'Magic: the Gathering': 20 Years, 20 Lessons Learned

[Music] welcome everybody okay so I am Mark rosewater the head designer for Magic the Gathering so uh we do something a little weird uh we make a game and we put it on paper um you can come to the experimental game Workshop it's it's something new kind of Cutting Edge um so anyway uh let's walk through my game employment history so back in 1995 I went to work for a little company called Wizards of the Coast that's it that's that's my employment industry uh so I've actually spent the last 20 years designing the same game of course Magic the Gathering uh and not a lot of people actually design a game for 20 years not a lot of games last 20 years um but what I found was over the

years as I worked Wizards went through a lot of changes and Magic went through a lot of changes so for example this was one of our main villains Nicole Bolis when I started at the company and there he is now so we magic has changed a lot over the years in fact in the 20 years since I've been there we have made 85 randomized booster products 69 random sorry 69 non-randomized products we've done online licens in other miscellaneous products and have produced over 14,000 cards so in 20 years we've made a lot of magic so in those 20 years I've learned a lot I've made a lot of mistakes done a few things correct but I've had a lot of lessons and so I decided for my first talk ever at GDC I would share those 20 years lessons that I learned and I decided I would do 20 lessons I figured I could average one per year um but this isn't

chronological um this is not like here's the lesson of 1995 um these are just lessons I learned over put in an order that makes sense to me hopefully by the end of this it'll make sense to you but these are 20 lessons I got 60 Minutes go okay lesson number one so for this one we're going back to time spiral back in October of 2006 so we had a little uh mechanic or called um suspend and suspend basically let you trade time for money money and Magic being mana of course so the idea essentially was normally in Magic you cast a spell it happens right away but suspend said well it's cheaper but you have to wait several turns for it so this is Aaron ephemeron takes four turns once you play it so you cast it wait wait wait okay you get Aaron emeron and then as soon as people got it they would attack with it in Magic tapping you you have to turn into attack so they would attack with it um but they weren't

allowed to do that because the magic rules say you can't do that so we were trying to figure out how could we communicate to people not to attack so we tried a lot of different ways um some got less and less subtle to try to encourage them to say no you can't attack you can't attack with this creature um and in the end the solution was no guys you can't attack and finally we said okay you can attack we'll change the rules the rules just say you can attack you you want to attack you can attack so that brings us to lesson number one fighting against human nature is a losing battle um so they say in game design you should know your audience so our audience is human um and they come with a complex operating system um but while it's quirky it is something that can be understood there's an entire field of psychology trying to understand it but as game designers we have to be forewarned humans can be a bit stubborn so what I like to say to people is don't

change your players to match your game change your game to match your players don't get yourself into a fight that you're probably not going to win so lesson number one fighting against human nature is a losing battle and there are things throughout the time the cell phone there's things that get invented that change human behavior but don't assume your game is going to be one of those things and that when you try to make humans change for your game your game's going to suffer change your game to match your audience which are human so here's what I'm going to do each lesson I'm going to put up on the board and at the end it'll be a pretty picture you guys can take of all the lessons Okay lesson number two so this one goes back to 2012 Avis in restored so the card I got the most complaints about was a card called gristle brand in fact I got way more complaints about this card than any other card why was it a power level issue well no here's Jerry

Thompson a very good magic player a whole article explaining how awesome gristle brand is gristle Brand's a very powerful card in certain formats it's actually very very strong okay was it a flavor thing no Liliana is one of our most popular characters in fact she made a deal with four demons to get Eternal uh Youth and and beauty and he was one of the four demons she made a deal with so no he's super flavorful so what was going on well he was a seven power creature with seven toughness you could pay Seven life to draw seven cards and he cost eight Mana so lesson number two Aesthetics matter so I just explain how you have to understand human behavior that's important but you also have to understand human Aesthetics I'm sorry human perception I'm getting ahead of myself you have to understand human perception so I went to Boston University College of communications I took a lot of classes there so one of

the classes I took was a class called Aesthetics which is also known as the philosophy of art or the science of beauty uh and the idea of Aesthetics is they study how humans perceive the world you literally study like how does the brain work how do the senses work how do the eyes the ears how does it all come together how do people perceive the things around them and what they do is they look at all the different qualities that humans cross culture and they try to figure out what exactly to humans is aesthetically pleasing and while there's some variant from person to person there are just things about the way the human brain works that Mak certain things more appe appealing than others so in your game players expect the components of the game to have a certain feel now I'm not talking about just visual stics magic actually does that pretty well but I'm talking about whether the game component has the right qualities it it has to feel right you know things like balance symmetry pattern completion and if you failure to provide the Aesthetics you want it makes the players feel ill ease

it distracts them from the focus of your game and it makes them pay attention to what the game isn't instead of what the game is so I just said don't fight human nature don't fight human perception so lesson number two Aesthetics matter the the the key element here is that humans like to perceive things in a certain way and if you fight that it just draws attention away now you might make your game because you want to do that maybe you want them to feel ill at ease that's okay you could use this to your advantage but be aware that how people perceive things affects how they take your game in and that don't disconnect from the Aesthetics unless you mean to because otherwise it just draws Focus okay lesson number two Aesthetics matter up on the wall lesson number three so for this one we go back to inrad and dark Ascension this is back in 2011 2012 so this was our Gothic horror sets we had vampires and werewolves and zombies so one of the thing I did very early in this design

