to direct there. And you need to be willing to accept that mistakes will happen.

    Now, here’s an important thing to understand about mistakes. Is your audience is much more forgiving of mistakes than you, the artist, tend to be. That I think going in, that your thought process is, “No mistake will be tolerated. If I make any mistake, it will be horrible.”

    And the answer is, the first time you make a mistake, your audience will learn with you. When I make a mistake in Magic, when I do something, it’s not as if the audience gets mad at me. They go, “Ooh, what’s this new thing? Oh, that didn’t quite work out the way we thought!” But they like the fact that you’re exploring. The audience in general is willing to put up with mistakes because they enjoy the act of discovery from the artist.

    Now, what they tend to get upset with is not mistakes but repeats of mistakes. When I say they don’t get mad at mistakes, I’m not saying nobody gets mad. In general your audience is much more forgiving of mistakes than you think.

    What they are less forgiving of is you making the same mistake. If you do something wrong and then do it wrong again, like, come on! You just did that. Didn’t you learn from that? They want you to learn from your mistakes.

    So one of my big examples is, in college, I started an improvisational comedy group called “Uncontrolled Substance.” So for those that don’t know, what improve is, is you get up on stage, and you say to the audience, “Okay, give me whatever. Give me a relationship. Give me a place.” You get input from the audience. And then you make a scene there on the spot.

    One of the things that’s scary about doing improvisation is, you have no script. You’re just making everything up. And when I first started it, I’m like, “Oh, this is going to be really hard to do. Because once you make a mistake, the audience will be on you.” And what I found was, the audience actually enjoys mistakes.

    Because they made you feel more human to the audience. They knew what you were doing was really hard to do, and that when (???) mistake (???), instead of it being something that was negative to them, it kind of—they liked it. Once they don’ want you keeping the same mistake, but making a few mistakes, the audience was not only tolerant of the mistakes, but there was an expectation that mistakes would happen.

    And that I think that—the same I find true in Magic, which is when I go to a new area and do a new thing, the audience doesn’t get mad at me for trying something new. Even if that something new ends up being a mistake. In general, they’ll go, “Ooh, I’m excited that you tried new things.” And that at the end of it people say, like, “Okay, well, we learned something from that.” And they’re not nearly as mad as I would assume.

    Because I think going into it, you think like the audience is like—no mistakes are allowed. If I make any mistakes, they will be tragedy. And the answer is that your audience is a lot more forgiving than I think you think they will be.

    And another reason to be less risk-averse is, it’s okay to make a mistake. That making a mistake is not the end of the world. I mean, obviously you learn from it, but also, it makes you human. I mean, you don’t want to make tons of mistakes all the time, and I’m not saying that you shouldn’t be careful about what you do. But there is difference in the type of mistake.

    So the type of mistake that I think is much more accepted is, you pushing boundaries to try something new. Because people appreciate you doing that. The mistake that’s not tolerated is, you make the same mistake you’ve made before. Which is you didn’t learn. That upsets people. “Come on, haven’t you learned? Didn’t you learn your lesson?”

    That’s a very common thing. If we make a mistake and it’s something that we’ve done before, that’s when the audience is like, “Come on! Didn’t you learn your lesson?” But when we make a mistake the first time, the audience is like, “Oh, okay, didn’t see that coming.” And I think the mindset when you deal with mistakes is understanding that they’re valuable, they can teach you things, and the audience isn’t as (???) as you think.

    Okay. The next important thing to understand about mistakes is mistakes are a tool. Mistakes are a tool that you can use. And the key to using correctly is to understand how best to use mistakes.

    Okay. So to explain this, I will use a story. So there was a man named Warren Wyman who used to run security for Wizards back in the day. And Warren is an awesome guy. I mean, he left Wizards long ago, but I saw him at Richard Garfield’s fiftieth birthday party. And Warren was doing real well.

