This past Monday I got the email from Wizards of the Coast telling me that I’d washed out of the competition in this year’s Great Designer Search. The round that saw my demise was a 75 question multiple choice test that put contestants’ knowledge of Magic: The Gathering’s history and design through the wringer. If anyone tells you that the test was easy, they’re fooling themselves. I’ve written about the Dunning-Kruger effect before, and denying the challenge thrown at us would be a prime example of it.
Those of us who’d been eliminated from the final round learned exactly how difficult it was to make the cut — only 94 people finished with 2 or fewer questions wrong — but not how we as individual recipients of the email had scored. The correct answers to the test will be revealed officially some time in March, but there’s been considerable (if not slightly controversial) effort put in by some of the over 3,000 participants that were cut via the test to extrapolate the correct answers. Based on this data, combined with the research and verification of my own answers, I believe I missed the cutoff by only a single question — and I know exactly which three they were, if that’s not a total kick in the gut.
That’s beside the point of this post though, and I intend to dive into the story of the community’s sleuthing for the answers in some later post, including my explanation as to why “the wisdom of the masses” is a logical fallacy. I may not have a degree in applied mathematics, but I can show two specific cases in their aggregated selections in which I was in the minority and, despite the community’s collective agreement on a different answer, I was right and the community was wrong.
Ballsy, I know. We’ll get to that some other day soon.
Today is about the essays.
In order to qualify to take the test in the first place, participants needed to write ten essays, each between 250 and 350 words, answering ten questions posed by Magic R&D. These questions served primarily as a test of will rather than one of de facto qualification; the general idea is that if you’re not willing to grind through the essays, there’s not much point in taking the multiple choice test. In the event of the multiple choice test not narrowing the field to exactly eight finalists, the essays would become the tiebreaker. Ain’t nobody in R&D that wants to read 30,000-plus essays to pick the 300 people who should take the multiple choice test.
I wrote ten essays to move forward to the test round. I did not move past the test round. My essays no longer serve a purpose in the competition. There is no reason for them ever to be read by the judges in the Great Designer Search.
I’ll be damned if they never get read at all though. See, I’d put money on it that out of the over 3,000 people who wrote those essays, nobody sacrificed more to write them than I did. It was a calculated value proposition for me, as the potential reward could well exceed the expense, but make no mistake, the time it took to write them did come at an expense.
I think I might have blinked. Honey, we need to go back and take the picture again.
I wrote the essays over the better part of two days, alone in a hotel room, while my wife, our two-year-old son, and my wife’s parents spent that time exploring Walt Disney World. I skipped Disney World. In order to write ten essays that would otherwise never be read, I gave up seeing my son, who idolizes Figment the Dragon, ride on Journey Into Imagination for the first time. It may sound petty, but this genuinely stings.
In all fairness, I was also sick as a dog on those two mornings, so maybe I wouldn’t have enjoyed my family vacation in the Most Magical Place On Earth anyway.
Ouch.
C’est la vie, though. I knew what I was getting myself into. Missing the cut on the test is all on me, and I willingly gave up those days.
After all that though, I still have those essays, and they make for a nice, fat, 3,200-word chunk of a blog post about game design. Multi-purposing is a thing. Double-dipping, sort of. Making lemonade. Recycling for blog traffic. Whatever.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give to you… The Essays.
Introduce yourself and explain why you are a good fit for this internship.
For about 36 years, I’ve been training to design Magic.
No. Scratch that. That’s not entirely accurate. It’s almost ridiculous; Magic hasn’t even been around that long. But 36 years is a pretty good ballpark for how long I’ve been studying and designing games.
My name is Sean Fletcher. Since I was a kid, deconstructing board games has been one of my favorite hobbies. Somewhere in the last decade, I went pro, and I’m currently a full-time board game inventor, designer, and developer with a studio in Seattle. In that time I’ve created games that went on to be published by at least a dozen publishers all around the world. Throughout the course of creating themed and abstract strategy games, card games, word games, and family party games, much of the design philosophy I’ve come to follow has its roots in the history and workings of Magic.
