Magic the Gathering's design articles

[OgreBattle]

Reading through his Magic The Gathering articles, it's a long running game with a lot of good design so always neat to see how the designers view things.



https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/a ... 2016-05-30

Lesson #1—Fighting against human nature is a losing battle

Lesson #2: Aesthetics matter
Lesson #3: Resonance is important (Cultural context, trends)
Lesson #4: Make use of piggybacking

Lesson #5: Don't confuse "interesting" with "fun"
Lesson #6: Understand what emotion your game is trying to evoke


https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/a ... 2016-06-06

Lesson #7: Allow the players the ability to make the game personal
Humans associate what they know with 'quality'

Lesson #8: The details are where the players fall in love with your game
Ex: A background character became a merchandize mascot for a set

Lesson #9: Allow your players to have a sense of ownership
Building your own deck, commander format makes it more accessable

Lesson #10: Leave room for the player to explore
"Don't talk at, talk with the audience", getting audience to ask a question then answer is more engaging than just stating the answer

Lesson #11: If everyone likes your game but no one loves it, it will fail
Making something to fall in love with is the priority

Lesson #12: Don't design to prove you can do something
The example is Tybalt was a 2c planeswalker just cause there wasn't one before

Lesson #13: Make the fun part also the correct strategy to win
Or, avoid degenerate play

https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/a ... 2016-06-13

Lesson #14: Don't be afraid to be blunt
The example is players hesitant to attack with a huge creator, so a new version of that card always attacks to show how good it is at attacking

Lesson #15: Design the component for its intended audience
Having psychological profiles of players

Lesson #16: Be more afraid of boring your players than challenging them

Lesson #17: You don't have to change much to change everything
Example is that Invasion block was "play 4-5 colors", Ravinca is "play 2 colors", both are multicolor blocks but a small change makes it feel different

Lesson #18: Restrictions breed creativity

Lesson #19: Your audience is good at recognizing problems and bad at solving them

Lesson #20: All the lessons connect


My take on organizing these 20 lessons...

Feel, Emotion that game invokes in player
- Fighting against Human Nature is a losing battle
- Aesthetics matter, like an 8/8 costing 8 feels better than costing 7
- Understand what emotion you want to invoke, don't sacrifice
- Be more afraid of boring the player than challenging them, give them something to love even if some will hate
- Leave room for player to explore and project and bond, specific details can be greatly appealing to diverse audience


Context, Player's pre-existing knowledge and associations
- Make references to what audience knows, if not then build meaning for that image yourself (ex: a wooden horse in a fantasy setting will be filled with soldiers, a wooden lion is further removed from the troy meme)
- Know psychological profile of players, can be diverse reasons to like the same thing
- Don't be afraid to be blunt to get players to play the game 'right' and have fun doing so
- Don't have to change much to make fun new things
- Audience is good at recognizing problems, bad at solving (you show them the way or solve them)

Challenge, Skill element
- Don't confuse 'interesting' with 'fun', don't do something just because it hasn't been done without understanding why
- Restriction breeds creativity
- The fun way to play should be the optimal way to play
- Customization gives a feeling of ownership and bonding


Will make more posts reading more MtG design articles

[OgreBattle]

https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/a ... 2009-05-04

A good one on the purpose of randomness

Positives
+ Creates Surprise, makes the same decks play differently from game to game
+ Makes players react instead of implementing a perfect plan

Negatives to Neutral
- Repetition to the same setbacks, keeps game from advancing
- Can make the more skilled player lose too often, but this is a matter of getting the right odds and giving the underdog the right chances
- Hidden information, player A and B knows something B and A don't know, both play off of that

Advice to keep randomness positive
* Random chance of degrees of upsides instead of upside or downside
* Randomness is the JOURNEY not the Destination. Let players respond to randomness instead of their response be random
* Let players influence the randomness. In TCG's the randomness of the library/deck is mitigated by the player building that deck. Effects like flipping the top of the card have more 'player influence' than a dice roll.

That's a particularly useful article. For a dice rolling game like most tabletop RPG's that can mean having a pool of rerolls, extra rolls, or maybe a hand of actions to use.

