Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #17 - On the Duelist

Episode Date: January 18, 2013

Mark Rosewater talks about the Duelist Magazine.

Okay, pulling out of the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today, I've done many things in my time at Wizards. A lot of times I focus on my time as being a designer. But, when the dust has settled and I look back at my wizard's career, I had some other jobs. Today is about one of those jobs. Yes, once upon a time, I was editor-in-chief of The Duelist. Now, for those who might not know, once upon a time, words were put onto paper. And you had to go to the store have it delivered to your house

and the latest news not that latest because it was on paper but once upon a time there were these things called magazines and so the do-all list for those that are unaware let me get people up to date that might not know Magic came out in

1993 in 1994 Wizards of the Coast decided that they needed to have a magazine to support Magic. And at the time, look, that was how you did fan support. You did a magazine. You know, nowadays we have websites and other things, but back in 1994, those didn't exist yet. And so they made a magazine called The Duelist. Why The Duelist? The idea was, I believe the organization they made to run tournaments was called The Duelist Convocation. It's the DC and the DCI.

And so they decided to make a magazine to go along with it. I thought they thought The Duelist sounded classy. I don't know. Also, the was part of the name, by the way. It's not Duelist. It's The Duelist, as I was often reminded. So it's like The Duelist. Anyway, so what happened was, in fact, the reason that Duelist is warm to my heart is

it is very entwined with how I ended up at Wizards, and I ended up becoming super involved with it. So let me explain. Okay, so once upon a time, Wizards of the Coast said, oh, we have a phenomenon. Magic is hitting it big. We realize this is a big thing. Okay, we're going to

make a magazine to dedicate. So what they did is they hired a woman named Catherine Haynes. Now, she might have already worked there, but she essentially was the person put in charge of this. So let me talk a little bit about Catherine. So Catherine was, now I, I'm not a tall man. Every time someone sees me anywhere on videos or something, they always say to me, I thought you'd be taller. I'm 5'5". Compared to Catherine,

I'm a giant of a man. Catherine was a little person. I mean, not a little person, but Catherine wasn't very tall. And although, to be honest, she's probably like 5'3", 5'4". But she wore glasses and she had long brown hair

and around the office she tended to go barefoot. She liked to be barefoot. And she had bottomless energy. She was very thoughtful. I mean, the thing I love about Catherine was

that she would always listen and she always, like, you know, if you had a good idea, like, she had a good ability to judge things, and she would listen, she had a serious face when she listened, and if she liked it, she's like, do it. That was what, do it.

Because the thing about Catherine is, I would pitch her ideas, and pretty much the way it would work is, well, let me get into the story, I'll get to Catherine, I guess I'll get there. So what happened was, duelist number one comes out. And if I remember correctly, I had a date that day.

Yes, once upon a time I had dates. And I, before I went to the date, had swung by the game store, and I picked up the latest, the first Duelist was out. And I was very excited, because there was very little written about magic at the time. There was a magazine back then called Shadis. I think it was in Southern California. And Shadis was about role-playing mostly. But they had a few articles about magic.

And they were the first ones to ever guess at rarities. So I had read a few things about magic. Remember the Internet as we know it wasn't really there back then. I mean, the Usenets existed, but they were in the early days, and I wasn't really on them yet. So all my gossip or whatever about it was from reading from magazines and things, and there wasn't much talked about it. So I was so excited when the first Duelist came out.

I was so excited when the first doulas came out. I was so excited, so excited. Anyway, what happened was, so I used to do stand-up, and one of my jokes in my stand-up was, I talked about how I was what's called over-punctual, and what that means is, like I used to say, you're at a party, there's a guy that gets there, like before everybody else gets there, and he helps, like, set the up. And put the food out.

I let him in. A little glimpse of my stand up days. So I was renowned. For being places early. I mean early. So I remember I got to where my date was. I was meeting my date at a restaurant. And I got there way earlier than I should.

