Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #537: Poll Position #1

Episode Date: May 18, 2018

I started a new feature on my Twitter where I polled the audience about various Magic design issues. This podcast goes over the issues I asked about and the feedback I received. ...

Transcript
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Starting point is 00:00:00 I'm pulling out of the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today's topic is an interesting one. So, as they say, necessity is the mother of invention. So what happened is, I run a daily poll on my website, on Twitter, not my website, on Twitter, my Twitter, called Head to Head, where it takes place over three weeks. There's 16 things of a topic, and they vote against each other. And normally, before I put it up, I give it out to R&D to pre-vote on. And there's a little game we play in R&D where the winner gets a trophy, a bragging trophy, that they get to hold on to, so someone else wins it. But anyway, I was really busy with Great Designer Search, and I just forgot to do, I didn't get to it.
Starting point is 00:00:47 And so I had this week where I didn't have the head-to-head ready. So I decided, okay, well, maybe I can use that for something different. And I ended up making what I call poll position, poll being P-O-L-L. And the idea is that I would ask people poll questions, things that we're curious about for Magic. I would ask them, and then just a means for me to sort of see what people think about stuff. Once again, my caveat with polls is polls are more
Starting point is 00:01:15 for entertainment than anything, but it's a means by which I can get some information. And, for example, when we get to Dominaria, there's a theme in Dominaria that directly came from one of these polls. And other things. I mean, I know there are decisions that got made because, oh, we were surprised to see something in a poll and it affected decisions. But anyway, so today my plan is to talk about the week of poll questions. I'm going to tell you the question, I'm going to tell you how people voted,
Starting point is 00:01:45 and then I'm going to talk about the topic of why I put it up and sort of a larger issue at hand, what's going on there. As you will see, some of these questions were definitive in their answer, some less definitive. Okay, so we'll start with the Monday's poll.
Starting point is 00:02:00 So Monday's poll said, if we have to do more of one than the other, which would you prefer? More new worlds or more return worlds? Now the current policy, oh, let me give you the answer, sorry. So the audience said with 6,098 people voting, 60% said they prefer more new worlds and 40% said more return worlds. said they prefer more new worlds and 40% said more return worlds. So the issue at hand here is one of our goals recently, or our goal has been to do 50-50. That will do 50% of new worlds, 50% of return worlds. But that number was created in a time where we kind of went to one world a
Starting point is 00:02:43 year. And then we went to two worlds a year, two blocks a year. And now in the three-in-one model, we could go up to three places a year. So we're trying to get a gauge of if we, like, for example, within the context of one year, we're going to skew in one direction or another because there's three different things. Now, be aware we could stay in the same place. So it's not always three, but it can be. It can be up to three. So I was more trying to gauge the audience opinion to figure out if we push in a direction.
Starting point is 00:03:11 Now, obviously, we can still average 50-50, but we're just trying to gauge that if we wanted to push in one direction or the other, what direction would the audience want? And the interesting thing there, when we talk about return worlds versus new worlds, is they're very different animals. Return worlds come with sort of more known quantities to them. Meaning, I've done podcasts on both making new worlds and making return worlds. And the trick to return worlds is trying to recapture what it was that people liked about it. So when you go to a return world, there's a lot more known built into it. Your theme is known. You don't always necessarily know your mechanics, but usually something's
Starting point is 00:03:49 coming back, and something's coming back from the original world. Most worlds will have something. We tend to return mechanics often, but when it's a new world, then we're bringing back something that obviously had never been there, if we haven't been there before. The other thing that's a little fuzzy is what exactly a new world... When I say a new world, I mean a world we haven't been there before. The other thing that's a little fuzzy is what exactly a new world... When I say a new world, I mean a world we haven't visited before in a standard legal set. There are definitely stuff like Magic Origins, where we sort of visited a few worlds. There's stuff like Plane Chase, where we introduced planes, but we didn't actually go there. There are supplemental sets like Conspiracy that had its own plane
Starting point is 00:04:25 or Fiora, I guess, those got introduced in the comics. But, you know, there's a lot of... It's getting fuzzier and fuzzier what's new versus what's returned anyway.
