Great Designer Search 2: Essays

Great Designer Search Essays

As many listeners and tweeps know, I am participating in the Great Designer Search 2. Normally this sparse, utilitarian blog is just something people can RSS to alert them to my new Magic articles and podcasts. Since I have no polished Magic blog, though, I’m going to use this as a place to share GDS2 stuff as well. Sorry for the lack of web design, but most people only see the content of this site in their RSS feeds!

The first “test” was a series of ten essay questions. Full details here, but the basic gist was to answer each question in 250-350 words each. With the month I’ve been having, I had to crank these out pretty fast to meet the deadline. Primarily these essays represent a barrier to make sure only people serious enough to write 3,500 words even enter. I’m sure if I get to the point where these essays are read carefully, I will already be facing judgment on more important card and set design criteria.

Maybe that’s just how I’m justifying the haste with which some of these were written, and the handful of shameful spelling and capitalization errors I corrected in what I’m posting below. Overall though, I’m happy. I took some stands, made some cases, and got ‘er done. Here they are...

1) Introduce yourself and explain why you are a good fit for this internship.

Hi there, my name is Ryan Spain, aka “Godot” on Magic Online. I’ve spent most of my ten-year career in the game industry developing traditional strategy card games for digital platforms, and I have been a dedicated Magic: The Gathering player since Fallen Empires.

A role on the team moving the first and best collectible card game forward represents the perfect intersection between my strongest professional skills and my deepest gaming passions. My great love for Magic, my deep understanding of game design, and my proven project management and communication skills would make me an excellent asset to the Wizards of the Coast R&D team; I’m excited to compete for that privilege in the Great Designer Search 2.

Beyond simply loving Magic as a player, I have an innate desire and ability to evangelize and teach the game to others. I have introduced (and reintroduced) countless people to the game, and I have spent many hours writing and recording content for the Magic community through my draft walkthrough column “Waiting for Godot” at PureMTGO.com, and through the “Limited Resources” podcast over at mtgcast.com, where my co-host and I have helped thousands of listeners get more from their Limited Magic experiences.

I’ve been waiting for the opportunity to compete in a second Great Designer Search, and that time has finally arrived! I love the format for the second search. Not only is it clearly is more representative of actual set design, it is more aligned with my skill sets as a designer: working with my ideas and the ideas of others to create a cohesive whole. I look forward to proving that in the weeks to come!

2) You are instructed to move an ability from one color to another. This ability must be something used in every set (i.e. discard, direct damage, card drawing etc.). You may not choose an ability that has already been color shifted by R&D. What ability do you shift and to what color do you shift it? Explain why you would make that shift.

The color pie is to Magic: The Gathering what the Constitution is to the United States of America: It is the defining “document,” spelling out the foundational rules of the land. You do not make changes to it idly. Making changes should require extensive, careful thought, and must have the support of a large majority of the caretakers.

The importance and sanctity of the color pie is why I find this to be easily the most difficult question of the ten. Magic made many sensible, much-needed shifts to the color pie many years back, but I frankly don’t see much need for too much additional shifting now (and as you will see below, I was extremely bothered recently by what I felt was a fairly frivolous toying with the pie.)

All that being said, if I were forced to find a mechanic that I would shift into a new color, I would choose to move non-parallel, random discard from black into red. While I wouldn’t move all discard out of black and into red, random discard in particular would be at home in red, whereas something like “look at target opponent’s hand” discard would remain fully in black.

While red has had synergistic draw-and-discard-at-random effects, as well as random discard as a drawback for the caster, it has never had a straight-up, “target opponent discards a card at random” spell. Random discard captures red’s haphazard, myopic approach to player interactions perfectly, and while I realize that random discard is powerful and potentially frustrating, in limited doses and appropriate costs, it could have a flavorful home in red. Random discard already has a foothold there with parallel cards like Burning Inquiry, so it’s not a huge stretch to bring non-parallel random discard into red—and when it comes to the color pie, I would not make any shifts that would be considered a huge stretch.

3) What block do you feel did the best job of integrating design with creative? What is one more thing that could have been done to make it even better?

