Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1240: Communications

Episode Date: May 9, 2025

In this episode, I walk through the history of Magic and talk about how communicating with players has changed over the years.

I'm pulling away from the curb because I dropped my son off at school. We all know what that means. It's time for other drive to work. Okay, so today's topic comes from a blog. Someone wanted to talk about communications. So the core idea is how it has changed over time, how wizards communicates with the audience. That is my topic. I want to try to go chronologically.

I know I did a little bit of research, but this is a very complex topic, so I might have things slightly out of order, so I apologize ahead of time. But the idea essentially is how do we at Wizards communicate with all of you? And this is sort of a history starting in 1993 and the start of magic to now. So first thing, let's go back to 1993. Couple things. The first thing I should stress was when Richard Garfield, the creator of magic, when Richard first made magic, I think his philosophy was that he really liked the idea that a big part of playing Magic was discovering Magic,

that the exploration of the game itself was a big part of the game. So he really did not wanna share information about the game. So when Magic first came out back in 1993, there were no lists of cards, there were no deck lists, there was very little information. In fact, just knowing what the cards were, you know, you'd open a pack and see cards for the first time you'd never even seen before.

And I think Richard's vision at the time was that you would sit down to play and you would see cards you didn't even know existed when you played against somebody. And another thing that's really important to remember is when Magic started in 93, the internet existed but it was in its infancy of what we think of now. For example, the World Wide Web, which means sort of a graphical interface for the internet, it might have technically existed when magic came out, but it was not widely used. In fact, I remember when I got my job at Wizards in 95, that my computer at Wizards was the first computer, I mean, not that I owned my work computer,

but the first computer that was my computer that I used that had access to the World Wide Web. Like I remember when I lived back in Los Angeles before I moved to Seattle to work for Wizards, I would go on Wizards website, but I didn't have a graphical interface. So I would just see words, and then a lot of times you're supposed to click where there's pictures, but I didn't have the pictures.

And so like I had to learn how to navigate Wizards website, like trial and error to figure out what different sections were. So anyway, early magic, there was a thing at the time called the Usenet, which is sort of what we call bulletin board. So the idea essentially is, there would be different sort of channels.

Originally there was rec.games, and then there was rec.trading cards, and eventually rec.magic. And the idea is people could start a thread. Whether it be a question, a comment, someone would say something. So for example, someone might say, oh, I'm playing and I'm really enjoying merfolk. Anyone else have a good merfolk deck or something? And then other people could chime in, oh, here's my merfolk deck or whatever.

The people, although in the early days, merfolk deck was Lord of Atlantis and lots and lots of merfolk of the Pearl Trident. But anyway, people could then respond. Now, this was all public, so if you posted something, everybody could see it. And if you responded, everybody could see it. There was no, I mean, there existed email at the time,

but if you really wanted to talk about magic most of the time you were communicating through the Usenet. And early on Wizards didn't even technically talk through the Usenet. What ended up happening was there were some people, Tom Wiley is a good example, so Tom Wiley ended up becoming the first magic rules manager. and Tom played magic and sort of got to know the rules decently. So he would go on and he'd answer the rules questions. And then eventually Wizards of the Coast saw that Tom was like doing a good job answering rule question. And so I think they hired him like a contractor at first, like, okay, we'll pay you to answer the rules questions online and then eventually he got a full-time job at wizards being the rules manager. So I was active on the use net at the time in 94 the duelist comes out we'll get to the duals

in a second but the important part there is once the duals comes out and I start writing puzzle columns for it I start because people at least know who I am I start writing puzzle columns for it, I start because people at least know who I am. I'm the puzzle guy. I'm the guy who makes the puzzles. So I definitely had a presence on the Usenet. One of the things I used to do, the way the puzzles worked is we would put the puzzle in one issue, but the answer would be in the next issue.

