Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #37 - Lessons Learned - Part 3

Episode Date: June 7, 2013

Mark Rosewater discusses Unhinged in part 3 of his Lessons Learned series.

Okay, I'm pulling out of my garage. We all know what that means. It's time for another episode of Drive to Work. Okay, today I'm going to do part three of a Lessons Learned. So for those that have not heard the first two, it's a series I'm doing where I'm looking at all the sets that I've done and evaluating them to see what lessons I can learn from their designs. So today, previously, previously on Derived to Work, the first time I

talked about Tempest, Unglued, and Urza's Destiny. Last time I talked about Odyssey, Mirrodin, and Fifth Dawn. So we are up to Unhinged. So Unhinged was a very valuable lesson. Unhinged was interesting. So what happened was,

a little history here of silver-bordered products. So we made Unglued. Unglued came out. At first, it looked very successful, and so we right away rushed into an Unglued 2. It was technically called Unglued 2, the obligatory sequel. And then it turned out that Unglued, we had misjudged how much demand there was,

and we'd overprinted it. And anyway, it ended up not doing well comparative to what we'd printed. And so they put it on hiatus. But many years later, Randy Buehler, who at the time was my boss, came to me and said, I think it's time to make another unset. And it had been a while. I think there was a gap of six years between the two sets. And so the first Unglued was mostly me with lots of people

suggesting things. It was not a traditional design team. It was more like I was there doing things and getting a lot of input from lots of different people. Unhinge was a much more traditional design group. And I think the lesson I learned from Unhinge is a couple lessons. The first one is the mistake that is the gotcha mechanic. So for those who might not know Unhinge, gotcha mechanic said, if I'm in your graveyard and your opponent does this thing, and this thing could be all sorts of things, you may say gotcha and you get it back. Some of them were verbal if they said certain things. One of them was laughing. One of them was saying numbers or flicking your cards or just different things.

And the problem with gotacha Mechanic was, and I talked about this a little bit on my Lessons 2 podcast, so we played with it, and it was fun. It was a fun mechanic. But the problem was, the team that was playing with it,

we weren't playing it as a spike, essentially. We weren't trying to min-maxing it. We weren't trying to, like, you know, win at all costs. We were trying to have fun. And so what happened was the gotcha mechanic, when you're just kind of goofing around and having fun, you know, it's like, I'm going to keep talking, but I'm going to try not to say this thing. But the reality is the actual way to win, if goal is to win is oh I get punished for saying things I will not talk you know oh I get punished for laughing I better never laugh you know and so what happened was the mechanic made people clamp down and sort of not participate

as much and not have as much fun and so I talked about this many times but I mean this is kind of where I really learned this lesson, which is, you can make players do whatever you want, but you have to think about how they're going to do it. You know, you have to assume people are going to try to win at all costs, and like, okay, well, what happens when I put my mechanic through that grinder? What does it make people do? And the gacha mechanic made people basically have less fun. It's like, you want to win? Have less fun well that was a huge problem

and so I mean one of Unhinged's biggest mistakes was that it I think we relied on the gotcha mechanic which sucked a lot of fun out of it that was in my mind the biggest mistake another thing that we had done and we did this on purpose is

unglued was a little more silly. And so we tried on Unhinged to be a little more sophomoric, to cut the fine hairs of comedy. And so it was a little more, you know, like that's where the ass jokes came from. So in the set, there was donkey folk. And all the donkey folk had ass in their name. You know, ass as in donkey. But they were all puns, you know, smartass, dumbass, fatass, and it, in retrospect, I mean, I kind of feel like magic's a little better than that, like that style of humor.

I mean, there's people who obviously enjoyed it, and I mean, it was fun, but I feel that, like, I don't know, it wasn't really magic sensibility, that it was a little, I mean, I love unsets. I think unsets have a really good place in magic, but I feel like we kind of lowered the humor a little bit more than we needed to, and I felt that didn't work out great. We also had a mechanic, the half mechanic, where I had fractions, and the reason I included it was I thought that I was trying to find some simple things we could do. Like little girl, for example, cost half a white and was a half-half creature. Well, that's pretty simple. That's a vanilla creature in a silver-bordered vanilla creature.