The most impressive integration of design and creative the game of Magic has ever seen was in the Alara block. Building on the foundations of what could be done in a multicolor block established by Ravnica and Shadowmoor, Alara took the multicolor block to new heights with a simple “what if” framework that proved to be an effective inspiration for design and creative.

“What would each plane be like where one of the allied color combinations didn’t exist?”

This foundational question provided the creativity-breeding restriction for both design and creative in the Alara block. What is a world without the law, order, and intellectual pursuits of white and blue? Welcome to Jund, where the fittest survive, and everything else is dinner. A world without green and red mana? Welcome to Esper, where, with nothing to destroy it, artifice was all but invincible—to the point that every creature in the plane had artificial enhancements of some kind. A world without the chaos and greed of red and black magic? Welcome to Bant, a lawful, noble plane where disputes are handled with honor and grace in one-on-one combat.

Answering the central “What if?” question for each of the five shards provided so much deftly-integrated material for both design and creative, it was impossible to tell as an outside observer whether design was the primary influencer of creative, or vice-versa. I like to believe this is a sign that it was very much a two-way street, with many concepts from creative leading to top-down card designs, and many mechanics originating in design leading to flavorful implementations from creative. The culmination in the all-multicolor Alara Reborn was the cherry on top of an amazing design/creative collaboration.

I think Shards of Alara could have been improved by spending the middle block more on deeper explorations of the shards and less on the domain theme. I wasn’t done caring about the individual shards when Conflux started asking me to care about domain. I also think the devour mechanic, while flavorful, fell well short of what it could have been from a design perspective.

4) R&D has recently been looking at rules in the game that aren't pulling their weight. If you had to remove an existing rule from the game for not being worth its inclusion, what would it be?

A sacred cow of a rule that I don’t think pulls its weight in the game is the maximum hand size rule. For starters, the fact that breaking this rule is now about as free as an ability can get—it’s a static ability on a land that taps for a colorless mana and comes into play untapped—demonstrates that it doesn’t break things to have no maximum hand size. If it did, Reliquary Tower would see more play.

In general, the limiting factor for how much you can do when your hand is over seven cards is based on your available mana, not how many more cards above seven you have in your hand when you pass the turn. There is generally not a huge difference between passing the turn with over seven cards and keeping them or discarding down to seven. In either case, you are going to work from your best seven cards, and you can usually tell which seven those are. I discard down to seven all the time when playing my Pyromancer Ascension deck, and it has never had an impact on the result beyond making the game take a little longer as I think through my discard decisions.

The biggest argument for getting rid of discarding down to seven, however, is that it is psychological punishment for new players who are mana screwed. Experienced players know that, stuck on two lands, discarding the seven drop is functionally identical for the most part to holding it and never casting it. Every forced discard for a mana-screwed beginner, though, is simply salt in one of the game’s more punishing wounds. When I play with my 8-year-old, we disregard the maximum-hand-size rule because it only ever adds to his frustration without impacting strategy or game results.

The power level of certain older cards would change with the elimination of the rule, but it would also open up new design space for rewarding and punishing players for having more than seven cards in hand after their end steps.

5) Name a card currently in Standard that, from a design standpoint, should not have been printed. What is the card and why shouldn't we have printed it?

For the same reason question #2 was so hard for me, this one was pretty easy: Hornet Sting is a card that, from a design standpoint, I feel should not have been printed.

The last time green saw the ability to deal targeted damage to creatures without flying or players, it was in the wild-west days before the reorganization of the color pie, where pie bleeding was just a normal part of the game. Since then, green has never had instants or sorceries that deal targeted damage to non-flying creatures or players. Colors are defined as much by what they can’t do as by what they can, and this is something green was not supposed to be able to do.

So, why amend the Magic constitution now? Why for this? Hornet Sting bleeds the pie, but not in a way that has a major effect on either Constructed or Limited formats. While this may seem to some like a reason to do it, to me it is a clear reason not to do it. Giving green haste at higher rarities, for example, is a bleed with a purpose for competitive magic.

Hornet Sting erodes green’s standing as a damager of flyers by allowing it to damage anything, and as a core-set common, confuses green’s role for new players. Core-set commons define the pie for new players, so why is the game suddenly defining green as a color that has target-anything direct damage in its arsenal?