Starting point is 00:04:35 But the reason I did this question was I wanted to get a sense of, you know, what do people prefer? So not only did people vote on this, people made a lot of comments. So I read the comments from people. And what you'll see,
Starting point is 00:04:49 one of the themes of all week long is people tend to feel strongly. They just don't all agree with each other. So the people that want a new world are like, hey, we want to see new and different things. Stop giving us stuff we've seen before. And the people that want returns are like, oh, there's so much things we enjoyed in Magic.
Starting point is 00:05:06 We want to revisit the things from the past. And so, I also got a bunch of people who were very excited for Dominaria, who were like, more returns if it means more times in Dominaria. So I got a lot of that. But anyway, that was the first poll question, is return worlds or
Starting point is 00:05:20 new worlds. Okay, question number two. This is Tuesday's question. Would it be okay to carry over a mechanic between consecutive sets if they occurred on different worlds? So this was the most answered question of the week with 6,388 people. Yes was 91% and no was 9%.
Starting point is 00:05:40 So this was probably the most, the loudest day of we believe one thing. So one of the tricks now in the three-in-one model is we're going to be changing worlds more often than we did back in the old days where, you know, once upon a time, the whole year was in the world. You know, back in the old school block days, like one year, one world, and we'd be in that world for the whole year. days, like one year, one world, and we'd be in that world for the whole year. Now we're like, oh, we can be there for longer, but we can be there as short as one set. So trying to get a sense of how often we're supposed to do consecutive things.
Starting point is 00:06:22 The notes I got here mostly were people saying, look, it's fine. We like continuity. We like things being continued. We like you taking mechanics and building on them. All we ask, and the funny thing is, even though it was 91%, a lot of the yeses gave the same caveat. And the answer was, it had to make sense. Meaning, and so they said that was one of two ways.
Starting point is 00:06:40 One is, there's certain mechanics, cycling being the poster child, that doesn't really mean anything. If you're cycling on one world or the other, it's pretty vague in what it means. So anything that's a vague mechanic to start with, okay, that's fine. It's already a vague mechanic. The other is if we can make it make sense. Like if we have a mechanic in one world and the next world,
Starting point is 00:07:02 thematically there's some crossover between them. So the reason the mechanic made sense in the first world, it also one world, in the next world, thematically there's some crossover between them, so the reason the mechanic made sense in the first world, it also can make sense in the second world, they were okay with that as well. But while we got 91%, yes, there was a really strong undercurrent to it of it should be done willy-nilly,
Starting point is 00:07:18 that it should feel like it belongs. Now, people seem to have faith that we could do that, they believe that we can make things fit. But it is interesting. I mean, one of the things in general is I live in the future, as they say. And it's very funny, sort of, you guys are acting in the world as you know it, which is right now, and I'm acting usually two to three years out trying to figure out where we're going. So a lot of these questions, in some ways, are really interesting to me
Starting point is 00:07:49 because these are things we're actually thinking through because one of the things, whenever you change up how you do things, and the three-in-one world is different in a lot of ways, it's really making us question everything. That's why a lot of these questions came out, is in the future, I'm sort of questioning things and trying to figure out sort of what direction they're going
Starting point is 00:08:09 also a little a little quick little sideways thing one of the perks so I have on my Twitter I don't know I'm up to like 75,000 followers I think which I've been told puts me in the 1% of Twitter people. One of the things that's very interesting of having a lot of followers on Twitter and having Twitter have this poll function that's just so easy to do
Starting point is 00:08:37 is that I can sort of do a poll at a moment's notice. And I got a lot of people answering my poll. For example, the last poll, I did 6,800 people. 6,800 people answered my poll. It's funny because one time at dinner, we were eating, I think, at the Outback. And they had this little screen you can pay money to play games and stuff at.
Starting point is 00:09:04 And one of the games they did, they ask you questions and then you have to get, the goal of the game is for you to match what the most common answer is. And one of the questions was, which would be cooler to have, a flying carpet or a monkey butler? And we were having all sorts of arguments at the table. So I said, fine, I'm going to ask my Twitter audience. And I did, and like, I don't know, 8,000 people answered over the course of 24 hours. It turned out that a flying carpet is better than a monkey butler.
