1. All podcast content by Mark Rosewater
    I’m pulling out of the parking spot! We all know what that means! It’s time for another Drive to Work.

    Okay. I dropped my kids off at school today. Okay. So today, I thought I was going to talk about something that I have done a lot of, which is leading teams. This came up in a previous podcast and I said, “You know what? This would make a good podcast.” So today’s all about “How do you lead a team?”

    So let me talk in context, be aware I’m leading a creative team. I’m doing design work, but I believe a lot of the things I’m saying are probably (???) for leading most teams. Some of the stuff I’m talking about is specific to leading a creative team, but anyway, I believe there’s a lot of takeaway even just for general teams.

    So starting in two weeks, or it will have already happened by the time you hear this, I will have begun leading my 23rd design, I believe. So anyway—and I’ve also led stuff other than just design teams. I’ve done a lot of mini-teams and sub-teams and other projects. I have led a lot of teams in my day.

    And so one of the things I want to talk about today is, what makes for good team leading? What do you need to do to lead a team?  So I have a bunch of different things that I want to talk about. Hopefully we’ll get those in before I get to work.

    Okay, number one. And these aren’t necessarily in any particular order other than the order I came up with them in. So be aware there. Okay, number one, you need to provide focus and direction for your team. The role of the team lead is to make sure the team knows where they’re going. What are they doing? And a big responsibility of being a team lead is making sure that your team understands where you’re going. It doesn’t mean that they have to understand every nuance, but it does mean you want your team on board. You want your team to know what you’re doing, what you’re aiming for.

    So like when I lead a design, one of the things I want to very early on establish is, what is the design trying to do? What’s our goal? When we sat down to design Innistrad, I was very clear, we were doing a top-down design. We were going to match our design to get the flavor and feel of the horror genre. When I sat down to do Ravnica, I was like, we are making the guilds come to life. We are going to build something that brings to life each of the ten two-color pairs. Or four of them were in Ravnica.

    Each set that I sit down with my team, I have to say to them, what are we trying to do? What is the emotion we’re trying to get out of the audience? What kind of—what is the essence of what we want. Because he team, together, as a team, we’re going to discover that and find it out. And so, first and foremost, I think when you lead a team, you want to make sure that you are providing direction for your team.

    Now, another big part of it is that your team has to trust in you. Believe in you. You have to have an air of confidence. You have to make your team believe like you know what you’re doing. Now, you don’t always know what you’re doing, (???) thing. You don’t always know what you’re doing.

    But you want to make sure that your team feels confident that you have a good sense of where you’re going. And a lot of giving focus and direction is saying to the team, “Here’s what we’re working toward, and I have confidence that this is what we need to do.”  Because the role of the team is to help you, the lead, solve your problems. But it is your job as the lead to figure out what problems you need to solve.   Now, your team is a resource, and you can use your team to help solve all sorts of problems. But as a leader, what you need to do is make sure that your team is all on board and going in the same direction.

    And the way I try to explain this is, let’s say your team was all holding an object. If you’re all going the same direction, you’ll move that object in that direction. But if one of you’s going west and one’s going east and one’s going north, you’ll not go anywhere. And a lot of that is just providing that direction, of getting the whole team going in the same place at the same time.

    Okay. Another thing is, you want to make sure that your goals are clear. That when you’re leading a team, it’s not just you want the overall project to be clear, but you want to make sure that you break up your thing into small bite-sizeable chunks, and that each chunk, the team knows what it’s trying to accomplish.

    So what it means to me is, when I have a meeting, every meeting, I start the meeting by making sure the team understands, that day, what are we going to accomplish? What are we going to do? And I think it’s very important that you are able to break things down, because even though you’re giving your team the long-view picture, it’s important to also break down like, okay. Long-term we’re trying to do this thing. What are we doing today? Short-term, what are we doing? And meetings work a lot better if you have a direction to them that sort of says, here’s what I’m doing, here’s what the team is doing, here’s the direction we’re going, here’s what we’re trying to accomplish today.

    A lot of producing a good meeting—so one of the things I talk about all the time is how design is a microcosm of the macro. That the micro is the macro. That is true in meetings as much as it is in the design itself.

    Which means that every meeting is its own little micro version of what you’re trying to do with the design. You want to start, you want to give focus to your team, you want to say what you want to accomplish, you want to tell them what we’re trying to do and what the goal is for the day, and then give them the tools to then during the meeting do that.

    So that’s the next thing that’s important. You need to provide the tools for your team. Whatever your team needs, you need to make sure you have the tools. In design, a lot of that is card files or if you need to have a certain structure, something figured out, you need to make sure what the team needs is there.

    Now, once again, like I these days have what we call a strong second. I don’t actually produce the files. But I have to tell my strong second what he or she needs to bring to the meeting. That every day, what are we doing today? What’s the meeting today? Okay, we’re doing…

    Meetings in design break into two things. Either you are sitting in a room talking and designing and figuring things out, or you’re playtesting, usually in the pit. So I—like I said, it’s all the iterative process. You’re making changes or you’re playing what you’ve done to experience what you’ve done to see what you need to do next.

    And so, you really want to make sure in your meeting that each little meeting unto itself is its own little tiny design experience. You come in, you say what you want, you let the team know it, you give them the tools you need, and then you let the team do it.

    So next thing which is really important is, the goal of the team lead is to make the team feel as a cohesive whole. It’s not—you don’t want your team to feel like a bunch of individuals, you want your team to feel like a group that’s come together that is working together. And a lot of that is making sure that you give your team what they need so that they can work together, and you need to set the tone as the lead that you are a group. And you want to make sure that you do plenty of things where the team gets to interact with each other.

    One of the things for example that I like to do a lot of is I like doing a lot of design in meetings. And the reason for that is, the design process is a very collaborative process. When one person comes up with an idea, somebody else will riff off that idea. And what happens is, like for example, Innistrad’s a good thing, where I talk about this all the time, where we came in with some names, and we designed—what does a black cat do? What does an evil twin do? What does a jar of eyeballs do? What is that?

    And we had these neat names that, Jenna was the creative lead, she had brought to the thing, and then we were making cards. But the funny thing is, who made Evil Twin? PICTURE The whole team made Evil Twin. No one person made it. The team made it. And there’s a really nice quality of when you make cards, that there’s just, it’s so collaborative in nature that it makes the team feel like the team has accomplished something. And that’s really, really important. You want to make sure that the team itself feels like it can see itself doing work.

    Now, there’s a couple different ways we do work. One way is we do in-meeting stuff, like design stuff in-meeting. The other is we’ll do homework where I’ll ask them to do something and I give them parameters. One of the big things about homework is, you want to have a lot of detail for what you’re looking for.

    There’s a (???) belief that the more open-ended you make it, the better it is for people, and I believe that’s incorrect. I believe in general you—I mean, you want to give your, in creative endeavors, your people enough information so they know what you’re looking for. You want to give them some latitude to be able to make things, you don’t want to be too (???), but in the same sense, being too open-ended also is a problem. “Make me a card.” It’s hard. “Make me a wacky blue rare enchantment,” it’s a little easier. I have a little more focus.

    So one of the things I like to do when you’re giving a homework assignment is, is make sure that there is plenty of focus and then a little bit of room for people to play around and do some stuff of their own that might not be exactly what you’re looking for. But you want a lot of your homework to be very, very focused.

    Okay. So in the meeting, you set your tone. You try to make sure that everybody feels welcome and able to speak. That’s another really important thing of running a meeting is, you want to make sure that everybody feels empowered in the meeting, and that everybody can contribute and it feels like they are contributing. And that’s very important.

    One of the things, so there’s this thing, while I was at GDC I saw a talk by Jesse Schell. So one of the things he talked about is this research that’s been done on the intelligence of groups. So this was very fascinating. I don’t know her name, he had her name [NLH—Anita Woolley], but there’s a woman who was doing a lot of research of looking at groups and trying to figure out what exactly makes a group smarter.

    And the cool thing about it is, it’s not—you would think, “Oh, is it just the individual intelligence of all the people kind of added together or averaged or something?” No. That the intelligence of a group has very little to do with the intelligence of the people individually. What it has to do is with three things.

    Number one is I think they call the emotional intelligence, or they call it the eye test. Can you look at someone’s eyes and tell what they’re feeling? So emotional intelligence means can you read other people and get a sense of how they’re feeling? That’s number one.

    Number two is not interrupting. [NLH—This is a slight misinterpretation, the actual finding is that everyone needs equal time to speak.] This is an important one, which is letting people say what they have to say without interrupting them. R&D, interrupting is kind of a bad habit, we’re working on getting better at that. But I try to make sure that meetings, like if someone has the floor and they’re talking, you let them talk. Not that people can’t have interplay back and forth, but make sure people feel like there’s an opportunity for them to talk, and that they’re not being cut off.

    Okay. Number three is a mix of genders. That when you have all men or all women, communication gets a little bit skewed and the overall intelligence drops. Of the group.   

    So what you want is, those are the three things. Emotional intelligence, meaning being aware of how other people are feeling, it’s kind of what that’s saying. Be conscious—when other people are talking, get a sense of what’s going on with them and how are they feeling. Don’t interrupt, let other people have the floor and have them talk, and try to get a mix of genders into your meeting. Those are the three biggies. Anyway.

    Okay. So, you want to make sure that everybody in your meetings feels empowered and feels like—like, one of the things that I want to do is, everybody in our meetings has a role. They’re there for some reason.

    For example in design meetings we’ll have a representative from the creative team. Their job is to oversee it and make sure we’re matching what the creative is for the world. We have a representative from the development team, they’re making sure that what we’re doing is developable and can be done. Can be something we can do. We always have somebody from the design team just to make sure we have enough sort of design muscle to get the job done.

    So it’s important, one of the things we do before every design starts, we have a one-on-one with each person on the design team, and the role of that meeting, a short meeting, it’s like half an hour, to just say, here’s what I expect from you in the meeting. Here’s the role that I expect you to play, and here’s what you are contributing.

    And that’s really—we didn’t always used to do this, but that’s really important, because what it does is, it makes sure each person understands what’s expected of them, and what they’re supposed to do there in the meeting. And one of the things that’s important is, not just to let them know what you expect them to do, but what you also don’t expect them to do.

