6/12/15 Episode 234: Lessons Learned, Innistrad

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?

Like, 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.

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.