In 2006, I was invited by Mark Rosewater to join the Shadowmoor design team as a contractor. Through Mark and the work I did for Wizards of the Coast, my wife and I have built strong personal connections to many of the folks who’ve worked there (and still work there). Even after my contract had ended and Shadowmoor was on shelves, the extended family we have found within WotC has only grown.
You’re looking for a new game designer. When it comes down to it, I’m a known quantity; I’ve worked on Magic once before, I’ve got a successful track record of making fun and exciting games professionally, and I already have a positive rapport with many of the people I’d be working with. Speaking as someone who’s had to interview and hire new game designers for my own department before, I’d take that kind of known quantity any day of the week.
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An evergreen mechanic is a keyword mechanic that shows up in (almost) every set. If you had to make an existing keyword mechanic evergreen, which one would you choose and why?
Evergreen mechanics earn their status as “any set” tools by being easily understood, highly versatile, and benign in relation to aesthetic themes any given set may have. The nature of evergreen mechanics is that they work in literally any setting, without a need to justify how they fit thematically into that world.
When Equipment made its debut in Mirrodin, it was easy to see how the Equip mechanic was going to be a permanent mainstay of the game. Armor, weapons, and tools are a natural part of any narrative world, so it follows that a mechanic like Equip, which is obvious in its granular intent without steering other layers of narrative, would become an instant evergreen mechanic.
Vehicles and the corresponding Crew mechanic seem to be poised to be the next addition to the evergreen roster. If I were to choose any existing keyword ability to bring up to the primary tool set, I wouldn’t have a single doubt about whether Crew could hold its place reliably. Since its second appearance in Ixalan block, it’s proven to be a mechanic that takes the flavor of its setting, rather than the other way around. It is generally intuitive, and it can be applied in a functionally limitless number of interesting ways.
There are strong connections that tie Equip and Crew together; both were key thematic showpieces within the sets they premiered in, both have pushed the limits of reasonable balance in their early days. I believe that those connections give credence that Crew will also find its footing quickly, like Equip, and be something we can expect in nearly every set moving forward.
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If you had to remove evergreen status from a keyword mechanic that is currently evergreen, which one would you remove and why?
Shaving a keyword off of the evergreen roster isn’t easy; there’s not much fat to trim on that roast. The mechanic that stands out most to me in this regard is Prowess, and frankly, I think it’s a shame that it does. Don’t get me wrong; Prowess is a good mechanic, and outside of academic debates I wouldn’t have given it a second look, but here we are and here Prowess is.
Prowess is one of only a handful of keywords that produce no effect without a secondary independent action happening within the game. A creature with Flying is always flying, regardless of what other creatures are doing. A creature with Lifelink is always ready to start padding your life total for you. A creature with Prowess is always, well, waiting for something else to happen. Prowess does absolutely nothing all by itself.
Evergreen mechanics need to be unambiguous and straightforward enough that new players will understand them quickly in any context in which they might reasonably arise. Mechanics that appear on creatures need to be even more “self-aware” in this regard. To this end, I’ve come up with a simple litmus test for whether a keyword ability is clean and straightforward to a degree that justifies being evergreen:
If a creature loses or gains a combat-relevant keyword ability just before combat begins, it should be immediately apparent what the impact of that change will be.
Adding or removing Prowess from a creature, without other effects applied afterwards, does absolutely nothing to any combat interaction that may arise around that creature. Meanwhile, this change in the creature’s abilities can leave questions for inexperienced players as to whether the creature’s power and toughness are changed. If the Prowess ability had already granted bonuses this turn, and then the Prowess ability is removed, do the bonuses go away? If Prowess was granted to a creature by way of a non-creature spell, does the creature get a bonus for that spell?
In these regards, Prowess is too fussy for the expectation of everyday inclusion in Magic sets.
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You’re going to teach Magic to a stranger. What’s your strategy to have the best possible outcome?
Magic is just plain difficult to explain and teach to absolute newcomers. Its play patterns subvert a lot of common assumptions audiences would have based on its themes and components, which can make any common reference points to hold as foundational cornerstones difficult to find.
I believe there are three key elements that make critical differences when a Magic veteran tries to introduce a new player to the game: Environment, Complexity, and Pace.