Those are hard to come by. are hard to come by. The problem was, it turned out that tracking fractions was a lot harder than people realized, and so what I'd included to be something that was simple, to, you know, make things a little easier, actually caused

it to be a little more complicated, and not necessarily in a fun way. It's like, you know, you have 18 life, and you get hit by 3.5 damage. What are you at? Like, you know, and I mean, yes, you can get there. If you stop to think for a second, you'll figure it out. But it's just something that kind of your brain doesn't naturally process super easily,

unless you're super mathy. And so it ended up having the negative, like the opposite effect of what I wanted. Now, that said, things I did learn about Unhinged that I was very happy with is we messed around with sort of doing more mini-games. We definitely, I liked a lot of the stretching I did of sort of taking known mechanics, like, you know, Super Haste or things where I'm trying a different version of them. I mean, obviously, the slug went on to be the Pax from Future Sight. The old Foggy and Blast from the Past,

which were cards that mix and match old mechanics, both were created by Mark Gottlieb. That clearly inspired, you know, the mix and match from Future Sight. In fact, it's funny because we joked that Future Sight was Un-3 and a lot of Un-2 influenced Un-3. And then the other thing that I learned about Unhinged was that I feel that where Unhinged thrived, I think we tried hard to connect some stuff with mechanics,

because when Unglute was made, it was just like a hodgepodge, and Unglute wasn't made for Limited, where Unhinged was made, it was just like a hodgepodge, and I wanted it to... I mean, Unglued wasn't made for Limited, where Unhinged was very much made for Limited, and I was trying to give it a little more cohesion. I think some of the stuff worked. I actually liked how the Artist Matter stuff worked, and the thing I most enjoyed about Unhinged was

there was very solid card-by-card designs, that there's a lot of very neat things. Now, not all of them necessarily were understood, and part of doing a Silver Border set is messing an area that's fuzzy a little bit, so people have to kind of figure out what's going on. But I was really happy that there was a lot of just, like, really cool individual cards in Unhinged. And so that, I mean, the lesson I walked away from is that when you're trying to go outside the box, or you do something a little different, that you have to be careful to allow it its own

movement. That sometimes what you do is, when you're trying to make something, you follow the things you've done before. And like, okay, I'm making a magic set. What are the rules about a magic set? And I think on unhinge, I tried very hard to adopt the rules of how magic are done to Unhinged, and I think some of it was successful, but some of it kind of made the set not do what it wanted, because a silver-bordered set works differently than a black-bordered set. And, like,

one of the big lessons for me was, like, you have to learn to let things be what they want to be. And I feel like, um, like I said, one of the trickiest things about doing a silver border set is that the constraint of

you can't do this in black border, which is one of the main constraints of a silver border set, is very challenging. You know, that at Common, you want to be able to do things that make sense at Common, but what's simple enough

that it makes sense at Common, but simple enough that it makes sense in common, but different enough that it is a silver border, not a black border? And so, like I said, Unhinged for me is, it's not a complete myth, but I definitely made some huge mistakes that I learned from. Okay, next we got Ravnica. The lessons of Ravnica are interesting. So I think Ravnica is where, I mean, what happened was I had taken over as head designer

in the middle of Kamigawa block, but that had already really, the momentum of that had already happened. And so Ravnica block was where I got to start fresh. And I went into Ravnica Block wanting to have more cohesion. And so I think the lesson of Ravnica Block, well, there's a couple lessons. One was that the audience very much connects to cohesion. You know, that once you make a structure, that the audience understands the structure, that, I mean, I talk about this a lot, but humans not only like structure, they crave structure.