Way earlier than I should. And I was sitting in my car. And I was reading the duelist. I'm reading the duelist while I'm waiting for my date to show should. And I was sitting in my car, and I was reading the duelist. I'm like, oh, I have my duelist, I'm reading the duelist. Well, I'm waiting for my date to show up. I had some time to kill. And I was fascinated, I was excited. I mean, I was excited that a magazine was dedicated to magic,

because at that point I was hook, line, sinker, I was in. But I was kind of disappointed, because I felt like it was very basic and I wanted something that was I mean at the time I was as involved as the Magic players there was I was playing every week

and so I kind of wanted a magazine that at least had a little bit more for advanced players I felt and I mean I'm like if anyone's going to have any stuff for advanced players how about the magazine dedicated to Magic like if you're about the magazine dedicated to magic? Like, if you're reading a magazine dedicated to magic, maybe you're into magic.

And so I felt it was lacking something. And then I decided, I don't know, in the back of my head, I'm like, what's it missing? And I came up with this idea of doing puzzles. Because I thought, you know, maybe what a magic player would like is, what if you gave them the game and somehow let them help figure it out. I'd seen chess puzzles before.

I think I was inspired by chess puzzles. So the chess puzzle is, here's a board. You have so many moves. You know, make a checkmate or whatever the puzzle is, or capture piece, or there's different puzzles. And so I liked the idea of, okay, here's a board, win. And it just came to me, I wasn't particularly trying to make something for the magazine, I just was trying to solve the problem, because I felt like I didn't want to just complain,

I kind of wanted to give a suggestion. Because I felt like I didn't want to just complain. I kind of wanted to give a suggestion. So what happened was, once upon a time, Wizards of the Coast used to send somebody to every convention on the face of the earth it felt like. I mean, Wizards used to travel everywhere. So anyway, there was a convention in Los Angeles. In fact, I think there were three of them. Two or three of them.

One was OrkCon. I don't remember the name of all of them. But anyway, one of the conventions, Wizards of the Coast sent a small contingency. One of them was a guy named Steve Bishop. So Steve Bishop, if you've heard me talk about him in my article, Steve Bishop for a while was the head of the Duel of Convocation, the precursor to the DCI. And the head of what we used to call events, now we call organized play. And what happened was Steve had gotten into it. I think he knew somebody who worked there. It was a friend of a friend. A lot of early Wizards employees were just kind of in the right place at the right time because the company was growing so fast.

They were just looking for people to hire. And a lot of people were like, oh, I got a roommate or I got a friend, and they would get hired. And Steve, at some point I'll talk about early nationals, early worlds. I mean, Steve had a lot of passion, but he was not well-versed in how to run tournaments, at least not how to run Magic tournaments. I think he kind of fell into a position

that was really not something that it was when it got created. Anyway, my memory of Steve was he used to wear leather pants and a bandana. And he was at the convention and I said to him that I had this idea

for the duelist. And he told me the name of Catherine Haynes, who is the editor. And I don't know, I think, I don't know whether I gave him the puzzles or whether, he might have just told me the name and I mailed them myself. Anyway, I ended up mailing the puzzles to Catherine Haynes. And the idea was, I thought it was a neat idea. I think I made two or three puzzles. I was trying to show proof of concept.

And so I made some puzzles. I sent them off to her. And then nothing. I heard nothing. And I was like, oh, I was very proud of them. I thought they were kind of cool. So anyway, back then, The Duelist was a quarterly magazine. It came out four times a year.

And so I eventually, I think a couple months went by, I just heard nothing. So I finally, one day I said, I said I had to call. I got Catherine on the phone. First time I'd ever talked to her. And I'm like, hi, yeah, my name's Mark Rosewater. I don't know if you remember this, but, uh, I sent some puzzles to you as a, you know, a puzzle column and you had to solve the puzzles. Oh yeah.