team is on the Whiteboard we wrote up just cool sounding names just things that sounded evocative and then a lot of the cards a lot of the popular cards from the set came from that whiteboard that we would put things up and we would design to match it and we ended up with a lot of very evocative cards some of the favorite cards in the set and it all came from just matching the idea of what sounded cool what would make a cool sounding card so that guess this to lesson number three reson resonance is important okay so I'm use a lot of metaphors so one of my metaphors is humans your audience the people are going to play your games come preloaded designers don't have to start from scratch that the audience always has pre-existing emotional responses that the game designer can build upon for example magic didn't invent zombies players came to the game with a pre-built emotional relationship with zombies created from years of watching

pop culture so magic was able to build on that knowledge and make a rich emotional game experience your audience has a deep deposit of emotional equity in pre-existing things and as game designers that's a tool you should make use of and build upon so lesson number three resonance is important the key to remember is your audience comes to your game with a lot of stuff already there as a game designer use that build upon it that it's I'm going to talk a lot today about you're trying to create emotional responses with your audience well they they come with emotional responses built in you as game designer should take advantage of that okay up on the wall lesson number four so for this one we go to Theos from just a couple years ago so Theos was our Greek mythology inspired set it had us sort of following you know lots of cool ideas from Greek mythology so one of the cards in the set was called tro

horse um and the idea of the card was you would give it to your opponent and then every uh every turn a soldier would pop out of it Trojan Horse now there's no Troy in the game because we had our own world we our our version of Troy was called acros so it was called a croin horse not Trojan Horse um and we play tested with it and it was really popular the players really liked it um but then the creative team decided to make one small change uh instead of being a horse we've done horses let's let's make it a lion let's make it a crowing lion so we changed the card and then I started getting complaints in play testing that people they didn't like the C they didn't understand the car they were really confused like what what is this car doing so we changed it back to a crow and horse and then everybody liked it again so lesson number four is to make use of piggybacking so residence has another valuable use it's a teaching tool for game mechanics so it makes use of something I call piggybacking and what piggybacking is is a use of

pre-existing knowledge to front-load game information to make learning easier so for example in Magic we have a mechanic called Flying it is the easiest mechanic to teach because all I have to say is you know like it flies you know that it matches it that that I don't have to teach a lot of the rules because it does even though in a vacuum it h there's rules with it but it so matches expectation it so matches what people already know that it's easy to learn so my my one non-magic example today from Plants versus Zombies designed by a guy named George fan also is a magic player um so he was trying to make a tower defense game so the idea is that things are attacking and you have units you're putting to stop the attacks um but one of the key things is once you place a unit you can't move it and George didn't like the fact that normally like they'd be soldiers it's like well if my Soldier is right here and right next door I desperately need the help why won't the soldiers just go right next door and help you why why is that the case Cas so he's like could I pick something can I

pick something to be my units that the audience won't think they can move and so he chose plants plant it can't move it's in the name it's planted and so he chose it so that people would realize oh once I plant my plant I have no expectation the plant's going to get up and move anywhere also he needed invading forces he need something that kept coming in waves so he chose something that represented that that people would expect the zombies to slowly come and come in waves so a lot of people think oh he just picked two funny things oh oh they're plants haha they're zombies but no he carefully picked them because the choice reinforced the game that by choosing those people understood the game easier and faster so remember you don't have to teach players things they already know so lesson number four make use of piggybacking that resonance not only will it emotionally attach your your audience it also is a it's a tool for

teaching that you can use it to help people get your game quicker and faster that flavor while it definitely has an emotional appeel can help you with mechanics so put it up on the wall lesson number five so for this one we go back to Odyssey back in September 2001 so in Magic there's a there's an idea called card Advantage uh it is a strategic thing that people learns they get better at the game so in I'm doing a very abbreviated version of this for people actually understand card Advantage the idea is if in my hand and in play I have more cards than you have okay then I I have an advantage if I have more cards than you strategically I'm at an advantage so we were doing Odyssey and I said okay what if I could turn card advantage on its head so for example there was a card called Patrol Hound where you could discard a card from your hand to give it an ability but it didn't matter you didn't even care what it got you didn't want the ability you just wanted to discard cards from your hand well why would you want to do that so there was a mechanic in the set called threshold and what threshold said is when you got

seven cards in your graveyard things would change so for example the croen Beast which is a one one became an 88 so the idea was if you had seven cards in your hand you could discard them all to the patrol Hound to give your croen beast and make it a 1-1 into an 88 how' that go over with the audience the problem was yes you could you could make do that but they didn't want to do that you know instead of throwing away their entire hand they'd rather I don't know play the cards in their hand so at leades a lesson number five don't confuse interesting with fun so there there's two different types of stimulation there's intellectual stimulation so H interesting and there's emotional stimulation fun those are different things so for example in Magic looking at the cards is intellectual stimulation