Hornet Sting seems to exist solely because one damage for one mana is an elegant card that was too weak for black or red, not because a one-point Lightning Bolt was something the game or the color actually needed. As elegant as Hornet Sting may be, it simply does not do enough for the game to justify an amendment to the Magic Constitution that is the color pie.

6) What do you think design can do to best make the game accessible to newer players?

One of the biggest things that design can do to make the game accessible to new players already began with M10: reboot the core set to incorporate comfortable, familiar “basic fantasy” flavor, and have it accurately represent the core elements of the color pie.

Taking the theme of “basic fantasy flavor in core sets” further, I would push linear tribal mechanics in core sets even more than they are pushed currently. While experienced players don’t want Wizards to “build their decks for them” through overly-linear mechanics at competitive power levels, the opposite is the case for new players. Magic is a daunting game, and linear mechanics help new players feel like they are building their decks correctly by taking advantage of obvious linear synergies.

I would apply this linear philosophy in core sets to tribal themes—which consistently have strong appeal for new players—by introducing a cycle of “lords” at uncommon in the core set. Lorwyn proved that uncommon lords don’t break Limited, and arguably improved it, as you frequently had the opportunity to draft a lord early, build around it, and potentially secure a second or third lord in the process.

New players generally don’t have the access to cards that an experienced player does, so making lord cycles uncommon in the core set would allow new players to secure the cards they need to create a deck they love without having to hunt down rares. Also, by being at uncommon, new players would be more likely to be exposed to a lord early on. What player doesn’t remember fondly the first time they read a lord card, and immediately began dreaming of the killer deck they were going to build with it?

In place of the rare lords, there could be splashy, powerful instances of that tribal type that would make great one-of or two-ofs in a tribally-themed deck, but a deck wouldn’t feel naked without them the way a tribal deck does without a playset of lords.

7) What do you think design can do to best make the game attractive to experienced players?

One of the things I feel Magic needs to do to help keep the game attractive to experienced players was pulled off with unparalleled success in Rise of the Eldrazi (ROE): create Limited environments that appeal to all three psychographics.

Making sure each set contains individual cards for each psychographic is a standard aspect of Magic set design at this point, but we had never seen it fully executed on all fronts in a Limited environment until ROE.

For Timmy, the appeal is fairly obvious. ROE had 8/8s for 8 at common, for crying out loud! It contains the biggest creatures the game has ever seen, and fantastic, Timmy-friendly occurrences came up in almost every Limited match. “Battlecruiser” Magic is, at its core, a Timmy experience, and if you didn’t like ROE Limited, you probably aren’t a Timmy.

Johnny is tough to please in Limited, but ROE pulled it off. There were more common and uncommon “build-around-me” cards in ROE than in any previous Limited environment. By providing enough narrow cards that had synergies with a high volume of the staple commons and uncommons, Johnny could put his cleverness on display in ROE Limited like never before.

Any Limited environment can be approached with a “win” mentality, so what makes Spike prefer one to another? Spike likes Limited environments that reward superior skill. If an environment heavily favors the player who opens, draws, and resolves the biggest bomb, Spike dislikes it because Spike’s superior play skill is not rewarded. Environments with lots of decisions and ample opportunities to outplay opponents appeal to Spike. Again, ROE had this, particularly with the constant flood of decisions presented by levelers: Level guy #1, guy #2, or cast this spell?

Magic had never before seen a set that hit a Limited home run for each psychographic like ROE did, and because prereleases are typically the first experience players have with a new set, taking care to repeat the psychographic triple crown that was ROE Limited in future sets will help keep the game attractive to experienced players.

8) Of all the mechanics currently in Extended, which one is the best designed? Explain why.

While there are many great mechanics in Extended, the one that delighted me most was Shadowmoor’s wither.

I fully approved of the underlying philosophy behind controversial M10 rules changes: if new players consistently expect the game to function differently than it does in a given area, the problem is in that area, not with the players. Magic has identified and fixed some of those problem areas, but others simply cannot be “fixed” without radically changing the game, completely unbalancing the power level of a large class of cards.