So I would let people on the Usenet, if they thought they had the answer, they would write to me like, so that's correct or that's incorrect. I'd point out why it was incorrect. So anyway, so the first thing is the Usenet. Now, when I got to Wizards, and I was full-time working at Wizards, I started jumping on, like I was always on the Usenet, but I started being a little more official, like, okay.

And I started answering things like, hey, I work at Wizards and here's the answer. And you saw a little bit of that. There are a few people at Wizards at the time that would, Tom being one of them, but other people that would go on the E-Snet and sort of more officially answer things, at least. I mean, not what it was official,

anyone told me it was my job to do it, but more like, hey, I liked interacting with people and I liked writing, so I would do that. Okay, so the next big innovation is magazines. I just mentioned the dualists. I would do that. Okay, so the next big innovation is magazines. I just mentioned the dualists. So basically in 1994, January 1994, the first dualist comes out.

The second dualist would take like six months to come out. In the meantime, there was a dualist one and a half, which I'll get to in a second. But anyway, so what happens is I get the dualist and I'm starved for magic content. At the time, there was a magazine down in LA called Shadis. And Shadis is a role playing magazine, but they did a couple articles on magic. One of which they did their best stab at what they thought the cards were.

Now the list was incomplete, the rarities were wrong in some cases, but it's the first time I even saw some of the list of cards I didn't know about. So that was very exciting. Um, and so when the duals finally came out, I just was so excited just cause it was, it was content on magic. And you gotta remember back then we haven't really got to the point where there's content on the internet about magic. We'll get there. Um, and so it was really, um, it was this glorious thing.

But my take from reading the first duelist was it was light on advanced material. That it was very, it had a lot of cool stuff that only wizards could do, behind the scenes stuff. But it just was, it sort of assumed that everybody had just started playing. And by then, I mean given, it was only six months in, but I'd been playing a decent amount.

And so I ended up, okay, so another way wizards interacted with the public early on is they went to conventions. So early magic, early wizards, they had presence almost everywhere. There was a decent sized convention, especially the United States game convention, they'd send somebody. So I met Steve Bishop, who was the head of the of organized play at the time. He actually was the head judge of the

first few big magic events. And he and I talked and he gave me the name of Catherine Haynes, who was the editor of the dualist. And then through him, once I got information, then I pitched my puzzle column. That would end up going into issue one and a half. The one that was in between issues, a little tiny issue that they were trying to, because it's taking so long to get a second issue out. But my puzzle showed up there and then it became a staple and then my puzzle was in all the rest of the dualists. Eventually, I would do multiple puzzles per dualists. But anyway

Okay, so the story is I I get into the dualists and then At gen con in 94 I go to gen con to convince kather haines to let me write more so I start writing articles So I actually have articles showing up in issue two. Actually, maybe issue two is longer than six months because I didn't talk to her until August and I'm in issue two. So it took a while to get issue. Issue one, issue two was maybe nine months.

It was a long time. So anyway, I start writing for the dualist and the idea is the magazine, at the time the internet was young. Magazines were the way that you can get a lot of communication out. So we did a lot of things. Wizards did a lot of things through the magazine. It was in the magazine that I started doing a column called insider trading.

And the idea there was, hey, I'm a magic player just like you, but I got hired by Wizards. And so now I'm inside. I'm going magic player just like you, but I got hired by Wizards. And so now I'm inside. I'm gonna share information with you. So that was the earliest of me doing like teasers. Like my very first teaser was for Mirage, which was in 96. So anyway, I start writing sort of more behind the scenes information and I start writing articles.