    So Warren was in the army. And he tells a story about they were firing some artillery of some kind. Where there was like a tank setup. A fake tank. But they were practicing. And the idea was, they had to shoot it, and they had to hit this tank.

    The problem was, it’s hard to hit something. That when you have this big giant artillery gun thing, it’s not easy to hit something. And so what the instructor taught them is, if the first time you shoot, you shoot short, the next time you better shoot long.

    And let me explain what that means because it’s a very important point. What he meant was, you’re going to fire, and you’re going to miss. You’re not going to hit the target the first time. That’s rare that you do. But you want to use your mistake as a tool to help you get better faster.

    So what he’s saying was, the best information you can get if you are firing at this tank—if you shoot short again, you don’t learn nearly as much as if you shoot long. If you miss the tank, now you have two points at which you know, “This is short and this is long, and I know the tank’s in between it.” If I shoot short and then shoot short again, I haven’t learned as much. I just know that I still have more to go.

    And so I say this to my design team, which is, when you’re committing to something, figure out where you’re at. And most times what happens is, usually when people try to do something, they underdo it. That’s the most common mistake is they’re trying something new and they don’t do it enough.

    And so one of the things I always push my teams on is, err—there’s nothing wrong with erring in excess when you’re trying to figure things out. That doing something too much, in a lot of ways is a better teacher sometimes than not doing enough. Not doing enough says, “Oh, I have to do more.” But doing too much usually says, “What increment do I need to do to get there?” And by overshooting, you also tend to learn more because you experience it.

    Like one of the problems with undershooting—let’s say I’m doing a mechanic and I undershoot it. I might not even experience that new thing. If I overshoot it, okay, it dominates the game, it’s too much, it has too much impact on the game. But at least I get a chance to see it. And so one of the things—mistakes are a valuable tool that you can use. And you want to think about them as a tool.

    Like one of my big lessons of today is stop thinking about mistakes—I think too many people think of mistakes as a negative outcome. Which is, of the bad things that could happen, what is the worst? Oh, I could make a mistake. As if, like, it’s a bad outcome. That’s what a mistake is.

    And what I’m saying is, mistakes are a natural part of the creative process. I mean, there’s a… I’m paraphrasing a little bit here, but there’s a famous quote that says, “Never made a mistake? Well then you’ve never taken a risk.” That the act of trying something, of creating something, is the act of taking risks.

    And the act of taking risks is the act of making mistakes. Nothing amazing that’s ever happened came without mistakes along the way. And like I said earlier, sometimes the mistake ends up being the discovery. But even when it’s not, the mistakes can be tools on the road to discovery.

    When I look at different things I’ve done, and I look at designs I’ve done, and I’ve said—a lot of what happens is, it’s the act of trying the things that teaches me things and gets me where I need to be. And that some of the—for example. When I talk about a playtest, what’s a good playtest?  The best playtest for me is where I get lots of data.

    That data doesn’t have to be positive. In fact, a lot of negative data is a very good playtest. I learn a lot from negative data. That’s not to say I don’t learn from positive data, but the reality is, if I had a playtest and it could either go, “ehh,” or go “ugh,” I’ll talk “ugh.” Because I’ll learn so much more from that.

    Having a playtest where things just didn’t work will teach me a lot. Having things where everything ehh, kind of worked, it wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t amazing, it’s like, oh, that’s the worst. It’s just like, “Well, something’s there.” It’s not bad enough that I feel I need to just throw it away but it’s not good enough that it’s quite there yet, it just, it’s middling.

    Like in some ways, one of the worst things for a creative endeavor is to have something be good. But not great. Because if something is good, you’re like, “Oh, I don’t want to throw this away.” But the goal is not to just be good. The goal of any artistic endeavor is to be great. It’s not just to be good.

    One of my quotes is, if everybody likes your game but nobody loves it, you will fail. And once again, you can apply that to creative endeavors. That one of the goals is you are trying to make people love what you are doing.