Starting point is 00:09:35 But anyway, it's fun that I can do that. Anyway, I'm not sure if that, my little segue is, I guess there are perks to having 75,000 people on Twitter who very much like to answer questions. The other interesting little sidebar thing is one of the things I track on my Twitter is what they call impressions, which is how much are people engaging with what I write. And it turns out when I started doing my polling
Starting point is 00:10:00 that the engagement went way up, that people really like answering polls and stuff. So anyway, one of the reasons that I do the polls. You guys like it and it just raises engagement. Okay, question number three for Wednesday. On average, how many keyword mechanics or slashability
Starting point is 00:10:18 words should be in a large set and not counting obviously evergreen more? So this 4,161 people answered. This was actually the smallest answering of the week. So I said three or four. A lot of people wrote to me wanting more answers. The reason I said that is our current,
Starting point is 00:10:38 what I say in R&D is that the average set has on average three and a half mechanics, which means some have three, some have four. We can go up to five if we need to, and we can go down to two if we need to. But three and a half is kind of the place we sit around. So this was a very, oh, I didn't give you the answers, did I? This was a very interesting question to me, just because I'm always struggling with how many mechanics I'm supposed to have. So this was super, super close.
Starting point is 00:11:11 Three was 51%, and four was 49%. So for all intents and purposes, this is kind of tied. The funny thing is our average is three and a half, so we're kind of, 50-50 makes sense. That's kind of where we're at right now anyway. We're kind of 50-50 makes sense. That's kind of where we're at right now anyway. The thing I've discovered when we try to figure out how many mechanics to have, all mechanics are not equal.
Starting point is 00:11:36 And so what I tend to find out is how much what I call weight they have, which means how much, weight's a couple things. One is how much of the design does it fill up? You know, how much does it sort of let you build around it? And how much complexity and how hard is it to wrap your mind around? And the weightier the mechanics, the fewer of them are set in need.
Starting point is 00:11:57 For example, Dominaria technically has two mechanics in it. I'm sorry, not two mechanics. It has two mechanics in it. It has... I'm sorry, not two mechanics. It has three mechanics in it. It has Kicker, it has Modular, and it has
Starting point is 00:12:12 Sagas. And... But those are pretty weighty. You know, Modular does a lot of sort of gluing things together. And there's other themes like caring about legendary things, stuff that are at higher rarities we get to mess around with. But anyway, a lot of whether or not we do three or four
Starting point is 00:12:35 is dependent upon what we're capable of, sort of how much weight that carries. Sometimes, for example, if I need to add in something in small, that I'll make it the fourth mechanic. And I can even go up to five if I have to. I'm trying to avoid that. Like I said, it's something available to me. But what this said to me mostly, by the way, mostly what this poll said to me is that our current goal of three and a half is about right, since the audience seems to feel naturally that somewhere between three and four is the correct answer.
Starting point is 00:13:09 So this one was nice. Okay. Thursday's question. Okay. So Thursday is, which do you prefer for legendary creatures? Less, but all story relevant, or more, not all story relevant? And so the answer to this one is
Starting point is 00:13:32 51% said less, but all story relevant, and 49% said more, but not all in the story. So people online were saying that I was pitting the Vorfos crowd against the Commander crowd. So one of the tensions that comes up, and this is an interesting one, which is, once upon a time, the reason to have legendary things was mostly a story-driven thing. It's like we just wanted a flavor. And so we would make as many story characters as it made sense for what the story was doing.
Starting point is 00:14:02 Now sometimes, I just did a podcast on legendary creatures. I mean, sometimes there are reasons for structural reasons to have more. But we had as many as we wanted to have. It didn't really matter. And then Commander became a thing. So the Commander format, for those that somehow don't know, you choose a legendary creature to be your Commander, and then you take 99 other cards.