Like when I finally get a set that I lead Tempest, I read a whole article about the leading of Tempest and stuff. And so a lot of the early behind the scenes stuff that Wizards did, it started coming out through the Duelists. You know, Richard's writing articles and other R&D members are writing articles and we're at least starting to do that. Another thing that happened at the time was books. So we put out a thing called a pocket players guide, which mostly was for all intents and purposes,

a book that was, it was like a magazine in that different people were at different articles. I wrote an article about combos, about some famous combos and how a lot of the fun and magic is finding cards to put together. So I talked about a channel and fireball and really innovative combos that no one had heard of. And so there's some wizards sort of puts out a couple books,

Pack a Player's Guide being the big one. So there are a lot of the early things just it's print, but when I mean print, I mean little like books and magazines, things in print. And also there's some amount of visiting to events. Real early magic, some of the way they would tease things is they literally would bring upcoming sets to conventions and just put some of the cards out

and people would see the cards. Now, once again, the internet was young, so people would see the cards and get excited, but there wasn't tons of sharing about what the cards were just because there was a little bit on the internet. Then, as we started doing magazines and books another big thing advertising became really big and not just advertising in our own magazine advertising in other magazines even doing some advertising online. A lot of early previews a lot of early

Here's content you don't have would be in magazines They was very common in the early days that we do an ad for the upcoming set and show you a card from the set To try to get you interested in the set So a lot of like the early early previews some of it were in magazines magazines What are previews some of it were in? And there were other magazines. I mean, the Duelist was the first one. The two big ones in the early days was Scry and Inquest, were the other big ones in the early days.

But anyway, there's just a lot more content coming out about magic finally. And Wizards has started to put a lot of content out magic. So the next big innovation is you start to see the internet slowly advance. The first probably big website for magic content was not our website actually, it was a site called The Dojo. So The Dojo was created by a man named Frank Kusamoto.

And the idea was he really realized that he saw the potential what the internet could do for community. And so what he did was, and this took a lot of time, is people would send him, he would get people to send information. At first he would ask people. And so people started sending tournament reports,

they started sending strategy articles, and there were people like Rob Hahn and Mike Flores and people that were writing more More content and these multi-part articles And the idea was that finally there was a place that everybody knew and I say everybody I meant more of the Competitive scene it was definitely air toward competitive play but the idea of you were a serious Magic player, especially if you were playing in tournaments, here's where you could come and see things and you would have actual good players writing articles about how to be better at Magic. And so it's the first time if you wanted to learn how to get better,

there's actual content about how you get better at Magic. And the tournament reports, early on, they started a little more on the drier side. And then there were some players like Brian Hacker out of California who started sort of jazzing them up a little bit and realized that I can tell a story about the tournament and I can give you actual content,

you know, strategic content, but I can make it entertaining. And I can sort of lean to the lifestyle of what it is to be, you know, a magic player. And so, so a lot of the dojo did a lot of early stuff. It was definitely in the place and it kind of was proof of concept that a site about magic, you know, really could be a potent thing. I, in fact, by the way, I did do one. I had a column on the dojo. Most people don't know this. I did a trivia thing where, I don a column on the dojo, most people don't know this. I did a trivia thing.

Maybe I can't see the name, but I remember what the name was. Anyway, the way it worked was I would ask a question, day one, anybody who wanted to answer could answer it. And then everybody who would give me the correct answer, I would send a question for day two. I think I would post it to the public so everybody would see it, but only the people that answered it correctly on day one

could answer it day two. And then I kept going until there was only one person left and they won there was no actual prize at the time It was just like the honor of having won it and it would vary You know, I would I would start usually the first couple days I have questions that were you know Not easy but not super hard and then there's a day when I would start make the questions a little bit harder to try to narrow it down But anyway, the dojo would lead to the next evolution of that is there are a bunch of websites that Sold magic, you know and wanted to encourage people to come to their website and they seeing what the dojo had done

started paying People to write content mostly Mostly pro, you know, mostly pros, the pro tour, early 96, the pro tour had started. And so you start seeing different websites where there's just regular content, you know, and you start associating certain writers with certain sites. And so, you know, definitely if you were a Magic player, you know, back in 96, let's say,

there were a bunch of different sites that you would go and visit and you would see things and there were different writers that would write once a week or something. So at that point, once we saw that, the brand team, the early Magic website was just like a wizard's website. We had created something called the Duelist,