The human brain just wants to structure things. In fact, here's an interesting thing I learned. When I went to communication school, I had to take a class in aesthetics. And what that is, is the brain, I used to call it the science of beauty, but what it means is there's this idea that art is completely subjective, that each person likes a different thing. And what science kind of said is, no, no, no, the brain is hardwired so that certain things are just attractive to the brain. There's certain things that humans crave and that if you're going to understand sort of the appeal of things, look, let's study how the brain works, because there are certain aesthetics that just will feel more natural to humans, you know.

And that one of the tenets of aesthetics is humans crave balance. That they, well, not necessarily, they crave completion. They do crave balance, but they crave completion. And that they want order to things. So the idea is, if you take a picture and you just randomly splatter dots on the picture, and then you show it to a human, the human brain wants to see something in the splatter of dots.

Is it a face? Is it like looking at clouds? The humans just want to see something. And it's funny that when you look at random patterns, your brain will just connect the patterns. It will find ways to make the things mean something. And that one of aesthetics is saying, look, the brain is going to try to make things matter.

It's going to look for structure. So when it finds structure, it latches on because the brain craves structure. And Ravnica really, it's funny because when I went to school, I went to communication school, Boston University, college communications, class of 89, and one of the things that they really communicated to us was that, you know,

communication is about understanding how humans function. That if you want to be good at communicating, you better understand how humans receive information. And, you know, the aesthetic class was like, look, people like, you know, the aesthetic class was like, look, people like, you know, synergy and balance and completion and structure. There's things humans just need.

And if you are going to do your job as a communications person, you need to be using those tools to help you. And so a lot of block structure, when I sort of took over as head designer, I'm like, look,

I want to embrace it. You know, for example, when I started the website, I did a whole podcast on this, I think, where I talked about how the website, or I did an article on it, how the website started. And essentially, you know, the high end said, we want, you know, Magic doesn't really have a good website. We need a good website. And that got passed down to Bill, who was the VP. And Bill passed it down to me because I had the communications background. passed it down to Bill, who was the VP, and Bill passed it down to me because I had the communications background. Well, the way I made the website was I said, let's just apply every rule to communications that I know and do stuff like have

regular schedules so people can expect things and just play into the nature of how humans function. And one of these days I will do a communications podcast because it's a cool topic. I did the same thing when I took over as head designer. I said, okay, let's apply the same technology to how sets are structured. And if you notice, one of the things that we've been getting better at, and Ravnica was like the big lesson of this, is look, if you build a structure, they will come. And that when I first proposed it, I mean, if you think about it in a vacuum,

what I proposed during Ravnica was a little radical. I said, there's ten color pairs. We're going to have a set. We're going to do four of them. Well, how about the other six? No. Now, at the time, people were like, what do you mean? And what I was saying is, no, no, no.

You're thinking too much of the set. If all we made was that magic set, yes, humans would be, players would be screaming from the rooftops. What do you mean there's no other colors? Where are the other six colors? How can you not include them? But that's not what we did. What we did is we presented to them as a whole block. And by presenting as a whole block, what we say to them is,

okay, you understand that you're not getting it here, but that means you're getting it later. You know, and that, using that, I mean, taught me a lot about how, you know, if you want to build something, like, once upon a time, blocks were just a collection of things. Like, you made a set, and then you made another set, and then you made a third set, and you would evolve what came before it, but you weren't planning it out. Here's another way to look at it, is that when you write soap operas, and by soap operas I mean any ongoing storyline, I mean comic books are soap operas in this regard, it's just an ongoing storyline where there's different people

and the story never really ends that's the key to a soap opera, it just keeps going I mean comics are the same way where Superman's been in the comics for 80 years 90 years and it's not like he solved his problems and things are done. No, no, the same cast of characters keeps coming back. When you plot episodic soap opera-ish things,

there's two ways to do it. One method is that you make a lot of open-ended things. You just keep going, I'm not sure what's going to happen, but I'll keep, oh my God, somebody kidnapped his uncle. Who is it? And, you know, we'll leave it. And you make hooks so that later on you can come back and you can connect onto the hooks.