Another article... https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/a ... 2011-12-19

Has two points that stand out, a game needs...
1) Inertia: Dragging on too long sucks, suddenly declaring a win/loss is jarring
2) A catchup mechanic: winning on the first move when your game intends to have way more is very bad.

[Blicero]

When I see articles like this, it gives me the impression that MtG has remained a pretty well-designed and well-thought-out game. But then I look at things like your other thread (http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=57646), and you flat-out say that most of the Kamigawa set was pretty boring.


So, what do failures in MtG look like? Do they frequently "own goal" themselves with unforced errors, or do they just occasionally mess up in unpredictable ways?

[Whatever]

So, what do failures in MtG look like? Do they frequently "own goal" themselves with unforced errors?

[Blicero]

Assume that I know nothing about Magic at all, because I don't.

I see that list of banned cards. It could be good -- WotC has gotten better at identifying when they've goofed -- or it could be bad. If it's bad, then how does this badness square with MaRo's high-minded theory articles?

[Whatever]

Part of it is that online play has forced them to ban problem cards more consistently, but part of it is some serious design failures in recent sets.

He's been writing high-minded theory articles about designing Magic cards since he started working for Wizards in 1996 (he's been in charge since 2003). Magic has had some major design defects in that time.

A big part of Magic's success is that it has a lot of robust, emergent gameplay. It started out very well designed and has stayed that way--very little of the core gameplay has changed in 27 years. As a result, people find interesting things to do that often have very little in common with what the designers planned for a particular expansion. So when things work well, that's not always to the designer's credit. You could design cards at random and have decent results. That's pretty much what happened for the first few years, when the game first exploded into popularity.

[...You Lost Me]

So, what do failures in MtG look like? Do they frequently "own goal" themselves with unforced errors, or do they just occasionally mess up in unpredictable ways?

WotC's recent track record with breaking the Standard format and constantly needing to ban cards is one of their biggest mistakes. But most of the bans are due to balance issues: for example, Smuggler's Copter could have been tuned down and Felidar Guardian could be fixed by replacing "nonland permanent" with "creature". Those balancing issues are distinct from actual design issues. You are on the mark that most of these mistakes are unrelated to the high-minded theory.

As far as design mistakes go, WotC is good enough that Magic doesn't fail anymore due to "boring" mechanics. Usually, the opposite happens, where WotC tries to push a creative or mechanical envelope and gets bitten for it. Here are a couple failures that come to mind:

Set Failure - Ixalan: Ixalan is a plane focused on tribal mechanics (i.e. your creature type matters) and a sort-of-faction split. There were 4 important tribes: merfolk in Blue and Green, vampires in White and Black, dinosaurs in Red/White/Green, and Pirates in Red/Blue/Black. The two cooler tribes got an extra color.

Usually what happens with faction design is that you give each faction unique mechanics that are somewhat related to each other, so players get flexibility when playing their deck. But Ixalan's mechanic for the set was "I care about other creatures with this creature type". The result was that Ixalan's deck-building was extremely constrained. This hurt the limited environment a ton.

Secondarily, Ixalan's individual card designs were pretty weak and uninspired. Usually this is the fault of Set Design, which is the team that takes over a set idea after Vision Design (which is MaRo's team). But Vision Design is also responsible for creating individual card designs, and there were so many underwhelming individual card designs that it seems like the Vision Design team dropped the ball.

Set Failure - Battle for Zendikar: Zendikar is a well-beloved plane themed around adventuring (it's as close as we get to a D&D world), the land being alive, and giant alien monsters called Eldrazi. Before I talk about why it didn't do well, I need to give a little background.

The last time Zendikar was featured was back in Rise of the Eldrazi, where they were big bois like this

Smaller creatures existed like this, but they only did so in order to get the big bois out (note that their ability creates little weenie creatures that produce mana).

One reason this worked was that Rise of the Eldrazi was a small set. The designers didn't need to design a ton of cards or build an entire environment around giant monsters, because Rise of the Eldrazi would always be paired with the large Zendikar set.

