Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1144: Color Imbalance

Episode Date: June 7, 2024

In this podcast, I talk about why we don't have colors show up in different amounts in sets.

I'm pulling away the curb because I dropped my son off the college. We all know what that means. It's time for other drive to work Okay, so today I'm gonna answer a question I get all the time on my blog which is Why do we balance colors a lot of people like oh, let's make a set with have one of the colors not there Have one of the colors more represented. So I'm gonna really delve in today into color balance. I'm gonna explain what color balance is, why we have color balance, and talk a little bit about why we're not so keen

on having a color imbalance. And I'll even talk about the times we did do it. Okay, so let's start with the idea of what is color balance. Color balance actually means a couple different things but first and foremost, okay, we make a file. The file has so many commons, so many uncommons, so many rares, so many mythic rares. With playbooters we have 80 commons and we have a hundred uncommons Rares and mythic rares don't matter quite as much When we talk about color balance

Mostly we're focused on as fan of color balance. So it's common and uncommon that matter the most So let's get into what that means So when I say color balance when I make my file at common, I will have the same number of cards of each color. So let's say, for example, if you have 80 commons, if you have 14 of each, is that right? No, I did the math wrong. If you have 16 of each, 18, 18 of each, is that right? No, I did the math wrong. If you have 16, 16 of each?

18, 18 of each? The idea is if you take 80 divided by five, which is, is that 18? No, 16, it's 16 of each. So assuming you have no artifacts, colorless artifacts or no lands, whatever, at common you would have 16 of each color. And then at uncommon, so at common and uncommon, we are exact.

If there are 16 red cards, there are 16 green cards, 16 black cards, 16 blue cards, 16 white cards. An exact number. And if we have multicolor in the set, so let's say we're doing enemy colors, for example. There'll be an equal number of white red cards or red white cards as there would be for green blue cards or white black cards. The idea essentially is if you think of two-color cards

as being half one color and half the other color, we keep the color balance, meaning there's the same number. Usually by the way, when we make enemy or multicolor cards, we make them in a cycle, an ally cycle, an enemy cycle, an arc cycle, a wedge cycle. We make them in a cycle that sort of goes around so that all of them are equally represented. So the idea is now at high rarities, we used to color balance at all rarities and then we decided I don't know maybe four or five years ago that rare and mythic rare should be roughly color balanced

but it doesn't need to be exactly color balanced meaning if you have an extra red rare card or an extra green mythic rare the Asfan is going to wash out so like it's not crucial and so i mean for many many years we were being very exact and if we you know uh we finally decided that we wanted color balance to matter for general like the azz fan of color balance to be even but rares and mythic rares just affect a little tiny bit. Even at rares and mythic rares, we'll be generally, we might have one extra of a color, but we won't have like three of one and not of another. There'll be roughly color balance.

Okay, so let's get into the larger question is, why do we do that? Why are there the same number of red cards as black cards, as white cards as green cards? Why do we do that? Why are there the same number of red cards as black cards, as white cards as green cards? Why do we do that? Well first and foremost, let's get a little bit into the color pie. So I've talked about this many times. Richard was making Magic. He needed to make sure that there were reasons that you played different cards. He didn't want every deck just to be the same cards. So he used the mana system and he used the color pie to differentiate.

The key idea of the color pie was that different colors had different strengths and weaknesses. And so if you played any one color, you would be good at some things and bad at others. But another thing that was important was in order for the colors to matter, you need them to be equal. One of the things we aim, we roughly aim for all the colors to be at the same power level. Within any one set, we're going to miss a little bit, the idea of being exact on them is kind of hard. But one of the things we do is we look at sets as they come out. We have metrics we can look at.