Starting point is 00:14:24 No repeats. It's all singletonleton other than basic lands. But anyway, commander is such a popular format that there's a lot more pressure on us to sort of try to make more legendary creatures or be more conscious when making legendary creatures to make sure that some of them are commander friendly. I will say this every time I talk about legendary creatures. They're not all commander friendly, there's other people who like legendary creatures and we get to make them that some of them are commander-friendly. I will say this every time I talk about legendary creatures. They're not all commander-friendly. There's other people who like legendary creatures,
Starting point is 00:14:48 and we get to make them happy as well. But commander definitely pushes us to want to make more of them, and it pushes us to make legendary creatures that encompass themes that are themes in the set. So the reason for this question really kind of boiled down to where are we... Oh, another thing about this question that was really interesting is the reason it's less but story-relevant or more of not story-relevant is because it's correlative. Like, one of the things that came up from Dominaria is I had to let people know, hey, there's a lot of legendaries. They're not all in the story, you know what I'm saying?
Starting point is 00:15:24 There's way too many legendaries, they're not all in the story. You know what I'm saying? There's way too many legendaries for them to all be relevant. Normally, if we do a story and there's a handful of legends, yeah, we can make them all relevant. And even then, even when we do that, normally there's some legendary creatures that you sort of hear in passing
Starting point is 00:15:37 that have a role in the story, but a small role. The thing with something like Dominaria is they can't all have a role. There's just too many of them. Now, the interesting thing when I asked the audience, I got a lot of mixed opinions, as I guess evidenced by the 5149. There are some people that really liked the fact that they meant something and that they really wanted them to, you know, we should be stingy with what we make legendary. And there's other people like, no, no, no, no, not only do I like Commander or whatever,
Starting point is 00:16:11 but I like having legendary creatures that we don't necessarily know everything about them. And so there's a big debate that this opened up about how much are we supposed to fill in? How much are we, like, an offshoot of this, I didn't do a poll on this one, but an offshoot of this was, hey, I like it when you make characters that you don't make cards out of. I like having some characters that are mysterious and we don't necessarily have to know everything about them. And other
Starting point is 00:16:36 people were like, no, what I dislike most is when you make a character in a story and then don't make a card out of them. And there's a lot of debate of sort of what people want. And the answer to this really is an ongoing theme of regular listeners. Different players want different things. It is not a unified thing. It is not as if all players want the same thing.
Starting point is 00:16:55 That's one of the reasons I do these polls and the reasons it's interesting to sort of get the feedback is the audience is not a unified thing that just all wants the same thing. They want different things. The audience is not a unified thing that just all wants the same thing. They want different things. So on some level, making one group happy makes another group unhappy. And I'm just trying to gauge.
Starting point is 00:17:17 The reality is there will be sets like Dominaria where we just need more and we'll have more. There'll be sets where there's not a lot of reason to have legendary creatures other than a handful. And, you know, we'll probably make enough to make sure Commander works, but we still won't go crazy with it. And so there's a balance to be struck. Note, by the way, this is a good example of a question where this really isn't my area. I don't choose how many characters are in the story. So I was asking poll questions that weren't necessary things that I was directly doing,
Starting point is 00:17:46 as a side note. I did make the creative team aware of this, and they were actually, when I asked them what they thought the result would be, they thought that more, but less story relevant was going to just beat out less,
Starting point is 00:18:01 and it was the reverse. So they weren't super proud, you know. But it was interesting. Actually, if you had asked me for each of these who I thought was going to win, I would have thought more but less relevant to the story
Starting point is 00:18:14 or not relevant to the story would have won. It did not. I mean, it barely lost, but it did not. Do you think anything else interesting about this? The interesting thing about this one, I guess,
Starting point is 00:18:25 versus some of the other ones of the week was how many different opinions there were, meaning that only... I only gave you two answers. And a lot of people... A lot of people are like, well, what I want is more, but they're all relevant. And I'm like, okay, this is correlative.
