The Great Designer Search 2: My Essay Answers

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

 

I’m Billy Moreno. I started playing Magic in 1995 when I was 13, then lost track of it for a number of years before rediscovering the game through Magic Online. At that point I quickly immersed myself in competitive Magic, eventually spending about three years on the Pro Tour “gravy train”. During my time on the Pro Tour I found a lot of friends and made the professional contacts that got me started in game design almost five years ago.

I worked for Brian David-Marshall at his game design studio for a few years, creating new games, developing the Chaotic TCG and lead designing the second expansion of that game. After that I worked briefly for Upper Deck Entertainment designing and developing their unreleased Marvel Superstars game before being laid off when they dismantled the division.

 

Even though I am at heart a very competitive, spike-ish game player, I am able to empathize with a wide variety of viewpoints and gaming needs while working from a design perspective. In my years in game design, I have worked on games intended for girls, youths, mass consumption, fans of particular IP’s and have felt comfortable with each.

 

Similarly, while I have focused on Magic as a competitive game for the last decade and have turned my designer’s eye in other directions, I have recently reached a point in my relationship with Magic where I am eager to work on the game as a designer and not a player. To that end, I feel both my design experience and intimate knowledge with the game at its most cutthroat, competitive, and broken would serve me well during this internship.

 

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

 

My first step answering this question was imagining why color-shifting an ability might be necessary and what criteria might apply. For instance, if a color seemed less competitive and less represented over a number of blocks and that color could not become more relevant just by upping the power level of its cards within reason and within its current share of the pie, that situation would seem to warrant shifting a/some abilities to that color. However, not every ability can be moved to every color because each has a philosophy and culture that isn’t openly compatible with every ability (i.e. green and non-flying creature removal).

 

The first shift I spent time thinking about was discard to white. Balance and variants set a precedent for White to have equalizing discard in the same way it has symmetrical creature removal and land destruction. But White can also justify targeted discard in the same way it does targeted creature removal, i.e. with restrictions on use (Second Thoughts), trade-offs that benefit the opponent (Path to Exile), or reversibility (Pacifism). Unfortunately, that shift didn’t satisfy my first criteria.

 

Alternatively, it seems like too long since Black has been a featured color in Standard decks. My instinct is that this is because Magic has become much more about winning with creatures and other permanents rather than with spells. Black excels in spell-heavy environments because it pairs efficient discard with aggressive creatures that aren’t great against other creatures. With most games won on the board now, Black has one leg to stand on (targeted creature removal) and struggles against resilient creatures or powerful non-creature permanents like planeswalkers. So, I would give Black the ability to destroy enchantments and planeswalkers. This ability can be flavored black with non-black restrictions, additional life/sacrifice costs, or bargaining clauses.

 

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

 

For my money, the best way to integrate design and creative is not through evocative mechanics or individual cards, but by creating an environment that produces the desired patterns of play. Rise of Eldrazi pitted aggressive level-up decks against spawn-based battle-cruiser decks. The cards and the mechanics combined to lead players who didn’t have any vested interest in the story into these decks, so they ended up reenacting the war at the center of Rise of Eldrazi repeatedly. Kamigawa block, especially the first set, also did an excellent job of persuading players to play out the central struggle.

 

But I think Alara block did the best job leading players through evolving play patterns that mirrored the creative story. During Shards limited, the shards were the primary unit for building decks. There was some variation, but because of the color fixing and the shard-based mechanics, players usually placed themselves in a Shard and hunkering down. Fittingly, the five Obelisks were highly valued here.

 

As the shards collapsed in the background of the second set, design added five-color fixers, rewards for being able to generate five colors of mana, and brought back domain. In Conflux limited, players followed the incentives and ended up in four- and five-color decks as the definition of the shards broke down.

 

Finally, in Alara Reborn, hybrid mana costs and an abundance of two-color gold cards pushed players into aggressive allied-color decks that mirrored the post-Conflux shape of Alara. What’s more, anticipating ending up in two colors forced players to reevaluate the shards in the first set and notice how they were made up of two allied-color halves (for instance, Jhess and Valeron making up Bant).

 

I do feel Alara Reborn could have superficially, with names especially, done a better job of identifying those sub-shard pairs.

 

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

 

Currently, the active player has priority on an empty stack, which makes perfectly intuitive sense, but also retains priority after taking an action which, in addition to not being that intuitive, is largely invisible and ignored. In fact, it comes up so little in game play that Magic Online doesn’t even have a setting for toggling “priority retention” on and off, instead allowing retention with a much-less-than-universally-known hotkey.