We can look at limited play using digital gives us a lot of feedback. One of the nice things about digital data is it's a lot. It's a lot of a lot of people playing and it's all like we have all that data. We do get some data from sort of tabletop play, but as far as just hard crunchy who's playing what colors, the digital data is the best for us. So we get a sense when the set comes out how it performs in limited, how it performs in constructed. And one of our goals, this is something Play Design spends a lot of time on is we generally want the colors to be equally balanced. There is a pendulum, things ebb and flow, any one point in time, you know, for example,

in any one limited set, one color usually is slightly better than, you know, like in Outlaws of Thunder Junction, green is the best color in limited. And the reason there is just hard. I mean, our goal is to balance everything. But there are a lot of factors, and it's a tough job to do. But what we can do is we can make sets. We have a lot of testing to figure out. And there's also internal testing that we can do.

We will do a lot of testing and keep our own data for internal play testing. So before we get digital data, obviously. So we get a general sense of, oh, this set is contributing more cards in red to standard, and this card is contributing more green cards to modern. Like we sort of can look and see where things are. And the general rule of thumb,

our goal is magic is at its best when the colors are all equal. It's a hard goal. In any one moment in time, somebody's going to be leading somewhere, like I said, the pendulum swings. But is there a goal over time to have the colors roughly balanced? And the reason is we want all five colors to be equally enticing to you the player. We want you all to sort of, we, the idea of the color wheel sort of philosophically is that these are five different forces of equal merit, of equal power, and you the player get to choose more so on what you want to

play on the style of decks, the kind of play you enjoy, not because, well, this is what's best. Now, at the top, top tier level, we're talking the pro tour, you know, when there's a lot on the line, okay, people will go where the power is. Well, in this format, green's the best, we'll play green. But at the local sort of game store, even in F&M, which is still competitive, we want people, so another important thing to talk about is players have favorite colors and one of the things we've learned is the less enfranchised you are, the more likely you are to have a favorite color. The more you play Magic, the more you play a lot of different things, the more you start seeing value in different colors, like

people ask me all the time what's's my favorite color? And the answer is, it's hard. Like I, I'm so invested in all the colors. I've worked so hard between the design and the color pie. Like I really have an affinity for all five colors, but that comes from, hey, working on the game, you know, for many, many years. Um, But what we've learned is when you ask players that are a little less in franchise, like when you first start playing Magic, the colors do a really good job of being a handheld because it's intimidating.

There are a lot of cards in Magic. And so the very first thing you do when playing Magic is just pick a color. A very common thing, for example, for newer players is they'll play one color decks. Why a they don't need dual lands and And your mono color decks. I did a whole podcast on mono color mono color decks are the most consistent You don't have to worry like just getting the right mana, but mana, you know

Mana balance can be hard just sort of having what you need But the absolute simplest thing, the simplest thing to do is build a monocolor deck. The other thing a monocolor deck does for you is it just, it splits all the available cards into roughly a fifth, they're all colors cards. But let's say I'm a green player, okay, I get my new packet, I look at the green card,

like it gives you something to focus on. And that one of the things about magic is magic can be very intimidating You know when you play chess chess is intimidating and chess has six pieces, right you get to magic and like oh We have 27,000 pieces a little more intimidating, you know, our rules are inches thick comprehensive rules So one of the things that's nice and one of the things that was definitely built into

Magic is there's some handholds that allow you to sort of self-select. And color is a really nice early way. The colors, you know, the colors have philosophies, they have a feel, they have a strategy built into them, you know, and so you can pick the color that just speaks to you. Maybe you like the philosophy, maybe you like the mechanics it has access to, maybe you like its style of play, maybe a combination of all those. But we do want with any one set, we know that every color is somebody's favorite.

And so another reason we balance is we just want everybody to have equal access. And so when the new set comes out, there's somebody out there, many people out there that are going to open up the pack and, you know, look for their favorite green card. So for example, let me give my, I'll tell my beginning magic story. Okay, so I, during alpha, I go to a game convention. I'd heard of the game, never seen it before. I opened up my packs, I got a starter and three boosters. So the thing that caught my eye when I first opened my booster was I had a craw worm, a

craw worm at the... So at the time of Alpha, Richard was very conservative about how big creatures got at common. Over time we've allowed more bigger stuff in common, but I believe there was nothing at common. There are only two creatures I think above three power, if I remember correctly. One was bluehead, was it called sea serpent? Bluehead a five five.