Starting point is 00:18:45 We only get so much story to write write and there's only so much space within the story and, you know, doing name dropping with a thicket and name dropping is not particularly great. So, I do get people wanting more choices. Usually when I make a poll and I give you the choices I give you, there's a reason there. That's why more and relevant and less and not relevant weren the choices I give you, there's a reason there. That's why more and relevant and less and not relevant weren't choices because it wasn't really fit in the thing we're trying to decide. I did let the creative team know and I don't know if this
Starting point is 00:19:13 will influence them at all. I think in general they try to get a balance anyway. So hearing that the audience wants a balance probably isn't changing things all that much to them. balance probably isn't changing things all that much to them. Okay. Friday. So Friday talked about milling. So for, it should milling be keyworded. And there were three answers to this one. Real quickly, milling means to take cards from the top of your library or a library and put them directly into its owner's graveyard. It's slang. So the term milling is slang. The very first card that ever did this was called millstone. So a millstone, for those who don't know, is something you use to grind things, wheat usually. And it grinds it into a powder.
Starting point is 00:19:56 Like you take wheat and it grinds it into a powder so that you can then bake it, make a dough out of it and stuff. I'm probably skipping some steps there in making bread. But anyway, so this was the only one of the week that gave you three choices. So question number one is, should milling be keyworded? Yes, but only if it's specifically the word mill. Yes, even if it's not mill, or no. So 4,507 people voted in this one. And so what they said was
Starting point is 00:20:29 40% said yes, but only if it's mill. 39% said yes, but doesn't have to be mill. And 21% said no. So, anyway, most of the discussions here was people yelling at me. I think I actually, when I first put up the poll, I just said yes or no,
Starting point is 00:20:48 and built in the question was we wouldn't use mail. And enough people yelled at me about that that I made it an option. Okay, yes, but you have to use mail. One of the things that's a big debate is the audience is like, we've done something, we've done it for a long time, we don't want to change. And kind of what I was pointing out is, We've done something. We've done it for a long time. We don't want to change. And kind of what I was pointing out is, look, we have lots of evidence that we will pick the right name for something.
Starting point is 00:21:17 And that if the audience has a nickname for it, one of two things will happen. Usually what happens is eventually they start calling it by the name we call it. Haste used to be called Celerity, and people called Lifelink Spiritlink, and they called Vigilant Sarah, and there were just nicknames for things before they had words. And, you know, or even
Starting point is 00:21:35 color pairings, there were nicknames. And then once we gave it a name, the audience tends to adopt the nickname we give it. So, one of the things I was trying to say is, look, if we gave it a name, it'll start having a name and then people will start learning it
Starting point is 00:21:49 because it'll just be on cards. My big issue with Mill is that because it's extrapolative name, meaning the flavor originally, which was a tangential flavor to begin with, is the flavor text of the millstone is like, you know, it goes off at all hours and it drives people crazy or something. You know, it's like, it's just this noise that you can't get out of your head and it drives you crazy.
Starting point is 00:22:14 And so they, oh, get it? It drives you crazy. It makes you mill cards. But I mean, it was the kind of flavor in which you had to like have flavor text explain it. it was the kind of flavor in which you had to, like, have Flavortix explain it. Now, a lot of people are like, oh, mill means to grind. Maybe you're grinding the deck. And there's people who just have come up with a reason why it makes sense to them, even though its origin really has nothing to do with actual explanation. I think if we keyword it, I'm not saying mill will be off the table,
Starting point is 00:22:49 but whenever we've done, sometimes what we'll do is we'll do polling with new players to get a sense of vocabulary words. In fact, I did a whole podcast where I talked to Rachel, back when I was driving Rachel to school, and I gave Rachel words and had her come up with what she think they did. And I did mill with her and she had no idea. So we have come close to talking, well, we've talked about keywording milling a couple times. Probably the most serious
Starting point is 00:23:11 was during Shadows of Innistrad where for a while there was a stronger milling theme built into it. They said a little bit of a milling theme, but there was a stronger milling theme that you were trying to drive your opponent crazy at one point
Starting point is 00:23:22 and if you milled them out, you made them go crazy. That didn't end up being the thing. But anyway, when milling was going to be a major role in the set, we said, oh, maybe now is the time to find a keyword for milling. So the problem we discovered is twofold. One is any word that correctly sort of conveys flavorfully what it means to lose stuff from your library
Starting point is 00:23:45 also feels like it makes sense to lose stuff from your hand. Like a very popular one we had was forget. Target player forgets three cards. And like, oh, does that mean you lose them from your library or you discard them from your hand? And what we found was anything that flavorfully made sense for your library also made sense for your hand. And the problem there is the idea is your hand, flavor-wise, is kind of your current memory, and your library is kind of your brain, and your hand is like your current thoughts. So the idea of forgetting things makes sense both from your hand and from your library. They're all your brain. So we had that problem.
