More than 20,000. That is the approximate number of cards in Magic: The Gathering, and there is a person who has been behind practically all of them creating the mechanics and novelties of each set. If Richard Garfield created the game, Mark Rosewater has kept him alive.
The mere fact of thinking that someone has seen pass by your table blows my head over 20,000 unique cards and that, expansion after expansion, it has broken its horns thinking about novelties that may be appetizing for a mass of more than 12 million players. If that is not a design achievement, I don’t know what could be.
Entering the world of synergies
Following the advice they gave me in my chat twitch broadcast last Thursday – I hope you could see it, because it was quite epic – after those first games in which I had managed to amass some money in Magic Arena, I decided to spend my precious coins in the mode Draft.
Far from buying envelopes like crazy, the trick was to invest the same amount in an entry to Draft mode not only to try to win a bigger prize for the same price, but also to continue training that of understanding the synergies between cards and the possibilities there is when creating your own decks.
It seemed like the best way to continue understanding the game and to advance in that Road to Mythic whose path should lead me from zero to hero – like Hercules – at some point in the future.
The idea behind the draft mode is as simple as shaping a deck based on the cards you collect in packs. That is, the game releases a good handful of cards and you gradually decide which card from each group to include in your deck. Make something of yours by playing with the limitations. Then we focus on that.
Having gone through similar ideas in other games like Hearthstone with very little luck – uh, I’m talking about a level of insulting manchism – I not only caught myself carefully reviewing each of the letters, but also understanding what should include to shape different strategies.
The image you have on these lines is proof of how well my deck worked. Two victories would have seemed like a tremendous achievement to me, so reaching five was a spectacular experience that, because of how well I had tied the deck, it was most gratifying.
I, who until four days ago did not know how many cards to include in a deck, had shaped a winning combination of cards that, even despite my inexperience, had endured eight rounds with a personal record – not only in Magic– five wins and three losses.
Having worked as designer, knowing the difficulties behind creating something and making it understood by the public, and knowing that designing games would have been the way to choose if I hadn’t come across enjoying so much writing in Extra Life in my life, it was difficult not to fall into a question that I couldn’t get out of my head:
How can anyone shape a game design so well spun, blended and executed staying fresh and original through the years? Yes, that’s how my head works, what can I say.
The Origin of Magic Magic
Although he is not the protagonist of today, talking about Magic yes or yes implies putting on the table the name of Richard Garfield. We are not going to focus on it – there will be time for that – but it does seem logical to lay the foundations of how it was born Magic to better understand everything else.
We are in 1991 and Wizards of the Coast focuses on marketing role-playing games while its CEO, Peter Adkison, controls everything from his garage. In search of new ideas to produce, he comes across Richard Garfield, Ph.D. in mathematics, who has a board game in mind that he would like to commercialize.
Adkison recognizes that it does not have the necessary infrastructure to bring that to fruition – it will do so later on taking advantage of a generous income – but that it would be happy to publish something smaller and simpler that could be carried around and enjoyed in a few minutes. With that goal in mind, Garfield created the first version of Magic.
In 1993 the game was presented at a game fair in Dallas and became a runaway success. Not only do they get the units to fly, what they had created in anticipation for that entire year is almost instantly depleted. Since then, Magic It has not stopped evolving.
Although addressing how to get there is also extremely interesting, it is a story for another day. At that point what I needed was to get to the bottom of the design formula over the years. How a team can stay sane and orderly when it has so many creatures and spells behind it. How is it possible to innovate in a well of more than 20,000 ideas.
Investigating about it I get to Mark Rosewater, head designer de Magic: The Gathering and one of the key names behind the Wizards of the Coast card business. If there is anyone capable of going beyond how it was created MagicThat can make me understand how he’s still alive and fresh to this day, that’s Rosewater.
Luck has wanted that, in addition to being passionate about his work, the designer is also a great popularizer who writes and lectures on how he copes with the complex job of continuing to invent in a world that seems to have already seen it all.
Through entries in the blog de Magic, a Tumblr in which he talks to the community, and talks like the formidable design lesson he offered at the GDC, I try to get into his way of thinking and try to better understand where he is hiding the magic behind your creativity.
Connect with the player and set limits
Beyond the interesting lessons of the philosophical life of rosewater, and how all of them can be transferred to the design of a board game -or video game-, from not worrying about things that you cannot control to embracing mistakes to learn from them, what really interests me is how you face the design itself.
It turns out to be something as simple as standing firm before two fundamental principles. His speech, although with considerably more branches, seems to focus on connection and limits.
The first concept focuses on establish an emotional connection with the player. You don’t have to fight them or get carried away by what they say, just be aware of what audience you are addressing, what they expect from your game and how you can take advantage of what they already know to pave the way.
Let’s think about a basic mechanic of Magic: fly. Even if it’s the first time you’ve seen a flying card, it’s easy to imagine what it might imply because you’re working with concepts that you already know. It is simple and effective, there is no reason to try to take the idea further or fall into more twisted strategies that end up causing more problems than solutions.
In one of his lectures, Rosewater clings to the Plants vs Zombies original to land this even better. From the outside you can think “plants against zombies, what a funny and absurd mix”, but the truth is that behind it there is one of those messages as simple as effective that, although you have never stopped to think about it consciously, it is already informing you about what you are going to find in the game.
If it must be a tower defense with defense towers that do not move from their place as they fight against incessant hordes of enemies, the idea of ”plantar“A tower while slow zombies appear that advance without rest and without distractions is, if you stop for a second to think about it, simply magnificent. Only with what the player knows about the basics of a plant and a zombie can he understand what the game is about.
In the connection with the player there is also the need to make them feel part of it, which in addition to involving the entire community also includes the need to be able to give them tools to personalize the experience. Let him create his own deck, join one color with another, make it his own. This, by the way, is also the first key of the modo draft.
The second point that I cannot avoid picking up and sharing is that of the limits. One might think that more freedom, more creativity, but what Rosewater picks up when it comes to breaking schemes – and making your mind shine even more – is putting restrictions. TO fewer chances, more incentive to reach a solution.
Part of the idea is that you do not have to change much, that with little you can already make a difference, but also that creating too many mechanics at once can cause you to end up burning ideas and muddying both concepts and the complexity of the game. As in creating your deck in Draft mode, you have to set limits.
Keeping it simple and forcing the brain to solve very specific problems, creativity rises to a new level. That is the starting point that they establish with each new set to, for example, sit in a room with different restrictions that motivate them to look for a way out.
It can be just having the names of each card and creating from them, focusing on a new mechanic and seeing how far you can squeeze it, or even among some of the most applauded sets, something as simple as restrict color scheme to try to discover what can come out of there.
In this quest destined to take the risks of challenging the player with increasingly crazy ideas to avoid boredom, but also with the awareness that not everything goes, and that interesting does not mean fun, the team of Mark Rosewater focuses on keep pushing Magic forward without forgetting your past. I adore my job but, what do you want me to tell you, it seems an exciting job.
This is an initiative in collaboration with Wizards of the Coast.