    For example, a lot of times, when I’m talking to my creative rep or my development rep, I want them to design cards, I want them to do as much design work as they can, but they’re not there to do the brunt of the design work. They’re there to fulfill their role, and do as much design as they want to do, it’s not that I in any way (???) doing design, but the expectation of them is not to be doing the brunt of the design so the pressure’s off. If they have homework and they can’t quite get it all done, that there’s a little less expectation on them to be doing all of the design work. We have a lot of our designers that are going to do more of the heavy lifting.

    But as much as they can do, and like I love when members of the representatives are able to do a lot of cool stuff, and a lot of the great designs come from development representatives and creative representatives. But it’s nice early on to explain to them, “Look, the main role you have here is just you’re a representative to represent the thing.” That’s the most important thing. Now, secondarily, hey, you’re on a design team, I want you to design things. But you want to make sure you understand where the pressures are on or off. So once you set expectations, then, when you start the meetings, you want to make sure that people know their individual roles and the team knows its overall role.

    Now, another thing that’s really important is, you want to make sure that your design meetings, or your meetings, I put down fun here, what I mean by that is you want to make sure that it’s enjoyable. You want people to have fun with one another. And one of the things that I make sure to do in my design meeting is we definitely goof around a little bit. We have some fun, we make jokes, there’s a lot of laughing. It’s important to me that when we do design, that the people are having a good time.

    Now, design is fun, luckily we’re doing a meeting where what we’re doing is inherently a fun thing. But it is a lot of work. I think sometimes people think about, “Oh, it would be awesome to have a job working in R&D, that would be so much fun,” and it is fun. But it’s also a lot of work. And no matter how much fun something is, work can get daunting. It’s a lot of work. Having a blank piece of paper and ending up with a card file, and mechanics and a mood and a tone and everything that requires of a handoff, that’s a lot of work. And your team has to produce that.

    So one of the things you want to make sure that you’re able to do is create a tone for the meetings that makes it enjoyable and fun. And another thing that’s really important is, sometimes when you’re goofing around, so like my favorite book, I’m sure I’ve mentioned this many times, my favorite book, a book called A Whack on the Side of the Head, by a man named Roger van Oech, and he, one of the hypotheses of the book is anybody can be creative, the reason you’re not creative is because there’s ten mental locks, that you keep yourself—that you inhibit your own creativity.

    And the idea is, if you recognize when you do this, you can be creative. You’ve just got to stop yourself from not being creative. And one of the big points he makes in the book, and multiple times is, that a lot of being creative is not stopping yourself. Is not saying, “Oh, I can’t do that for reason X, Y or Z.”

    And so a big part of trying to set up a team is making sure that everybody feels comfortable enough to try things. Because one of the things is, a lot of good ideas start as bad ideas. A lot of really good ideas, like a bad idea can be a stepping stone to a brilliant idea.

    And not even necessarily it’s a bad idea. Just an unworkable idea. A lot of times—for example, like in Innistrad, I said to my team, I want to make werewolves work. Here’s what I need. Here’s the demand I need. They are humans, something happens, the humans become werewolves, something else happens, the werewolves become humans. That I wanted them to change states. That’s what a werewolf was. And I said, let’s figure out how to do that. How do we make cards that go between two states?

    And Tom LaPille came to me and said, hey, in Duel Masters, we do these cards that are double-faced. Two-sided. There’s a front and a back. Cards on both sides. And I’ve talked about this. I was skeptical. But I knew that we would learn from it.

    Now it turns out, it was practical. The thing that seemed impractical was practical. Sometimes that happens. But sometimes you go, “Oh, well you learned something.” Maybe you should try something that doesn’t into itself work, it leads you down the path to something that will. And so one of the things is, you want to make sure as a leader for your team, that your team is open to exploring things.

    Now another really important thing, I talked about this in my podcast on the different stages of design, the different parts of design, is you want to make sure you understand where you are in your process. Meaning, as I explained before, iteration speeds up as design goes along. That early on, you might spend three weeks talking through things before you have a playtest. Where by the end of design, you have a meeting or so and then you’re going to playtest again. You’re playtesting every week. Your iterations get sped up.

    And so you want to make sure you understand where you are in the overall picture, because you are marking for your team what you are doing. It is not your team’s job to understand the bigger picture or how things are coming together in a meeting-to-meeting case. I mean, you want to make sure they understand what’s going on, you want them aware, but it’s not their job to monitor exactly how things are happening. That is your job as the team lead. And what you need to do is you need to make sure that you are constantly letting your team know what is being accomplished and what you’re doing.

    Like I said. I think it’s very, very important. I think, like when you write. One of the things that they have you write is a thesis statement. And the point of a thesis statement is to introduce to your reader what it is you’re going to talk about. It’s very important. “Hey, hello reader,” in fact look at my column. I always start by saying, “It’s whatever! We’re going to talk about this. This is what we’re going to do today.” And the first paragraph’s just telling you what I’m going to do.

    Meetings are a lot like that. You need your thesis statement of the meeting where you walk in and say, “Here’s                 what we’re going to do today, here’s what’s going to happen.” Another very common technique I use is what I call the “to-do list,” which is we will have a meeting where we talk through a playtest, or we figure out how something went. Then we write up on the board everything we have to do that comes out of that talk. Every time we come up with an agenda item I just write it on the board.

    I’m a big believer, by the way, that having something in the room you can write on is pretty important. Every single room or pretty much every single room in Wizards has like a whiteboard. Pretty important. Visually—I’m a big fan of visualization of stuff, being able to write things up, have people see things, I think that’s really important.

    Sometimes, even when we bring papers to meetings I still want to write things on the board. I want everybody looking at the same things at the same time. And it also allows you to organize things in the way you want to organize them. I think as you’re brainstorming, just—anyway, I’m a big fan of having something you can write on right in front of you. But anyway, the idea of a to-do list is as we come up with ideas, as we talk about what we’re doing, I really, really enjoy generating lists and then we literally—I mean, we jump around the list.

    Another technique, by the way, that’s very important is that you do not want your team—you want your team to feel as if the team is accomplishing things. Not you, not the individuals. So one of the things as a lead is, I always go last. Whenever there’s any kind of input, whether it’s creative input, whether it’s feedback, I always go last.

    The reason I always go last is, I want—if there’s an important point to make, I would rather somebody else make the point than me. If there’s important feedback, if there’s something that—even if I know the feedback, if I know the thing, if somebody else on my team can provide the feedback, it makes it feel like the team is making decisions.

    That you give—if you always go first and you always speak and you’re acting on what you’re doing, and a lot of what you’re going to do is acting on—I mean, you’re the lead, you’re going to have a general sense of what you want to do. But the more you can get the team to feel like the team is coming up with things and you’re reacting to them, and a really good trick of that is just go last. Just talk last.

    And if somebody else makes the point you were going to make, I mean it’s okay to sort of go, “I agree,” but let it be okay, go “That’s a good point. John made a good point. Mary made a good point.” Part of being a team leader is fostering a team confidence and a sense of a team accomplishment.
    And that is very, very important. That—let me talk a little about what we call emotional investment, which is you are going to put extra energy in something that you feel emotionally connected to. You will go the extra length for your child because it is your child.

    And creative endeavors are a lot like your children. That when you make something, you are very possessive. It is your thing. And what you want is, you want your team in a creative endeavor to feel like they think it’s their thing. It’s not your thing, it is the team’s thing. The team has made it. The team has generated it.

    And the reason that’s so important is, when you feel emotionally connected, when it’s something that you have bonded with, you are so much more willing to invest time and energy. That if you want to get the best work out of your team, you want to make them feel it’s personal and it’s theirs, and connected to it. And there’s nothing you can do that will get the team more motivated and more excited than having them have emotional investment in the overall product.

    And that, like I said. It’s really, really important, you want to establish a good camaraderie between the team, you want to establish roles between the team, and you want to establish that—well, here’s another really good tip.

    At the end of every meeting—so, in writing, you always start with a thesis statement, and end with restating what you’ve done. In fact, teaching is the same way. I’m going to teach you this. I teach you it. I have just taught you that.

    The same thing. At the end of the meeting, reinforce what you’ve done during the course of the meeting. Make sure the team walks away going, “Wow, that’s what we accomplished today.” You want to walk in the meeting knowing what we’re going to do, you want to walk out of the meeting knowing what you’ve done.

    And, and this is important, people feel good when they get recognition. It is very important when you’re leading a team to tell the team that they’re doing good work. So I mean—I’m not saying lie to them, when they do good work—get them to do good work, and then acknowledge that they’ve done good work.

    And that you want to reinforce and you want to make sure that as the team is doing stuff, that you—as a lead, people look to the authority figure for approval. That is just—starts with Mom and Dad, and continues all through your life. That is’ important, if you’re being an authority figure and the team lead you are, that you’re providing approval. That you are making it clear what you expect, and then when they accomplish that, you’re letting them know that. That is very, very important.

    And like I said. When you are creating a team, what you are trying to do is you want the team to as a whole understand its role, be possessive of what it’s doing, be proud of what it’s doing, and have a harmony in working together.

    So that’s another big thing about team thing is, make sure the goals of your team align with each other. If two people have goals that contradict each other, you’re going to create conflict. So that’s for example why I’m not super big—I want to acknowledge people did things, but I also want to be careful not to like keep a checkboard of who did what, or—I don’t want to make a competition between my people. I don’t want my team to feel competitive between themselves. It’s okay for the team to sometimes feel competitive outside, the team’s going to do well against some outside metric, that’s okay, but you don’t want your team being too competitive within itself. You want your team to all feel like it’s working together.

    Another important thing is, make sure that your team understands that it is not a democracy. That is not the role of—that when I make a team, it is not that—I do not make every decision something the whole team votes on.

    Early on in design I used to do that, and I realized the problem was that you don’t end up with the best results through whatever the most people agree with. The way you get really good design is having strong vision.

    Now, part of that is setting the vision so the team’s all on the same page. But another part of it is, you as the lead are the final word. The final say. You actually—one of the things I say, the very first meeting, is I say to my team, look, you are here, we as a team are going to make this, but let me stress, we are not a democracy. I have final say. That if I believe something’s correct, I am going to do it, and I will always explain to you why I make my decisions, and you are always free to question my decisions up to a point, but I will be making decisions. I will be the one that’s the final say. And I want input from the team, and I will ask for input from the team, but it’s important that the team understands that even if the majority wants to do one thing, if I the lead think it needs to go in a different direction, we’ll go in a different direction. And it’s really, really important early on, like I said the very first meeting, to establish that.