One such place where the rules don’t reflect player intuition is in creature damage. I don’t think I’ve ever taught a player Magic without having to explain carefully and repeatedly that a damaged creature doesn’t stay damaged, it heals at the end of each turn. While the “healing” metaphor eventually makes sense and becomes accepted, it is not without having to overcome the initial feeling that those creatures were injured, and should stay injured.

While it would be disastrous to change the creature damage rule to reflect player expectation and effectively give all creatures wither, I love it when mechanics like wither are introduced that cause spells with that mechanic to behave the way players think the game should behave in their early play experiences. (Provoke is another one: every new player thinks creatures should be able to attack other specific creatures.)

Wither is elegant, flavorful, and powerful, and it felt particularly good in the Shadowmoor environment, where provided a beautiful foil for the persist mechanic. I would have loved wither had it been introduced in any set based on the quality of the mechanic alone, but the fact that it had an extremely relevant interaction with another keyword ability in the block put it over the top for me as the best mechanic in Extended.

The fact that it has returned as part of the infect mechanic is a testament to its quality, but I prefer straight-up wither, where my creatures deal damage to players in the form of damage.

9) Of all the mechanics currently in Extended, which one is the worst designed? Explain why.

In a continuation of my thoughts on what could have been improved about the Alara block for question number 3, I am naming devour as the worst-designed mechanic in Extended.

When a mechanic requires other creatures in play to do anything, and further requires the player to sacrifice those creatures to gain any effect, several problems are created. The first one is that the cards are going to be very swingy. To make the effect worth the hefty cost of creature sacrifice, the effect needs to be a powerful one. Putting that much power into a single creature then creates blowout situations, either where the devour creature survives and dominates the game, or the devour creature is bounced or killed, blowing the game out in the other direction.

Also, while it’s true that many players in the Timmy archetype probably liked the big effects that could result from a massive devour sequence, even Timmy isn’t going to be entirely comfortable with the all-in required to truly do epically big things with the mechanic. Players tend not to like mechanics that require doing things they don’t like to do, and players definitely dislike sacrificing their own creatures.

Finally, devour is also counterintuitive in how it plays out mechanically. Players are quickly conditioned to expect enters-the-battlefield effects to stack in Magic, leaving a window to respond. Multiple times at FNM, someone would resolve a creature with devour and name their sacrifices, only to have their opponent then indicate their intent to respond to the devour ability. I would step in and point out that there was no window to respond between a devour creature entering the battlefield and the player making his or her sacrifices, which was often met with anger, frustration, and disbelief, with a chorus of people weighing in on both sides, certain that they were correct.

That kind of rules conflict is not healthy for the FNM experience, and the devour mechanic simply doesn’t deliver enough on the other fronts to justify the rules conflicts it created during play.

10) Choose a plane to revisit other than Dominaria or Mirrodin. What is a mechanical twist we could add if we revisit this plane?

Because I feel it was the most successful integration of design and creative, I would love to see a return to Alara one day. I can think of a couple of interesting approaches for revisiting Alara that would be fun ways to take a fresh look at a familiar world.

First would be the “prequel” approach. A return to the world of Alara could portray the events leading up to the divided Alara that we find in Shards of Alara. Mechanically, the prequel Alara could have hints of what each shard would come to care about most when split off from its enemy colors. We find Esper colors dabbling in artificial enhancements, Grixis colors exploring the graveyard as a resource, and so on.

With the enemy colors still around, though, these mechanical explorations would be held more directly in check by the opposing color pairs. Naya colors might still care about beefy creatures, but black and blue would have tools particularly good at containing high-powered threats.

Another approach to a revisiting of Alara would be in a far-future scenario. It is a long time after the events of the original Alara block, to the point that the modern inhabitants of Alara regard the pre-Conflux era of a divided world as little more than myth and legend. That is, until Alara is torn asunder again, once more finding itself divided into five worlds.

The catch? This time each world represents a single color stranded with its two enemy colors. Five planes, each with one color scrapping to stay relevant and alive in a world where it is outnumbered by two enemy colors, battling their devastating multicolored spells with whatever resources they can find.

The “shard” theme of Shards of Alara begs the question of what the five “wedge” worlds might be like, so it only makes sense to go back there someday to explore it. Perhaps that’s where I’ll go for GDS2…