Environment is about helping a player see the nature of a Magic community. Magic is a social game, and this is a feature that many outsiders don’t recognize right away. Avoid overwhelming a new player with unnecessarily large crowds. Introduce them to a group of 6-8 players at most, whom they share other common interests with. Show them how several one-on-one matches can happen at once, and explain how Magic is simultaneously a group activity and a game played head-to-head.
Complexity and Pace are more controllable once the Environment is accounted for. New players often fear judgment, and the complexity of the game leaves a lot of space for judge-able errors. Reducing fear of judgement begins with demonstrating the right environment; limiting the opportunities for judgement comes through limiting the depth of a player’s first game.
I prefer teaching by presenting the new player with a mono-green deck, while I play mono-white. Limit decks to common creatures and sorceries, with no abilities or effects that would be played at instant speed. This caps the Complexity of interactions to moments when spells are played and combat exchanges, and allows the new player to focus on those moments individually. Play with the new player’s hand face up, so that choices can be discussed along the way.
Keep the mana curve between 1 and 5 CMC for all cards, and include redundant copies of cards with evergreen mechanics. This should help keep the Pace of the game quick and give the new player a sense of familiarity when subsequent copies of cards come up.
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What is Magic’s greatest strength and why?
Magic has maintained a robust audience for 25 years now by constantly evolving and growing in how it presents itself. It is a game that can take on whatever creative flavor is applied to it without thinning that flavor or losing itself into it. It has a set of components that are equally as accepting of new themes as the full game is. Everything about Magic has enough rigidity to always be internally compatible and familiar, but is also porous enough to let new settings permeate the entire game.
The openness of Magic’s underlying framework is by far Magic’s greatest asset as a game system.
On the most basic level, Magic’s architecture allows for very transparent mapping of new worlds and narratives. The construction of a set uses the game as a theater and the rules as a stage. Characters, both primary and background, can be cast (like actors) with creature and planeswalker cards. Surrounding elements can be built like scenery and costumes with lands and enchantments. Props are brought into the story via artifacts, and dramatic plot points come into the story through instants, sorceries, abilities, and other broader game actions.
On a more granular level, Magic gives itself the space to illustrate an infinite number of concepts through variation and recombination of its various components and rules. When a designer wants to build outside the current set of known ingredients and tools, the game’s framework allows for new design space to be defined at will. A prime example would be the double-faced cards introduced in Innistrad; designers saw an opportunity to use the game’s components in a brand new way that better illustrated the duality and changes in the world’s pieces. Responsively, the game rules afforded and helped define new systems of framework to build those concepts on.
Without a structural system so resilient and yet so flexible, Magic could not have sustained the degree of growth and change it has seen over a quarter of a century.
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What is Magic’s greatest weakness and why?
Having worked in a board game invention and production studio for seven years, I can attest to the greatest weakness in any game being its production schedule. It’s an invisible factor to most audiences, but the results of a rushed schedule are ultimately always visible.
I’ve seen this with my own eyes. As a project manager, an inventor, a developer, and an artist, every step of the way, I’ve always felt that there were just a few more things I could improve with more time. And that’s often just small, low-threshold kids games with no plans for expansion.
Magic is hundreds of times more complex. At least.
Magic’s primary set releases, not including supplemental products, land roughly every three months, with around 250 brand new cards each. Even with a nine to twelve month active production schedule and the efforts of dozens of staff members moving it along, it would be impossible for a set to reach players without flaws. The game — and the system needed for producing it with such regularity — is simply too complex for a 100% success rate.
Compounding this, the global Magic community is enormous, and contains some of the most analytical gamers ever. With myriad intricacies of mechanical interactions presented by so many cards, there is no way for a limited pool of staff members, no matter how skilled, to catch every abusable combination of cards in any given environment.
If a flaw in a card or mechanic’s design exists, players will find it and exploit it. Quickly.
The options available to Magic R&D in response to these exploits are limited. Bans can be put in place relatively quickly, but are tremendously unpopular and difficult to appropriately gauge for optimal effectiveness and efficiency. “Silver bullet” cards can be added to subsequent sets, but these get stuck in the same slow production cycle that any release is bound to, and could take months to catch up to the cards and strategies they’re meant for.