 

The natural rhythm for taking an action in Magic is to make a play and then check if your opponent has a response. Most stacks are that simple and most players are habituated to the pattern. When a player learning the game runs into a situation where he/she wants to builds onto a stack as the active player, there is a good chance they will check with their opponent after taking their first action, which can be a frustrating learning experience when that opponent opts to do nothing and knows the rules well-enough to stop the learning player when they attempt to play something else on to that stack.

 

Further, while there is a strategic difference between the active player retaining priority or not, it is similar to the differences between combat before and after the M10 rules change, i.e. neither situation is especially more skill-testing. The real differences are these: certain infinite loops in corner cases (probably involving Split Second) become easier to breakup and cards like Fork put more of an onus on the defending player by not forcing the active player to show his hand right away.

 

After changing this rule, the active player would always have priority on an empty stack and on a building stack whoever didn’t play the last action would have priority, a situation that matches players natural inclinations much more closely.

 

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

 

Searching for an answer to this question and not having a card in mind to start off, I took the most logical step and started scanning through the Standard format on Gatherer. I doubt the following cards are the only ones I’d have a problem with if I made it through the whole list, but I only made it halfway through the B’s before finding at least two cards that I think miss from a design perspective.

 

First, Archive Trap. My play group often teased each other about walking into the various Trap cards. For most of them, the triggers were hard to avoid or not worth avoiding or didn’t feel like something the player should be punished for. But mostly they allowed players to be especially vigilant if they chose to. Some, like Arrow-Volley Trap captured the Trap/caution dynamic very well.

 

Archive Trap, on the other hand, wasn’t a Trap at all. You couldn’t keep any eye out for it. Either you drew cards that searched your library, or you didn’t. Didn’t matter if the trap-player was tapped out, it only mattered if he’d drawn the trap or not. Archive Trap fails as a design because it doesn’t capture any kind of booby-trap mentality.

 

Second, Broodwarden. Rise of Eldrazi really delivered with the Spawn tokens. And while Spawn-based strategies operated well enough without targeted help of this kind, I understand the impetus for a spawn lord. But Broodwarden makes my spawn feel suddenly very un-spawn-like rather than capitalizing on their fodder-ness like Magmaw and Mortician Beetle. Even having Broodwarden in my deck makes my spawn feel less expendable. Much like Archive Trap, there’s nothing overtly offensive about Broodwarden, but on closer inspection it fails to deliver the right kind of gameplay for the mechanic it’s supposed to work with.

 

1. What do you think design can do to best make the game accessible to newer players?

 

I think the best way for design to make the game accessible to newer players is to maintain a rules-teaching philosophy towards rarity. Whereas, experienced players are more concerned with learning strategy and figuring out how to play better, new players’ primary challenge is figuring out how the game works mechanically.

 

As they are learning the game, players are going to have the highest amount of exposure to commons and so most of the examples they store in their memory for reference to be used for figuring out new and more complicated cards are going to revolve around commons. For that reason, it is very important that commons cleanly deliver the building-block concepts of the game, from keywords to more general functions. A common flier should often not do anything else so that a new player can confidently associate his experiences with that card with flying and not have to worry about whether his creature was unblockable because of flying, protection from artifacts, or trample. Commons are not just responsible for providing clean examples of keywords; a common like Rampant Growth simply captures a game mechanic that is used in a number of variously complex ways.

 

At the uncommon level, cards should integrate keywords and mechanics, providing examples for players who have mastered the building blocks alone and are now learning to combine them. As clean looking as a creature with the text box “death touch, trample” is, it doesn’t belong at common because the interaction of those two abilities clouds the understanding of each of them individually.

 

The rare and mythic level, from a teaching perspective, are the home for cards that require and thus teach a deeper understanding of the game rules and what possibilities they allow.

 

1. What do you think design can do to best make the game attractive to experienced players?

 

Where new players are primarily preoccupied with learning the mechanics of the game, an experienced player can actually be defined largely by the fact that the mechanics of the game are mostly second-nature and no longer provide opportunities for learning and discovery. An experienced player instead gets his or her kicks by figuring out not just how to do things, but how best to do things; that player is on a journey of strategic discovery.

 

As much as skill-testing stinkbombs are maligned by experienced players, these cards are designed especially for them; obviously bad cards are signposts pointing towards the less-obviously bad. By including obviously good and bad cards, design helps experienced players start filling in the ends of their gradient, giving some initial shape to each players’ strategy map.

 

Besides these obviously good and bad cards, though, it is important that design provides cards that are situationally good and bad, effectively multiplying the individual cards in the set by the number of situations those cards could show up in and giving experienced players a huge strategic landscape to map out.

 

In short, the best thing design can do for experienced players is to keep mixing it up, keep making cards that do new things (cards and mechanics without analogs are naturally harder to get a handle on), keep making enough obvious cards and plenty of more subtle ones, keep shifting the power levels of different colors, and keep experienced players guessing.