    I also think, by the way, you want your team to look up to you as the lead, as—if they’re not sure of things, you want them to look to you as the authority to help make many decisions. A lot of times in trying to solve a larger thing, you need to figure out what you’re doing on the micro level. And they look to you to say, “Help us, can you give us some role or some guidance?” And that when the team comes to you and asks, that’s important you can give them clear and concise guidance.

    And that’s another big thing about being a team lead is, a lot of options will present before you. But you as the lead need to keep making decisions. Part of iterating is going down paths. And sometimes, there’s multiple paths, and what you have to do as a team lead is figure out which path you’re going down.

    Now, be aware. Sometimes you’ll pick a path that’s the wrong path. You will have to go back and go back down another path. But that is better than not picking a path. A real common mistake sometimes I see with my design leads, people that I oversee as Head Designer, is sometimes people are a little afraid to commit to a decision. They’re like, “Oh, option A, B, and C are all good options. Maybe we can continue playing with A, B, and C for a while.”

    And early on, you can play with A, B, and C. But at some point you’ve gotta pick A, B, or C. You’ve got to say, “Okay, we’re doing A.” Or “We’re doing B.” Or “We’re doing C.” And drop the other ones. And like I said. Even if you find out that it’s wrong and you have to go back, you will get more accomplished than if you just don’t make a choice.

    And part of the lead, part of your role is very much making that choice. It’s very much trying to decide what is the next step you want to take. Because one of the things about design and iteration is you want to keep moving forward. You want to keep making advancements and changing the file directed toward where the end state is.

    And like I said, I’ll stress once again. That doesn’t mean you can’t make mistakes. It doesn’t mean you can’t learn things and backtrack some. It doesn’t mean when you go down a path you can’t go down a different path. But it means you have to commit and try things. You have to commit to trying a path. Because the only way you will learn if something works is committing to it. Trying a little of everything doesn’t teach you what you need to do. And so it is very important that you are able to do that. And so as a team lead, having the ability to make the hard decisions is very important.

    And, getting your team to see that you’re making the hard decisions is also very important. You want your team to look up to you. You want your team to believe that you are the authority on the topic you’re doing.

    Now, right now it helps a lot, like when I lead a team, like I said, I’ve been doing it twenty years and I’m leading my 23rd or whatever design team, it’s very for my team to go, “I have some confidence, he’s done a lot of this.”

    But even when you are newer at it, you still want to make sure that your team has a sense of confidence in what you’re doing. And part of that is making sure they understand your vision. Because if they see your vision and see what you’re trying to do, it definitely gets (???) confidence from them that you know what you want to do.

    Now, are you, the team lead, ever unsure of things? Yes. Should you ever communicate that to your team? You can to a point. You can understand, when you’re not sure of something, you can talk to your team of how you’re trying to figure something out. But you want to make sure that your team has a sense that you have a larger goal at hand. And you want to be a little bit careful. You want your team to always feel like you know where the next step is coming. And even (???) always know when the next step is coming, you want to create a sense of confidence for your team. And that’s important.

    Okeydokey. Well that, my friends—so like I said, I hope today was informative. Leading teams is definitely something that requires a lot of different skills. There’s a lot of people skills. There’s a lot of process skills. There’s a lot of organizational skills. But when it all comes together and you’re able to do it, and you’re able to sort of produce something, it is real fun. It is great running a team and watching your team accomplish something.  I mean, I think back to all the designs I’ve done and how proud (???) of my teams, that we just made some really awesome, kick-ass designs.


    But anyway, that my friends is everything I have to say about leading a team. But I’ve parked my car, so we all know what that means, it’s time for me to end my drive to work. So instead of talking Magic, it’s time for me to be making Magic. See you guys next time.
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  2. All podcast content by Mark Rosewater
    I’m pulling out of the parking space! So we all know what that means! It’s time for another Drive to Work.

    Okay. So today, I had to deliver my son’s Rube Goldberg project to school. So I’m leaving from school. But as we all know, school’s right near my house, so we get a full day of Drive to Work. Full episode.

    Okay. So today, I am going to talk about, I’ll continue a series that I call Lessons Learned. Where I started this long ago, where I talk about sets that I’ve led, and what lessons I learned from leading those sets. It just turns out, by the mere circumstance of how things work, that I’m up to Innistrad at the same time that I’m talking about Innistrad block! They converge!

    So what I want to do is, I’m going to talk about Innistrad and I’m going to talk about Dark Ascension. My plan is that this podcast will probably be Innistrad, but if I get to Dark Ascension we get there. I might intertwine—actually, maybe what I’ll do is intertwine a little bit, since some of the lessons between the two of them, they were shared. I did both Innistrad and Dark Ascension, it’s the only large/small back to back set—well, I did Shadowmoor/Eventide. So I guess it’s the second one I’ve done.

    But anyway, so let’s talk about what did I learn? So here’s—let me start off by saying the following. If you had to ask me, of every set that I’ve done that’s been released, what set is my best design? Probably I’d have to say Innistrad. I mean, I have some soft spots for like Tempest and Unglued, and some of my early stuff that just emotionally means a lot to me. But probably if I had to be honest, like what is the best design I’ve done? I think Innistrad is the answer. I’m very, very happy with how it turned out.

    So the interesting thing is, a lot of my Lessons Learned are like, you know I talked a lot during the Odyssey one about all the mistakes I made and what I learned from it. Today’s about how you can do something and be very successful. Innistrad might be one of the most successful sets I’ve ever done at least. And yet there are a lot of lessons to learn from it. Even though it was successful and I’m very happy with it, that doesn’t mean there weren’t lessons learned.

    I talked about during my mistakes podcast, about how when something goes wrong, you have more motivation to learn. Because things didn’t go right. Things went bad. I don’t want that to happen again. What do I need to change?

    But one of the important lessons is—so, lesson number one is that you have to make sure you understand not just what went wrong in your failures, but what went wrong in your successes? And what went right? You know what I’m saying?

    But I think successes tend to breed repetition. So it’s very common, when you have a success, for you to go, “Oh, okay, I’m going to repeat that success. I’ll keep doing what we did before.” And that unto itself can be dangerous, because a lot of times, what makes something successful?

    Aladdin
    Ali BabaLike, Innistrad’s a good example where Magic, early on, the very first expansion was a set called Arabian Nights. Made by Richard Garfield. And that was the first time Magic did what I’ll call top-down design. Where Richard took the Arabian Nights and very much designed cards from a top-down perspective of Arabian Nights. What does Aladdin do? What does Ali Baba do? What… he was taking all the different components of Arabian Nights.

    Now, the one thing he did that we don’t do anymore is he was doing what I call a straight transliteration. He was making characters as they existed in the story. Since then, when we do top-down, what we do now is we do stuff inspired by a source but it’s our own version of it.

    So the first set that we really did top-down on, in any sort of modern sense of us taking our own take on it, I think would be Champions of Kamigawa. And the idea of Champions of Kamigawa was, what if we started from a place of creative? What if the creative did its work first?

    The way it used to work was, design did its work, and when design was done, creative would then figure out what they could layer on top of it. “Okay, well if we know the design does this, what is that?” And then (???) creative to match the design.

    So Champions of Kamigawa was the first time where we said, “Okay. What if we start with the creative, and then layered the mechanics on top of the creative?” Now, the big lesson from that set, a lesson learned from a set I didn’t do, was that mechanics aren’t as flexible as flavor. And so when you start with flavor, you have to really hamfist mechanics to work. And so Champions of Kamigawa did a lot of things incorrectly that didn’t quite work out.

    And it kind of scared us away from top-down sets. One of those things where I talk about how your successes can have things that you—there are failures within your successes, and there’s successes within your failures.

    The idea of doing a top-down design was actually a pretty neat idea. It wasn’t executed well the first time we did it. But that doesn’t mean the idea was a poor idea, it just meant the execution need to be changed.

    But the interesting thing about Innistrad is, when I wanted to do Innistrad, so remember, a little, for those that don’t remember this, because my Innistrad podcast [NLH—not transcribed], the original one was a long time ago.

    Kamahl, Pit Fighter
    The way Innistrad came about was, we were making Odyssey. And Odyssey had a strong graveyard component. And Brady Dommermuth, who would later run the creative team, although at the time wasn’t even on the creative team, made the comment to me that the creative was a very poor fit. That the creative for Odyssey was the story about Kamahl, and it had nothing to do with the graveyard, and Brady brought up how we could do something cool, a Gothic horror sort of thing, and that when Brady brought up the idea of Gothic horror, something that I really liked the idea was to take a genre, which is horror, and build around a genre.

    That I thought that was a really neat idea. And so when Brady brought that up, it triggered an idea that I had, which is, the idea of a design in which you take something that has a pop culture relevance to it, a genre that means something to people because they’ve seen this kind of story again and again, and I married the idea of a Gothic horror set Brady talked about we could do, with the idea of a set that I wanted to do that was genre-specific. That is built around a genre.

    And horror specifically. Horror fits very well because horror and fantasy have a lot of overlap. A lot of classic fantasy very much overlaps in some of the fantasy tropes. A little (???), traditional fantasy tends to be a little more medieval, where a lot of the Gothic horror tends to be more Victorian. But Magic, we knew, could shift a little bit.

    So anyway, I had this idea. So this is Odyssey. So I’d taken sort of my idea and Brady’s idea and mushed them into a neat idea. And it was not for ten years before Innistrad got made. And even then, for those that remember, Innistrad wasn’t even originally gonna be the fall set. Originally it was going to be the small, what was in the Avacyn Restored slot, was going to be Innistrad, its own world, by itself, a little one-of, large set.

    You could kind of tell, by the way, early on, the way we were messing around, when we were starting to do large sets in the spring, we were toying with the idea of having them be their own thing. Which was really a precursor to where we ended up with the two-block paradigm.

    Okay, so, what happened was, Innistrad, it just took me a while to convince people to do it. Partly because—I mean, Champions did not help. When Champions happened, me trying to pitch this idea of a more top-down design, people were a little intimidated by it. And there was not a lot of confidence outside—I think Brady believed in this, the creative team I think believed in it, but the idea of there being enough substance to do a whole set around. Could we make a whole world built around horror?