not the Duelist, I mentioned the Duelist, the Sideboard. The Sideboard started as a, it was for anybody who was in the Duelist Convocation, and it was, I mean pamphlets the wrong word, but it was like a newsletter. And then that eventually turned into its own little glossy magazine once the Pro Tour started. And so anyway, the brand team said, look, we're making content in magazines, but really

we need to be making content online. We need to make a website that we're drawing people to the website. And that would allow us, there's just a lot of advantages if we have people, if eyes are coming to a place we know every week. And so what they said is, okay, we need to start our own website. And so the brand team went to Bill Rose, who was the head designer at the time.

Bill Rose came to me, because I was the one that had the background in communications. And Bill said, we want to start a magic website. So what I did was, I said, okay, let's follow all the rules of how you make content, of how you want to drive behavior, right? So the idea was I want people visiting this website every day, at least every weekday. So we ended up starting with five articles. So Monday was me

writing about designs. It's the one article, Making Magic, that still exists. Friday was latest developments, which was Randy Buehler at the time, Aaron Forsyth would take it over, and Devin Lowe and Sam Stoddard, and many, many people wrote latest developments at some point. Apparently, I like writing, so somehow I keep writing,

but people would write for a year or two and go okay I'm done someone else would write we then had three other articles. I don't know exactly the day I Here's my my memory of it, but I could be off I believe Tuesday was called serious fun by Anthony Longi that was our Timmy Tammy column talking more about social play Then I think Wednesday was House of Cards with Jay Moldenhauer Salazar. And that was our Jimmy Jenny column about deck building and creative building and all the cool things.

And Jay would build fun, weird decks and just show all the sort of cool things you can do with deck building. And then I believe Thursday was Uncommon Knowledge with Ben Blyweiss, who recently started working for Magic this year. And Ben, the idea was there were a lot of articles writing strategic content, this was our Spike article.

So it ended up being more about history, more about talking about different things people had learned. And it sort of talked about competitive play, but a little more in advantage point that was a little different than just all the strategy articles everybody was writing. And then over time our website would evolve. Eventually we got to the point there were two columns a day, so we had ten columns. And then we had we had regular features. We had a thing called Ask Wizards where people would write in and then somebody who was an expert in that thing would answer. Like if you asked about editing the editor

would answer. If you asked about art, the art director would answer. And then we had that. And we did, there were a bunch of things like the Orb of Insight, where when a new set would come out, you could put words and say, how many times that word appeared in the new set. We try things like Flavoricleicle where we could make up, Oracle for flavor attacks, that one didn't do too well.

And we started doing like you make the card, where you let people sort of, people could vote, and then the audience would slowly make a card. And then there was four of those over time. But anyway, really the idea was, there was just a point where a lot of magic content, especially for wizards, was living on the website and we were spending a lot of time sort of creating content.

The next evolution of that is you started moving from sites just being content sites to start seeing what I would call aggregator sites, which is it's not that we're producing content, but we're searching the internet to find all the magic content and putting it in one place. And there are a bunch of different places that became aggregators. Eventually, Daily MTG mostly became an aggregator, where we were just, we were making some of our own content.

I've obviously, I've still written my article, but we were starting to point to other things. And so it was as much us pointing to other existing things as us making content Okay, then we get to the point where YouTube starts coming online and starts becoming more potent The early early days of videos were more short short form videos like the professor started doing reviews of products and You know a lot of the early magic content wasn't particularly long It was you know, the videos were actually on the shorter side