 

Ironically, despite clamoring for mechanisms to smooth draws, decrease mulligans, and eliminate mana screw, experienced players would not especially enjoy any of those in the long term. Those variance factors fit in just right with satisfying the experienced players need for an environment that encourages sustained discovery.

 

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

 

The best mechanic in Extended is hybrid mana, introduced in Ravnica block and currently appearing in Shadowmoor, Eventide, and Alara Reborn. The mechanic has a huge impact on design space while also being very elegant and intuitive for players.

 

One of the world design ideas I was discussing with friends was one based on encouraging mono-colored play. The biggest hurdle for mono-colored play is the draft format. With five colors in the game, only two lucky players could go through the draft without directly competing with anyone. They’d be at a huge advantage against the players either splitting colors or being forced into drafting a second one.

 

The use of hybrid mana in Shadowmoor and Eventide eliminated that problem while fostering a mono-colored environment. Rather than leaving two or three players to fight over cards in a single color, that block’s hybrid mana spread out the fight by allowing cards to be played in two different mono-colored decks. The dispersed competition meant that there were less terrible or great seats to be in, everyone had similar opportunities to navigate themselves into the right “colors”. As players developed more sophisticated understandings of what options hybrid mana allowed them, they were rewarded by more in-draft control and more powerful decks on average.

 

The use of hybrid mana on cards like Flame Javelin, where colorless mana could replace colored costs inefficiently, also added an artifact-like dimension to color spells, clearly demonstrating the kind of trade-offs necessary for getting off-color effects.

 

The use of hybrid mana in Alara Reborn had a similar, if less dramatic, impact on that format, especially the cycle of “blade” bears. Hybrid mana allowed those cards to maintain shard identities but encouraged people to play solidly two-color decks to gain more consistent access to those aggressive two-drops.

 

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

 

I briefly considered arguing against some less obvious offender, but no mechanic sticks out for its combination of unfun-ness and impact like Cascade.

 

It’s not that Cascade is completely unfun. In fact, the mechanic was built around the idea of generating thrilling once in a life time moments like blindly cascading into exactly what you need in a game you couldn’t possibly have won otherwise. And, as it was released, Cascade does provide some of those moments. But often when you play with Cascade fairly and blindly, you don’t get exactly what you want or need. And after a lot of playtime with and against Cascade it actually seems like you’ve added a lottery mini-game into the game of Magic you were trying to play. Winning the lottery isn’t especially satisfying when you are trying to measure your skill or your success at achieving some other game goal. Losing that lottery is especially frustrating as most players want the game to seem mostly about skill. Other random elements are also frustrating in this regard, but usually do a better job of hiding themselves in the flow of the game.

 

Cascade also misses out as a design because it is not clear what the mechanic means thematically. It often seems tacked on and unintegrated. For instance, Demonic Dread changes combat math by getting rid of a blocker and then it cascades, rather than changing combat math by giving your creatures haste until end of turn, then giving you the opportunity to cascade into a cheap creature. Furthermore, because you can cascade into anything, casting cost aside, the relationship between the Cascade spell and its Cascade destination is even more ambiguous. Ultimately, Cascade just doesn’t click often enough and doesn’t encourage players to experiment with it in fair ways.

 

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

 

The competitor in me, the guy who thrills at a mental challenge, really wants to revisit Kamigawa. That block stands out for its insularity, its parasitism, and its incongruity with the rest of the multiverse. Most Magic sets have the tint of a European heritage and the vocabulary of the multiverse is almost-wholly anglicized even in off-color sets like Mirage block. Kamigawa breaks that mold in spectacular fashion, featuring mechanics like Ninja and Bushido. Those names feel like they wouldn’t really fit outside of a Japanese-themed block. Even though the Ninja ability could make sense on a wide variety of creatures, the name itself makes it near-impossible to bring back the mechanic without revisiting Kamigawa.

 

Even the Kamigawa mechanics that aren’t hamstrung by their names are hard to work into other sets because they demand to be major themes with a lot of space devoted to them. Whatever the other shortcomings of Arcane and Splice are, the big hang-up is that you can’t put them in a set on just a couple cards each. They don’t play off anything else and having just a couple opens up almost no exploration space for players.

 

If I were to revisit Kamigawa, I would make salvaging Splice and Soulshift my first priority. I would expand Splice to be able to work with other spell subtypes, tribal seems like a natural fit given the deep tribal identities already built into the Kamigawa story, including not only Spirits, but Rats, Snakes, Goblins, Soratami, Demons, Ogres, and Humans. Tying Splice to Tribal allows us to jettison the parasitic Arcane type, and create Splice and Tribal cards that can incidentally show up in non-block decks. Similarly, I would want to look at expanding Soulshift outside of the Spirit type, giving it the same kind of exportability.