    And the answer, obviously, was yes, but people were nervous at the time. One of the things to remember is, and this is an important lesson unto itself, which is, the role of design is to see what isn’t there. My job is to design things that don’t yet exist. Sometimes I bring things back, I mean I’m not reinventing the wheel every time, but a lot of design’s job is to find the things it could be. That it’s not yet. And people can rely on the known. You say, “We’re going to do this known thing,” it’s a lot easier for people to go, “Okay.” When I say, “We’re going to return to Ravnica,” I can get people on board. It’s like, “Ravnica was successful. You want to go back?” “Okay.”

    Or even when I was picking themes that were just established themes. “I want to do a multicolor set.” “Oh, we’ve had successful multicolor sets, okay.” But when I want to say, “I want to do something in a way we’ve never really done,” and the one best example to compare it to was one of our least successful products ever, it is—it’s a hard sell.

    And the funny thing is, the thing that I think finally, ironically got the foot in the door was that thanks to things like Twilight, horror was taking off, becoming very popular. It had a kind of a resurgence. And so when I was going to the powers that be and said, “Hey,” I was able to pitch, “You know this idea I’ve had, the idea of doing horror? Horror is hot right now!” And I think that helped get the ball rolling a little bit. Like, well, okay, I guess we’re going to take a risk. At least there’s some proof that the theme is popular. And that’s one of the things that helped get me the foot in the door.

    But anyway. So the first lesson, the first lesson of Innistrad is one of persistence. Is one of believing in good ideas. And actually, there’s two examples from Innistrad. One is just the whole set itself. It’s funny, because trying to get the set made took forever. There was a lot of resistance. Once the set was finally happening, once the set was in design, the actual idea of doing Gothic horror, nobody blinked an eye. Like, once—like getting to get the right to do it took forever, but once it got the right, everybody’s like, “Okay, sounds good,” and people were happy. And in general I think as we were designing, people could see what we were doing and they were happy.

    But it’s funny. So once we got into design, I was trying—I had told my team that werewolves were very important. Magic had not really ever been successful doing werewolves. I think we had werewolf cards, but none of which were successes.

    And so what I said is, look, we’re going to do stuff like vampires and zombies. Magic has done good vampires and zombies before. But we’ve never really nailed werewolves. If we can nail werewolves, then we could have something to hang our hat on. And it’s out of my desire to sort of figure out werewolves that got us the dark transformation that got us the double-faced cards.

    And for those that remember the story, it didn’t start like—that was just one of a bunch of ideas. (???) weird, but—so one of the lessons was—I mean, something I knew but I got reinforced during the set is, when Tom LaPille first suggested double-faced cards as a solution to the werewolf issue, I’ll admit I was a little skeptical. Magic had always had a back to it. That sounds like a pretty radical thing.

    I don’t believe in breaking out of the box for the sake of doing it. I don’t want to do something that we’ve never done just to say we’ve done it. I only want to do something because it fits the needs at hand. But Tom’s idea did fit the need at hand. And so even though I was a little skeptical, I’m like, “You know what? We have a lot of ideas, let’s try them.”

    And an important part, and the big lesson of this, which got reinforced is, even things that seem impractical in design, try them. Do not—there’s so much—if things work, if things are showing sign of progress, you will figure out ways to solve your problems.

    And so design, early design is not the place to be nay-saying. If something is fitting with what you need, try it. That there’s plenty of things that will fall out along the way. If the idea functionally won’t work, trying is not going to make it happen. If double-faced cards was not doing what we need to do—but it did. Like, oh. Well, we need werewolves, werewolves need two states. That is definitely a way to show two states of werewolves.

    It had baggage with it. There’s a lot of complication. It wasn’t something that was an automatic “of course we’re doing it.” But I did say, “Okay, let’s try it.” I did not write it off. Even though, I’ll be honest, like I said, I was a bit skeptical.

    But I’ve learned, and like I’ve said, that was a big lesson was, you’ve got to try things. Even things that might sound crazy, you have to try them. Because sometimes, A., they’re not as crazy as you think. Take double-faced cards. Or they lead you down a path to something that is not as crazy, but you wouldn’t have got there without the stepping stone of the crazier idea.

    Now, second thing was, so we made these cards. It became pretty clear to me about midway through, we were doing it. There’s a point where I realized, I said, the set handed over in July or August, and like February, I went to Aaron and said, “I’m pretty sure we’re going to do this.” And we needed to talk to other parts of the company. There’s a lot of things we do that only R&D, like as long as the rules and the templating people can figure it out, if R&D can handle it, it can be done. This was a printing thing, I know Duel Masters had done it, so I knew it was something that was doable.

    But I knew we needed to develop earlier because there were a lot of factors that went into—there turned out to be tons of factors. In fact, in February I started the ball rolling and had I started a month later we might not have been able to get them in the set. That’s how, like I thought I was starting insanely early and I wasn’t. Although, I mean that’s when I figured out we were using them.

    But one of the big lessons is, you have to have passion to support your ideas. A lot of people came along and said, you cannot do this. This is breaking a fundamental rule of Magic that cannot, should not be broken. And I had to fight very hard. I had to say, no no no, this is okay. Magic is a game that breaks its own rules and we do things, and that it’s scary to do something you’ve never done before.

    But I have worked on Magic for a long, long time, I’ve watched us do things that we’ve never done before, and every single time—I mean, interesting, by the way, there always was—outward, the players would be skeptical. But they’re not the most skeptical. Because to the players, we made it. Most players are like, “Well, it’s here,” they can complain about it, maybe we shouldn’t have done it, but we did it. By the time the players see it, it’s a done thing. We have done it. And so players will gripe about it. Usually before they’ve seen it. But at some point they’ll get used to it because it exists.

    When you’re inside the building, if you believe it shouldn’t be done, you are fighting to stop it. You are fighting to say, “This should never happen.” So the people that disagree with things are very passionate. Now, that’s great, I love passion, people make Magic, I think that’s good. But the thing here was, I had people who were trying to stop it from happening because they fundamentally believed we were making a critical error. That we were taking Magic someplace it should not be going.

    So I had a lot of fighting on my hands. Erik Lauer, who was the head developer, a lot of people came to him—because by the time—people didn’t really understand what we were doing until it got to development. And so there was a lot of me having to convince Erik that like this was the right thing to do, and Aaron and all the people, like there was definitely, there were a lot of voices on the other side saying it was a huge mistake, and I had to sort of be the voice saying, no it’s not. We need to do things like this. That it’s going to be okay, and players are going to love it.

    So that was a big—stick to your guns, understand what you’re caring for. Take chances, and then when your chances work out, you’ve got to defend your (???). You’ve got to believe in them and you’ve got to fight for them. And that had I not been so passionate about double-faced cards, had I just been willing to be a little more accommodating, go “Well, maybe there’s another way we can do it,” I don’t think they would have happened.

    And I realized early on that in order to make them happen, I needed to be full committal. I had to sell it. So that’s another big lesson here is, that one of the big jobs of a designer, lead designer, head designer, is you are a salesman. You have to convince people that some of the stuff you’re doing is the right thing to do.

    Now, when it’s small things, it’s not that hard to convince them. “Here’s a new mechanic” usually isn’t that hard to convince people. But when you want to do something radical, when you want to, right, go someplace the game’s never gone before that requires some salesmanship.

    And one of the things I think I’m proudest of looking back on Innistrad was, I had some salesmanship. I had some salesmanship because it got off the ground, I had some salesmanship to make the double-faced card happen. There were a lot of things that had to be done.

    Another thing that I had to sell people on, people who were skeptical was, the set had three keywords in it. We had transform, which was a double-faced mechanic, we had flashback, which was coming back, and we had morbid. Now, there was other things going in the set. There was a tribal component. There were curses. It wasn’t like that was the only thing going on. But it only had three keywords.

    Now, early in Magic, we used to do two keywords. And over time, we started keywording more things. So at the time, three keywords was actually pretty low for us at the time. And what I said was, “There’s a lot going on, it’s okay.” That the three keywords is, there’s plenty happening.

    One of the things that’s very interesting is, and this is true of players as well as internal, is that people tend to use the keywords as a marker of what’s happening in the set. And that if there’s few keywords,  a lot of people will read that as meaning there’s less going on in the set. “That other thing had five keywords. There’s more going on in there than this, that has three keywords.”

    And part of the answer is, there was a lot else going on. But not everything needs to be keyworded. And the way that Innistrad was designed, a lot of the tribal components, a lot of the—some of the flavor with the curses and things. They just, they worked better not as a named mechanic. It doesn’t mean they weren’t there, it didn’t mean it wasn’t something people couldn’t build around or draft around and have fun, like they were themes to play with. But they weren’t things that needed the keyword.

    And so there was some debate at the time about was there enough in the set. And so I also had like—one of the things that’s important, and Innistrad really taught me this, is don’t put things in your set—like, understand the volume of what you have. You have to believe in—you need to gauge how much you need, and then don’t put more in your set than you need.

    In fact, one of the big lessons, and Innistrad was a really good—I mean, Innistrad was a good example where I did this and the response proved I was correct in my assumption, which was you want to put as little in your set as you need to accomplish what you need to accomplish.

    The forces that be will make you put more in. And there’s a lot of moving pieces to a Magic set. I’m not saying sets shouldn’t have a decent amount in them. By the nature of what they need to exist they need a bunch of stuff. But avoid the pressure of putting things in because you feel you need to put things in.

    Put things in because you need them. Put things in because there’s space missing. Put things in because there’s something that the set isn’t doing that it needs to do. But do not put things in your set because you feel that, well, I don’t have enough. It doesn’t seem like I have enough so I should put more in.

    I mean, if there’s a gap, if something’s missing, that’s okay. But there was a bunch of conversations about, “Oh, should I be adding a keyword?” And I’m like, no no no, the set’s doing what it needs to do. The set has enough in it. There’s enough going on.

    And Innistrad, the thing that’s interesting about Innistrad is, on the surface, because of three keywords, it looks like there’s a little less going on. But when you start playing with it, and you start seeing some of the tribal connections and some of the different themes that were woven in, the role of the graveyard, there was a lot going on. It’s by no means a simple set. It definitely had a lot going on.

    But on the surface, like one of the things that I learned about being a top-down set was, I’d let the top-down carry a lot of the content. What I mean by that was, I knew when you played the set, there’s things you’re going to want to do because the top-down leads you there. “I want to build a zombie deck, and I want a zombie deck to act like zombies.” “Okay, we got that.” “I want to do the same with werewolves, with vampires, with spirits, with humans.” Each one of them had a story and had a role.