    Now, not everybody has to love every aspect. Part of designing Magic is, I have a lot of different style players, and I want to make sure every set, there’s something for everybody to love. For every style of player to love.

    But they don’t all need to love the same thing. A lot of the point of the psychographics and a lot of the stuff we do is saying, I want to make sure I understand who’s playing, and that we give each person something they can love.

    And part of playing it safe is, the way you find things people love is by pushing boundaries. That people tend to love the outlier more than they love the average. So what I mean by that is, if you’re used to seeing something all the time, it’s not particularly special. If you come play a game of Magic, there’s certain things you expect. And we have to deliver on those expectations because you expect it, but the things that you always have usually is not going to be the thing that stands out.

    Like one of the things I talk a lot about in design is, for example, the importance of novelty. In that your audience is drawn to novelty. Now, you want to be careful not to get too novel, you don’t want novelty for the sake of novelty, but you definitely want to have something your audience goes, “Wow. What is that? I’ve never seen that before.”

    You want to make sure that your audience has something that’s out of the ordinary they get to look at. Now, that can be novel, that can be just pushing in some area you haven’t pushed before, that can be trying something you haven’t done before. But part of sort of drawing attention is in the doing what you haven’t done. And being conservative, being safe, doing what you’ve done before, leads to familiar. And being risky and trying things you haven’t leads to more standing out.

    Now, by the way, I’m not trying to say, by the way, my message of today isn’t, “Ehh, mistakes, whatever.” I want you to understand that mistakes are a tool that need to be used carefully. And ideally, what we try to do is, we try to get as many mistakes in possible in the design. I want to make as many of my mistakes during design, so that I can then figure out what the right way to do it is and fix them.

    It’s never my intent to put out mistakes in the product. I don’t want to. My point of today is not, “embrace mistakes as an awesome thing,” my point today is “don’t be afraid of mistakes.” That mistakes are valuable teaching tools and can help you as a means to become a better designer, creator. Mistakes—my lesson of today is, understand what mistakes can do for you, don’t be afraid of them, and use them effectively. Not “put mistakes.” The goal is not to put mistakes in what you do. I’m not saying that you want mistakes. I’m saying that the act of trying to avoid them causes a lot more problems.

    Okay. So let’s talk a little about my mistakes in Magic. I want to talk a little bit—like sort of, things I have done and lessons I have learned, and kind of demonstrate where I was able to learn some things. So, one of the classic ones. Champions of Kamigawa.

    So I was not on the design team for Champions. I was on the development team. And during development, I said to the team—I felt that design was a little unfocused. Obviously it was a top-down Japanese theme. That came through in design. But the set didn’t know what it wanted to do.

    And so I kept asking the development team, “What’s the set about? What’s the set about?” And so finally they said, “Uhh, its about legendary things. That’s one of our major themes.” And so I said, “Okay, well if there’s a legendary theme, then we have to really hit that hard.” So we made every rare creature in that set legendary.

    And from this I learned a couple important lessons. Number one, I learned—one of my quotes, and this comes from this experience is, “If your theme’s not at common, it’s not your theme.” I learned the lesson of, you can’t do something such that it’s such a low as-fan if you will, that your audience can’t see it.

    And what that meant is, hey, we had a theme, that someone could open up ten packs and still have no idea what the theme was. Well, that’s not your theme. So I learned the lesson that something has to exist where the audience can see it. That having a theme is not the same thing as the audience being able to identify the theme. If your theme can’t be identified, it isn’t your theme. And that that was an important lesson.

    The other thing I learned was the legendary creatures were supposed to be a special thing. And that when you take a special thing and do too much of it, you make it less special. And the fact that every single rare creature was legendary meant that we had to make a lot of bad legendary creatures. Because in every set, there’s only so many good things. Some of the cards, they can’t all be good. Especially for Constructed.

    And so what we did is we took something that people had a lot of positive feelings for, and made a lot of bad examples of it. And that another lesson there was, be careful how you use things that are valuable to you. That how much of something—I mean, a lot of the lessons of Champions was understanding how much of something matters.