Battle For Zendikar was supposed to be a large set, capable of supporting all of Zendikar-themed games on its own (it would get a small supplemental set a few months later). As a result, Mark Rosewater personally decided that Eldrazi should stop being exclusively large monsters or mana producers. Because they wanted to fill a set with Eldrazi, the Vision Design team decided to make the eldrazi tentacle aliens of any shape or size. That led to creatures like these:

One big problem with this is that Magic uses lots of colored mana, so most cards need to have colored mana costs. But Eldrazi are supposed to be colorless, anti-mana monsters. As a band-aid solution, the design team put a "marker mechanic" on the cards to show that they were supposed to be colorless even though they costed colored mana. It was... weird.

The end result was a set that focused on fighting aliens and not adventuring, that pushed Magic's only alien monster race into a boring space, where the premier "mechanic" was just a label slapped on a creature telling you to ignore one of Magic's most intuitive rules.

Mark is generally very generous when it comes to evaluating the work of Magic's design team. His retrospective on Battle For Zendikar was probably the harshest take I've seen from him -- https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/a ... 2016-08-29

Battle for Zendikar block, was not as jelled a design as I normally like to hand over. Development, led by Erik Lauer, took on a Herculean task to get it playable, but a lot of the flaws of the block were already baked in.

So to answer your question, they don't own-goal themselves too frequently when it comes to the actual design process. Maybe once every 2-3 years. Their balancing problems are a lot more frequent nowadays.

[Kaelik]

I think it's fair to say that their last several bans represent a "Design failure."

Here is some VERY basic information about magic that I think everyone knows, but if you don't know none of this will make sense:

There are special parts of YOUR turn you can cast any spell, but also even during those parts you can't cast two spells at the SAME TIME. There are lots of parts of your own turn and your opponents turn where you would want to cast spells (including any time you cast a spell and then your opponent casts a spell in response so you can't cast another REGULAR spell), and some spells can be cast those times, mostly only creatures with the keyword Flash and Instants. Part of the power of those spells is the Flash or Instant ability to cast at any time.

Pretty much all spells cost mana, where you tap lands, and once untapped they MOSTLY don't untap until your next turn starts.

Wilderness Reclamation is a card that makes all your lands untap at your end phase. If you have multiple copies this happens multiple times. So if you have 5 lands and two Wilderness Reclamations you can produce 15 mana at the end of your turn.

Teferi Time Raveller has a passive ability that prevents your opponent from casting ANY spell except during those specific times that you can cast EVERY spell. It also comes down, bounces any non land enemy permanent, and then draws you a card on the first turn before anyone can interact with it.

Everyone has hated Teferi Time Raveller for as long as it existed. They are right to hate it. It's absolutely bullshit and it turns of like half the game of magic with it's passive, and it ALSO is so incredibly mana efficient and card efficient that it would be good even without the passive!

But! You see, they could never ban it. Because without Teferi Time Raveller turning off half the game of magic, Wilderness Reclamation control decks are too powerful!

So literally for like 6 months they justified not banning Teferi because they needed him to prevent Wilderness Reclamation decks from controlling the meta. But at the same time they also just kept printing more and better cards for Wilderness Reclamation decks.

Until eventually the entire fucking meta was just 70% Wilderness Reclamation Temur (Green/Red/Blue) control and 30% Teferi Jeskai (Blue/White/Red) Control decks.

So they finally just banned Wilderness Reclamation and Teferri at the same time.

They have put out five sets where both of these cards existed and kept printing more and better ways for Wilderness to own the meta and thus demanding they can't do anything about Teferi. It was pretty dumb!