Oh yeah. Oh yeah. And I'm like, oh, well, okay. Uh, did you like them? Oh yeah. I thought they were really good. Okay. Well, is that something you might want to do? Oh yeah.

Yeah. It's in the next issue. Like what? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, it's in the next issue. Like, what? Oh, yeah, yeah, it's coming out pretty soon. It's in the next issue. So basically, they had decided to do it, knew it, and printed it, and printed the magazine, and no one bothered to call and tell me.

Which, it's kind of the early days of Wizards in that Wizards was a company, it was a little tiny company that kind of the early days of Wizards in that Wizards was a company that was a little tiny company that kind of exploded overnight. And, you know, a lot of, like it took a while for the company to kind of get more corporate in that they were, in the early days,

nobody knew anything, you know. Nobody had really had a corporate environment. And so the company kind of took some time to find itself. For example, printing someone's work without contacting them. That's not something most companies would do. But anyway, so she said they were printing the puzzle.

And so it turned out that there was such a gap between Duelist 1 and Duelist 2, getting Duelist 2 out, they made a Duelist 1 1⁄2. A little trivia. It's a little tiny magazine. My puzzle's in it. It's sort of a claim to fame, one of the claims to fame, the Duelist 1 1⁄2. I think the cover had Stone Calendar on it. It's sort of a claim to fame, one of the claim to fame. The duel's one and a half. I think the cover had Stone Calendar on it.

It had Amy Weber's Art of Ever. So Amy Weber, by the way, so the artist Amy Weber who did Time Walk and who did Stone Calendar and I say Celestial Prism. I feel bad. That's not one of her best words. Anyway, she was the art director when the magazine first started.

And so, anyway, they did my puzzle. So I decided that, for those that know my, I've talked about this in How I Got Into Magic. But anyway, I was working in a game store. I got let go from the game store for reasons I don't understand. I was kind of in a weird place. And I decided that I just wanted to do something. I spent some money that I didn't really have and flew myself to Gen Con on this whole idea

that I was going to meet Catherine and convince her face-to-face to let me write for The Duelist. Anyway, so I flew to Gen Con. I met Catherine, and, like, I was really prepared for, like, you know, I'm going to have to convince her, okay, you know, like, I have, I thought of all the things, and I'm like, okay, I have 25 reasons why I would be a great addition to a, and I wanted to be a freelance writer.

I wasn't, you know, at the time, I wasn't moving to Wizards yet. I just wanted to freelance. And I had, like, 25 things, and it literally is like, you know, okay, Catherine, I think you should hire me because, number one, I'm a good writer. And she's like, okay. Well, I've got 24 more. She's like, well, look, here's how we do it. You pitch me a good idea.

If it's a good idea, you can write it. That's what she said. And like I said, Catherine had this great thing where she had this serious face and then she'd have this smile, this wonderful smile. And it was just like, give me an idea. It's a good idea. You can write it. And so I came back to her later that day, and I said, I had pitched her two ideas. Number one is I said, okay, it might be neat since we're at Gen Con, and this was kind of the mecca of game conventions.

What if I write about the convention from the focal point of a Magic player? What's it like to go to the largest game convention in the U.S. as a Magic player? And it ended up being an article called an MTG-er at Gen Con. That's me trying to come up with an MTG-er. That was my sling for what you call a Magic player. That one didn't catch on.

But anyway, if you go online, that article has been put online. Search for an MTG MTG or Gen Con. You'll find my article. It's on our site. Also, I pitched the idea of, I go, let me cover the finals. I'll write about the,

because the first world championship was going to be there. And I said, I'll write about it. Now, somehow they didn't have a plan for someone to be there. That was my plan two days before. I'll write about it. But anyway, she let me do it.

And so, if you've ever seen pictures of the finals of Zach Dolan versus Bertrand Lachere, you see this goofy little kid in the background writing on a pad. That is me. Little blonde kid. Curly hair. So anyway, somehow, I gave her some ideas. And so what happened was, I had two qualities that cemented my time in the doulas. One was that I was a decent writer.