    And that story and role, because I was building top-down from pop culture, meaning I knew you had seen zombies in movies and TV and read them in books, and you had a sense of what zombies were like. So when I made a zombie deck, and figured out how the zombie deck worked, I knew the audience would have an expectation and I could meet that expectation. And a lot of the interesting things about Innistrad is trying to figure out what people would expect and designing to match the expectation.

    So one of the biggest lessons I guess of Innistrad was, I did not do Champions of Kamigawa. I mean, I was on the development team, so I was familiar with how it was designed, although I did not design it. So this was the first time that I had done top-down.  And I learned a lot. I learned a lot about top-down.

    And one of the big things is, the need to allow your top-down to sort of guide expectations and try to design to expectations. The other thing which is a big thing, which started with Scars of Mirridon but would get reinforced in Innistrad was, trying to understand the emotional content. That one nice thing about using pop culture was, when you’re messing with a genre, genres come pretty emotion-loaded if you will.

    Like it’s clear, horror was about fear. That when you watch a horror film, it’s crystal clear that the genre, the emotion that it plays around with is fear. It is playing into fears you have. That’s what horror’s about is taking human fears and exploring them and digging into them.

    So if I’m doing a set around that and I want an emotional response, well, fear’s what I’m going for. I’m trying to evoke fear out of the other player. I want to scare them. I want to make them feel uneasy. I want some sense of tension. And a lot of the design was built to match that feel.

    And the big thing I’ve learned walking out of Innistrad was that there are a lot of tools available to a top-down design that are unique to a top-down design. And not that that was the only way to design, but it was a way to design. And I think a lot of what Innistrad did was sell the rest of R&D that this was a viable format to design.

    In fact, if anything, it oversold it. I believe that our player base so loved Innistrad that their response is, “Stop doing how you do design, let’s do all the designs top-down designs!” And the answer is, we can’t. Partly because there’s not the amount of top-down material that we need, partly because Magic is better if every set is not designed the same way.

    Magic is better if different sets come from a different place. I was really happy with how Khans came out, but Khans was not at all top-down. Not that there wasn’t a top-down component that was later woven in, but it’s not where it started, it’s not how it got designed.

    And I guess, even—I mean, the big takeaway from Innistrad was the idea that there are tools available from us that we should be more conscious of. And we had definitely tapped into some resonance things that were going on during Magic 2010 and Zendikar. I mean, there were places we were looking at resonance. But it made me sort of approach it in a whole new way. I think we looked at resonance as a thing. “What things can you replicate?” And Innistrad taught me that there was resonance in emotion and feeling and sort of how things were played out. And that we could take advantage of that.

    (???), by the way, I’m not quite to work yet, but that I’m not getting to Dark Ascension today. So today will be an Innistrad day, and then next time we do Lessons Learned I will do Dark Ascension. Dark Ascension, actually, a lot more went wrong, so Innistrad’s more of “things went right,” Dark Ascension’s “things went wrong.” We’ll get to that next time.

    But anyway, so what went wrong in Innistrad? I’m talking a lot about things I did right and how it taught me. So let’s flip the coin. What went wrong?

    So the number one thing that went wrong in Innistrad was, I had a lot more going on than I think I explained to my lead developer, Erik Lauer. I mean, the classic story, I’ve talked about curses, how I had this big plan for curses, and one of the things I was trying to do was I was trying to show the role of the humans vs. the monsters in the first so that I could play it off in the second set.

    And the problem was, although I set this stuff up in the design, I didn’t elaborate with my lead developer what I was doing. There was a lot of stuff I was doing I was trying to pay off. And some of it happened. Some of the payoff happened. But not all of it. And the reason was, I didn’t do a good enough job explaining to my lead development what I was up to.

    And part of that was that one of the things is, I am very intuitive in how I do design. That there’s things that I believe I was setting—like I knew I was doing Dark Ascension. I knew when I was doing Innistrad that I was doing the next set. So I acted a little differently than I normally do. But I didn’t change my process, even though—I acted differently because I was leading into myself, something that I don’t often do.

    And even with Shadowmoor, I didn’t know when I was doing Shadowmoor that I was going to be leading Eventide. For those that remember that story, the lead designer dropped out at the last second, and I led just because I had nobody else I could put on it.

    So I didn’t design Shadowmoor knowing I was designing Eventide. I designed innistrad knowing I was designing Dark Ascension. And so I did a lot of things—I now realize a lot of them were sort of, I did on a gut level, but I didn’t do it on a level where I understood what I was doing until I got to Dark Ascension, and then I saw what happened in Innistrad and I’m like, “Oh, why didn’t I explain this?” Because, why didn’t I explain this? Partly because I didn’t know.

    And that’s an interesting thing about design that I learned from Innistrad was, how much of the way I design is by feel. I mean, people ask me a lot sort of how I design, what do I do, one of the things you learn as you design is, every time you design something, you are learning more about who you are as a designer. And that’s a never-ending process. It’s not like I go—I mean, I’m twenty years in. I’ve been designing a lot of Magic sets. I’ve designed like twenty Magic sets. I’m still learning about what makes me tick as a designer.

    Now, partly that’s because I’m growing as a designer, and so I’m changing. But part of this also, like, “Oh, I now see something I didn’t understand before.” And so Innistrad was a very important design for me to understand a little bit more about who I was and how I designed.

    And one of the things that like, it’s funny because I write a design column, I talk about my designs all the time. I do my podcast. It’s not like I’m not constantly talking about my designs. But it’s interesting that as I talk about my designs, like as I do a podcast like this, it is—a lot of times I’m saying aloud things I have never said until I bother—I mean, I might have internalized them, but like the big lesson I learned in Innistrad, it’s funny, is understanding how important—I think I knew I was trying to evoke emotion out of people, but what I didn’t understand, like I’ve talked about this before, which is, you want to understand your…

    I talk about in writing, I had a writing teacher that says everybody has a theme. Every writer has a theme. And read famous writers and figure out their theme. And then one day she’s like, “Now let’s figure out your theme! What is the theme you write?

    If you guys remember, my theme as a writer that I always come back to is how people like to function intellectually, but in reality they make most of their decisions by emotion. That people want to think that they process intellectually, when they process more emotionally than intellectually. And I made a whole play about it—the theme pops again and again. Mood Swings is about emotion, emotions are a very strong theme in my work.

    And one of the things Innistrad made me realize is that I think that I spend a lot of time thinking about what my audience would think about what I’m doing, and not what they would feel about what I was doing. That Innistrad was a big—I mean, I did a whole podcast about emotional connection. And I think that a lot of the lessons of that podcast came from Innistrad design. Of working on something that has this really emotional core, and starting to understand that what I was trying to do was match expectations, and that expectations was as much emotional as anything else.

    And a lot of what I was doing, interestingly, was as a designer, was I was trying to—and this was done sort of subconsciously, that I was trying to say, “Oh, they’re going to respond not intellectually, but emotionally. Let’s make sure I’m emotionally hitting the beats I need.”  

    That I was, as a game designer, having the same theme I was as a writer, and just unaware that I was doing it. And that was a very illuminating thing. That one of the neat things about doing design is understanding how you are functioning as a designer.

    So one of the things that’s a great thing to do, what we call postmortem, and I mean postmortem in R&D is when the whole group sits around and talks about what went right and what didn’t [go] right. But one of the things (???) sort of a personal postmortem. Which is, I find it very interesting, and obviously I write things and I have a very public place to do this. But even if it’s privately.

    Write down, after you’re finished designing something, about the design process, walk through your design process. Talk about it. And that what I find is, when you walk through your design process and you’re forced to kind of label things, and think about how you did things, that you will—“Whaaa?” Like, light bulb went off, you’re like, “Oh my goodness,” all these things you did not understand why you did them.

    And like I said, it was very interesting in Innistrad. In some ways, next time I talk about Lessons Learned, we'll do Dark Ascension. I didn’t realize some of the stuff I was doing in Innistrad until I got to Dark Ascension. I did a whole bunch of things to set up stuff in Dark Ascension that I didn’t understand when I was doing Innistrad even though I did it. I knew I was doing Dark Ascension and I did it, but I didn’t understand what I was doing necessarily.

    And so there’s a lot of design work that is done subconsciously. Like, one of the things about writing that I know from my writing teachers is that when you write things, there’s a lot of themes and things you put in your work that you put in, you did it, but you weren’t aware that you were doing it. And Innistrad taught me that I do that a lot in design, more so than I was aware of.

    So my first big mistake was not getting a better understanding of what I was doing so I could communicate it. Second… what other big mistake… I mean, I didn’t make major big mistakes, obviously, it’s the set I’m most proud of. I also, like I said, I think I made a mistake on the spirits. I solved it in Dark Ascension, I believe, but I wish I had given spirits more of a definition in Innistrad. I feel like Dark Ascension kind of picked up the ball there.

    Now, part of it was, early on I didn’t realize we were doing four monsters, and I kind of added them in later and I didn’t give them the same treatment as the first three. I also think that—I wish, I mean it taught me that I needed to be clear earlier about some of the things I want. Innistrad did a good job, the fact that I came out early trying to explain double-faced cards and wanting to do double-faced cards made me realize that was something that we should be doing all the time.

    And a lot of how design has changed is we are getting involved much earlier with other people outside of design to say, hey, is this working? Hey, development, is this developable? Hey, rules teams, can we write text for this? Hey, templating people, can we template this?”

    Talking to the different people, talking to digital, talking to creative, there’s lots and lots of people that have repercussions of what you are doing, and that design is better if it’s serving those other functions. And Innistrad made me realize that we need to be doing that more often. That part of being good at—part of being a good designer is making sure that you are setting up all the people down the road that are going to be working on what you’re doing, and you are maximizing your design for those people.

    A good design is design that is developable. A good design is design that creative can do the work they need to do on it. A good design is design that digital can work with. A good design is design that organized play can work with. A good design is design that can be template. That rules can be written for. A good design is design that everybody else doing their job making Magic can do their job.

    Your job as the first ones down the road, the first ones in line, is to make sure that you are making something that fulfills what everybody else working on the project will need. That you’re not making a product in a vacuum, you’re making a product that a whole bunch of other people will work on. Your job as first one in the line is to make sure that everybody else is served by what you are doing. Your job as a designer is to serve as everybody down the line. To make your design not just the best design it can be, but the best design it can be to fulfill the roles of everybody else. And that was a big takeaway.