    And like, you want your theme to be at enough volume that people get it, and you want your special stuff to be—you want your things that are supposed to be special done at a volume that you can make them special. And that if you do too much of a special thing, some of it by nature can’t be special. And so you have to be careful how much of a special thing you do. Because do too much of it, and you start to take away its specialness.

    Okay. In Odyssey, I talked before about card disadvantage. I talked about how I’m trying to take a theme, and I was trying to do something that had never been done before. And what I learned there was, the lesson of—probably the intellect vs. emotion thing I thing I talk a lot about, which is that you can think about how your audience will think about your product, but you have to understand how they’ll feel about your project.

    And what I did is, I took something that was intellectually interesting. I made an interesting set, but I didn’t necessarily make a fun set. That interesting is not the same thing as fun. And that being mental and making you think about things is good, but you also emotionally—people have to want to do the thing you’re making them do. “Hey, the correct play is to throw your whole hand away to give your creature first strike, and it doesn’t even want first strike!”

    Well, not enough people wanted to do that. Yeah, there were some Spikes, and it was a super-Spikey set, and there’s people who did love it. Like, every time I talk about making a mistake, Time Spiral for example was a mistake. A lot of people love Time Spiral. Odyssey was a mistake. A lot of people loved Odyssey. Just because it was a mistake doesn’t mean everybody disliked it.

    But if enough disliked it, it means you made a mistake because—just because somebody likes something doesn’t mean it’s not a mistake. If not enough people like something, you are failing some part of your audience. You have to understand what that is.

    Shadowmoor, for example, I was trying to do this thing where we shifted between Lorwyn and Shadowmoor. And that Lorwyn was the bright side of the world and Shadowmoor was the dark side of the world. And so in order to make the sets play together, we had this crossover in tribal.

    But I was trying so hard to show the shift that I shifted all the tribes. And so the tribes overlapped in one color, but they went to a different color. And what I learned there was, that I didn’t make enough branching between the two sides. That it wanted you to make X in Lorwyn, and then it wanted you to play with Shadowmoor cards, but I’d moved the theme too much. I’d moved the theme such that it was hard for you to play what you wanted to play with the new set. The goal of Shadowmoor/Lorwyn (???) them to play together, and so the mistake I made there was, I just shifted something too much.

    The funny thing about Lorwyn and Shadowmoor is, by the way, the reason that it was two mini-blocks was we were trying to solve the summer set problem. And ironically, in trying to solve that problem, we ended up—I mean, the two-block structure, the two-block paradigm we’re moving toward, the test case—I mean, we didn’t know it was a test case at the time, was Lorwyn and Shadowmoor. It demonstrated that we could do that.

    And that here’s this thing that we took this risk and tried to do something, and like our goal was not to change how Magic sets got made. We were not trying to make the chocolate chip cookie or find penicillin or discover America. But we did. And that that’s the kind of risk-taking—like, when I presented it, it was different. Magic had never done large/small and then large/small within the context of a year. We had never done blocks like that.

    But we tried it. And by trying it, we ended up finding something that was much richer than we could have found had we not tried it. And that’s another good example of, pushing boundaries ends up being something that can be very good.

    Kill Destroy
    Another big mistake I made, in Unhinged I did what’s called the “gotcha” mechanic. So the gotcha mechanic was, if this card was in your graveyard, and you could get your opponent to do whatever the gotcha was, often it was saying a particular word, there was a cycle at common where there were two words on it, and if you said—and they were in the title. And if you said one of the two words, so like, black had a kill spell called “Kill Destroy.” So if your opponent said the word “kill” or the word “destroy,” then you said “gotcha” and you got it back to your hand.