oh I let me see what they do and let me that's interesting and what how they design the set and there's playing with the cards but that's more about emotional like oh is it fun am I having fun playing this so we tend to think of ourselves as intellectual creatures but we tend to make most of our decisions based Less on facts and more On Emotion so your game can speak to your audience on an intellectual level or it can speak to them on an emotional level now both are valuable but when you speak to the players on an emotional level you're more likely to create player satisfaction so lesson number five don't confuse interesting with fun look when we talk about why we make games and what we want the audience to get out of the game it's an emotional response you know we talk about fun and maybe you're trying to create other emotions there's games that do things other than produce fun but you want to get some emotional response out of your audience so there's a difference between being interested and being fun and make sure that you're not confusing the to because being fun

more gets the result that you want so put it up on the board lesson number six back to industr our Gothic horror set remember with vampires werewolves and zombies so I was the lead designer of this set and I was trying to figure out what exactly we wanted the set to do so what I did is I thought back to the pop culture that inspired this you know where the audience would get their resources from where would they think about the horror genre and that's movies and TVs and books um and what I realized was if I sort of followed the guideline of the source material I knew what I wanted out of my audience fear that when you look at the horror genre that it's about scaring the audience it's about creating a sense of Terror a suspense of dread so when I built the set I actually built mechanics with that in mind so for example normally in Magic we only have one face but we did a double face card cards that had stuff on both sides so one side

could be a human and the other side is a is a scary werewolf or it could be Dr Jackal on the back it was my Hyde or could be a scientist messing with things he shouldn't be messing with and on the back it's the fly we also had a mechanic called morbid that things happened when creatures died so all of a sudden death became kind of scary because you never quite knew what was going to happen and we had a mechanic called flashback which would have spells happen again that once things are on the graveyard they could happen again so you can make 13 zombies and then flash it back and make 13 more so lesson number six is understand what emotion your game is trying to evoke to be successful with your game you need to know what your audience is trying to experience what emotional response are you're trying to create in order to know what to put into your game you have to understand what comes out so you must continually ask yourself what impact will this game Choice have on the player experience and

it doesn't contribute to the overall experience it has to go so back to college I took a lot of classes in college uh this time I took a screenwriting course and the teacher taught me something that really stuck with me so it talks about no scene is worth a movie no line is worth a scene so what that means is no matter how good a scene is if it's not serving the lar larger movie it has to be cut and the same holds true for a line if the line doesn't serve the scene you need to cut it that the idea behind this whole thought was it doesn't matter how good your line is if it doesn't enhance the scene Get rid of it doesn't matter how good your scene is if it doesn't Advance the movie Get rid of it so the same applies to game design because everything in the game has to contribute to the emotional output you're trying to create if not it has to go so lesson number understand what emotion your game is

trying to evoke like once again the theme of today is you're humans are emotional creatures you are trying to get a response out of them think about what emotion you're trying to get then make sure your game is moving in that direction that all your components are trying to get the emotional response you're trying to get from your audience up on the wall lesson number seven so this one happened on a plane ride to Gen Con so that's a big gaming convention um I was seated next to Christopher Rush uh who sadly just passed away a few uh weeks ago um he is a magic illustrator probably best known for illustrating Black Lotus one of the most iconic magic cards um also not a lot of people realize this but he also did all the Mana symbols so his his work sticks with us today so he and I were talking about land so in in the game of magic land's the basic resource it it's a pretty boring part of the game in the big picture it's not where the excitement lies um and Chris came up with a neat idea he said what if we took the land which looked like this at the time and

we made the art real big and we did something exciting where the art was most of the card and the rest of the people there said uh Chris no that that's not what a land looks like and who cares we don't need it the land's not the exciting part of the game we don't need to worry about the land so a year later uh I made a set called unglued which is a very different kind of set and so I put full art land in I said I thought it was a neat idea and loved players really liked it so a number of years later I did it again I made the art bigger um eventually we started putting in in normal set since zendar had full art land very popular battle for zendar had them very popular and what we found was players really did attach the land it mattered to them and it wasn't just a matter of full art that we started working up trying really hard to make sure that all our lands had a very unique look to them so that we gave the player choices that when you play play an island for example obviously there's

five basic lands I'm showing Island that you had a lot of choices we even experimented there's some cards we made which these are real actual Earth places that were on cards and here's one for example the the guru Island that was made by theres neelon very pretty it's very rare it's one of the most valued cards in the game because players do care it's not it's not just an island it's not just a basic land that players care about that so that leads us into lesson number seven allow the player the ability to make the game personal okay back to college this time an advertising class so I learned something really interesting so if you're in a store staring at a shelf and you've never purchased the product before what are you most likely to purchase the brand you're most familiar with why why is that because it's a little quirk in the brain so it Associates your knowledge of something with quality because if you know it well

then it must mean it's better that knowledge equals quality okay for the psychologist out there technically knowledge equals familiarity which equals preference which equals quality but I'm shortcutting here by by the transfer property Works um so the idea essentially is your brain just it prioritizes things you know that things in your brain it just thinks that they're better because you know them so what this means in game design it's it's important for your players to have a person personal connection with your game the more the players feel the game is about them the better their brain will think of it so how do you do that okay provide a lot of choices give them different resources different paths different Expressions give the player the ability to choose and importantly not to choose things allowing them to feel that what they choose is theirs so for example in Magic one of things I think that really helps magic is we give you so much choice you can