Now it is an island home, it can only attack your opponent if they were playing islands. So it was more a defensive card. Every once in a while, you had the ability to turn your opponent's lens into islands or maybe they're playing blue. But a lot of the time, the Sea Serpent wasn't attacking. It was more defensive. But there was one other creature other than the Sea serpent that was a larger than a 3-3 Crawl worm was a 6-4

a 6-4 And had trample. It was just I remember when I saw chrome. I'm so excited I'm just like I didn't understand I had multiple crawl worms So when I built my first deck also when I built my first deck, also, when I built my first deck, I wasn't even aware you could have more than one color. I thought the rules were you could only have one color.

I hadn't seen dual ends yet, because they were rare. So when I opened up, I hadn't seen dual ends, so it hadn't even dawned on me that I could play more than one color. But with my craw, and I had, I think I had two craw worms when I first, in my first three, I had I think I had two crawler worms When I first but my first three I had a starter and three booster. So starter 60 cards a booster was 15 cards. So That's let's see. It's 45 and 60. I had 105 cards. That's how many cards I when I started it interestingly

Now when magic first up the rule was you needed to have 40 cards. There was no four of limits back in Alpha. You just needed to have 40 cards. And I think if I remember correctly, I didn't have enough forest. I had enough green cards to make a deck. I didn't have enough forests. So maybe I played Islands as forests. I played another land as forests.

Or probably not Islands because the first two, I made a mono green deck and then I later one another land is forest. Or probably not islands because the first two I made a mono green deck and then I later made a mono blue deck and then I played the green deck against the blue deck in which I would play both sides because I didn't have anyone to play with yet. So early on when I was sort of teaching myself I made a mono green deck and a mono blue deck and I played against each other. But mono green spoke to me it had the crawler worms and But Mono Green spoke to me, it had the crawl worms, and it just said, oh, this is exciting, you know? And that then, so eventually what happened is beta comes out, I buy a whole bunch of beta,

two boxes of starters and two boxes of boosters. Not that I was planning to open them all, I just needed them, if I wanted to have friends play, I know I needed to provide the cars, because I realized the cars were gonna sell out right away. So early on I would find friends friends and then I would sell them What I paid for them I would sell the magic packs and then interestingly Later on when they they didn't get into magic

I would come back and pay them like I would give them back their money take back the cards because they weren't the ones that Didn't get into magic a few people like my dad to get into magic as my podcast my dad talked about. Um Okay, so we know that there are people that care about each color and we want to make sure that every booster pack is speaking to every piece. So that's why you'll notice we try to make sure now play boosters have shifted things up a little bit. When we were in draft boosters, we were able to guarantee one of every color. I think now with play boosters we're guaranteed four of every color, although five happens a lot. We just don't, we can't, due to the way the makeup of how the boosters work, we can't guarantee five.

But we do a lot, I mean a good chunk of packs have five colors. Just we don't guarantee five. But we do a lot, I mean a good chunk of packs have five colors, just we don't guarantee it. Anyway, okay so we like having the general balance. The other reason the balance is important is a lot of making magic sets. Well, this is a two-way story. One is we, there's a certain quality and feel you want for a magic set, right? You want somebody when they're playing that it feels like what a magic set feels like. This has a lot to do with, and I've talked about this, that magic has this combination of it wants to feel familiar and comfortable, but at the same time offer new things. And the balance we get to do that is, I talked about our design skeleton, there's a certain

structure of the way we make a magic set. All magic sets will feel similar because there's a certain structure to them. You know, there's slots for certain effects. Like there's a way we build sets that there's a sameness to them. Now there's differences, we have new mechanics, and we want magic sets to feel different, but at the core, when you play a set, we want it to feel the same. And the reason we want it to feel the same,

there's two big pieces for that. One piece is we just want magic to feel like magic, and just having a certain underlying structure to it just makes it feel like a magic set. As I've talked about many times, we could take all the rules to magic, make a bunch of cards that follow the rules, but it would feel like a magic set. As I've talked about many times, we could take all the rules to magic, make a bunch of cards that follow the rules, but it would feel nothing like magic, even though it's

following the rules of magic. And there is a certain comfort level that is really important. We want when you sit down and you play magic to go, oh, I'm playing magic. An important part of that is there are certain things you learn that we then want to stay relatively true. I mean, from time to time, we will make a set where we take one, like normally when we do something new, we might take one facet you know and mess with that one facet, but we want all the other facets to stay the same.