And that when you have the incident happen, you know, when, you know, something happens, you don't necessarily always know the results of it, but you've laid hooks down so that later you can tie on to those hooks. A second way to do it is the plotting method where it's when, you know, when Joe's uncle gets kidnapped,

you know who kidnapped his uncle. You know exactly, you know, you know the outcome of that. Now, the reason hook plotting is very popular is it takes less work up front. You know, it's like, I plan it leave hooks later i'll solve it later and if you're trying to do something quickly it allows

you to do it faster but the downside is the plotting version has a lot more um it just feels better you know and the thing i talk about so like um i love when you're watching something and something happens and you're like, oh, wait a minute. Four years ago, they said this. This is this, you know. You can do that same event with backward plotting with hooks sometimes. But the best stuff, like, one of the things I loved about Scars of Mirrodin was we knew in Mirrodin that the Phyrexians had invaded. And we laid down very subtle clues, not enough that it drew much attention, but when we were able to go back, people

go, oh my god, they were there the whole time. That was awesome. I love doing stuff like that. What Ravnica said is, let's do more plotting. Let's kind of think out where things are going. And that got us to start doing that way inter-block, within the block. It got us to do that way

between blocks, that we're more conscious of where things are coming and we're working ahead and knowing what's coming next and trying to make things work together. So Ravnica taught me that. Ravnica also taught me another thing, which is if you look at the mechanics in Ravnica, I'm not saying there aren't some good mechanics, but they are what I think of as Tier 2 mechanics,

meaning they don't need to take up as much space. A tier one mechanic has to fill a lot of space. And usually in Magic, before Ravnica, like the key mechanics were the tier one mechanics. You had a couple mechanics, they filled a lot of space. So along with Ravnica, I'm like, well, let's try a different approach. Because I needed to do 4-3-3, I knew I needed 10 mechanics. So I said, okay, I can't do big mechanics. Let me search for smaller mechanics. And what I found was I got to find a whole different set of mechanics that had a different set of criteria. For example, there are a lot of mechanics where you're like, I can do 8 to 12 maybe of a card, maybe 15 if I stretch it, but I can't make

a major mechanic. I can't make a tier one mechanic, but oh, it's an awesome tier two mechanic. And that finding the spaces for that really helped. The other big thing that I learned from Ravnica was that before, if you go back at Magic, the focus was always on the mechanics and it was about what the mechanics were. And what I realized is not that the mechanics were good, not that I didn't like the mechanics,

but the mechanics served a higher purpose. The set wasn't about the mechanics. The set was about the theme and about the guilds. And the mechanics served the guilds. The mechanics weren't the forefront. They were down the road. They served another purpose. I think that is fascinating

in that I think that shifting mechanics from being the forefront marketing to being one of the tools. Obviously we market with mechanics, but literally once upon a time, what's the new set? Here's the two mechanics. That's how we sold sets. And now it's about, what's the set? It's about this thing.

It's about the guilds. It's about a war between the Frexians and the Mirans. It's about, you know, a war torn by, you know, monsters eating away at the humans. You know, like, that you're trying to set some structure that is about something.

That it's not a... The mechanics serve a purpose and they're not just there to be there. So, what else did I learn from Ravnica? The other thing I learned from Ravnica was... I think that...

It's funny that... I mean, I've always definitely been one to sort of go with my gut. But Ravnica is also the set where... I think what happened over time was I more and more embraced sort of being what the set was. And I think that Ravnica was the first set where, like, I went full throttle. was I more and more embraced sort of being what the set was. And I think that Ravnica was the first set where, like, I went full throttle. Like, I look at something like Odyssey, I'm like, yeah, it was a graveyard set,