Starting point is 00:24:27 The second problem is the reason we keyword things is we're trying to save some space. So, for example, creature keywords, oftentimes we write those out with other things going on on them. And having them shortcutted allows us to sort of make some cards that we can't normally make. Because we're allowed to drop reminder text when we have to on high-rarity cards. So having creature keywords, it makes sense. There's value to having them keyworded. The problem is, if you look at something like milling effects, look, they're almost always on spells, and once in a while I guess it's on ETB or on tap ability.
Starting point is 00:25:03 But usually they're not in a place where we have problems with space. Every once in a blue moon, but we don't... It's the kind of thing where, yeah, we save some words, but it's not in a place where necessarily we need the word saved. The other issue, which is a large issue, which is a barrier for entry problem, is the more vocabulary you have in your game, the more someone starts playing and you're using words that they don't know, even with reminder text, the more daunting
Starting point is 00:25:30 the game is. And so one of the things we always talk about is that there is a bar you have to clear to become a keyword. And part of it has to do with how often you use it. Part of it has to do with how good is the word you have for it, meaning something like dies, the reason we adopted that is we felt like it made it easier to understand what's going on, not harder. It wasn't vocabulary you had to learn.
Starting point is 00:25:52 It was actually using vocabulary as a means to make it easier to understand what's going on. Stuff like that is great. Stuff like that we're more eager to add in. Stuff in which is like, oh, it's a term, I don't know it, I have to learn what the term means. Too much of that is a problem. So there's only so much keywording we get. And so the question is, you know, how much keywords and does it pass the bar? Milling it, the reason we have not keyworded yet is it's always sort of dubious whether it crosses the bar or not.
Starting point is 00:26:22 Will it ever be a keyword? I don't know. Maybe one day we eventually do it. And the one that we do know is when we keyword things, it increases our using them. So that's another reason sometimes not to keyword things. It's like, oh, is this something we want to up? Usually if we keyword it, it rises in usage anywhere from like 15 to 20%.
Starting point is 00:26:39 So another reason for keyboarding is do we want to use it? So there's that question. But anyway, that was so basically what I heard was most people want us to keyword it in general, establish the more experienced players like us keywording things. It's better for them. It's just less words for them and sure hands for them. Um, you know, especially if we use mill for them because it wouldn't be adding much vocabulary.
Starting point is 00:27:04 They already know what it means. But even if we made a new word, they would pick that up pretty quick. Extra vocabulary words for the established players doing things they're used to doing is not much of a strain for them. So it makes sense when I go to the modern franchise crowd that 80% of them are like, yeah, keyword it. They're very mixed in what should be keyworded. The funny thing is, obviously, the Mill crowd strongly felt that only Mill should be used. The other crowd was sort of like,
Starting point is 00:27:32 either they didn't want Mill to be used, or they're like, we think there's better answers than Mill. So anyway, I don't know if we're going to keyword it. I don't know if we do, whether or not we'll call it Mill. My gut is we wouldn't call it mill just because it is clear from experimentation that players just don't get it. New players just don't get it. Anyway, we'll see. Okay, then I had a bonus question. Actually, I didn't write down how many people answered this, but a surprising number.
Starting point is 00:28:00 This weekend, there was a topic on my blog that somebody asked me if I could do a poll so we can get a sense of what the audience thought, so I did. So the question was, if you had to give a label to Nahiri, the Planeswalker Nahiri, the core from Zendikar, one of the three that originally jailed the Eldrazi on Zendikar, if you had to label her with one of these two labels, which would you choose, hero or villain? So hero was 34% and villain was 64%. So one of the tricky things about Nahiri,
Starting point is 00:28:31 for those that don't know, Nahiri was originally an old school planeswalker back in the uber powerful days. And she is from Zendikar. And she was one of the three people that originally imprisoned the Eldrazi on Zendikar. She did it to save her home world.