And then with time as youtube started stretching how much how long the videos could be you started seeing longer content Um, you started seeing more strategy content history. And then eventually you started getting to actual gameplay. I know Jimmy and Josh were one of the earlier ones that started doing more polished gameplay, meaning they would shoot content and edit it. Like, I don't know if you've ever seen Game Nights, but having shot Game Nights, you go, you play. There's a lot of stop and start as you reshoot things. Then you do interviews. It's like a full day process. And then they

have to edit everything, which takes weeks. But the next evolution along with seeing sort of some of the video content is the idea of streaming. Twitch comes along. And so the idea there is there are people that say, hey, I'm going to play Magic. We had Magic Online. Then eventually we had Magic Arena. And people could start playing Magic Online, and people could watch them play. And that part of the experience on streaming

is that it's live content where you're interacting with the audience who's watching. One of things about early a lot of the early communication like the duelists and the books and even the websites to a certain extent is In communication theory. It's what we call one-way address ability What that means is you are talking to your audience, but your audience doesn't have an easy way to talk to you It's not nothing when we used to to do what we started doing the website, we would have a thread where people could talk about it. And the people who wrote, I would go read my thread to see what people were saying about my articles.

People could write into me, I'd email. It wasn't that there was zero communication, but it was a lot more we're talking at you rather than they were talking with you. And the idea of streaming is that you're starting to get content for the first time where there's back and forth. And Wizards got in on streaming.

We started doing, Blake started doing a show once a week where he'd bring on guests and we'd stream and talk about magic, I've been on many of those. The other big thing I should mention here is early communication between wizards was wizards doing the vast majority of the content. So if we had a preview season, for example, oh, we had 10 different columns where we'd preview all the different cards in our different columns. Like we were the crux of the preview.

And as time has evolved, as other people started coming up, as there were influencers, we started working with the influencers. So the idea is, you know, now, I mean, I still do some previews in making magic, but Wizards, maybe we preview 10% of the cards in most, most of the previews these days. We communicate with people who are doing content and that we'll give them cards and let them make their own content around the cards. So we're giving them the preview card and we hand pick who gets one preview card. We try to give things that lean into what the player

is known for so that it helps them make the content that would be good for them. And so, you know, there's a lot of what we're doing and how we communicate is, once again, working with external partners to do that. The other big thing that pops up during this time, and once again, I'm not sure I'm getting the order correctly right, podcasting became really big. The idea is, oh, well, you can just get a tape recorder and you can talk, maybe on your

drive to work. Then you can just get a tape recorder and you can talk maybe on your drive to work. And then you can share that with people. And back in 2011, I started this podcast. And it's been a good example where there's a lot of cool ideas. I mean, I write my weekly column, but what I learned is there are certain things that if I have 30 minutes to explain it, like this column, like there's a very different avenue of explaining something in 30 minutes than writing an article that someone's going to read in 10 minutes.

Each has its strengths. I mean, I like writing articles and there's certain things that articles do really well. Articles are better for things that you want to go back and reference where a podcast is harder to reference, where if I'm trying to teach you something that you want to go back and reference where a podcast is harder to reference Where if I'm trying to teach you something? Where do you need to see the exactness of it? like nuts and bolts where I'm giving you technical advice that you're gonna want to go back and look at or like The mechanical color pie article things in which you want to look at is much easier to be in text form

But anyway the evolution of podcasts also split into videocasts. People like Evan Irwin, and there's a lot of people early on who just like, hey, I'm going to talk about magic, I'm going to get together, usually with my friends, my podcast actually is, is I mean, not that I don't do interviews from time to time, but I'm not there's not as many solo podcasts, most podcasts are a number of people talking to each other. I just don't are a number of people talking to each other. I just don't have a lot of people driving to work with me.

That's why it's my solo podcast. I also have the huge advantage of, I know a lot of material that people wanna know, that no one else, like one of the competitive advantages of my podcast is, nobody else is doing this content. So if you're talking strategy or something, a lot of people are talking strategy.