Production schedules are the bane and biggest weakness of every game. Magic is no exception.
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What Magic mechanic most deserves a second chance (aka which had the worst first introduction compared to its potential)?
Oh, Surge, you lost puppy, you.
When Oath of the Gatewatch came out, the conversation was much about comparisons to the original Zendikar block, and the comparisons were not kind. BFZ and OGW had some problems with dilution once the latter arrived, and the new Eldrazi were hellbent on warping Legacy and Modern. It was easy to miss the quiet little mechanic that never had a chance.
Surge was simple, and it worked in an “I like it when it happens, but I’m probably not going out of my way to make it happen” sort of way. It was a great flavor match for the “we need to work together” theme of the set and story, and it doubled-down on that theme by kicking in when a teammate played a spell on the same turn.
The problem was that apart from a handful of modestly-promoted events, we were never given a strong incentive or opportunity to play them with teammates. Surge lived in a weird space where it wanted to be played in Two-Headed Giant games, but still needed to be playable in a one-on-one match. Making the value proposition more difficult, it was often tough enough to rally players up for BFZ/OGW limited in general, let alone specialty format events.
Surge was made to be a gift to fans of 2HG. It showed up in a block that was widely perceived to have been made for fans of things that were not fun.
If only we had limited edition draft environments where something as gimmicky as always playing in teams was the focus.
Oh, wait, we do. Two Conspiracy sets in, we’ve seen proof that supplemental “multi-player limited format” sets work. They’re fun, and they’re successful enough that we should generally expect to see them continue. Surge would be a slam-dunk centerpiece mechanic for a supplemental set intended for 2HG play (or even other fringe multi-player formats like Star Magic or Emperor).
There’s a home for Surge. Just not in the beleaguered wastes of Zendikar.
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Of all the Magic expansions that you’ve played with, pick your favorite and then explain the biggest problem with it.
Poking holes in Ravnica is like serving up melted ice cream: you’re only doing it to prove that something awesome can be crappy if you try hard enough.
I know I’m not distinguishing myself from the pack when I say I loved Ravnica (Original Recipe), but that’s the truth. So now, it’s painful to have to look back at it and figure out which rib I want to kick it in.
Sadly, you don’t need to dig deep to find the shame under all the shine.
See, while Ravnica was absolutely revolutionary, a true watershed moment in Magic design, in retrospect it’s not as internally consistent as I recalled. For all the style that went into personifying each color pair as a guild with purpose and goals, the mechanics associated with those guilds are kind of spotty matches.
Ignoring cards with the Radiance mechanic, Boros’s cards are aggressive, precise, and swift, and they tell the story of the guild well: “We are righteous retribution. You can’t stop us.”
Radiance though is a mess. Half the time it’s inconveniently comfortable with collateral damage, so you’re often holding a weapon it’s not worth using. Not exactly a precision machine fueled by hubris and militaristic justice.
Dimir is a similar story. “We’re so shadowy, you’re not even sure we exist. We’re going to siphon away your mind before you know it’s disappearing. This card? It’s not particularly useful right now, so I’ll show you one I can use. Now forget you saw that, because we’re sooooo sneeeeaky.” The Dimir cards seem to indicate that they intend to mill you, but Transmute has nothing to do with this at all.
Selesnya embodies consistency, with the power-in-numbers “go wide” strategy matching perfectly with the Convoke mechanic. We’ll skip them.
Dredge fits Golgari’s story and flavor well: bottom-feeding compost recyclers. Despite that, their master goal is a little fuzzy. It seems like they just want respect, so I guess they’re “in it for the long game”?
Me though, I’ll ignore all that. Ravnica’s still the best. Ever.
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Of all the Magic expansions that you’ve played with, pick your least favorite and then explain the best part about it.
Not a fan of Theros. Not at all. Took nearly the full year off from drafting. My teeth itch thinking about it.
At least the silver lining of that set is fairly easy to find. And it’s almost literally an actual silver lining.