Starting point is 00:28:56 And anyway, she was sort of left behind to make sure they stayed in prison, spent many thousands of years doing that. I think there was one time they almost escaped and she called for help, but no one came to help her, but she managed of years doing that. I think there's one time they almost escaped and she called for help but no one came to help her, but she managed to keep him contained. At some point
Starting point is 00:29:10 she goes to find out Sorin. Ugin at this point, although no one knows it, is dead. He would later become undead thanks to the work of Sarkhan. And when she finds Sorin, he's not in a great mood. Not that Sorin's a wonderful human... He's not a human being, he's a vampire. Not a wonderful vampire to begin with.
Starting point is 00:29:27 He ends up locking her in the Hell Vault for quite a while. And when she gets out, she is rightfully... I don't know, rightfully. She's mad at Sorin. She ends up luring Emrakul to Innistrad. And does some stuff in which she's whether she's rightfully angry or not, I guess is an interesting debate. So anyway, I asked this question.
Starting point is 00:29:51 Like I said, 64% said she's a villain. A lot of people were basically like, the second you do things that cause harm to the innocent, you're not a hero anymore, you're a villain. But a lot of other people were like, well, she's really not a villain, she's an anti exact. She's not a villain.
Starting point is 00:30:05 She's an anti-hero or whatever people wanted to say. Some people also said that, like, you know, she's kind of forced in this or a victim of circumstances. The interesting thing about this, by the way, of all the polls that ran all week long and they all generated lots of conversation, none has generated the amount of conversation of the Nahiri poll. None has generated the amount of conversation of the Nahiri poll. So, let me, before we wrap up today, I will tell you where I stand on each of these things, just if you're curious.
Starting point is 00:30:38 So, if you had to do more new or return, I would lean slightly more toward new. If a mechanic had to carry over between worlds consecutive worlds is it okay? it is to me I think we should do it on average how many keyboard mechanics should appear in a set when I say 3.5 is the answer I actually probably deep in my mind feel like 3.3
Starting point is 00:30:57 I like to make it 3 if I can I'm willing to go up to 4 or above if the set really needs it but I 3 is where I'm happier if I can make it work. So for legendary creatures, I prefer
Starting point is 00:31:13 more, but not story relevant. I think there's a lot of fun things we can do, and I'd rather make more legendary creatures and not worry about making them all show up in the story. Should milling be keyword? Right now I'm in the camp of no, but if we keyword? Right now I'm in the camp of no. But if we do do it, I'm in the camp of it shouldn't be mill.
Starting point is 00:31:29 And do I consider Nahiri a hero or a villain? I consider her a villain. I think she was a hero. I think bad things happened to her and forced her down a dark path. But I think she's made some villainous choices. That doesn't mean that necessarily that's the future path for her.
Starting point is 00:31:45 It doesn't mean she always will be a villain. But I believe that right now with the actions she's taken, that it makes her a villain. Once again, the question was all about putting a label on her. I think she's a lot more great than hero or villain. But the point of the poll was to sort of force you one way or the other. And then if choice between hero and villain, I'd choose villain. I think she's a really interesting character, and
Starting point is 00:32:07 a villain, and one of the coolest villains, where a villain you understand why they're doing what they're doing, which to me makes an awesome villain, where like, yeah, she shouldn't have been doing that, but I get where she's coming from, and I understand her motives for why she's doing it. So anyway, guys, that is my podcast on poll position. I hope
Starting point is 00:32:23 you guys, for those that got a chance to vote, I hope you enjoyed it. If not, you can start following me on my Twitter. I do the head-to-head every day. And my idea on poll position is this was something I did out of necessity, but I like it, and I like the feedback I got. And I'm not going to do it between every head-to-head, but I think
Starting point is 00:32:40 every once in a while, I might take a week off of head-to-head and do poll positions. I don't have endless questions I necessarily need to ask, so sometimes things seem like the best. But anyway, guys, I hope you guys enjoy it. I hope you enjoy today's podcast. But anyway, I'm now at work, so we all know that. Well, na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na. Let's try that again. So I'm now at work, so we all know what that means. It means it's the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. See you guys next time.

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