You know, maybe one time, you know, we're doing Zendikar and we're like, okay, your landfall matters in a way that doesn't normally matter. You know, you might normally in magic, I'm going to play, your landfall matters in a way that doesn't normally matter. You know, you might normally magic, I'm going to play the land once a turn if I have it. But if you're playing Zendikar, maybe I don't, maybe I hold it. Maybe I wait to play a land later in the game because I want to trigger a certain effect. It changes my behavior. And that's the fun part. We want to make sure that every set changes some asset behavior, but that means the rest of your behavior needs to stay the same because we want it to feel familiar.

And the color balance is a big part of that. And that the other thing is the reason we want it to be familiar also is on our end, the people making the game, there's a lot of shorthand that we learned, the shorthand that you the players learn when playing and the shorthorthand that we the designers learn when making games. And so another reason to want a certain consistency is over time we've learned and understood how that works. There's a lot of making a magic set is insanely hard, especially balancing magic that is very hard.

So one of the ways we're able to do that is we can use sort of communal knowledge over time. You know, most of people working on magic haven't worked on magic for 31 years. But we, you know, we stand on the shoulders of giants. Like people design things and learn from them that communal knowledge passes down and that there's a lot of things we've learned. If you change too much, both the players don't into it correctly, it doesn't feel right, and we, the people making it, have trouble making it. Okay, this is not just hypothetical. As often as the case, whenever players come up with, here's something you could do that you don't normally do,

we, the designers, also do that. So I had the idea many years ago. Okay, so we were working on a set called Odyssey. Odyssey block, it had a theme, a graveyard theme. It was the second block where we embraced block themes. The set before Invasion had embraced multicolor as a block theme and Odyssey was embracing the graveyard as a block theme. The other thing that was happening was as we were getting into block themes, at the time Bill Rose was

the head designer and I was sort of the right-hand man to Bill. I was really starting to experiment more with the idea of a block having some sort of purpose to it, that there was feeling to a block. I'm the one, I along with Henry Stern, I was one, an invasion that pitched the idea that apocalypse was the enemy spells, that we had two sets with ally

and then one set with enemy, that there was some larger structure to the block. Now, I would take over as a Ravnica as far as being head designer, and then I would take that and step it up quite a bit. But at the time, I was definitely a voice in Bill's ear encouraging us trying different things. So the idea I pitched to Bill was looking at sort of the story that we were building

for the Odyssey block, the bad guys kind of take over in the second set. So I said to Bill, what if there's just more black cards? The set was called Torment. What if it was just one? Okay, the bad guys take over, over whether it's just more black cards and then the idea that I had was what we would do is we would go down in white and green which is black enemy and So red and blue would be at the normal levels Black would be more than normal and that would be made up for by white and green being less than normal

Then the next set judgment we would flip-flop that. Green and white would be up, black would be down. The idea being that the whole block would be color balanced, that when the dust settled, standard would still be color balanced, but we'd have the opportunity for two different sets, for limited and for even for standard, you know, like when torment came out,

just there would be more black cards in standard, for example, than normal. So I was fascinated, I'm like, okay, you know, like one of the things that as a designer, you're like, how can we shake things up and do something? And the same reason I get people asking me, like, why didn't we do color and balance, is that same idea of, hey, here's something we always do, you break the rules, break this rule. Well, it turns out we did break this rule. So what we did is we made it such that Torment had more black cards and Judgment had more white and green cards.

So how did the experiment go? Not well. It did not go great. So one of the things that I really didn't, that I didn't take for granted was this idea that I'm talking about, that there's a certain feel to magic, and that there's certain things that the players intuit.