And the second was I turned things in on deadline. So writers out there, those are the two most important things, quality and in on deadline. And to be honest, in on deadline is probably more important, although they're both important. Probably more important. Although, they're both important. So anyway, what happened then was that I got in this relationship where I, basically every month I would call and I would pitch ideas. And it was a given I was going to write every month.

I got to the point where I always would write, but it's what am I going to write about? And Catherine let me pitch whatever I wanted, and I pitched all sorts of stuff. I mean, I did an article once where I talked about making decks to play against each other's, you know, 10 decks before, or 15 years before Duel Decks came out. I made a solitaire variant called Manamay Solitaire,

which I was proud of. I wrote about, anyway, if you go look at early Duelists, I'm in there. And then, what happened was, I went up to Wizards one day

and said, oh, I'd be willing to move here. And then, it turns out three different people were fighting to get me hired. Once I said I'd be willing to work at Wizards. R&D obviously wanted to hire me. The Magic brand team wanted to hire me because I've been doing a lot of freelance work for the brand team. And the duelists wanted to hire me.

And so there's this three-way struggle. In fact, what happened was, and it's another indication of the early days, is Mike Davis, J. Mike Davis, J. Michael Davis, of J.M.D. Tome, by the way, he's the guy who came to Wizards with Richard originally to pitch RoboRally that turned into Peter saying, Peter Atkinson,

the founder of Wizards, saying, we don't have the money to make that because it had too many pieces to it, but here's the kind of game I do want. And then Richard said, oh, I have a game like that, I think. And anyway, so Mike Davis was the head of R&D. He's the one who hired me. And so I called Mike Davis

because like a month has gone by after I said I'd be willing to move there. And he's like, when can you start? I said, what's going on? I haven't heard from you guys. He's like, oh, well, three different sections of the company are fighting over you. We're trying to hammer it out.

Nope, by the way, I hadn't been hired yet. So I don't want to tell somebody that they're fighting over you. Anyway, that would lead to another story of mine. When I got hired, I made some demands. It ended up being very good for me. Okay, so I get hired. And the deal is that I get hired in R&D. I'm supposed to work on magic primarily. That I get hired in R&D, I'm supposed to work on Magic primarily, and I was going to be the liaison to the duelist from R&D. So I become the liaison to the duelist from R&D, which means all the technical stuff, anything they need to do, I'm the connection between R&D and the duelist. And then what happens was, what happened was, Catherine ended up moving. She was dating Dave Petty.

Dave Petty is one of the original East Coast play tefters. So Scaffoli, Jim Lynn, Chris Page, and Dave Petty were the guys who designed Antiquities, Fawn Empires, Ice Age, and Alliances. And Catherine was dating Dave Petty. Dave Petty was, for a while, in R&D. And then Dave eventually moved east. I don't know if he was going back to school, but I believe Catherine moved to be with Dave, I think, because maybe I have that wrong. Maybe she moved for other reasons and they got back together. But anyway, I think this,

anyway, what happened is Catherine left. And Catherine had been the lifeblood of the magazine. You know, Catherine had been, I mean, had been the one, you know, really cheering it on, supporting it on. And the magazine needed some focus. And there were a bunch of people working on the magazine, but none of them quite got it like Catherine did. And so somebody asked me, I think the publisher,

so we had a publisher at the time, her name was Wendy Noritaki. And Wendy was quite fun. When I tell the Duelist podcast, Wendy is a big part of how the Duelist Invitational came to be. But Wendy was very, she was very sort of efficient and definitely a business person trying to get things done.

And I think Wendy realized that the magazine needed some focus. And I was the one who, I used to come up, I don't know, once a day or whatever, and I would sort of give advice and, you know, chime in on things. And, you know, I was the R&D liaison, and I enjoyed the do list. Plus, I was right, what happened at the point was, once I started working at Wizards, Catherine came up with the idea of me doing a column called Insider Trading, which the idea was, I was like an outsider inside Wizards.