choose your colors you can choose your creatures you can choose your characters you can choose your factions you can choose your illustrations and of course you can choose your frames that there's so many options available to you so lesson number seven is allow the player the ability to make the game personal so just remember the players will think more highly of things that they can find a personal connection to and in order for you to do that make sure you give them the choices to be able to find the things to be to make personal up on the wall lesson number eight so this is from Gate Crash a couple years ago um so in it we had a card called totally lost so this was not a particularly strong card it never got played in constructed tournaments people would play in limited it's not bad limited um limited is when you open the cards and you play with the cards that you open uh so anyway we needed something simple the card makes the creature go away for a while and so the artist said okay well let's just show a creature getting lost in the city of Ravnica was where it took place um uh

and so this little guy uh his name is fibble and he's a little homunculus mean a creature made of Magic the audience really took the fibble uh they started putting them in different magic settings and non-magic settings did everybody find him he right there okay I'll help you a little bit right there and there's Waldo um they started doing memes with him they started making greeting cards they put them in comic strips

they started making illustrations with him they made figures out of him just they really really took to him and did all sorts of crazy things and then we got in on the game we started making cell phones and keychains we even made a little plush he's really cute um and the players just really really took to him so much so that that we started putting them back in the game you guys catch this one so lesson number eight the details are where your player falls in love with your game so as the player explores explores their choices they are searching for things to bond with the players want to find a piece of the game to call their own now in Magic players Bond over cards or characters sometimes even over a single image this is bear punching very popular last year um this

means the details matter because the individual will bond with the game through the details what might seem insignificant is anything but that small detail may only matter to a tiny percentage but to that percentage it can mean everything because that might be the thing that makes the player fall in love with your game so lesson number eight the details are where the players fall in love with your game I cannot stress this enough that it's very important that people want to people are individuals they want to sort of come to the game and find something that they can claim to be their own and that that's going to happen in the details so when people always say the details don't matter that's not true at all the details matter very very much it's not that everybody will care about every detail but somebody will care about each piece of detail and it's crucial that it's those details it's those little tiny things the little fibble fips of the world that really endear the audience to your game so up on the wall lesson number nine okay there are many

different ways to play Magic we refer to them as formats so some formats we create standard uses the last 18 months worth of cards modern uses about the last 10 years worth of cards a booster draft you ripping open the cards and you draft them right out of the booster pack so other formats are made by our players popper uses just common cards Emperor is a three onree match but the current most popular player made format is command Commander so Commander goes back there were a bunch of Judges way back when who all day long would judge and when they were done judging they wanted to play Magic but they decided to make their own format and so they were inspired by these five elder dragons from a set called Legends long ago and so they made a format here's how the format works you choose a legendary creature you can see that on the card these represent individual characters these are specific people um and then they act as the commander for your deck and you add 99 other cards that match the color of your commander so if your commander is like

green and white your cards have to be green white or green and white no repeats so 100 cards one's your commander 99 are other cards they all have to match the color um and Commander was such a popular format that we back in 2011 made a commander product that we we we put this out now it was planned as a one-time thing but it was so popular we did something the next year and the next year and now it's just something we do every year and the players of fallen in love with it and it's something that we didn't even generate I mean we obviously made the product but the players generated this and created it and it's become something that's an endearing part of the game so lesson number nine allow your players to have a sense of ownership okay so once the players made choices and bonded over details next you need to add customization you need to give them the ability to build things that are uniquely their own now in Magic this customization can happen through a format um but it's most often in Magic

done through deck building players can choose any 60 cards or any 100 cards playing Commander or other formats require other amounts of cards from over 15,000 cards so by the way when I said 14,000 earlier that's on my watch there's a thousand that got made before I got there um and then for each card they get to pick which exact version they want you know there's different frames there's different art there's lots of choices um and the result is they don't just create a deck they create their deck something that personally represents them so when their deck wins they win because the deck is no longer just a part of the game it's an extension of themselves so lesson number nine allow your players to have a sense of ownership this is very important that if you want your players to bond as closely as you can the game has to move Beyond being yours and become theirs you have to find a way to make sure that the player can do that and the key is customization because you want your player to be able to do something that nobody else could do that

they did that's their creation so up on the board okay lesson number 10 so we made a card a while back called Summoners pack so here's what Summoner pack does it lets you go into your library with your deck and get a green creature out of it and put it in play um the trick is it doesn't cost anything well next turn you have to pay for you have you're putting on credit um so you you don't have to pay for it now you have to pay for a next turn now if you don't you lose the game but probably you won't cast this if you can't do that so that's okay so this card lets you get a free green creature out of your duck I mean free for the turn but good enough maybe you'll win this turn um okay now we have a card called Hive mine we made so what Hive mine does is it says whenever a certain kind of spell is played you can copy it so the idea is let's say someone cast divination this let you draw cards everybody gets a divination everybody gets to draw cards okay so what happens when Hive mine meets Summoners packed