That it's like, magic works a certain way, and if you play long enough, you sort of just learn the rhythms of magic. Likewise, the R&D folks making the game, also we learn the rhythms of magic. Likewise, the R&D folks making the game, also we learn the rhythms of magic. And there's a lot of shorthands that we use to, like there's a lot of things when we balance, there's a lot of tools we've learned over time.

So one of the problem when we sort of unbalance the colors is we threw a major monkey wrench, if you will, into all our tools making it. What we found, and this is a general thing we've learned, is I can throw new things at the designers. Part of magic is we adapt. But one of the things we've learned is there's only so much you can, like, the play designers only have so much time.

And so there's only so much they can absorb. And if you give them more than they can absorb, we just start making mistakes. That there's only so much like there's only so much things that can be different where we're not using like one of the powerful things of making the same game for a long time is that you learn lessons from that game. You learn shorthands. You learn an intuition if you will. And what it did is it just threw all the like we had major issues. It just every time we would try to do something we'd use tools that we'd carefully crafted

over years of building tools and the tools wouldn't work. And then on the flip side is the whole reason for doing this was like a lot of the reason we'll try things or do different things. In other big things we did, we used to do a lot of what we call gimmick sets. It's all creatures, it's all gold. Like we do something in the very nature of what we're doing. And the lessons of those was a similar lesson, which is

it causes us a lot of problems that are way harder to do. And then, when we put a set out, we're like, okay, the novelty will be exciting to people. And what we found when we make the black set is the number one complaint we got was where are the green and white cards? It was the green and white players going, hey, why didn't I get as many green and white players?

Now the people who love black are all gonna be happy to get more black cards. But it didn't, one of the things we look at with themes is does our theme raise the bar and it raised the bar in two ways one is hey does it sell more packs we're business in the other ways does it raise discussion to more people talk about the set and what we found was in torment that we made this change because major problems are our end and the response to the player was, eh, okay.

Like in fact, they complained about the things that we had problems with. They complained about not the white and green cards. There were weird things in draft where black just made up of the lion share of drafter, you know. Oh, another thing that happened in the real world is people have learned to read signals, right? So if you're gonna draft, the reason you figure out what color to be in is, oh, I see green is drying up. There's a lot of

intuitions about, about reading colors. All that got thrown to people like, oh, green's open. I'll draft green, but no green isn't open. It's just low or wow. Black is open because look at all the black, but black isn't open. The three people before you were dropping black. It just threw major things. And so what we found was it caused us problems, it caused the players problems, and it didn't make the set any more exciting. It wasn't like, oh, people are like, oh, I'm so glad there's more black. I'm going to buy more magic and I'm more excited about it.

It just kind of upset the apple cart and it we didn't get the benefit from it Like that's the reason we don't really do a lot of the the gimmick sets anymore The reason we don't do color balancing is what we discovered is there are certain core integral elements of how magic works and that players find comfort in those and That we have to be very careful when and where and how we mess with those because we've messed with them too much it just doesn't feel right. It's off and all these things that players have intuited over time don't feel right and then the thing that's really funny is there is a sweet spot to making new magic.

Like, one of the things about Zendikar, just using landfall as my example since I brought it up before, let's say for example I am not paying attention to landfall. I can just play magic. I'll get some land triggers, hey yay, but I can just play magic. It doesn't get in the way that landfall, so I have this thing I call lenticular design. What lenticular design means is for the players that don't know any better,

it's kind of invisible to them. And to the players that do know better, there's a lot of depth. There's a lot of things you can learn. Landfall is a great example of a really good lenticular design because if you don't know, let's say you're newer to magic, whatever, you can read the card, you can understand it, things will happen, you'll be happy, I'll play a land and something will go on, but the advanced player says, oh, maybe I play different because of

this. Maybe I change how I function. So it's a really good example where the players that don't want to be influenced by it can ignore it. And that a lot of the best tweaks we add are ones in which the player that doesn't want to get invested in it doesn't have to get invested in it. That they can just play magic. And the people who want the more enfranchised players that really get a kick out of it, they can do that. But what we've learned is there are certain fundamentals when you mess with, you can't just play normal magic. That it messes with normal magic.