    So anyway, I think that Innistrad—I learned a lot from Innistrad. It’s funny as I talk about it today, like there are major things I learned from it. Major things I understood. It was successful, but it really made me rethink a lot of how I did things, on how I structured things. How I thought. How I thought about myself as a designer. How I function with the rest of R&D and the rest of Wizards. 

    So anyway. It was pretty illuminating. Like I said. While it was a very successful set, I think behind the scenes it was very successful too. That I walked away with a lot of lessons. Interestingly, the very next set, Dark Ascension, I made a whole bunch of mistakes. But that will be my next lesson sort of we talk about.

    But anyway, I’ve now parked my car, which we all know what that means, it means it’s time to end my drive to work. So instead of making Magic, it’s time for me—no, I said that backwards. Instead of talking Magic, it’s time for me to be making Magic. 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 is another in my series of the color pairs. So we’re up to blue/red. So we’re in the enemy section of the color pairs, so these are now colors in which they have an internal conflict. So I’m going to talk about the two colors, what their internal conflict is, and where they overlap. What happens when you put them together.

    Okay. So blue, blue seeks perfection through knowledge. Blue believes in tabula rasa, that every single thing is born a clean slate, and it can become whatever it wants to become. That the only thing in its way is it needs knowledge to understand how to do it. It needs to gain the experience, it needs to gain the tools, it needs to gain the training. Blue believes that, like, with the proper training and tools and just understanding, that blue can become whatever it wants. And it is seeking perfection. What it says is, I want to make myself the best that I can be. I want to figure out how to use my intellect and reach the pinnacle of what I am capable of.

    Now, red in contrast is all about seeking freedom through action. Red says, I have the strong… my body tells me what it wants. I have these emotions that speak, that are primal, that tell me what I need to do. And my goal is to live true to my own heart. I have this passion and these beliefs and I need to live to my passion and my beliefs.

    And what I want is, I want to exist in a world where that can happen. Where I am free to do what I am able to do. That I can have a passion, have an idea, and do what I need to do. And, red is all about seizing the moment. Of following your heart. That if you feel something, you act on it. If you are happy, be happy. If you are sad, be sad. If you are angry, be angry.

    Now, one of the things about red is red is often shown—because we tend to focus on conflict and fighting, you tend to see red’s angry side. And so a lot of people associate red with anger. And while red does have anger as a component, that’s not the only emotion that red deals with. It’s just the emotion that is most frequently seen in the card set.

    Okay. Now, the conflict between blue and red comes from these different ideologies. Blue very much believes that what you want to do is think and in order to have the best outcome, you want to think through every option.

    Let’s say a situation comes up. Blue’s like, “Okay, before I act, I want to think through every possibility, because I want the perfect answer.” And the key to doing that is to examine the problem at hand and look at every possible solution. So before I act, I carefully think through everything I do. Red, who’s all about sort of impulse, is like, “No no no. Thinking causes you problems. Thinking, you doubt yourself. What you want to do is be true to what you’re feeling and act on your feelings.”

    So right here we get the key conflict between blue and red. Blue is about thinking, red is about feeling. Blue is about passivity about waiting, about making sure you’re doing the right thing. Red is about acting in the moment.

    So blue is all about not acting in the short term to make sure that in the long term you’re doing the right thing. Where red is all about doing the right thing in the short term, not worrying about the long term. And so they very much come in conflict. Very much this is emotions vs. intellect. That blue is the intellectual side, red is the emotional side.

    It’s a key—a debate that goes back to the beginning of humanity, which is are you supposed to follow your head, or follow your heart? Do you follow your intellect or your passion? Do you think or do you act? That is the key of the blue/red conflict.

    Okay. So, well what happens when you get the color that’s all about waiting and doing the right long-term thing, with the color that’s all about doing the quick short-term thing? And the answer is a very interesting one. Because blue is all about, blue has a sense of curiosity and a sense of wanting to know. Red has a sense of acting.

    So when you get curiosity and action and you put them together, you start getting creativity. Because creativity has two components to it. It has a combination of a quest of curiosity and a love of knowledge, combined with a passion for discovering something. Of finding something. And when you get blue and red together, you get this very strong passionate creativity.

    The Izzet, for example, is the blue/red guild in Ravnica, they are the inventors. And the reason is, blue and red both have a little bit of interaction with artifacts. Blue believes in technology. Blue believes that the key to becoming the best you can is having the best tools available to you. Technology is one of those tools. If I can have a device or something that will help me, then I should have that. Why shouldn’t I have that? If I’m better with a particular weapon or a particular tool, well then I’m better to have that. Blue very much leans toward technology.

    Red loves to tinker. Red loves to get its hands on things, and it is very hands-on. It learns by doing. Red doesn’t learn by reading or talking, red learns by doing. And so when you get this passion for technology and this desire for hands-on, you very much get into the inventor’s mindset. That inventors are very passionate, and must get in and dig, and that they’re not necessarily thinking—they’re sort of exploring as they go. They’re learning along the way.

    And that the Izzet mentality, which really captures the sense I’m talking about, is the idea of this passion for discovery. That you take the passion of red and the love of technology and the curiosity of blue, and you mash them together.

    So like the interesting thing there is, that blue and red when they combine—one of the things about when you find colors combining is they tend to find different aspects that move together. So blue, when blue gets with red, it gives up a little bit of its stand-backishness. And plays up more its curiosity. Where red gives up a little bit of its recklessness, a little bit of its destructive qualities, and leans a little bit towards its constructive qualities.

    So—and also another big difference is that—so let me give the similarities. (???). So the thing that blue and red have in common, the number one thing that blue and red have in common is, in Magic, we have—the colors have a percentage of creatures vs. spells. So the number one creature color is white. White has more creatures than any other color. Green is number two. Black is number three. Red is number four. Blue is number five.

    Now, when you don’t have creatures, what you have in those slots are spells. So it literally flips upside-down. So blue is the number one spell color. And by spell I actually mean non-creatures. Blue has more of—now, it also, by that nature having more, tends to have more instants and sorceries. It also tends to—it just has more noncreature spells, literally because it has less slots dedicated to creatures, so it has more dedicated to noncreatures. Which makes blue number one and red number two of noncreature spells. Especially instants and sorceries.

    So that’s one area where red and blue tend to overlap. They tend very much to be spell-oriented. And as we get into mechanics, spell mattering is a very big part of red and blue. That when you look at what red and blue do when they get together, one of the big focuses they’ll often have is caring about instants and sorceries.

    Okay. So let’s start talking about where they overlap. Now, I will say this, one of the things when we make hybrid cards or we make, so to a lesser extent, multicolor cards, or like I was talking about, recently I did the Dark Ascension podcast [NLH—Not transcribed] where I talked about flashbacks with a different color. Those act a lot like a hybrid card.

    The key to a hybrid card is, where colors overlap. If I make a red/blue hybrid card, it’s like, “Well what can red do and blue do? Where do red and blue overlap?” And what you’ll find is, red and blue of all the ten color pairs overlap the least. Blue and black is probably number two. But red and blue have always traditionally been very problematic.

    For example, currently right now red and blue have no overlap in an evergreen mechanic. That it’s something we’ve been searching for forever is what could blue and red do? And so one of the things right now is that when we do like hybrid cards, like blue and red have to start finding other things to do. Activated abilities or something. Because of all the keyword abilities—now, black and blue aren’t much better, black and blue overlap in flying and flying only. So like I said. Red and blue and black and blue, somehow blue’s the trouble child, tend to have less overlaps. But anyway, let’s talk about blue and red, where do they overlap? They overlap in some places.

    So number one, they both have the ability to… I’ll say looting, although we call the blue version “looting” and the red version “rummaging.” Which is, drawing cards and discarding cards. Now, blue will draw first and then discard. Red will discard first and then draw. And that’s trying to play up the different ideologies. Of the colors. Both of them are spell colors, both of them want to have access to new cards, but the difference is, blue, the careful, gets to draw first and think, and really think about what it wants to do. Red is a little more reckless, so it throws things away before it necessarily knows what it’s getting.

    And the reason we did that is, we liked to have both of these colors have access to some card flow. But we wanted them to feel a little bit differently. And we like a lot. And a lot of people complained that the blue one is just strictly better than the red one, and the answer I have to that is that card flow in red—one of red’s big disadvantages is, red tries to burn you out. Red has direct damage. And that usually what happens in red is, it gets very—it tries to beat you as quick as it can. Red can get very, very close to beating you, and the ability to get access to one or two more cards often can mean the game. It can mean winning.

    And so the ability of looting in red is just slightly better. That what red does, it is very powerful. So one of the other reasons we do rummaging is, red already has a slight advantage in that its lack of getting cards is something that’s supposed to rein it in. And so we were careful with red, we don’t tend to give red card advantage. Blue can get card advantage. But looting isn’t card advantage. Card advantage would be drawing cards where you go up the number of cards.

    But we tried to make sure that what we do with red, that we are careful of how much utility of getting cards red can do, because it’s so valuable to red. That a color that like, it’s trying to eke out the last few points of damage. Getting access to other cards can be very powerful.

    So another ability that is similar in overlap is blue does get straight-up card advantage. Which is blue gets to draw cards. What we’ve done with red is what I call impulsive drawing, which is red can exile a card from the top of the library and then until end of turn, can play that card. So essentially, red has its version of draw, but it has to use it immediately. It doesn’t have the ability to long-term hold it. It has a short-term answer.

    And if you look at both rummaging and impulsive drawing, it’s a good example where you see the difference between blue and red. That red can kind of do some stuff blue can do, but it has to do it quicker, more immediate. It doesn’t have any long-term gain from it. It’s trying to use it very short-term.

    Okay. Red and blue also have power/toughness swapping. That’s not something we do as much. Sometimes in hybrid you’ll see us do it just because it’s an area that red and blue overlap. Which is—so one of the things that red and blue do is blue is all about being—blue has, I don't know if mischievous is the right word, but blue likes to manipulate things. Blue is into manipulation.

    Red is into trickery. Red likes to kind of fool you. And so blue and red kind of overlap a little bit in that they will mess with you, but the means by which they mess with you is a little different.