hey everybody gets a Summoner packed but here's the problem everybody gets to get a green creature out of their deck a lot of them don't even have a green creature in their deck and this is on payment they got to pay this next turn or they lose the game so you see where this is going so we started with a card that gets a green creature out of your deck and another card that copies certain spells but when you add them together you win the game no that's not something we built into that when we made each of these cards that was nothing we had in mind this is something that the players came up with so this is lesson number 10 leave room for your players to explore okay so I said you want to give him choices you need to give them details you need to give them customization okay so let's talk about how they're presented okay before I was a game designer I worked in Hollywood I was a TV writer if you didn't know in TV there's something called the

pitch so the idea of a pitch is you stand up in front of the room and you have to sell people on your story and this is very crucial the difference between being a good writer and a bad writer is your ability to pitch so I took a lot of classes in it so the number one rule is don't talk at at your audience you want to talk with them so here's one of the tricks they taught you so when you're doing your pitch you want to get your audience to ask questions why is that so important because people are more invested in things that they initiated that if you just talk they might drone you out but if you get them to ask you a question then they tune in because you're asking you're answering their question so this is very important we come to game design don't always show The Players the things you want them to see let your players find them give them the choices design and customs ation but let it be things they discover because

if they find it they'll be more invested so lesson number 10 leave room for the player to explore this is very very important the idea of investment is a key part of what makes people bind and so you want to make sure that you're not always giving it to them just like when I was doing my pitch I didn't want to just give them the story I wanted to get them to ask me the story because then they were invested in me telling it up on the wall okay lesson number 11 so in R&D we do something called a rare poll so we want to understand what impact our rares and Mythic rares are going to have on our audience so what do we do we ask magic players who work at wizards but not in R&D to take a poll and give us their feedback so each card's graded on a scale from 1 to 10 one means something you would you don't want to play with 10 you'd be very excited to open it up okay then we collect all the data and we use it to figure out which cards we should keep and which cards we should change okay so which is better a card

receives all sevens or a card with half ones and twos and half nines and tens I'll give you a second which one you think is better the second a card with half ones and twos and half nines and tens why because we prefer cards that evoke a strong response even if some of that response is negative so it brings us to lesson number 11 If Everyone likes your game but no one loves it it will fail so my metaphor here is a blind date so when you go on a blind date you have a list of things you want the things you're looking for and at the end of the blind date if everything is checked off on your list but there is no joy in the date there is no excitement there was no passion it doesn't matter that you checked off your list there won't be a second date you know the blind date isn't about not having negative things it's about having something positive so players don't need to love everything but they need to love something something has to draw them

into your game something they feel strongly about now don't worry that players will hate something worry that no one will love anything because things that evoke strong responses will most often evoke strong responses in many directions meaning that it's almost impossible to make players love something without making other players hate it in fact some players enjoy hating what other players love so it's almost impossible so stop worrying about evoking a negative response and start worrying about evoking a strong response so lesson number 11 If Everyone likes your game but no one loves it it will fail and I can't stress this enough people too often want to minimize the negative they're so worried about not having anybody dislike something that they miss the big picture which is that's not the important part you have to make sure you evoke the positive response people have to fall in love there's a lot of attention out there there's a lot of games to play if your game doesn't make someone fall in love with it guess what they're going to go to a game that

does up on the board lesson number 12 okay so in the game we have planes Walkers these are characters that cast magic that duel with magic you the player you're a plaines Walker and we spent a lot of time and energy on these Plaines Walkers there are major characters in the story in fact we make cards out of them and the Plaines Walker cards are very popular in fact they're some of the most popular cards we make whenever we have a new set people always ask about the new cards so this story goes back to restored in May of 2012 we made a card called tibolt so he was a devil Plains Walker they used like pain magic and a sharp dresser um but we decided that he was only going to cost two Mana because we had cards we had four Mana three Mana six Mana five Mana we we' done all that we' never done a two Mana Plaines Walker now nothing about this being two Mana serves the card or the character we just wanted to see if we could do it so what happened

one of the reasons people love planes Walkers is they're powerful they're good we tend to make our planes Walkers good but by making it two Mana we didn't allow ourselves the ability to do that and the reason they didn't like him was it just was weak because he cost two Mana so let bring us to lesson number 12 don't design to prove you can do something so I'm going let you in on a secret people who create tend to have large egos because it takes ego to will something into existence now having an ego is fine I personally have a very large ego um but you can't let your ego drive your motivation remember your goal is to deliver an optimal experience for your target audience your decisions have to serve your game and not you so ask yourself is this decision helping me achieve the optimal experience for my target audience or is it being done to fulfill an inwardly facing need for self-satisfaction because if the answer is the latter you're doing it for the wrong reason so number 12 don't design to prove you can do something and one of

the things I think people fall in the SHP we are game designers and most of us are all of us pretty much are game players and it's really easy to fall in the Trap to think of game design as a game that you're trying to have fun playing but the problem is it's not about enjoying the experience it's not about testing yourself it's about making the best game possible so don't fall in the Trap of sort of entertain yourselves to the sake of making your game the best the game can be up in the wall lesson number 13 we go back to 2004 set called unhinged so this was a humorous set which broke a lot of rules that we never normally break because magic is often very competitive and the product want to remind people the game can be fun magic can be fun so we put a silver border on it to say you can't even play these in tournaments it's non-tournament legal okay so in it we had a mechanic called gotcha so here's how gotcha worked if this card was in your graveyard if your opponent did a certain thing this card particularly if they said the word kill or destroy which happen to be the name of the card you could say gotcha and you