and I definitely committed to being a graveyard set. But I wasn't so defined what it was. And Ravnica was the set where, like, I know what this set is. I know what it's about. Like, it was very crystal clear the essence of what it was. And I think that it taught me, like, once I saw the reaction, it's about, like, it was very crystal clear the essence of what it was. And I think that it taught me, like, once I saw the reaction, it's funny, at the time when I did Ravnica, the time spiral was coming up next. And I thought time spiral was going to be the be all, end all, like the set to end all sets. And Ravnica, I was like, oh, well, I think

this is good. But, you know, you know, I mean, I don't know if Ravnica will be a time spiral. And then Ravnica just, you know, went gangbusters. And I think that it good, but, you know, I mean, I don't know if Ragnarok can make up a time spiral. And then Ragnarok just, you know, went gangbusters. And I think that it made me realize that, you know, identification is important, that giving people sort of something to connect to. It made me realize even more the power of the color wheel, that, like, the colors are so powerful that all you have to do is get two colors together and that meant something and it had a relationship and it had a feeling.

And the power of that, the potency of that. The idea of saying... Because one of the things that we had done is we've committed very hard to making the colors mean something. And like I said,

I'm a color pie guru. I love the colors and I want the colors of identity. And what Ravnica said is, you know what, the colors are so awesome, that way there's a next layer you can go to, that you can say, okay, red means this, and green means that, but what happens when red and green get together, what does it mean, you know, what if red's with white, or blue, or black, you know, and that each one of those, each one of those ten combinations took on its own identity, which was, I mean, very potent. And I think the funny thing is, like, what happened during Ravnica was

I dictated two-color pairs, but Brady brought to the table the idea of this guild identification, of the guilds. And that once we went down that path, and it's like, oh, well, let's apply color philosophy to color pairs i was like bam it was exciting and and the thing that was funny is i was really excited that's what happens sometimes when you're a designer which was it was playing right into my wheelhouse which is i love color pie i love color pie philosophy so it's like oh oh my goodness it's like figuring out what red and green do together and what black and white do together. I was fascinated.

And I was a little worried. I'm like, well, I'm fascinated, but will other people be as fascinated? Is this just me? Because I love the color wheel. Is this just like, you know, because sometimes you second guess yourself because you're like, is it something that I personally love but wouldn't be general? Because I talked about this before,

that one of the things you have to be very careful is understanding your biases, because your biases will influence you, and that's okay, but you need to offset them, you need to understand them, so that your biases are checked, essentially. And that was the set where definitely I was trying to check against my own bias, because I loved the concept. But it turned out that the very thing I loved really was what people loved, that self-identification is an important part of the game.

I mean, the color wheel's always done that, but the guilds allowed it in a little more fine-tuned way, that having 10 that had a little more nuance to them was a little better. I mean, obviously, down the road we'll have shards, and we start exploring with three color, but I don't think three color ever quite had the passion of two-color. I think two-color... Three-color has a lot of leaders going on,

and where two-color is, it's pretty clear. Like, what each two-color represents is very clear, where three-color is a little muddier. I mean, what we did in the three-color world is we made a center-color. So it was about the center-color and how the allies shared the essence of the center-color, is we made a center color. So it was about the center color and how the allies shared the essence of the center color, which is a little bit different

from meaning a three-color in which they're all equally shared. What else can I say about Ravnica? I mean, Ravnica also taught me... It kind of taught me the... the idea of... of using things as glue. This is a concept I haven't talked too much about,

which is when you're building a set, maybe glue is a bad metaphor, so I'm going to use a Lego metaphor. So, although Lego doesn't quite do the job. So imagine you're building something in which, um, some things, uh, some things you can attach to and some things need to be attached. Um, so essentially, um, the way to think of this is some things stand as a base and that you can that they're, okay I'll use my glue metaphor that they're sticky, that you can stick things to them. And other things

they themselves aren't sticky they need to be stuck to a sticky thing Okay this metaphor is not necessarily going the way I want but what I'm trying to say is certain elements of a design essentially work well with other things and other things need something to work with. And that, in a set, you need to make sure that you have the glue within the set,

which is, within the design, that there are... I'm not doing the best job explaining this. In design, there are... Okay, I'll change my metaphor. Okay, imagine I'm an architect, and I, the lead designer of a set, am crafting my building.