And color balance is one of those things. Messing with color balance just throws everything off. It doesn't quite feel right, the balance isn't quite there. A lot of things you've doesn't quite feel right. The balance isn't quite there. A lot of things you've learned just aren't right. It also messes like another problem we ran into is building for draft and building for sealed are tricky. A lot of what we do is we build for draft because it turns out that like 95% of all sealed play is at pre-releases. Now we want the pre-releases to go well, we think about sealed,

but there's a lot of shorthands we do. And for example, one of the problems we ran in Torment and in Judgment is that sometimes you just, you didn't get enough cards in certain colors to be able to build what you need to build. There's like a lot of making sealed work as we balance things, there's this nice little balance where we can build what we need to for for draft But there's there's just enough there that sealed will work out and it doesn't take a lot to mess with it

We're all of a sudden sealed doesn't quite work and and that and that's sort of the big lesson of today is There's so many things that we've developed over time that when you start changing them You don't even realize the impact that they have that was the lesson of torment and judgment is There's so many things that we've developed over time that when you start changing them, you don't even realize the impact that they have. That was the lesson to torment and judgment is, we're like, okay, hey, we color balance everything in standard. We're just messing a little bit. We're just experimenting.

We had no idea the ramifications of messing up, like all the things we messed up. We messed up seal, we messed up draft, we messed up up reading colors we messed up that we had trouble with balance like just like all these things that happen Because it just was taking against some of Years and years of all this technology we built up That's in built upon the idea that things function a certain way and then on the end for the players Magic feels a certain feel to magic because we do things a certain way and when we deviate a little bit too much it stops feeling like magic and so the reason that Color Band proved to be a problem is it's not worth it.

It is not worth it. That's one of the things we've learned over time. There's things we can do that it's not worth the pain of doing it. It's not worth making it more complicated to make it. It's not worth deviating from the feel of magic. And it just doesn't pay off. No one, I mean, nobody bought more, or very few people bought more Torment. Maybe a few players that love black, but we weren't selling more packs of Torment because there were more black cards in it. We weren't getting high marks in my in our market research because there were more black cards in it.

There were definitely a small number of players that are going, oh it's different, but it didn't move the needle and that is one of the big lessons over time is trying to figure out what the right, where pushing the pendulum in new directions, what makes for good, it's magic, but slightly different. And there's a few things, color being the biggest one, where you just mess with it and it causes too many problems. So anyway, why don't we do color imbalance anymore? Because we tried color imbalance

and it caused problems for little gain. And if you're going to make magic, the answer is we want to make small changes for big gain. We want to make small changes that makes that experience more fun and more exciting, and makes players more excited to want to buy it and talk about it. And in balancing of color, while it is different,

it is us doing something we don't normally do that not inherently, like we shouldn't change things just to change them. And we learned that lesson, I mean, we learned that lesson. We did try it and the big takeaway from it. And then similar to gimmicks, there's other things we've learned is we shouldn't do things just to do them.

We should do them because they make for a better magic set. And we've messed in areas and messed in spaces where the lesson we got is this isn't worth it. Color balance is one of those places. So why don't we do it? I mean, A, we did it once or twice, but that's why we don't do it. So anyway, I hope this was informative. A lot of the reason I like to do these is I want people to understand, like, you know,

one of the interesting things about working on the game in its 31st year is, you know, most people don't have the technology we do. We've made the same game continually for a long time. We've learned a lot of things, and we really want to make use of all those lessons. And so the big takeaway from this the big takeaway from torment and judgment and in legions and allow reborn stuff like that is There are choices you can make there are things you can do that don't lead to a better magic set

Every possible thing you can do that changes things isn't heraly for the better color being a big one Anyway, that is my podcast today. I hope you guys found this illuminating. But anyway, I'm at work, so we all know what that means. It means the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you guys next time.

Bye bye.