could get it back from your graveyard and there're all sorts of gotcha effects if they said a number if they touch the table if they flick their cards if they touch their face if they laughed if they laughed you could say gotcha and get it back so what what was the best way to win this game well don't talk because you might say something you know don't interact CU you might do something don't do anything fun you know heaven forbid you half uh so Le us a lesson number 13 make the fun part also the correct strategy to win it's not the player's job to find the fun it is your job as a game designer to put the fun where they can't help but find it because when players sit down to a game there's an implied promise from the game designer the game designer says if you do what the game tells you to do it will be an enjoyable experience so the players will do whatever the game tells them to achieve the desired gold usually to win even if

that isn't Fun they'll do it and when the game is done if the players didn't have fun they will blame the game and rightfully so because you the designer have messed up you have not delivered on the promise they did what you asked you didn't do you didn't fulfill your end of the bargain so remember you have to make sure that what it takes to succeed at your game is the very thing that makes it fun fun cannot be tangental it has to be the core component of your game experience so Le lesson number 13 make the fun part also the correct strategy to win and then I see this mistake be made all the time where like they find something fun and then add other things around it and the people like I I we do this where you watch through a window and see how your audience is playing the game and sometimes they go the wrong

path and they don't do what you expect them to do well guess what if they find unfun parts of your game you put them there you know make sure that the fun part is you guide them there and they find it because that is what's going to make them love the game is the fun part well make sure they find the fun part up in the wall lesson number 14 so this is Rise of drzi back in 2010 so obviously it had the old drazi in it these guys were Giant an alien and hungry they were eating the world so at common we made a card called ulamog's Crusher so he was giant he was 88 which for a common is pretty big he was alien look at him he looks really weird also most Magik CS are colored he was colorless um and he was hungry he had an ability called Annihilator and annihilator had a number and every time you attacked your your opponent had a sacrifice that many things so anilor 2 means every time you attacked they had to sacrifice two things so what would happen is we would play this and we did some play testing and the players wouldn't attack with him and like what

what's going on and what we learned was they were afraid that here's this awesome creature they finally got it out they didn't want something bad to happen to the creature so they weren't attacking with it but we knew that attacking with it was really good how could we educate them how could we get them to realize they needed to attack with it well the solution was force them to attack with it so we just said okay you have to attack we put this on the one of the common cards and when they attack they realized it was good and they did it more and so the key was by forcing their hand we we educated them so lesson number 14 don't be afraid to be blunt artists tend to prefer subtlety they're taught show don't tell but sometimes subtly doesn't work people can just miss the obvious for example in Magic we use keyword words to make sure that players can focus on the mechanics but once upon

a time back in radian math back in 1999 we had mechanics but we didn't name them we we didn't have keywords and the number one question we got was why doesn't the set have mechanics so sometimes to get your audience to understand you have to be willing to embrace to embrace bluntness I like to think of my creative tools as a toolbox and sometimes you just need a hammer so lesson number 14 don't be afraid to be blunt we as artists are taught subtly subtly subtly subtly and a lot of the times you want to be subtle but that doesn't mean that you can't use bluntness when it's valuable and when it'll get across what you need to up on the wall okay lesson number 15 so I created something a while back called player psychographics I took an advertising class I told you earlier there's a concept in advertising called psychographics where you're trying to understand the emotional needs of your audience why are they buying your product and so the idea was I created these three py Graphics to explain why our players played the game what

emotionally did they get out of the game so first there was Timmy or Tammy there was Johnny or Jenny and there was Spike okay so Timmy or Tammy wants to experience something it's very much about the visceral thrill the the excitement or you know it could be the emotional bonding with friends but it was about the how they felt about it what how it made them feel Jenny or Johnny wanted to express something the game was about showing other people something about themselves through the lens of the game through their deck through cool card combos through some means by which they can express something about themselves spikes want to prove something that the game is a tool to show that they're capable of doing something often winning but that's not the only thing Spike could be focused on but they use the game as a resource to prove they're capable of doing something so let's talk about rava in 2005 we made a card called molten Century so here's what it did you flipped a coin when it came into play and then either you got a five2 mean

five power two toughness or you got a two power five toughness and both of them were interesting both were balance they both interesting things you could get so let's look at the psychic graphics and examine this U I'm GNA take Johnny and Jenny out because this card really isn't for them okay so we are coin flipping oh Timmy likes coin flipping that's exciting what's going to happen Timmy enjoys that we had balance outcomes okay Spike likes that Spike like both things are good things and I can have interesting choices Spike enjoys that let's flip them for a second balance outcomes well that's not really what Timmy's looking for Timmy's looking for exciting things when he flips the coin ooh is is a bad thing or a good thing he wants an exciting moment and coin flipping Spike doesn't want to flip a coin he's all about skill he he wants to win the you know yes they're interesting choices but he wants to make the choices he doesn't want the choices to be random so what happened when this card came out the Timmy's didn't like it cuz it was too spiky and the spikes didn't like it cuz it's too Timmy you know that that