    There was a whole bunch. There was one that if you laughed you could get it back. The one you flicked cards. And so the problem with the gotcha mistake is, the gotcha mistake was saying, “Okay, well if your opponent does something then you can gotcha them. And you can get it back.” But the thing I didn’t figure out was, how were people going to play this mechanic?

    Because when we were playing it, we were trying to have fun. We weren’t trying to—we were just like, “This is fun, we’re having a good time,” and we weren’t trying to break it, if you will. And some—by the way, we had a playtest in which somebody played it, a guy named Rob, and Rob said, “This isn’t fun!” The correct answer is just shut down and do nothing. Don’t talk, don’t… I detach from you, I won’t be talking, I won’t be laughing, so if I sort of shut myself in a bubble and don’t interact with you, I increase my ability to never be caught by a gotcha.

    Okay, that’s true. Is that what we wanted for an Un-set? Did we want to make a mechanic that says the correct way to play this is to shut down? And the answer was no! That’s one of the big lessons that I learned, and I learned this from Unhinged is, your players will figure out what they need to do to maximize the mechanics you give them. If the behavior that comes from maximizing them isn’t behavior you like, don’t do it.

    Because it is your job to anticipate how your audience will try to maximize what you’re doing, and you should give them a mechanic that if they do the thing that’s going to make them win, they will have a good time doing it.

    And the gotcha mechanic was the complete opposite of that. That if you did the gotcha mechanic and did it correctly, the game was supposed to be the super, super fun set, and we made a mechanic that if you played it optimally, made it less fun for you. That is horrible.

    In fact, I don’t get to do Un-sets very often. So I look back at Unhinged and like, it’s a tragedy to me. Like, oh my goodness. How did I not catch it? And worse, I compounded my mistake. Because not only did I make the mistake, but somebody told me my mistake during design and I dismissed them. Rob said to my face, “This is a problem, the correct answer is to shut down,” and my response at the time was, “No no no, just have fun, don’t shut down!” I just didn’t listen to him. And he gave me awesome advice and I didn’t listen.

    And that is very—so I made two mistakes. A. I made the gotcha mechanic, second is I had this window where I could have caught that I made the mistake, I was given the feedback, and I didn’t listen to it. And that’s one of the things—that really has changed how I now deal with playtesting. That when a playtester says something, I don’t dismiss it.

    It is very, very easy, by the way, when you’re playtesting, and somebody gives you information that contradicts what you want to be true for you to get in denial mode and go, “Oh, no no no.” You know. “Oh no, I don’t need to do that,” or “Oh no, it’s okay,” or “That’s just one person’s opinion.”

    Now that doesn’t mean it needs to be changed. It might be one person’s opinion. But you do need to look at it and explain. As I talked about in the podcast I had done on dealing with feedback, your audience doesn’t necessarily always know the answer to the feedback. But they’re pretty good at knowing when something’s wrong. And you want to listen when they say that something’s wrong. Because even if their solution to the problem isn’t the right solution, usually their problem is a real problem you need to address.

    So anyway, I’m almost at work today. So the thing I want to stress today, I mean the message of today is, don’t be afraid of mistakes. I’m not saying you want to make mistakes, but I’m saying mistakes will naturally happen, they are a valuable tool, they can help you, and that if you work hard to avoid them, that itself, the act of avoiding mistakes is more dangerous than doing what you need to do where mistakes will happen. That the fear of mistakes is a far greater problem than mistakes themselves. And so my lesson of today is, don’t fear mistakes. Don’t act in a way that will avoid mistakes from happening because you feel that that’s going to serve your product better. It’s not. That if you aren’t willing to make a mistake, you are not going to make as good a product as if you are.

    So remember. Don’t be afraid of mistakes, let them teach you, let them get you to places you might not normally go. Sometimes they unto themselves won’t even be mistakes, and remember your audience is more forgiving of them than you might realize at first blush.


    So anyway, I have now parked my car, so we all know what that means, it’s time to end my drive to work. So instead of talking Magic, it’s time for me to be making Magic. Talk to you next time.
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