[OgreBattle]

Their "State of Design" articles mention design failures

https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/a ... 2020-08-17

They use softer words but their failures this year are...
- Balance problems
- Designing for too many formats
- Lack of cohesion in recent mechanics (I havne't played since the Bloodborne set so I can't say)

Ah they've also said that The "Two Block Paradigm, no more core" is worse than the 3 block one it replaced, so they're going back to something like the 3 block paradigm + core set
https://mtg.gamepedia.com/Block#Two-Block_Paradigm

---

For me I don't like most of their current art style. Everyone is mostly photorealistic with armor that's mostly stylized in that warcrafty way with segments. My favorite 90's 00's MtG cards had artist's style like Kev Walker (who does have big fantasy armor but composes it in a way where certain points stand out instead of it feeling like a pattern) and Rebecca Guay. Same with D&D/PF, I prefer AD&D and Wayne Reynolds to the current batch of "photorealistic-ish + painterly"

Card art I like from the last 10 years is... Lunarch Mantle has nice composition https://crystal-cdn3.crystalcommerce.co ... QzTzLX.png

[Leress]

There was also the companion mechanic that fucked over so many formats it wasn't funny. They had to nerf that to the ground.

Modern Horizons brought cards that got banned who knew that adding a broken mechanic (Delved) to a creature that is in colors that can fill the graveyard at an absurd rate (Green and Black) and adding a non-restriction (can't spend mana to cast) with a mechanic that makes it easier to cheat out (convoke) with a color that shits out creatures as an afterthought.

And that is just one card.

Astrolabe fucked formats.

The thing that confuse me is that they say they want an interactive game but then make things that can't be interacted with (emblems, Hexproof, can't be countered), or it doesn't matter because you already get all the value anyway and not care (Uro...oh you counted it and didn't exile the card/graveyard it will be back)

Now not everything they did is bad. Sagas are fine, Adventure is fine albeit kinda mindless, and food was cute until cats being put in ovens was an actual problem.

I always like Seb's art:

[Kaelik]

Yeah the Companion mechanic was pure bad design too.

[OgreBattle]

Hahah that's great, MtG prides itself on flavor and mechanics as one.

[GreatGreyShrike]

Cat Oven honestly could have been much less aggravating for Arena's online play if there was a default to 'always use most recently created food token automatically'. I mean, there are extremely rare corner cases where you care whether or not the food you eat is the one that was most recently summoned and would want to eat the *older* food - being under the effect of a 'force you to attack' ability and planning to turn the food into a creature, for example - but for 99.9999% of real world use WotC could have made the cat oven combo faster and easier to go through.

Most of the time there wasn't a choice in what food to eat, you only have one, and you still have to click the only food you have.

[jt]

The thing that confuse me is that they say they want an interactive game but then make things that can't be interacted with (emblems, Hexproof, can't be countered), or it doesn't matter because you already get all the value anyway and not care (Uro...oh you counted it and didn't exile the card/graveyard it will be back)

I think by "more interactive" they mean "creatures attacking and blocking." Which is fair - it's a huge chunk of the game's rules that are really under-used in older formats. But making creatures that are blanket immune to the other half of the rules is a pretty lazy way of going about it. Needs more conditional removal, or conditional hexproof.

[Leress]

I think by "more interactive" they mean "creatures attacking and blocking." Which is fair - it's a huge chunk of the game's rules that are really under-used in older formats. But making creatures that are blanket immune to the other half of the rules is a pretty lazy way of going about it. Needs more conditional removal, or conditional hexproof.

It may be fair, but that's not really what they did.
That's the thing though the biggest thing about creature value was when it entered the battlefield or left. It doesn't really matter that you have an answer.

[Kaelik]

Yeah, right now the meta decks are all control decks with lots of board wipes and Ugins of various kinds and Genesis Terror Peak/Omnielemental Decks that slam out creatures that do one or two times their power when they enter the battlefield.

You can still get an occasional Red Deck Wins or Golgari aggro, but the meta mostly doesn't give a shit about attacking and blocking, just creatures entering the battlefield to kill you.

[OgreBattle]

Was there a block where 'creatures attack and block and that's great' actually happened?

In FFtcg, your character cards are the (usually) only way to deal damage, 'sorcery' are just removal and the one mill deck was reeled in last year.

[Zinegata]

When I see articles like this, it gives me the impression that MtG has remained a pretty well-designed and well-thought-out game. But then I look at things like your other thread (http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=57646), and you flat-out say that most of the Kamigawa set was pretty boring.