    So for example, both of them can copy spells. Both of them can copy spells. Both of them can redirect spells. Both of them can kind of mess with what’s going on. But the flavor, I mean they overlap a little bit in mechanics, but the flavor is very, very different. Blue is manipulating you. It’s carefully studying magic and it is sort of using that knowledge to mess with you. Where red enjoys the sort of “Ha ha, what you thought was going to happen didn’t happen.” Red really likes creating short-term emotional responses. “Ha ha! Ha ha! I did this! I tricked you!” And so red and blue overlap there. And power/toughness swapping is kind of blue manipulating and red going “Hee hee!”  Some of the overlap in red and blue have that sort of feel.

    Also, blue and red are the two colors primary and secondary in gaining control of things. And this likewise has a little bit of flavor. But blue, blue is a long-term… what blue is doing when it takes control of something is, “I’m using mind control. I’m using magic in which I’m taking control of your mind.” That blue’s sort of mental manipulation is a long-term manipulation. I have changed the way you are thinking. You are now… I might have changed your memories or I might have done something where you are now convinced that you are working for me, or that you have no idea that I’ve manipulated your memory.

    Red, what red tends to do is when it controls something, t’s manipulating emotions, which are not inherently long-term. It’s inflaming your passion or your anger. It’s taking some aspect of you that you already have and sort of playing that up. But the point is, at some point you recover from that. It’s like, well, fine, you can make me angry for a turn, but at some point I go, “Oh, okay, whoa, what’s going on? Why am I so angry?” And that red’s control is a short-term bursty type of control, and not a long-term control. Which is something that blue has.

    Okay. So let’s see. Red and blue, so once again, you’ll see a lot of this. The overlap in red and blue, they overlap mechanically but they represent different things. It’s a very common theme you’ll see today. Okay, so red and blue also have +N/-N, which what that means is, oh, I get +1/-1. I get +2/-2.

    For blue, it tends to be part of a shapeshifting flavor. Usually when you get +1/-1, you also have -1/+1. They don’t have to come together. But in blue, when you see it, it’s a means of representing shapeshifting. That blue is changing its shape. Blue is the color of change. And so it has the ability to manipulate its own shape.

    When red does it, it is representing of red pushing advantage short-term at a long-term disadvantage, the idea being, okay, I’m willing to put more attention to my offense at the sake of my defense. That now I’m more powerful, but I’m easier to damage and destroy.

    So when red uses +N/-N, it is more trying to show that red is pushing to gain advantage, not caring about the disadvantage. That red is king of I will get my advantage with a disadvantage, just like okay, well if I need to get my offensive advantage for my defensive disadvantage, okay.

    Black and red overlap a little bit here, although black is here—red is like, whatever, I’m going to do it, and black is like I’ve weighed the options, this is worth the trade. That is one of the big differences between red and black is that they both do it, but black has carefully thought it out and decided it’s worth the risk. Red’s sort of like, “Ehh, whatever, good enough. I’m not going to think about it.”

    Okay. Another area that blue and red—this is another one that all the colors kind of overlap. Which is token-making. Red is number one in temporary token-making, meaning it makes tokens that go away at end of turn. Blue dips its fingers into that a little bit. You also sometimes see when we do red/blue that red can make dragon tokens and blue can make big flying tokens. So they’re the two colors that could make big flying tokens. That’s another place for overlap. Blue is not particularly big at making tokens, although it can do it. But making the big tokens or the temporary tokens is the biggest area you’ll see some overlap.

    Okay, another big area, where this is a funny one, which is blue and red both have the ability to help get creatures through combat. But they do it differently, although the outcome is very much similar. Red says target creature or any number of creatures can’t block. It keeps creatures from blocking. Blue keeps creatures from being blocked.

    So here’s the funny thing. If I make an enchantment and I say, “creatures cannot block,” that’s red. If I make an enchantment that says, “All creatures are unblockable,” that is blue. They do the same thing. Or more likely, instead of the broad one, you might want to say, “All my opponent’s creatures can’t block.” And then “All my creatures can’t be blocked.” That does the same thing. Yet one is red and one is blue.

    And there’s a little nuance there. One of the things that’s very important in game design in general is, the reason the colors exist, the reason there are five colors is, we want there to be different ways to play and you have different choices. And you want the colors to have different nuances.

    That’s why the color pie exists. That’s why each color has different abilities and different strengths and different weaknesses. That when you play a color, there’s certain things it does for you and certain things it can’t. And that’s important to us, that’s why the color pie is so important is, I want to make sure that the colors represent what they can do and that they have reasons you’d want to play them over colors, and reasons you don’t. A lot of this flavor stuff’s also important, even when you overlap mechanically, it’s important that what they represent is a little bit different. It feels a little bit different.

    Okay. Next, I talked about—so interesting sorcery matters. I mentioned that up front, but let me talk about that a little more. So number one, you’ll see a lot of triggers, where it’s like, “When you cast an instant or sorcery, something happens.” A creature, like a very common thing is you’ll see a creature get a bonus. Or sometimes you’ll have a triggered enchantment where when you do it it triggers something.

    Red and blue very much care about sorceries and instants being played. Sometimes they can make it easier to play instants and sorceries. They also are the two colors that allow you to go get instants and sorceries from the graveyard and bring them back. They’re the two colors that sometimes allow you to use flashback, to grant flashback to instants and sorceries in the graveyard. They’re definitely the two colors that intermingle to allow you to play a deck in which you want to emphasize instants and sorceries.

    Teleportal
    Leap of Flame
    Like, the two times that we have visited the Izzet in Ravnica, both times they were very spell-oriented. The first time we saw replicate, where they had spells where you could copy the spells, copying spells is something red and blue do. The second time was overload, where they could change the number of targets. Well, changing targets is something red and blue does as well.

    And as you can see, a lot of stuff where red and blue overlap is types of spells. For example, most of the stuff I said today, I mean obviously, power/toughness swapping occasionally is on creatures, but normally you do it to creatures. Looting and rummaging, once again, can appear on creatures, but once again they’re spells. Copying, redirecting. Token-making. Unblockability. A lot of that stuff is spell-oriented.

    A lot of where red and blue overlap—now remember, red and blue have more spells, so there’s clearly a place to overlap. So that is a place where you see a lot more of it. Red and blue, when you get them together, by the way, so one of the things that’s interesting is, every time we make a set, we have to make the color pairs and figure out what the color pairs do.

    And there tends to be what we call a default deck. And what that means is, given no exterior changes, the set’s not doing something a little different that pushes it in a slightly different direction, each color pair has a natural state. The kind of thing it wants to do.

    So the blue/red neutral state deck tends to be a tempo-oriented deck. It’s spell-oriented, and it’s tempo-oriented. What I mean by tempo-oriented is, red and blue both have a lot of spells that kind of disrupt things. Thematically, it goes back to the manipulation, to the trickery, that there’s a lot of spells that disrupt.

    Now, some of them are where they overlap, some of them are different. Counterspells can be very disruptive. Damage can be very disruptive. And a lot of what’s going on is, the idea of tempo advantage, we’ll get a little bit into advanced game theory.

    The idea is, there are different ways for you to get advantage over your opponent. Card advantage is all about, oh, well I just am netting more cards long-term than my opponent. I have more cards available to me, cards are a resource, I will overwhelm you in a resource.

    Well, another resource is time. And opportunity. And what tempo says is, if I’m able to gain advantage not because I’m drawing more cards than you, but I’m forcing you to sort of waste more time than me, that I’m getting things done, where I’m doing things that are delaying you, that I get an advantage of time. What we call tempo.

    Man-o'-War
    UnsummonAnd the idea, a good example of tempo is, I’m able to play a spell, play a creature that… like, Man-o'-War is a really good example. I’m using old-school—Man O’ War is a 2/2 creature that when it comes into play, Unsummons one of the opponent’s creatures.

    So when you think about what it does is, I play a spell, I play a creature. When the dust settles, I now have a creature. I am up a creature. And you are down a creature. Now, the creature’s back in your hand. It’s not forever gone. It’s not like I’ve destroyed it. But I had a tempo advantage. I played a turn in which I went up a resource and you went down a resource.

    And that resource is time-oriented. You’re going to get to play the spell again, but you’re going to take a turn to play it. You’re going to have to waste your mana and take a turn to do that. So I’ve sort of stolen a turn from you. That’s the idea of tempo.

    And once again, I’m way oversimplifying this. It’s the idea of getting the advantage of time and opportunity on the opponent. Red and blue tend to do that very well. They have a lot of different tools and availability to do that. And they tend to combine in a way that does that well. That’s one of the resources that blue and red get you.

    Stormchaser ChimeraThey also have a spell center. Usually when there is a mechanic in the set that’s a spell-centered mechanic, usually the deck that takes advantage of that archetypally is usually red/blue. Not always, but very often. When scry matters, a lot of the time red and blue might be the “scry matters” deck. Whatever. Pick your spell-oriented mechanic, that red and blue are often the deck that’s going to take advantage of that.

    Okay. But wait a minute? Is there nothing… do they not overlap anywhere in creatures? So let me talk about the ideas, there’s a thematic area that they can overlap a little bit. So red and blue happen to be the two colors of the elements.

    So there are four elements, so red takes the fire and earth part of the elementals, and blue takes the water and the air. And those components are very important parts of the color, thematically. The reason blue has so many flying creatures is because blue is the color of air. The reason blue has so many water-based creatures and the merfolk and stuff is that blue is the color of the water.

    Also, thematically, if you go to like astrology and stuff like that, that water and air have a lot of mental qualities to them. Where earth and fire have a little more body qualities to them. That’s another, a little difference between blue and red is that blue is very focused on sort of the mental, and red is a little bit more focused on the physical. More on, like red is sort of like, how am I feeling? And I have senses that I have, and the physical sensation.

    Maybe I should say physical vs. mental, maybe that makes more sense. Red is very physical.  “I feel something.” That’s a very physical thing. And I must act on how I feel. Where blue is about sort of how I’m thinking about it. That’s a very different thing.

    Anyway, because the elements overlap, they’re the two colors that have elemental qualities, we have an elemental creature type. So that’s something you’ll see in red and blue. It’s not that the other cards don’t have elementals, it’s just that red and blue have the most elementals, because the four elements, if you will, show up in red and blue. And so that’s a very common place for us to go.

    Time ElementalNow, Magic has had its fun with elementals. We have made elementals out of things that aren’t really elements by any stretch of the imagination. Time Elemental. We’ve done all sorts of things. But it is something that we definitely see overlapped in red and blue.