the card like but trying to make different people happy we made nobody happy so lesson number 15 is design the component for the audience is intended for so for example when you aim to please everyone you often please no one all your players don't want the same thing out of your game it's important to understand what different kind of things your audience want and to understand what kind of different players you have so when you design any one component you know which part of the audience it's intent for okay him this is for him protection from everything that's exciting um and then you design the component for that audience if other players don't like it it doesn't matter it's not for them so lesson number 15 design the component for the audience it's intended for you have lots of different players they're going to want lots of different things you have to figure out each component who it is for maximize it for that person forget everybody else it doesn't matter remember you want someone to love everything not hate it it doesn't matter

if people hate things make sure each component is for the person it's made for and you'll make something for everybody you should make something for that the person who hates this card hopefully will love that card but you don't Focus the card on who you're making it for okay lesson number 16 so this is unglued this was the first silverboard Set uh very humorous so we in it we had a card called bfm big furry monster and it was big 99.99 I just talked about how 88 was big for common well 999 is just big in fact this you notice he has two earrings on him uh those were the two biggest creatures in Magic at the time we printed this card which was an 1111 and a 1212 but he's big he's 99.99 and it was so big it had to go on two cards you actually had to draw both cards in your hand to play it so this inspired me to make this card which was well what if it went the opposite direction instead of it being so big that it requires two cards what if it was so small that two of them could fit on one card and Invasion back in September 2000 I made this card card or a bunch of these cards known as split cards so at the time who

was in favor of it I was in favor of it Bill Rose was in favor he was the lead designer of the set he's currently our VP of R&D and Richard Garfield was in favor he was the the creator of magic who was opposed to this everybody else um and it wasn't by the way that they they were thinking of what was best for magic they really were concerned they felt like that wasn't what a Magikarp looks like that that isn't how we do things and that it wasn't that the people who were against it they had the best the best idea of magic in mind they were trying to help the game but they really felt like we were breaking some boundary we wouldn't she we shouldn't be breaking but um Bill and Richard and I we we were steadfast and we slowly convinced everybody that it was the right thing to do and So eventually in Invasion the split cards came out what was the player reaction no they loved them they were very very popular um so much so we've Revisited and done them a bunch of different times so Le lesson number 16 is be more afraid

of boring your players than challenging them so in my 20 years at Wizards I've done a lot of groundbreaking things and every time someone usually multiple people come came out of the woodwork full of passion and purpose and they said to me you can't do that it's too risky it will hurt the game but interestingly I've also created my share of boring mechanics yet very few people ever had passion and purpose to stop me from making those why because people fear challenging the players more than boring them but I think that's backwards when you try something grandiose and it fails the players will forgive you because they recognize that you were trying to do something awesome they respect the attempt and they stick around to see what you'll do next but when you bore the players there's no such forgiveness because making the same mistake is not the same as making a new one when you bore the players they resent you sometimes they stop playing so as game designers I

think we have It reversed challenging the players isn't the bigger threat the greatest risk is not taking risks so lesson number 16 be more afraid of boring your players than challenging them that I really know there's a lot of risk aversion of oh no oh no what if we go something wrong but respect your players when you try new and different things even when you fail that's better received when you just do boring things so be willing to challenge your fans they'll they'll appreciate it okay last number lesson number 17 back to Invasion um so this was had a multi-color theme what that means is that the card had two or more colors in its casting cost and invasion you were encouraged to play as many colors as you could so invasion was very popular so years later we wanted to do another multicolor set ended up being ravnik in October of 2005 so the question we said to ourselves is how can we do another multicol theme without it being too similar so so let's look at the back of a Magik card this is what we know as the color wheel or the five colors of magic

so what if we made one small change we thought what if instead of encouraging players to play as many colors as possible all five we encourage them to play as few as possible two the reason two and not one is it wouldn't be multicolored if it was one and we looked at that with five colors we realized that there are 10 combinations so there are 10 two color pairs so we mapped them and then we made guilds out of them we gave them each a flavor like the aoras for example was all about Law and Order and control it was white and blue it took the elements of white and blue combin them and they were the they were the people that made the laws in the world and they were the bureaucrats and for each of the the guilds we gave them a very specific flavor matching that and then we took the guilds and we put them in a city world and we made Ravnica what was the player response they loved it RFA is the most popular World we've ever created the players just ate it up so lesson number 17 is you don't have to change much to

change everything so my metaphor here is I'm a bad cook so it's my responsibility to make the vegetables so for example I need to take the peas out and put them in here my job so every time I put some peas in and then I say yeah that's not enough peas so I put more peas in and then I'm like that's not enough peas so I put more peas in and then I'm like I dad and I put more peas in and what ends up happening every time is this way too many pe's um I think game designers treat game components like I treat peas you're you're never sure if there's enough so you keep sticking more in then in the end you have too much and this causes problems you create extra complexity for your players you muddy the message of your game and you waste resources you could use later so I've had a slight change in perspective so instead of asking how much do I need to add I now ask how little do I need to