So you have to find your angle. But my angle is I'm a head designer. No one else has that angle. So it helps. So anyway, some of the podcasts are a combination of podcast, video cast, where the idea is we record essentially a video cast, but we release it as a podcast also. So if you want to hear it as a podcast, you can, but there's also a video component. The other thing, by the way,

is you're starting to see also the conglomerate of that. A loading ready run is a good example of this, where they're doing sketches, but they're also doing live streaming, and they're also doing actual gameplay. They're doing lots of different things and that it's not that they're any one thing. They're doing lots of different things and that it's not that they're any one thing, you know, and they're very into gaming.

Obviously they do a lot of magic content. They do stuff that's not magic as well, but the idea is that there's lots of different things they do and so you can like, you know, they have a lot of different kinds of shows and so, you know, you might listen to all of them or you might, there might be a very specific one like when they crack packs or whatever the show you enjoy, they're making a lot of different content over the course of the week. And then the final bit that gets us into is what I'll call social media. The idea that a lot of what you use in it was becomes a little more commonplace, you know Twitter happens

Instagram happens tick tock happens Snapchat the tumblr name your Social media place of but all of a sudden now you can just interact with the people who make magic we Wizards can just talk to you directly And we started people who are hired specifically to handle social media. That we want to have a presence, and so you can see stuff in different places. Also back in 2011, I start my blog on Tumblr. So I literally answer questions every day.

And people can ask me things, and I could talk about it. People can reference it and get posted on Reddit. We can talk on Twitter or talk on blue sky or whatever whatever the thing is that there's this lots of places now where there's more direct direct interaction between us at Wizards who are making content and the audience and then the nature of social media really once again we start getting to much more two-way addressability where people have opinions and they share them like one of the things interesting about my blog is Once again, we start getting to much more two way addressability where people have opinions

and they share them. Like, one of the things interesting about my blog is people ask a question. I'll respond to the question and then people see my answer to that question and often that spawns a new question from them so that we start like, for those that don't read my blog, a lot of what I have sometimes is days get like themes to them where like I answer something and people start getting involved in that and then the day sort of becomes about a topic. That doesn't always happen but it happens a lot. And that's a good, the idea is there's a message but the message isn't dictated just by us

at Wizards that there is a lot more give and take. A lot of times people will put threads up online, whether it's Twitter or Blue Sky or whatever, where like, okay, when you say come out, I'm gonna tell you a little story and I'm gonna make a little thread so I can tell you the story. I have a column in a podcast and a blog,

so I mean, I have a lot more places that I can communicate my stories, but a lot of our, you know, don't have that, so the idea of making a little thread on Twitter or Blue Sky so they can communicate my stories, but a lot of our, you know, don't have that. So the idea of making a little thread on, on Twitter or blue sky, so they can communicate something about the stuff they've worked on. That is pretty cool. Anyway, I think the, the, the trends, you know,

as we look at over the years is really, it has a lot to do with sort of the nature of communication in the world. That us going from the use net to magazines to websites to videos to streaming to podcasts to social media is just the evolution itself of how the world has communicated with each other. And one of the things that's really interesting is when Magic started, right, there almost was this desire to not share information to a point now where we share lots and lots and lots of information.

In fact, I think Magic, and I have a lot to do with this obviously, has kind of set the gold standard for, hey, if you have a game and you want to talk about with your public, you know, let's share information. And it's nice to see that the now mainstay of making magic, I'm sorry, of making games is this expectation from the audience that you will communicate with them and you will share with them and you go behind the scenes and you'll talk to them. You know, it's a real different world. Like when I first came to Magic, the idea that you, a game player, would communicate with people

making your game that wasn't really a thing I mean there was a little tiny bit but it wasn't it wasn't something you had any expectation of and now it's like you know hey I'm playing a game well I want to talk to people making the game I want to understand what's going on and so that change I think is really cool anyway guys that is in 30 minutes the history of communication. As best as I remember it, I'm getting the caveat I'm sure I forgot things and I only have 30 minutes. And if my order is slightly wrong, I apologize there.

I'm roughly in order. But anyway guys, I'm now at work. So we all know what that means. It means instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you all next time. Bye bye.