I'm sneaking out information to the outside. But anyway, that was my first column. Well, I still was doing Magic the Puzzling. Magic Tricks was my answer column, which, by the way, I would write silly stories in for those that never read that. If you want to know where Evil Mark Rosewater came from, it started in those stories. And then, she

suggested I write Insider Trading, so I did. And then, I think what happened was Wendy Nortaki, in fact, maybe Sean. So, Sean O'Wolf of Narcisco, who still works at Wizards, was the person that did all the layout.

After Amy Weber left, she took over as the art director. And I think, anyway, the magazine was struggling. They kind of didn't have focus. I think Sean had suggested to Wendy that maybe I would be a good fit. And Wendy came to me and said, we want you to be the editor in chief. And what I said was, well, I like my job in R&D. You know, I'm honored. I would really, you know, I really do enjoy the dualist, but I'm not going to leave my job in R&D. And she said, oh, no, you don't need to leave your job in R&D. And like, well, what do you mean? She goes, well, just in addition, you'll be,

you'll be the, you know, she goes, all we really need is just for you to sort of clarify things and set vision. And, you know, you don't need to do the day to day stuff. We'll do that. We just need someone to sort of, you know, set the tone and, and, you know, figure out what to do. And so I said, okay, so while I was working a full-time R&D job, I became editor-in-chief of The Duelist. And I had that job for many a year. And I was very proud. I felt I did a pretty good job of sort of keeping on the tone. One of the things I did is I went out and got outside writers.

And so I pushed very hard to get a lot of known magic pros writing for us, and so there was a lot of rotating writers, you know, and there was a bunch of different columns, you know, I was one that got Rob Hahn to write a column, and I got, I think I got Beth Morrison to write her column. Well, Beth Morrison was always freelancing. I think I just convinced her to make it a column rather than a set. Like, I got her to do, what was it called? The Deck Series, where she talked about different kind of decks. I don't remember the name of it.

But anyway, I was editor-in-chief for quite a while. In fact, for most of the, rest of the duelists, I was editor-in-chief. And then what happened was I started getting stretched real thin because, once again, I was working full-time in R&D in addition. And at one point, some of the people who were working on it were frustrated that my time wasn't as focused. And they convinced, I guess it was Wendy, eventually that they could do it themselves and that they didn't need me.

Uh, and then, so the same day that I got told that Unglue 2 wasn't going to happen, I was told that they no longer need my services as editor-in-chief. Uh, and I was really busy at the time. So I'm like, okay. I mean, I understood that, like, I just wasn't, I didn't have the time I once did. Although it's funny that within, I don't know, six months later, it had morphed into a magazine called The Top Deck, which quickly died. So I kind of feel like the end of The Duelist had a lot to do with me shifting away.

Anyway, like I said, the thing I loved about The Duelist was that there was a lot a lot of I think what magicthegathering.com does now we did in the early duelist that we created some personalities not just the pros but just personalities in general that we sort of a lot of the early names

of magic were carved out through the duelist you know and one of the things I tried real hard was, if you became, if I felt you were somebody who I'd like to see have more celebrity status, I perfectly brought you in. I got Jamie Wakefield to write an article. I got different people

that I thought I wanted people to know who they were to write articles. I felt the duelist was a real good place to get magic names made. Like I said, I was proud. The thing about the Duelist that was interesting is that one of the things that had started with it was, and this was Amy Weber's doing, is the idea that art was very important to it. I think Sean had picked this up when she took over, that I always thought the magazine looked nice.

I mean, early days we had some readability issues, but those got solved. I don't know if you know, but the first couple issues, like the backgrounds would be this handmade, unique, specially flecked, cool thing, except you couldn't read the words. And they quickly fixed that. But I mean, there always was an essence of, you know, that the Duelist was, that it appreciated the art of the game. We did this neat thing where we would go to artists and we'd say to them, okay, we like this piece of art. Could you sort of, you know, follow up on that?