    The other thing that red and blue tend to do a lot of is red and blue, because they’re spell-oriented colors, you also see that they often have a little bit more activated abilities on creatures that have a spell sensation to them. Blue does this a little bit more than red, but red still does it. Of they definitely have a little bit of, I have a little guy, and the little guy, although he’s a creature, has a spell orientation to him.

    Frozen Shade
    The other big thing on creatures in general is you will see that red and blue tend to like activations. That they are colors that, for example, red has firebreathing. And blue often has different types of pumping as well. That you can see a lot—different colors do pumping in different ways, black has its shades, and things. But there definitely is a sense of even when you get down to the creatures of red and blue, that there’s a little bit of a spell-like quality to them.

    Okay. So let’s talk a little bit about, okay. So the positive part of blue/red getting together is, like I said, this passionate curiosity. This desire to get your hands on and find answers through trying things. So what is the negative side of red/blue?

    The negative side of red/blue tends to be—well, the negative side of blue is impassivity. Is the idea of not doing anything. And the downside of red is sort of acting irrationally. So when you get impassivity and irrationality together, blue and red together can be very vindictive. That blue is all about sort of manipulation and sort of thinking things through, and red has a very petty side because red is very emotional.

    And so if you cross red, if you do something that red doesn’t like, that red can really harp on it. But blue is mental. So if you take red’s quality of harping on things, of not letting things go. And blues just like to dissect things and blues sort of lean towards trickery, blue and red are the tricky colors, that you get those together, they can be a bit mean.

    They can definitely be—so like I’m talking about positive red/blue is definitely kind of the fun absent-minded adventure. Which Izzet plays into quite a bit. And the downside of blue/red is a little more the mean, vindictive, almost the bully in some ways, but the intellectual bully. Not the one that’s going to beat you up, but the one that’s going to make your life a living hell because it knows the things you care about and is going to one by one take those things away from you.

    Now, blue/black also has a little similar quality. Blue/black also, black’s a little more sadistic than red. So blue/black also has some of these qualities, but the difference is that blue/red comes more out of emotional spite than it comes out of tactical advantage. That blue/black is not going to do something that long-term is problematic.

    Where blue/red sometimes will, like “I’m really upset with this person, I’m going to get them” and it’s not necessarily, if it’s not necessarily long-term the right thing to do.  Blue/black will get somebody if it has a gain long-term for doing it, where blue/red does not. And once again, the kind of difference between red/black there, where red and black both can be pretty vindictive, where black is vindictive carefully, and red is not very careful. Red is not a careful color.

    So one of the things that’s tricky in general about talking about blue/red is that blue and red, like I said, are not—the lack of overlap is—like one of the things that’s interesting, which is, if you were starting from scratch, and you were like, “Okay, I’m going to make all the color pairs,” I mean, Richard clearly spent a lot of time and energy giving each color strong identity. Which he did a great job at. And the mechanics kind of fell out of where it made sense.

    And then with time, like a lot of the things I’ve labeled, that were overlap blue/red things, did not start in both colors. Spell redirecting was a blue thing that we moved to red. Stealing was a blue thing that we moved to red.  Looting was a blue thing that we moved to red. That there was a bunch of things that we said, “Oh, I think red could do this too.”

    So we had a meeting many, many years ago where we said, oh, you know what? Red has the smallest piece of the color pie. Red, there’s the least number of things. Of all the colors, red does the least number of things. Well, let’s go look at other people’s things and take some things so that red can do some stuff that felt red.

    And in some cases, we were extending it, meaning the original color wasn’t losing it, just red was also doing it. And in some cases, we were moving it to red. Red didn’t used to do it, and now red was going to do it. For example, temporary stealing used to be in blue, and we decided to say, okay, what if we divided stealing, gave permanents—let blue keep permanent stealing, give temporary stealing to red?

    And anyway, it was funny because what we said is, let’s just go with what the colors want to do. We wrote down all the abilities, okay, here’s what red does. What might red want to do? What, philosophically, will make sense in red?

    And what we found was, most of the things that red wanted to do that were in somebody else’s color pie tended to be in blue’s. There was some overlap with black. Red and black have a lot of overlap. But it was interesting that—well, where black and red tend to overlap in the destructive areas. Black and red were all about, “Oh, well black and red both have this destructive quality, oh, okay, there’s some destructive overlap between the colors.”

    But when we went to anything with some nuance to it, red and blue were where the overlap happened. It was very interesting. Interesting sort of… and that’s when we realized that red has this trickster quality that we hadn’t really been playing up.

    One of the things that’s hard is, red likes chaos. And trying to—for a long time we interpreted chaos as randomness, and a little bit of randomness is okay. But it’s not typically great gameplay because you can’t control it. And while thematically it makes a lot of sense, keep giving red things where it can’t control it doesn’t make for good gameplay. If red can never control what it’s doing, then why play red? You won’t play red.

    And so what we’ve found is, what red wanted to do is not be chaotic itself, it wanted to create chaos in others. And that is a really important distinction. That is why spell redirection and some of that stuff started to happen. Where it’s like, red is all about, you thought your plan was going… you were all orderly. I introduced chaos into your order. Not that I was chaotic. I used chaos as a weapon against you. That was an important distinction.

    So anyway, final thoughts. I… I had traffic today. So this was not the podcast—some podcasts, when I get in the car, and I say, “Okay, oh, I see some traffic,” I’m like, “Okay, whatever. I could talk forever about this topic.” Blue/red overlap, blue/red the color pair is tricky because it is—thematically blue and red do overlap a decent amount, there definitely is this desire to manipulate for different reasons where you see the overlap. And there is a spell orientation overlap.

    But it’s just less. Like, I did a sheet of paper and wrote all the things they overlap, just so I could look at it before I start my drive, just go, “Okay, what is the overlap?” And blue/red just had the smallest. I knew it had the smallest. But I wrote it out anyway.

    And like, there’s some colors like black and red or green and white, where like the sheet is filled. Top to bottom. I’m writing little notes on the side. Like, it is just filled to the gills. Blue/red’s like, ehh, it’s space. I can make my lettering a little bigger. I have tons of space. There’s just not a huge amount of overlap between blue and red.

    Should there be more overlap between blue and red? It’s something we’re always looking for. One of the holy grails we’ve been looking for is the idea of a keyword mechanic that overlaps between blue and red. Likewise, the keyword overlaps between blue and black.

    Flying right now, the problem with flying is, both blue/white and blue/black, their only overlap is flying. And so we need one more mechanic. Blue and white kind of want to be the flying overlap, because blue and white are the two flying colors. Black is for sure third in flying. So making flying the blue/black thing is problematic because really blue/white wants to be the flying thing. So finding the blue/black overlap and finding the red/blue overlap in a keyword mechanic is… anyway. An ongoing quest. (???)

    One of the things that we do in R&D is, there’s things that we want that we kind of write down that we know we’re always looking for. And the fact that we haven’t found it yet just means that it’s not sitting in an obvious place. But anyway, we have a list of things that we are looking for.

    And like for example, I talked today about both rummaging and about impulsive drawing. And both of those are relatively new. One of the things we’ve been playing around with red has been “Can you take abilities that you see in other colors, but have a more short-term feel to them?” That red can do it, but it has to do it quickly and immediately. Where the other color normally gets more time to do it.

    And so both these abilities obviously where it’s going to blue, there is interesting thematic. One of the things that’s very neat about enemy colors is, that there is something every enemy color—like, obviously the allies have something in common. I mean, the entire nature of the color wheel makes them have this huge philosophical overlap.

    The neat thing about the enemy colors is definitely the idea of, there is something about them that’s familiar even though they represent opposite ends of the spectrum. That blue and red are the spell colors, even though they’re radically different. Even though one’s the intellect color and one’s the emotion color. There still is an element to them that overlaps.

    And I think—I mean, I think black/white is probably the most iconic of the conflicts. But blue/red is probably number two. Emotion/intellect’s pretty big. And then even down to the idea of fire and ice, of just heat and cold, that there’s this quality to red and blue that really feel as opposite ends of the spectrum.

    Like, I just find it very funny, like, when I just look at a faucet, like there’s red and blue on every faucet. Because red is the color for heat and blue is the color for cold. And that is just something that’s—the iconography is there in us. Just like black and white are very much obviously iconography opposite colors. That the yin and the yang is black and white. And that when you want to see contrast, a checkerboard is black/white and stuff like that. It’s interesting that blue/red’s another thing with this color combination where there’s clear opposites that you’ll just see show up in everyday objects.

    But anyway, I’m almost to work. You can tell I’m trying to wax poetically here. I am blue/red, for those that do not know this. I’m Izzet, I am a passionate, curiosity sort of guy. Within me I have a love and a quest for knowledge. I very much want to constantly perfect myself and get better and learn and improve. But I also am an emotional person and I very much act on my emotions. And I’m famous for saying what’s on my mind, and I get in trouble all the time for sort of voicing what I’m feeling. So it’s very funny how when you combine those two together, that like they’re very much, the two color combination that I by far most identify with is blue/red. I see the blue in me, I see the red in me.

    So one of the things, by the way, that’s fascinating for those that have never done it is, it is neat to try to self-identify. I know people do that a lot when we do the guild things. But one of the best ways to understand the color pie is to apply it to things that you know well and sort of see, “Oh, well what color am I? What color are my friends?” We do a lot of—on my blog, we do a lot of pop culture. What color is Thor, or what color is Yoda? And that it is fun to sort of look at characters and sort of get a sense of what their motivations are, what are the tools available to them, stuff like that.

    So blue and red… oh, by the way. Blue/red, by the way, when you look at all the guilds and you say to the public, “What is your favorite guild?” By self-identification, Izzet is number one by self-identification. That when we say “Hey,” you know, “You can join a guild and you can pick whatever you want,” that people tend to gravitate toward blue/red.

    I’m not sure what that says. It’s very interesting. We know that blue as a color tends to peak very highly for Magic players, just because game players in general tend to have a little bit more of the intellectual side. Shared with blue.

    Anyway, a little tidbit, that Izzet is the number one self-identified guild. And I’m in the guild.

    But anyway, my friends, I am now arriving at work. We have a little less traffic today, so you got a bonus extended version of blue/red. So obviously, last time I talked white/black, which means next time I will talk black/green. We will learn all about life and death and the conflict there.


    But anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed the little tiny peek into the world of blue and red. But I have just parked in the parking space. So we all know what that means. It means this is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking Magic, it’s time for me to be making Magic. See you guys next time.
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