Design articles are by and large marketing articles; meant to make players more confident about the game they are purchasing.

They don't actively deceive people by giving bad design advice - most are often pretty solid for the specific game in question - but a lot of pertinent details about design are left on the cutting room floor.

In particular...

So, what do failures in MtG look like? Do they frequently "own goal" themselves with unforced errors, or do they just occasionally mess up in unpredictable ways?

Most design errors of any game - tabletop or electronic - is a function of the game's overall complexity compared to the time allotted for testing and bug-fixing. Lots of designers end up hanging themselves with their own rope because they've made an overly complex game but don't allot enough time to find all the errors.

Magic has an extremely large pre-existing design complexity issue due to the sheer number of cards that have been published for the game.

This is indeed why they have formats. Formats are a complexity-reduction mechanism, as each format reduces the overall card pool. Instead of needing to balance against every card ever published for instance, Standard format can just focus on the current set you're making and the few previous ones.

But Magic still has a very real publishing crunch - they have a schedule to keep in terms of publishing new sets - so while they can limit complexity they don't have unlimited time to find errors even of new sets.

Balance problems which require a card ban are generally a result of this lack of testing time. It's only when the game is published out in the wild - where you now have millions of players "testing" the cards with actual play - that some bugs become apparent.

On the other hand - "boring" sets or "bad" mechanics are often the result of the initial concept being very promising in the early testing (e.g. all the test groups "loved" the concept of the set), but the design team then encounters major bugs and issues in the middle and they can no longer change the mechanics or re-theme the set because of the production schedule. For example - making card art is a pretty time-consuming process; so you can't suddenly switch from a Greek-themed set to a Steampunk-themed set mid-stream. The design team will just have to grit their teeth and publish a set knowing the mechanics aren't really that Greek-themed anymore.

====

Their "State of Design" articles mention design failures

https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/a ... 2020-08-17

They use softer words but their failures this year are...
- Balance problems
- Designing for too many formats
- Lack of cohesion in recent mechanics (I havne't played since the Bloodborne set so I can't say)

Magic had a pretty major format revision recently (e.g. Pioneer for 2019), as well as a couple of new product lines. Most seem to be driven by the business (money-making) side which is probably why the design team had these hiccups. They were forced to make new stuff on a development time cycle they're not used to. And obviously, the designers can't say "WoTC/Hasbro wanted to make more money and pushed too much on us" in the design articles.

The thing to realize here is that unlike most games, Magic has a very convoluted player base with very different financial and gameplay interests.

Most games can just focus on balancing the stuff for the actual tabletop.

Magic however has a significant number of very old, and very expensive cards. And these cards are not only valuable to players, but the retailers who often make big bucks off these cards.

Any newly published cards that can potentially de-value these old staples will cause much controversy. Yet Wizards doesn't actually make any money off these old power cards (WotC doesn't resale individual cards), and in many ways these overpriced old cards is scaring new players off the game.

So designing for Magic really is trying to rush for the finish line (due to production deadlines and money targets), while at the same time trying to avoid landmines like not de-valuing old cards that they won't talk about in the design article.

[Lokey]

The content from the first set of articles was presented at GDC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHHg99hwQGY There are some directions to think about design that might help with the heartbreaker RPG design, but don't think it's too newsworthy or that applicable to the group and various works here. (I.e. the heartbreaker under discussion would carry on with fighters are terrible because they're terrible in dnd3.x--then you'd probably benefit from the design advice presented because you'd really need to move in another direction unless fighters suck is a chief design goal.)

Was it 2 or so years ago Frank was pretty bullish on the number of top strategies for Modern? While busy for other reasons, I'd assume some no news might not be good news?

[Archmage]

Tangent: OgreBattle, you mentioned the FF TCG--have you played it? I would really love to see some analysis of its play and design, because as an FF fan it really interests me but I have nobody to play it with and I would love to learn more about it.

[OgreBattle]

Tangent: OgreBattle, you mentioned the FF TCG--have you played it? I would really love to see some analysis of its play and design, because as an FF fan it really interests me but I have nobody to play it with and I would love to learn more about it.