And at the beginning, the artists would do whatever they wanted. Eventually, we started steering more toward this is the kind of thing we're hoping for. These are the kind of things the audience knows of you. You know, and the duelist is fun because a lot of what happened, I'll talk about this in future podcasts, is I also used the duelist

as a means to create other things. There's a thing called the duelist team challenge we used to do at Origins that has an interesting history. The duelist invitation, which became the magic invitational, started out in me

sort of using the duelist to do something. And like I said, I feel like the duelist was this neat organization or neat thing that really did a lot of community building in the early days of Magic. And obviously, once the web started kicking up, you start having websites, you know, the Dojo and a lot of early stuff that really started sort of creating other places for community. But the Duels was neat in that I felt like the thing that I felt the duels was missing,

you know, as I'm waiting for my date that first day of, you know, that I felt like I was part of helping get us there and that we really were relevant and, you know, kind of, you know, the who's who was there on the pages of the duelist and we were giving you previews, and we were doing neat things, and we were going behind the scenes. A lot of the sensibility of what my column does now, and the development column,

and the various creative columns, and I felt that the Duelist was a lot of the precursor to that. And one of these days I'll do my podcast on Daily MTG and the creation of that, but a lot of that came from The Duelist and of, you know, of sort of, I love, I mean, one of the things, my background is communications. And one of the things I love about my job, one of the things that, I mean, it's an awesome job for many reasons, but one of the things I love about it is that I've been able to take all these skills that I built up before coming to my job and apply them. For example, I had a lot of communication skills,

but I took an R&D job, and, you know, it would be very easy for me to go, well, I have a lot of, I have a communications background, but yeah, I'm not going to use that in my, you know, R&D job. And the opposite, you know what I'm saying? I've done so much communications, it's kind of crazy. And the duels was part of that. One of the things I did when I took over was apply all the things I learned about what a magazine was. Because I've taken classes in magazines. I take classes in just general communication.

I mean, the website, the same thing. One of the things about communication is there's just basic communication theory. Maybe one day I'll do a podcast on communication theory just because it's fascinating to me. There's certain truisms of communication that are just like this is how humans learn things. Anyway, that might be an interesting topic.

But anyway, I really wanted to apply that. My goal on the Duelist and the thing I love, we had so many awesome people work on the Duelist. I'm not going to name them all because now that I'm put on the spot. There was Melody and Will and... See, I'm put on the spot now.

I'm going to... I mean, Shauna was the art director and Amy before her. So many people. I'm just going to not do justice as me trying to name people off from the duelist. From the moment I focus and I talk about a specific role, I know exactly who it is. And as soon as, like, name everybody, like, oh, I can't do that. Also, I'm here at work, so.

Anyway, today was a little different. Sort of, like, talking about, I try to mix up what these podcasts are. Today was a little more of just a sort of like talking about... I try to mix up what these podcasts are. Today was a little more of just a slice of life of one aspect of magic. I mean, one of the things that's always neat about The Duelist was of, you know, what part of... Like, people have a glimpse of what magic is

and behind the scenes. And also, The Duelist was also trying hard to make sure people knew about magic and knew about archetypes. And like, I don't know, it was a fun challenge of saying, what do you want to show people about magic? And here's your resources. And you have so many pages.

And, you know, like I said, I could do multiple podcasts on this because it was, the duelist was a lot of work and a lot of time and a lot of energy. And so many people spent so much effort doing such awesome work and there's all these freelance writers and freelance artists and I mean it really was

a love of work of hundreds of people I mean all said and done and I'm proud to be one of the people that helped put it together and anyway that's today's column that's today's podcast I'm mixing my media together

but anyway I'm here so I guess it's time to go make the magic cards