add so lesson number 17 you don't have to change much to change everything when I look back at Ravnica we really changed one tiny element of it but that was enough that one tiny change had a world of differences no one's going to confuse Invasion with RAV they're radically different sets even though they're both multicolor up on the wall okay lesson number 18 so every week I write a weekly design column known as making magic I do 50 new columns a year I get a twoe break where we rerun columns and I've been doing this since 2002 so some weeks are theme weeks I have to write to a theme it's Goblin week or whatever I have to write about goblins some weeks are open-ended I can write whatever I want which is harder to write the theme week or the open-ended week the open-ended week because the theme week force my hand and make me explore options I might not so which is harder to design the theme set or the open-ended set the open-ended set

because the theme set forced me down paths I might not normally have gone so this gets us to lesson 18 and if you follow my podcast or read my column this is probably the one most famous for restrictions breed creativity so there's a myth about creativity that the more options available the more creative people can be but this actually contradicts how we know how most brains work you see the brain is an amazing organ it's very smart so when you're ask to solve a problem it checks its data banks and it asks itself have I solved this problem before and if the answer is yes it solves it in the exact same way the exact same way so what it does is it uses the same neural Pathways and does exactly what you did before now most of the time this is efficient it lets you avoid relearning tasks each time you do them but it causes a problem with creative thought because if you use the same neural Pathways you get to the same answers and with creativity that's not your goal so here here's the trick I've learned if you want to get your brain to get to new places start from somewhere

you've never started before that's why each time I start a new expansion I make sure to have a different vantage point I always say let's start this place from a set I've never started before this has forces me to think in different ways and create new problems to solve which results in new ideas and new Solutions which means that restrictions aren't an obstacle but a valuable tool so you can make use of restrictions to help you be more creative lesson 18 restrictions breed creativity so once again I can't stress enough having restrictions in fact if you don't have restrictions make restrictions for example my favorite article I ever wrote I asked for the audience to give me two topics a magic topic and a non-magic topic the magic topic was my biggest design mistakes and the non-magic topic was dating I would have never written that article I never would have written that article and it's my favorite article I've ever written it's called to air is human it's a topical blend one check it out put this up on the wall okay lesson number 19 so one of my jobs I'm a spokesperson for magic I interact with various sources of media I do a lot of

interviews including social media where I'm active on numerous platforms I have over 880,000 followers I probably spend the most time on Tumblr though because of this this is my blog AKA blog AOG magic joke for the non-magic players out there um so in four years I've made over 64,000 posts and of them I oops I've answered over 60,000 questions four years um I interact a lot with our fans um and not just online but also in person so after this by the way in the wrapup room which is across the street at level um level two in West Hall I will be there I will sign sign cards I will take pictures I will shake hands I will answer questions but that's not going to be in this room it's going to be there so afterwards if you're interested I will be there and I'll stay till I've talked to everybody and signed everything um anyway that's lead of a lesson lesson number 19 your audience is good at recognizing problems and bad at solving them so my manifold here is a doctor appointment what does a doctor always do first they ask how you're

feeling because you know better than the doctor how you're feeling but the doctor doesn't often ask you how to solve the problem because they're better equipped than you to do that same is true in game design your players have a better understanding of how they feel about your game you're trying to create emotional response well they know what that is they can tell easier when something is wrong and they're excellent in identifying problems but they're not as equipped to solve those problems they don't know your tools they don't know your limitations they don't know a lot of things they would need to know and so they're not particularly good at solving problems so please use your audience as a resource to discover what's wrong but take it with a grain of salt when they offer Solutions so lesson number 19 your audience is good at recognizing problems and bad at solving them and I must stress again they're really really good at recognizing problems they're a great barometer you should use that as a resource but just take it with the grain of salt the solutions don't always work okay lesson number 20 so when you look up on the board I started to realize that for example if I'm trying to make sure that

I match human nature it's a little easier if my audience feels a sense of ownership because they're less inclined to feel like it's contradicting human nature or for example if I want them to H can't read it um if I want them to understand the difference between if I push them to make it more um if I push it to make it more compelling and not boring I'm more likely to make it something is that right I'm sorry um I'm more likely to make sure that it's something that will be compelling to them um or if I have them explore it's more likely that the details will matter because if they're exploring they'll want to find the details that it makes them more interested in exploring and what I found was as you started connecting these different things they all start coming together which is lesson number 20 all the lessons connect that as I learned each lesson I began to see they existed in relationship to one another and that's when I realized that they weren't

separate lessons After All In fact when I was going to give my talk today the original title was 20 years one very complex interconnected holistic view of game design um but didn't seem quite as catchy so lesson number 20 all the lessons connect I I didn't really give you 20 lessons today I give you one really large interconnected um but I broke them apart for for easy digesting so let's put this on the wall okay so guys take your pictures okay did everybody get a picture well quickly F sure and I know some of you guys like list so here it is in list form everybody got the picture so that is 20 years 20 lessons do I have time for questions real quick do I have time for

questions I don't know my time do I have time for questions yes or no I don't know my time do I have time for questions what wrap up oh no sorry I don't I don't have time for questions um so thank you guys very much for joining me g once again please fill your forms uh it's very important if you liked what happened today or or you didn't like what happened today let them know um they but when I here they gave me a deck that showed the people the 50 best talks of last year to inspire me to be one of those 50 people so if you like this please fill it out you liked or didn't like it please fill it out either way um but thank you guys very much for coming [Applause]