Before I knew much about the design of the set, my wife and I attended the Theros World-Building panel at PAX Prime (née West). Both of us came out blown away by the visual distinction of the Gods and all things ethereal.
In particular, we loved the star field motif that appeared in the shadows and folds of cloth surrounding the Gods. Magic is a game where the other-worldly is commonplace; Jeremy Jarvis and his team found a way to make Theros’s version of it both clearly tied to that world and not of it’s natural order.
The distinction carried through into the card frames, which was a really nice touch. Thematically, there was an element of “gods bestow gifts and blessings upon mortals” in the block, so it was cool to see the sparkly aura-state Bestow cards attached to the traditional card frames of ”earthly” creatures.
We’d seen worlds with “mortals versus the spirit world” stories before in Kamigawa, so the fact that so much attention went into finding a new presentation for that narrative is impressive. Theros’s creative direction took a far more holistic approach, going beyond designated creature types or sub-types. The art direction was more meaningful than in most other sets, and the results were remarkable.
I may never reach a point where I want to play more Theros block (I will try to reserve judgment should we return there), but I will never cease to be impressed with how integrated the art and creative direction were with the mechanical design and development of the block.
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You have the ability to change any one thing about Magic. What do you change and why?
Pssshoooo. Change one thing about Magic? That’s dangerous. I’ve seen that movie. Things do not end well.
Squint. Clench fists. Tighten the gut. Here we go.
Narratives. I think that as a whole, Magic is a little too fixated on advancing a narrative storyline. We don’t always need them. Let’s see fewer of them.
Blink. Crickets.
Did the world end? No? Good.
One of the best sets (and blocks) ever was Ravnica. Did Ravnica have a story? Probably. I’m sure of it. Does anyone outside of Wizards remember it? Not so much. Ravnica did such a great job of painting an environment and society (or web of societies) through its cards that we just didn’t ask what any order of events was. Ravnica was a plane-wide “slice of life” snapshot that just nailed it.
And yet when we went back to Ravnica to hear what happened to the guilds after we left them the first time, things weren’t quite the same. The story that culminated in Dragon’s Maze was generally superfluous; players simply wanted to recapture the experience of seeing the guilds in action. It didn’t help that Dragon’s Maze as a set was overfilled with too many things — a design necessity driven by the narrative being told.
The general response to Story Spotlight cards has been, as far as my limited research has shown, blasé. The advent of them is evidence that Magic’s brand puts a high degree of importance on the story of each set. I just don’t believe this is always necessary.
While I think that there are plenty of strong stories told in Magic’s sets, I also believe that some planes should be allowed to exist without an unnecessary narrative. Places can be fascinating to explore without existential threat or intrigue. Not every set needs an epic arc; sometimes the scenery is compelling enough on its own (think of this as the “National Park” theory).
Ironically, in my GDS2 essays, I specifically supported revisiting Ravnica to get the story. How’s that for a story arc?
There. Somebody finally read them.
Worth it.
This is the second in a 
Compounding my misread were comments from other players that, in retrospect, only painted a partial picture of the problem. Just a few days earlier I’d heard one of the Friday Night regulars mention that they’d “love to see Marchesa wind up in an official Commander deck”. He was referring to a card that’s popular among those who play the format, one that can be used as a commander for a deck, and that has not yet been featured in a Commander product release. Without asking any further questions, I took this to mean that he wanted an oversized version of the card. Why else would he specifically want a card that already existed outside of the Commander products to be featured in one?
My introduction to The Great Dalmuti came as a direct product of my discovery of Magic. It was sold in the comic shop that I played Magic at, it was invented* by the same guy who made Magic, and it was cheap, as new games went. It seemed like a no-brainer when I picked it up.
For whatever cultural jump Settlers of Catan was for me in 1999, Puerto Rico was a full quantum leap in 2002. This was a game of pure strategy — no random elements, no hidden information. The concepts of round-by-round role selection and “first turn” markers were something that came totally out of left field for me, and I loved it. Like Settlers, here was a game with multiple ways to gather points and multiple paths to victory, but the sheer depth and variety made any other comparisons to Settlers outright silly.
Arts and Gamecraft 