Its a lot of fun and I’ve played against national champs so the highest level play is my local environment.

- you discard from hand to generate crystal points (mana), so you can play big cards immediately at card disadvantage
- backups (land) max out at 5, they cost cp so first turns are often discard a card Andy play a 2cp backup. Many have strong ‘comes into play’ effects or ‘sacrifice’ effects
- when you get hit by an enemy forward (creature) you send top card of your deck to the breakzone, if its an ex Burst card then an effect happens, so some decks are built to be hit and play powerful ex burst effects like ‘break enemy forward’
- legends are the default, many have a ‘discard card of same name to do a sorcery type effect’ power
- because forwards are the only way to deal damage with rare exception, the meat of the game is attacking+blocking+ playing a summon from your hand or not knowing if the guy with Cloud can discard a Cloud from his hand to activate Cloud’s ability to break one of your forwards

Card advantage is the main measure of power in this game. Every color has access to card draw and "return a forward or backup from breakzone (graveyard)" effects so a card that's sent to the breakzone has many chances to come back if you build around that.

[Prak]

It's worth talking about Magic's big failures, too, I think, namely-

• Urza's Saga, the (first) Enchantments Matter set
• Mirrodin, the (first) Artifacts Matter set
• Kamigawa, the block based on a Fantasy Japan Plane

Urza's Saga was in fact such a big failure, Mark and the rest of R&D were called into the pres' office and basically told "if this happens again, you're all fired." Mostly, it was just an environment full of insanely powerful cards, to the extent that when it got rolled into Extended (a specific tournament format), games frequently lasted one turn.

One of Mirrodin's big problems was the introduction of Artifact Lands. Magic's foundation is actually probably a really good case example of action economies. You can play one land a turn, which usually produce mana at a 1:1 rate (there are lands that produce more than one mana, but they are very few and far between). (I believe there is a land which produces a half mana, but it's from a joke set, so we're not going to bother with it). Likewise, most spells you cast will cost at least 1 mana.

Here's where Mirrodin created problems- it focused on the one type of non-land card which, at the time, could have no casting cost (without special mechanics/shenanigans), Artifacts. In fact, zero casting cost artifacts are numerous enough to have a nickname- cheerios (because their casting cost is 0). Mirrodin also introduced the mechanic "Affinity (for [thing])" where the card with the ability would cost 1 generic mana less to play for each [thing] you had in play. On non-artifacts, this is one thing, because it only affects generic, not colored, parts of of the card cost. Artifacts, however, typically only cost generic mana (in fact, at the time, they only ever cost generic mana).

So, turn one of a game while Mirrodin block was in-format might look like-

Land for turn-


Play-

Imprinting a Blue card

And you have an empty hand, and go into your next turn with two mana available, and eight artifacts, which includes three 2/2s and a 4/4, where the common expectation is that, without shenanigans, you might have a 2/1, or something. Then you draw a card, and maybe it's Broodstar-

And you go into turn 3 with a flying 8/8, and by the time you swing, that's probably at least a 9/9.

And mind you, this isn't even a high level play. This is me refreshing me memory of how degenerate Mirrodin was using Scryfall.

Kamigawa Block's main problem was ...allegedly that the mechanics were very "parasitic," which is to say, they interact with each other, but have almost no interaction with mechanics outside the block. I personally think that "Block based heavily on actual Japanese folk lore released during the really goddamned big hey day of anime and so everyone was expecting The Anime Set" was also an issue for it.

[OgreBattle]

Affinity is super not fun. I stopped playing Shadowverse because something similar happened with spellboost (card in your hand's cost is reduced or power is enhanced for every spell you played, effects include getting an extra turn or a 1-shot giant fireball or playing monsters for free)

[Prak]

Affinity, like many degenerate mechanics in MtG, is hilariously fun when you're playing it and it's working, and horribly unfun when you're facing it and it's working.

[Foxwarrior]

That's one of the reasons Slay the Spire is such a good game.