Now, development will later have to actually, you know, assemble everything, but right now, I'm crafting what it is. And so, some things are decorative, and some things are bearing. So we look at walls.

There's decorative walls and bearing walls. What a bearing wall is, is this wall is holding up the building. You know, if some person goes, I want to move a wall and they move this wall, that would be bad news. The building comes tumbling down. Other walls are decorative walls, which means they're there. They have a purpose. They're separating a room, but they're not doing the job of holding up the building.

And what's important is, when you are building your set, you need to understand you're bearing walls from your decorative walls. You know, some mechanics bear the weight of the set design, and others do not. bear the weight of the set design, and others do not. And this is something I talk a lot with development, because what will happen is, when you take a set and you turn it over to development, they will goof around with it and try to figure out how to improve it.

You know, you have your blueprints, and they're going to try to improve it. Sometimes what they'll say is, oh, oh, oh, this wall's in the wrong place, you know, it's too confined, we need to open it up, or whatever. They're like, okay, we need to knock down this wall. And my job as the lead designer of a set is to either say, okay, yeah, no problem, you can knock down that wall,

or no, no, no, no, no, don't knock down that wall. That's a bearing wall, don't knock down that wall. And that what Rathnagur really taught me was to get a good sense of where, to separate what were the decorative walls from the bearing walls. And that, I think early on when I designed, I mean, I might have intuitively understood it, but I didn't I didn't intellectually get it as much. And Ravnica helped me teach in this, is the

idea that, understand what your bearing walls are, you know. And that, a lot of what happened in Ravnica was, I was defining everything by the guild and so I said, okay, what must I have to define the guild? How do I make sure there's a set that the guilds come across? And the guild mechanics were decorative

in the sense that if one guild mechanic didn't work I could swap it, but the existence of the guild mechanics as a structure, that was a barren wall. I could not give Dimir a mechanic. If Transmute had not worked out, I could have changed something else. In fact, we had other mechanics, we changed it to Transmute.

I think Ravnica did a very good job of making me understand the idea of what is bearing from what is decorative. And that has served me immensely, especially with because I talk about this a lot, magic is an interactive creative experience. You know,

interactive is the wrong word, but it's a group experience. It's not one person making something. You know, I've written stories before, and when you're writing a story, especially something that's going to be read, like, I'm in control of everything, you know.

I mean, I might have an editor read it later, but like, I'm crafting the story, and the story I want to tell is a story that will be told, you know. And that's not true in magic card design. In magic card design, I have a vision, but once I pass along the development, their job is to make the vision the best they, is to fine-tune, you know, keep to my vision, but fine-tune the execution of the vision, you know, how it's going to be done. keep to my vision, but fine-tune the execution of the vision. You know, how it's going to be done. And a big part of doing that is understanding so I can explain to development when there's a bearing wall

and when there's a decorative wall. Meaning, when they want to change something, I have to understand when changing that thing will be problematic or not. Because, as the architect, I have a much better understanding of the infrastructure of what's going on. You know, and that... Anyway, like I said, one of the big lessons of Ravnica was getting a better sense of understanding infrastructure. Because I use the guilds as my infrastructure, and the guilds are a little more noticeable.

I mean, what happens sometimes is, sometimes your Bering walls are bright and loud. In Ravnica, the B bearing walls were the guilds. It was loud. It was hard for the development team to miss that. Sometimes your bearing walls are much subtler. What's important is much subtler. Starting with Ravnica, where I had very vocal and clear

bearing walls to see, it was a very good teacher because it helped me understand that. So, anyway, I'm now at work and I've gotten through two! This will go on forever. So I got through two this time. So there will be some future ones.

Not next week, but there will be some future lessons I've learned. So anyway, this was Lessons I've Learned number three. I hope you enjoyed it and it's time to go make the magic.